CHAPTER 2
ANTHROPOLOGY/PHOTOGRAPHY: TOWARD PRAXIS
"If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug a camera around." Lewis Hine
This chapter will examine the intersections of anthropology and photography and conclude with an open-ended discussion of methodology and ideas for practice. Brief summaries of the past and present practices of anthropology and photography, as well as past and present connections between the two, are necessary to situate them historically before attempting to formulate praxis.
It is necessary to note the primacy of the visual in the West, where knowing is tied metaphorically to seeing, and where the cultural landscape is saturated with images. Berger, in discussing the social construction of visual communication, notes that the visual element, "seeing," precedes language (1972:5). While we use words to explain the world, we use sight to establish their context. "The way we see things is affected by what we know or believe" (Berger 1972:8).
What we know in anthropology must be understood in terms of anthropology's development as a specifically Western enterprise based on an idea of rational scientific discourse. In an imperialist, colonialist context, the project of anthropology is to create an "other" and to turn difference into distance. Both photography (Barthes' characterization of its spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority) and anthropology (in the "ethnographic present") create the temporal distantiation of their object (Burgin 1982). Both practices employ this distance to preserve their authority.
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Native American writer Vine Deloria, Jr. comments on this disciplinary authority, stating that "the fundamental thesis of the anthropologist is that people are objects for observation, for manipulation and for eventual extinction" (1969:81). Although some anthropologists want anthropological communications "to make scientific/humanistic non-ethnocentric statements about culture" (Ruby 1976:5), this has rarely been the practice because of Western Anthropologists' unwillingness to expose their complicity in upholding Western hegemony. (This has been the subject of much critique within the past few decades [cf. Fabian 1983]).
When anthropology and photography operate together, the tendency to stress re-production -- presenting a seamless, ahistorical view of the subject -- and repress to process of production means effacing any marks of the photographer/anthropologist's culture (Burgin:1982). The anthropologist becomes the photographer's film -- ready to simply record what is out there and present the information, in the form of a monograph, as unproblematically as the photographic print (Pinney 1992). Thus the ideological nature of the reproduction and representation is hidden.
Power relations are inherent in photographic images, whose reproduction enables the creation of an image world which supersedes its referents. Paul Virilio points to a concrete reminder of this, Hiroshima, and states that, "in the atomic age, we are all human negatives waiting to be processed" (in Pinney 1992:75). Susan Sontag, noting the metaphorical power of photography, discusses the camera as weapon with which we can "shoot" the exotic and bring home a two-dimensional trophy (1977:14-15).
Michel Foucault's notion of the eye of surveillance (1977) is useful in examining the subtler aspects of social control embedded in visual power relations. The surveying eye of Western photography documents peoples of the world and the marginal at home for the ruling gaze, and anthropology often provides the institutional authority to justify their unequal status.
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The state began using photography for social control during the destruction of the Paris communes in 1871. Government officials took photographs of the demonstrators to create "Wanted" posters and to identify subversives. This practice continues on today, but with more sophisticated methods and technology. Police routinely take photographs of demonstrators, and in many countries it is illegal to disguise one's identity at these protests.
More overtly repressive is the use of surveillance cameras in prisons, a use taken to an extreme in so-called "control units." These isolation units perfected in Stammheim, Germany on Red Army Faction (RAF) political prisoners, utilize 24-hour camera surveillance, even while the prisoner is bathing. The US has used these same techniques in contol units in Lexington, Kentucky (a facility designed specifically for women political prisoners which is now closed for upgrading), Marianna, Florida and Marion, Illinois (known for its 24-hour "lockdown" practices). These units have been condemned by Amnesty International as fully within the definitions of torture (Ryan 1989:45-69). Clearly, the practices of photography and anthropology are not neutral and objective and should be used with caution.
Two strands of photography are commonly recognized: as a fine art and as social documentation. In the late 19th/early 20th century, photographers, notably Edward Steichen, began to push to have photography accepted as a fine art. Their work is characterized by its single-image nature: its frame-derived meaning, subjectivity, formalism and uniqueness. Galleries devoted to presenting photographs in this form were founded and the notion of photographer as an artist and visionary set apart from ordinary people began. Fine-art photography continued to develop in this direction.
In social reform photography, however, the bourgeois nature of the practice is less hidden. Jacob Riis, one of the first social reform photographers, trained his camera on immigrants and the poor in places like New York's Lower East Side during the early part of this century. In an article on Riis' work, Sally Stein critiques his personal ambition and the way his photographs ultimately
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upheld the existing social order and bolstered social control. She places his work within its historical context, showing how his photo essays mollified the upper-class' fear about threats from immigrants (1983).
During the Great Depression, Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography performed a similar function. Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes that in FSA work the American underclass became a spectacle for a better-off class. FSA photographers chose the poignant over the militant and pathos over a call to action (1991:169-83). The work did not attempt to portray specific people and their circumstances, but treated them as undifferentiated victims.
Jacob Holdt's American Pictures, a more recent example of social documentary, also exhibits some of these problems. In one striking example, an unnamed heroin addict asks Holdt to show the photograph he is taking to others to deter them from drug use by reminding them of drugs' debilitating effects. But because of the picture's presentation, it cannot do this. He is shown as but one of the many nameless faceless poor. Here again, as in earlier social reform photography, subjects are given victim status and thus denied agency. Although his personal ties to the people he photographs are stronger than Riis' and his political leanings more radical, Holdt's project is still aimed at the sympathies and good graces of the ruling classes. A Dane, Holdt stands as the outsider, able to stand back and point to the class differences in the US, but he aims his critique at those well-off for not doing more and tries to provoke their sympathy, rather than focus his attack on the basic social inequalities.
In reviewing social reform/documentary works, "it appears that all we can ever say is that the what is of photography, like that of anthropology, lies in its what it is not, its context" (Pinney 1992:90). This lack of context is even more clear in anthropology's and photography's relation to Native Americans in the mid- to late-1800s. US anthropology had a built-in "other" and built its reputation on its colonial function as a salvaging agent. In visual and written forms, it both documented the remaining vestiges of cultures being wiped out and also sped along their demise.
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It turned humans into artifacts and relics of dead cultures. US anthropology continues to resist acknowledging that its context is the on-going genocide of indigenous peoples.
In summing up the two main strands of photography, Sekula discusses how the idea of "art v. documentary" creates an unworkable dualism in which "expression v. reportage," "inner truth v. empirical truth," and "affective value v. informative value" become oppositional and exclusive categories (1978). This idea overlooks the reality that both strands are representational works within a socially-constructed context. Walter Benjamin discusses the early effect of this dualism and the problems with the idea of "art for art's sake." He points out how this dualism serves the dominant political order -- in his case, German fascism (1968).
The photograph, standing alone, presents merely the possibility of meaning. Photographs rely on discourse, on text, to create specific meaning. They can have many texts and a range of meanings and are not value-neutral.
The idea of the photographer as "objective" lingers on in documentary photography due to this false dualism. The belief in objective photography continues because photographs are mistaken for reality and because photographers are thought to merely record what really exists.
Anthropology also clings to the idea of objectivity because "scientific" discourse is believed to be neutral and rational. Over the past 25 or so years, however, anthropologists have begun to move away from authoritarian, "rationalist" objectivity toward a more "reflexive" stance which includes themselves in their work -- a move forced by social unrest in the West and decolonization movements in the Third World when the usual subjects of research began to question the whole enterprise. To continue, anthropology needed to change.
The pendulum has swung to extreme subjectivity and interpretation. While at times this
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extreme subjectivity has deteriorated into narcissistic navel-gazing without action, it has produced some interesting theorizing (cf. Clifford, Marcus and Fisher). Yet it remains authoritarian, failing to recognize the knowledge produced as dialogic. Even hyper-subjective anthropology's project remains to render Other, albeit not in the traditional fashion. (I am not suggesting that traditional anthropology has died out, however.)
As theories and generations change, new anthropological works are created. Many recent attempts to render the "other" in new ways recognize issues of representation. One is I, Rigoberta Menchu, a project undertaken by a Latin American anthropologist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, to bring a Guatemalan Indian woman's life in her own words to the public. This ethnography appealed to a wider audience than most traditional works. Other authors writing new works from the perspectives of historical materialism, political economy and feminism attempt to take into account their representation of others and how they produce anthropological knowledge. And with mixed results, others opt for less academic prose and packaging to reach wider audiences.
Today there is little dispute that photographic representation is not reality or "truth," although it may be taken as such. Sekula notes that "the meaning of a photography, like that of any other entity, is inevitably subject to cultural definition" (1975:37). In the Western context of photography, "imperialism breeds an imperialist sensibility in all phases of cultural life" (Rosler 1981:78). Yet at the same time, individual and collective resistance to these sensibilities is created by photographers and photographed.
Earlier photomontage work's (Heartfield, the dadaists, the Situationists) ability to demystify and expose the ideology of images is absent in present photo documentary practice. Once subversive, photomontage is now part of the repertoire of advertising and postmodern photography.
Postmodern photography is especially unable to recognize its own hegemonic cultural position. It certainly does not recognize irony. In a recent exhibition at the International Center of
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Photography in New York, "Commodity Image" (May 1993), a Richard Prince "Marlboro Man" appropriation (Untitled #8, 1980-84) hung on the wall opposite the show title "Commodity Image," which in turn sits directly above the sign "sponsored by the Phillip Morris Companies, Inc." -- makers of Marlboro cigarettes.
As captured on film by Sebastio Salgado, who is recognized as one of the world's leading documentarians, workers suffer not only the hardships of their labor but over-aestheticization. Although he creates images of manual laborers, he fails to provide historical depth or any overarching critique for the viewer. Salgado presents the photographs in a way that disguises the ideology of his representation. Jim Goldberg, on the other hand, presents an interesting attempt at collaborative photography in Rich and Poor . He took photographs of families, rich and poor, in their homes and asked them to comment about their situation at the bottom of the photograph. However, the work is flawed not simply because it has been disclosed that he directed the subjects in what to write, but because its analysis of US class relations is shallow.
However, other photographers are actively working on the boundaries traditional photographic practice, creating neither postmodern art nor traditional documentary images. Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependence, a personal document, is interesting in its ability to reflect cultural issues through first-person images. Allan Sekula's recent Whitney Biennial piece, "Loaves and Fishes," places the subject, the death of the docks in the US and England, within a historical and material context. His photographs are not always well integrated with his text, however. Martha Rosler's projects, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1975) and If you lived here... (1991), stress the audience, as a critical element when creating representational works. Jo Spence's work is personal, but because of her careful attention to gender, race and class issues, she is able to move beyond the individual experience to collective political documents. She also clearly articulates the dangers in representing others, and offers ideas for work, most notably in Putting Myself in the Picture (1988).
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In briefly summarizing the disciplines' developments/histories, anthropology developed as the science of representation and photography as an instrument of representation. Within anthropology, "photography's use by the discipline has been principally formal, methodological, and /or as adjunct polemic to a humanist agenda" (Faris 1992:253). Photographs were used for physiognomic or typographical illustration or to show detailed "scientific" behavior with rational, scientific objectivity. The camera was merely a tool to this end. Balinese Character, by Bateson and Mead, published in 1946, is a monumental illustration of this. The authors took sequential photographs of the most minute representations of behavior in an attempt to evaluate cultural differences.
As anthropology began to assert itself as an academic discipline, written text, seen as more serious, became the primary bearer of epistemology and discourse. Photography was dismissed on two counts: as "art," images aestheticized and abstracted; and as "snapshots," part of what the common people do and not fitting scientific pursuits. Thus, the possibilities of combining visual images and text have never been sufficiently realized. Although anthropologists frequently take snapshots in the field, they have not integrated the images into the ethnographic text. And anthropologists who do take photographs in the field do not usually have training in photography. They just assume that it is a simple matter of the camera doing it all for them. They accept the inherent Western ideology of the technology and never question why they have a camera with them at all.
The recent resurgence in interest in the connections between anthropology and photography mainly has reviewed and analyzed the historical links between the two disciplines and has not problematized current usage. Most of these reviews do not place their critique in a specific material context and thus lack historicity. From Site to Sight, the Banta and Hinsley book, based on an exhibition of photographs from the Peabody Museum, represents this type of celebratory characterization of the past. With its single image of "Renty," a slave, the cover of the book exposes this insufficiency in theorizing. Although this and other similar images are included
within a discussion of how anthropology was used for typological studies, the authors only mention that the images "are rare and graphic reminders that not all studio photo is voluntary" (Banta and Hinsley 1986:56). [italics added] Yet the authors have used this image again, inside a gold "frame" on the cover, only serving to aestheticize and further objectify. Are these reminders that rare?
Also in the Banta and Hinsley section on typological studies is a picture of an Indian woman stripping for the anthropologist's camera paired with a Susan Sontag quote about symbolic possession and the author's notation that "It is not always clear when consent has been given to photograph an individual or a community" (Banta and Hinsley:59). It is obviously not clear that the authors are willing to give up the power of representation.
In the book's later section on current practice, anthropologist William Crawford discusses his photograph of a Shavante youth and claims that because the "others" can now decide what to wear or what objects to include in the photograph, they now control the image. Yet Crawford's image still rests firmly within conventional Western representations of the "other." Further, he fails to question why he is there photographing at all -- perhaps the central question when discussing control. Therefore, all we can know from this image is how much colonialism has altered both colonists' and colonized's ideas of cultural and self-representation. Faris disputes Crawford's notion that these surface changes represent a shift in control. He states that the changes in practice are only political changes in the West, but the operational effects on others remain the same (1992b).
Collier and Collier's Visual Anthropology, now in its third paperback printing, is the popular account of the place of photography within anthropology. This is unfortunate. The book fails to question either anthropological methods or the use of photography to meet those aims. The book at best represents a naive attempt to use photographic, visual communication as a quasi-quantitative tool. The most famous "technique" presented here is photo-elicitation, in which
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anthropologists show informants photographs and ask them to talk about them. One sequence in a Native American village uses the technique to determine what the central public ritual is in the community, which could have been determined by simply asking. Although its photographs are interesting, the book offers no useful guidance for practice.
The related field of visual sociology is better theorized as sociologists have kept in closer touch with changes in photographic theory over the past twenty years. Howard Becker and Douglas Harper are two main theorists who have made invaluable contributions to understanding visual communication. They point to how visual methods can be used within the discipline and the possibilities for combining images and text. However, they do not discuss fully the ideology behind the resulting images.
Today photographers are more sophisticated about diguising the power relations in their work. For example, Banta and Hinsley discuss how modern camera technology has made it easier to take pictures of others now. They only note that this requires a "special need for sensitivity" (Banta and Hinsley:125) rather than question the whole enterprise.
Faris, quite pessimistic in his assessment of the future for anthropological photography (1992a), is less so about the possibilities for anthropological writing. One reason might be that there has been more dialogue about the issues involved and more attempts at doing something different. However, even these "new" ethnographies or historical materialist ethnographies are still including photographs that are unintegrated into the text in problematic ways. If images are going to be included, they should be discussed as well as the text.
Deer Camp: Last Lights in the Northern Kingdom, a recent photo essay by John Miller (1992), is an interesting attempt to bring visual and textual representations of culture together. He looks at the deer hunting culture in northern Vermont, an area, but not a culture, in which he grew up. He combines his first-person photo essay narrative with black and white photographs of the hunters and the people in the camps and area in general. He includes a discussion of the traditions
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and political economy of the region and the place of deer hunting within them. However, he leaves out captions for the photographs -- their context. He fails to ground his subjects in the text and renders them iconic figures. His summary text attempts to universalize statements about ritual and men, leaving behind the specific example of the deer hunters. This ultimately ruins his narrative. However, Miller's attempt to combine photographic images, personal documentation and cultural investigation/critique in one text is a step toward a praxis. Despite its shortcomings, Miller's project does point to what might be possible.
Allan Sekula calls for critically representational art whose referent is the social world (1978:862), necessary because we need to recognize that the visual is the West's dominant trope. Thus, it is important to continue to use visual representation and to retain the option to continue to represent people.
Visual representation, including photography, also can be used within the Western context as a tool in the struggle against the hegemony of a small selection of sanctioned images serving the existing order. Although every photo essay that deals with cultures will be problematic as it cannot completely account for histories and particulars, it would be foolish to stop trying to develop a model just because it is impossible to deal with every representational issue. Injustices will not go away if we simply sit around and abstractly theorize about ideal methods to deal with them.
We must be cognizant, however, of the political issues surrounding photography and anthropology and the ways images and information have been and are used to support hegemony. Cultural work must be characterized as political praxis. The cultural work of photographers can be used as a type of text, one that "speaks" to us in a different way than writing. To this end, Rosler urges that photographers must have a dialectical understanding of the relations between images and the living world, and between images and ideology (Rosler 1981:77). Our praxis should take into account that meaning is derived from collective relations, from the social structure as well as
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the individual. The Kayapo show their understanding of this by videotaping agreements with Brazilian officials to safeguard against government attempts to renege on contracts. Knowing that videotaped evidence is fully accepted in Western legal discourse strengthens their resistance to domination.
Unfortunately, a model of photographic production that incorporates all of these concerns and sidesteps the dangers of objectifying others does not yet exist. The majority of "documentary" work continues to be part of a limited liberal humanist agenda. This type of text relies on distance, which can make victims of subjects rendering them passive and denying them political agency. This type of text stresses compassion rather than collective struggle. Cameras and analyses are characteristically aimed downwards. Those in power have more control over who represents them and how they are represented, so it is rare to see documentary work which analyzes the elite (other than celebrities who have their own specific type of function in this society).
A better type of work would be dialogic, creating social relations between the photographer/anthropologist and the viewer, as well as between the photographer/anthropologist and subject. The work would be collaborative, but with the photographer/anthropologist claiming full responsibility for the final representation. An awareness of how the work is viewed, and who the audience is helps ground the work, moving toward praxis. The work is not created simply for knowledge or beauty, but to communicate an ideology. Spence paid particular attention to this by refusing to call her work "art" and by not showing it in galleries or museums, but in community centers and books.
Here it becomes apparent that the form of the work is also a key issue. An anthropological project must have some allegiance to context. Anthropology can be used to place subjects in their particular historical and material context. Thus a narrative structure and text are essential and must include an element of historicity. This textual component is necessary so as not to make a
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consumable single image and limit all meaning to within the boundaries of the image itself. Process should be stressed over production. Color images are preferable for this reason as they are less abstracting than black and white. Finally, just as we have standards for what constitutes acceptable writing, we have standards for interesting images, images that can convey meaning and engage the viewer. The work must fall within conventions of acceptability for writing and photography on some level, otherwise the impact of the ideas will be diminished.
My project on the current practice of tattooing in the US and women, whose bodies have long been a site for inscription of social control practices (especially through photographic and visual representations) is an attempt to synthesize some of the discussion above to create an alternate text to those that already exist of women's bodies and tattooing, -- to use the medium for stereotyping and turn it around. Representations of tattooed women have tended to either fetishize the women's bodies as sex object or exotic other, or they have illustrated the tattoo as art and fetishized the tattoo as commodity. I will focus on the tattoo on the body since this is the context of the tattoo and since meaning is fluid and will change depending on where the woman is. I took photographs of tattooed women with the context of a simple backdrop thus allowing the women to have some element of choice and control in how they will be represented. This also should serve to point out the mechanics of the photographs and my role in creating them. An earlier attempt at making images of the women in their homes (with house as personal context) failed because it chose one specific context at random.
Given all the above, my project is collaborative. There is no objectivity or neutrality in portrait photography. It is a moment that did take place, however, a moment that was shared time, intersubjective and reciprocal. I asked women to write about their tattoo(s) why they have one and to look at the finished photograph and give me comments. The women wrote their own words by hand and I am presenting the image in a fashion that will make it essential to link text with image and not just see the photographs as nice pictures.
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I have chosen to work within the Philadelphia area because I have a base from which to work and am an insider to this growing subculture. Besides a self-portrait, I chose 16 women I knew to photograph. I relied on word-of-mouth for interviews beyond the number of women I already knew. I was able to interview more women than I photographed, and I also talked with tattooists. I was interested mainly in women who are representative of the "new" tattooing. This meant women who were tattooed in the past 10 years or so, who had chosen less traditional and gender-based placement and designs, and whose tattoos were more publicly visible. They do not represent all tattooed women, but a growing subculture, in which a larger critique of the dominant culture is prominent. In my research specific to the Philadelphia area, the criteria fit mainly, but not exclusively, young white women from a variety of economic backgrounds. Although this "new" tattooing is a clear trend, it is not possible to generalize the demographics of who the tattooed are.
This photo essay is situated within a written text which traces the historical nature of tattooing in the West and the social control of women's bodies. In some way it may be a step toward developing an anthropological and photographic praxis.