Photography in Ethnographic Film and the New Studies of Material Culture: An Anthropological Perspective
Keywords:
photography, objectification, “material turn”, visual anthropology, signAbstract
Due to its semiotic features, such as iconicity and indexicality, which enable communication, as well as its material characteristics, photography as an object of research in anthropology is addressed by both visual anthropology and the anthropology of material culture. In both anthropological subdisciplines, photographs have been treated as ethnographic documents. At the same time, within the contemporary context, these branches of anthropology (each from its perspective) question and critique the view that photographs are merely illustrations of socio-cultural reality. On the one hand, contemporary visual anthropology addresses the question of what photography means to people (those photographed, the owners of photographs, photographers). Therefore, the emphasis is on understanding particular and local meanings or the broader cultural context within which photographs are situated. On the other hand, the anthropology of material culture, following the premises of the new studies of material culture that posit a dialectical relationship between subject and object, is more interested in what photography does for people and to people; that is, in the practices of the “production” of people and objects. Ethnographic films that focus on photography call into question these aforementioned separate academic fields. In this sense, photographs are multiply mediated: by the meaning inscribed by the photographer, the meaning that the photographed people wish to convey, the meaning conveyed by the ethnographic film through the camera and editing, and finally, the meaning attributed by the viewer. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to compare two classic ethnographic films whose subject is the photographic representation of local communities: Photo Wallahs (MacDougall and MacDougall 1991) and Future Remembrance: Photography and Image Art in Ghana (Wendl and Du Plessis 1998). Our intention is to analyze these films using concepts from the new studies of material culture, mainly “objectification.” Taking photographs as an example, the goal is to demonstrate the productivity of the approach of the new studies of material culture in researching themes such as identity and the self in visual ethnography.
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Филмографија
Future remembrance. Photography and image art in Ghana. 1998. Directed by Tobias Wendl and Nancy Du Plessis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rywTQZ6SIUA
Photo Wallahs. An encounter with photography and local Indian photographers in Mussoorie, a hill station in the foothills of the Himalay. 1991. Directed by David MacDougall and Judith MacDougall. DVD.
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