1The goal of this special issue of Civilisations is to explore the relationship between the anthropological project of understanding humankind and the practice of photography, in a continuation of the long-standing debate begun in the Anglophone world and continued more recently, in the Francophone world, by the journals Ethnologie française (2007) and Gradhiva (2018). Adopting a landscape format in full colour for the occasion to give visual content pride of place, our aim in this special issue is to bring together articles that focus on the photographic process, spanning multiple approaches that overlap extensively. In broad terms, we called for contributions addressing the technical and methodological, social and political, scientific and ethical issues underscored by the use of photography in the context of anthropological research, as well as the questions raised by the “persistence of images” (Le Gall 2014) beyond the contexts in which they were produced.
2Whether still or animated, images have been at the centre of our research in the various fields we have visited, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Laos (P. Petit), and from Vietnam to France (M. Le Meur) (see Petit 2014, 2020a, 2020b; Le Meur 2018, 2024; Le Meur, Strady & Chung 2018). In 2021, we both contributed to a travelling photography exhibition dedicated to youth in public spaces in East Asia (see Nguyen V.M. in this issue). It is from this shared experience that, through a reflexive process, our editorial project emerged, taking the form of a call for contributions from four different angles. Before narrowing our attention to three overarching themes that connect the texts in this issue, we think it is useful to return to these initial angles in order to share the range of questions that we had in mind when we began this project. This is also an opportunity to provide a summary of each contribution to help orient the reader as they use this volume.
3This first angle suggested by the call for contributions, and no doubt the most obvious one, explores the idea of the anthropologist being ‘augmented’ in the field through their use of technical tools, including the camera. This raises several questions. What role does the camera play in relation to vision and to memory, and in relation to the audio recorder and the notepad? What are the practical uses of photography during fieldwork, and what kind of ‘ethnographic pact’, often implicit, is made with the research participants? How should one negotiate one’s ethnographic identity alongside one’s identity as a photographer? What possibilities does this position create? What are its limits? Photographic prints are also among the few specific transactional objects that link anthropologists with their hosts, particularly when they serve as gifts on returning to the field, a practice that illustrates the relational dimension of the photograph in anthropology.
4After fieldwork, photographic materials are developed, whether by analogue or digital means, analysed as material findings, and then used in anthropological publications. What intentions motivate anthropologists who make use of this medium, beyond the “realist pact” (Olivier de Sardan 2017)? Is it predominantly a desire to demonstrate something, an aesthetic intention, or a wish to convey a sort of presence and affective or emotional dimensions that would be difficult to communicate through written text alone (Edwards 2015)? How and under what conditions does research continue in the form of a photography exhibition, and what constraints and effects does this have on the knowledge that is shared with a wider audience in this way?
5Almost all of the contributions to this edition address these questions. Two articles, however, stand out for their autobiographical treatment of the subject, over careers spanning over twenty years. Manoël Pénicaud captures the “shared religiosity” that unites believers of various faiths who visit holy sites around the Mediterranean alongside one another. His analysis begins with the practical issues involved in taking photographs in the dynamic context of pilgrimages, where the ethnographer has to find a status and a place. He then seeks to define the function of the photographs, especially in terms of memory, during his analysis. Finally, he considers what they evoke when distributed at conferences, in publications, and at exhibitions, thereby raising the question of their sensory and emotional specificity. Meanwhile, Maïté Boullosa-Joly addresses almost the same questions as she reflects on her long ethnographic project among the indigenous peoples of north-west Argentina, focusing on the way photography positioned her in this social space. As this was a case of repeated ethnographic research in the same field, the author captures the progression of what photography entails in terms of integration, trust, and interpersonal exchange. She details the ways in which her photographs circulate locally, used in service of the indigenous cause or of collective memory but also to generate personal ties and female solidarity.
6A third contribution aligns with this line of thought, but at a collective level. Nguyen Van Minh describes an exhibition of photographs taken by a dozen colleagues collaborating on a multidisciplinary project, ‘Asian Youth in Public Spaces’. He argues that the exhibition, its curation, and the process of visits to the exhibition should be seen as part and parcel of the research process, not as independent issues. For example, the selection of photographs from different geographic regions that are nonetheless relevant to the same concept forces the viewer to think more deeply about the comparisons –notably in relation to the topic of “late socialism” in the east of the continent, for instance. In the same way, the curation encourages a deeper reflection on the challenges of representation, from the need to protect people photographed in authoritarian regimes to the imperative to construct a visual narrative that forces audiences to rethink their preconceptions about Asia.
7The second angle emphasised in the call for contributions concerned the anthropological uses of photographs that were not produced by anthropologists. The potential field for research in this area is immense, ranging from colonial photography to family albums and from exhibitions with humanist goals to other, more circumscribed documentation projects. What anthropological perspective should be applied to the production of such images and to the uses of photography in these various contexts? How can we conduct detailed anthropological analyses of photographs produced by third parties? What do these photographs say about the societies and the groups in which they were produced and disseminated, and what power relationships and debates do they reflect?
8Based on doctoral research conducted across multiple sites in Europe, Naïm Jeanbart describes the uses of photographic portraits of Sheikh Nazim El-Haqqani El-Qubrusi (†2014), founder of a Sufi movement, in three places of worship connected to the movement. His article illustrates the variability and subtlety of these uses, which nonetheless all attest to the photographs’ agentive effect on the faithful visiting these places of worship –an approach not unlike Gell’s (1998) theory on the agency of artworks.
The challenge here is to preserve the charismatic power of the Sheikh’s intense gaze without exposing oneself to the accusations of heresy that exist within the Sunni tradition regarding images. For this reason, the photographs are often displayed in a “minimal” way (Piette 2015), in intimate spaces, or behind the scenes, in a way that appears informal or casual, in order to preserve their ability to create a spiritual and interpersonal connection between the Sheikh and each of his followers in this intimate setting.
9Based on studies conducted in French robotics laboratories, Lionel Obadia analyses the photography of robots from a dual anthropological perspective. This text could also fit perfectly into the previous section dedicated to the anthropologist-photographer, as the author describes how he integrated himself into the environment he was studying as well as his choices regarding the photographic framing of the robots and their environment, choices that show the robots from very different perspectives. Yet the author also details –and this is the text’s second anthropological perspective– the ways in which different users of these spaces photograph the robots, whether they are official visitors, artists, or roboticists. These processes say a great deal about the relationships between human beings and machines that appear to be an extension of our species, as well as about the imaginary that surrounds them.
10Photographic anthropology, in the strict sense of the term, presupposes that anthropological work and photographic work, conducted by the same person or by a collective, are intertwined from the research stage up until the production of an academic text. We are thinking here in particular of Bateson and Mead’s photographic analysis of the “Balinese character” (1942) or of the “scripto-visual description” suggested by Piette (1996) to analyse a ritual. We are also thinking of photo elicitation interviews, which have long been used in the field of visual studies (Collier 1957; Harper 2002), or of action research projects in which participants are asked to take photographs of whatever they find significant, often with disposable cameras (Meyer & Papinot 2017; Jonas 2017; Brandler-Weinreb 2023). How are these methods carried out in practice, and what role do they play in the broader context of other fieldwork methodologies?
- 1 We also received submissions about the photovoice method, although these unfortunately could not be (...)
11Patrice Diatta conducted research on waste in the suburbs of Dakar (Senegal) and Bamako (Mali) using a participatory visual method. He developed a method of study that could be adapted and reconstructed depending on the circumstances to capture his interlocutors’ views on the topic. He had residents of the suburbs accompany him while he took photographs ‘on demand’, without giving them the camera.1 In cooperation with some of these residents, he selected a corpus of images and then presented it to different groups of participants to collect their responses. Thus, by closely following people’s experiences of urban problems, his method was able to limit the biases of an individual study and to encourage discussion, notably about questions of public management and the moral categories of civic-mindedness and uncivil behaviour.
12In a text written as preparation for his doctoral dissertation, Merlin Ottou describes how he used photography to study the relationships between different agents in the mining sector in Cameroon. Here we are dealing with a sensitive field where information is heavily protected, given the issues that oppose and link these different actors. To break this ‘ice’, the author decided to turn to photography, which he usually carried out in a (semi-)clandestine way. When he later showed them to his interlocutors, the photographs turned out to be powerful triggers for speech in a world that is generally secretive. Here, we have gone beyond generally accepted deontological norms. To limit discomfort in the ethnographic relationship, the author also developed a practical ethic in which he continuously evaluated the situation and adapted his method on a case-by-case basis. The debate is open.
13The fourth theme in our call for contributions was inspired by the fact that anthropology often leaves photographic evidence to third parties. First, anthropologists can be the object of the photographic gaze of others, as in the case of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was photographed by his colleague Luiz de Castro Faria (Perrin 2003); sometimes, too, photographers embark on field trips and take photographs of anthropologists at work. We were also thinking of the photographic corpuses that anthropologists leave to posterity. Materials of this sort, such as, amongst many others, those from Evans Pritchard’s expeditions among the Azande (see Figure 1), or those of other founding fathers and mothers of the discipline, reveal a great deal about the methods and contexts of anthropology at the time, and are worth comparing to the published works of the same authors. What aspects of anthropological practice are visible on these photographs? What remains invisible? What power relations come to light within and beyond the frame? How can we make use of this photographic record of anthropology to share the discipline’s history with students or with the wider public? What methodological or epistemological insights can we draw from images depicting the ethnographic relationship or what happened ‘backstage’? This kind of mise en abîme, exemplified by the journal Gradhiva’s dossier (2018) focusing on photography in anthropology during the interwar period, is a creative way of extending the reflexive and positional turn in contemporary anthropology.
Figure 1. The British anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard with young Azande during fieldwork in Sudan between 1927 and 1930.
This famous photograph provides a thought-provoking image of colonial ethnography. Invoking Marcel Mauss, the anthropologist Sandra Revolon provides certain analytical keys in a short text that is at once serious and ironic, examining sitting and standing positions, seats, chairs, and power relations (Revolon 2020).
Photograph by unknown author; silver halide gelatine print, available at the Pitt Rivers Museum (Morton 2006).
14In the spirit of reciprocity with anthropologists of the past, these two photographs (Figure 2 and Figure 3) show the authors of this introduction doing fieldwork in their respective fields, in Vietnam and Laos.
Figure 2. Mikaëla Le Meur (Vietnam)
Mikaëla Le Meur was photographed by Dr. Xuân, a Vietnamese geographer and colleague with a passion for photography, during a joint fieldwork excursion to investigate the problem of waste on the banks of the Thi Nai lagoon, near Quy Nhon, in 2016.
Mikaëla Le Meur 2016.
Figure 3. Pierre Petit (Laos)
Pierre Petit was photographed by Sommay Singthong, a colleague from the National University of Laos, while filming an oral history interview in the village of Müang Van in Houaphan province in June 2011. To his left, research assistant Amphone Monephachan is asking a question; in front of him, on the tiles, are his equipment bag and his field notebook; to his right are two of the five interview participants (Petit 2020a: 51)
Pierre Petit 2011.
15The opening article of this issue, written by Raphaël Bories, is part of this critical review of disciplinary practices, based on the photographic corpus left by a little-known figure in French ethnology, Monique Roussel de Fontanès. Roussel de Fontanès conducted ethnographic research on the traditional costumes of women in Calabria (Italy) on behalf of the Musée de l’Homme beginning in the 1950s. While remaining in line with the documentary approach that prevailed at the time, particularly in the museum world, Monique Roussel de Fontanès was well aware of the positive social effects that photography had on her relationships with her interlocutors, in an economy of gifts and counter-gifts enlivened by exchanges of letters.
16The issue also includes a review by Oriane Girard of Anaïs Mauuarin’s recent book A l’épreuve des images. Photographie et ethnologie en France (2022), which examines collections of photographs produced by ethnographers for the Trocadéro Museum, which became the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1938. Mauuarin’s book investigates the deep and evolving connections between ethnography and visuality, artistic practices and museography, scholarly audiences and wider public dissemination, contributing, as Oriane Girard summarises, to a consideration of “the epistemological and heuristic relationships between anthropology and visual expression”.
17This issue includes a fifth theme in addition to the four from our original call for contributions: the anthropologist and photographer(s). Two contributions show how representatives of these two professions can, in various ways, find themselves involved in joint or parallel projects, which are therefore not (exclusively) under the aegis of anthropologists. These two texts, dedicated to depicting the circumstantial links between anthropologists and photographers, take a resolutely horizontal approach, investigating the modalities of cooperation between the arts and the social sciences.
18Caterina Borelli offers a comparative analysis of the work of three photographers with whom she has collaborated in various configurations and regions (from Romania to Italy and Spain, via Peru), and in whose practice she finds questions and ways of working that are similar to those of anthropologists embedded in the field. Following Hal Foster, who identified an “ethnographic turn” in artistic practice (1995), Borelli argues, conversely, for greater attention on the part of anthropologists to other ways of thinking about and representing the world, such as those of photographers, who privilege affect and experience over concern for documenting; corporality and the senses over rationality. She argues for greater openness to the hybridisation of scientific and artistic practices and fields of research in a joyful snub to borders, conservatism, and academicism.
19In their ethnography and comprehensive photography of a building – the Mackenzie Tower – that is representative of the social and urban transformations in Northern Canada, Lindsay Bell and Jesse C. Jackson call for “parallel play”, echoing psychologists’ observation that children first play side by side before attempting to interact. This is another way of thinking about the encounter between anthropologists and photographers: their shared path, which presupposes openness and curiosity, advances the project of understanding and representing the world without erasing the identities of the two partners. Their “collusion” (from cum-ludere meaning ‘to play with’) has clearly borne fruit, as attested by the multimodal exhibition that resulted from their “generative, but not necessarily collaborative” work, which took place over a decade and was guided by critical reflection on images relating to Northern Canada.
20As is clear from this first part of our introduction, the questions that we asked ourselves when we began this issue were as numerous as the sometimes different questions on which the contributors based their reflections. This diversity is very welcome, as it gives an idea of the themes with which anthropologists are engaging today, reflecting the contemporary evolution of photographic questions and practices in the discipline. The second part of the introduction will address overarching issues by exploring in greater detail three themes, or rather three sets of themes, that connect all of the contributions. For, no matter how anthropologists and their colleagues use photography, they will be confronted with technical challenges specific to photographic methods; with the social framework in which their practice takes place; and with the thorny question of what constitutes a ‘good’ photograph. These three questions will guide the rest of our discussion.
21We start the second part of the introduction by questioning the materiality and concreteness of photographic practice. For before we consider it as a visual art, photography should be regarded as a technique: a process of “recording a lighting situation” relying on the “modification of a photosensitive surface that is exposed to the light” (Conord 2007: 20). Taking photographs is literally (and etymologically) a way of writing with light, whether by chemical or photoelectric means.2
22Photographers, moreover, are constantly reminded of the ambivalent nature of light due to the limits of their technical devices which adapt with varying levels of success to situations with more or less light, more or less contrast, depending on the sensor, camera lens and shutter, not to mention the fragile nature of the film or older photosensitive plates which Bronislaw Malinowski, writing in the 1910s, describes changing at night:
I went back and looked at the stars. I changed the plates [in my camera] and walked along the shore; at moments felt a nervous dread. The stars sparkled; the view of the sky did not fill me with mood of ∞ [infinity], but rejoiced my soul as a “decoration of the tropical night” (1989 [1967]: 71).
- 3 We mustn’t forget that the financial accessibility of photography and the very idea of taking a “ch (...)
23When photographic constraints are assimilated and become routine, just like the range of possibilities they represent, this often determines one’s preferences and choices for the techniques used to take shots, whether as part of an amateur, artistic or academic process. Indeed, in addition to the crucial aspect of light and how to capture it, one also has to reckon with the weight of the objects, the memory of the camera, and the cost –financial but also environmental (Levin 2023)3–, how bulky, and how visible or discreet they are, particularly in the context of fieldwork. Depending on whether one opts for a disposable camera –often used in participatory processes– a smartphone, which can go unnoticed (see M. Ottou in this issue), or an analogue or digital SLR camera, which boosts the identification of the anthropologist as a photographer (see M. Boullosa-Joly and M. Pénicaud), these technical aspects are intrinsically linked to the research methods and the ethno-photographic experience.
For this reason, it would be interesting to know more about the experience of different ethnographer-photographers, and the sometimes long-standing and personal stories that affect the relationship between their equipment, how they use it, their sensitivity to its materiality, the stories and attachments that the practice requires, and how they construct the object of anthropological study. How, and with what equipment, does one start taking photos? And why? Is it a choice, something one is more or less obliged to do, a simple accident, or perhaps the chance to use skills learned in a more formal context?
24Let us consider the case of Monique Roussel de Fontanès, whose photography practice is described by R. Bories in this issue. Roussel de Fontanès’ work seems to be the result of the teaching she received at the Institut d’Ethnologie, and later at the Centre de formation aux recherches ethnologiques (Centre of training for ethnological research), from the founding fathers of the discipline in France: Marcel Griaule, André Leroi-Gourhan, Georges-Henri Rivière, etc. This way of teaching photography, which encourages the use of any technique that is able to leave a physical trace (including drawing, video, collecting objects), is closely linked to the museum approach and the “paradigm of collecting” (de L’Estoile 2005) that aims at exhaustive collections but which is most often characterised by the “absence of a precise epistemological vision” (Joseph & Mauuarin 2018: 14). Writing about this way of inducing people to engage in ethno-photographic practice, Claude Lévi-Strauss even declared “with a sort of bitterness”: “I took photographs because I had to” (Lévi-Strauss 2005, cited in Joseph & Mauuarin 2008: 14). His photographs from the field were only published in 1994, when there was renewed interest in the images, but also in ethnography, as a sort of “evidence” from one’s youth (Piette 2018). This institutionalisation of the teaching of photographic techniques during the middle of the 20th century went hand-in-hand with schemes to subsidise the “costs of photography”, in as much as this was an expensive endeavour that required institutional support. In order to produce the images so coveted by the museums, which would store them in their reserve collections both as a sort of proof and also as means of scientific legitimation (Edwards 2001; Joseph & Mauuarin 2008), starting from the 1930s photographic devices such as the Leica or Rolleiflex were recommended as being suitable for travel to far-distant destinations, and for use during immersive fieldwork.
25But these are also considerations –or even recommendations– regarding what should be included in the frame as we find amongst very early proponents of visual methods such as Marcel Griaule, who harboured a certain fascination for aerial photography (Griaule 1957; Joseph & Mauuarin 2008), or André Leroi-Gourhan who called for shots (including videos) to focus more on movements, gestures and techniques (Leroi-Gourhan 1948). In this issue, R. Bories shows that, even if Monique Roussel de Fontanès was seeking to take photographs of Calabrian costumes in their “original setting” –i.e., being worn by Calabrians in normal, everyday situations– it sometimes happened that de Fontanès entered into the frame and posed in costume herself in order to overcome ethno-photographic obstacles. In his text about robotics laboratories, L. Obadia considers the effects of knowledge produced by the framing of robots in close-ups or wide shots: the former makes it possible to see the ambiguous humanity of the machines; the latter, by contrast, emphasises their dependence on –and embeddedness in– the technical network of the laboratory. Sharing a desire to show the built environment of Northern Canada, L. Bell and J. C. Jackson found common ground in their use of overlays: a technique of superposing images that is as old as photography itself, here facilitated by digital means which allowed them to put in the same frame different temporalities, and multiple spaces, and to also bring in movement. Framing can also be influenced by the fluxes of the group being photographed, as in the intense experience of photo-ethnographic participation as described by M. Pénicaud in relation to pilgrimages: his gaze, but also his whole body, oscillating between dance and trance, were guided by his desire to visually capture the moment and capture the religious fervour “in the box”, so to speak.
26Since photography first emerged in the 19th century, and as it has gradually become more accessible, the technical and commercial ‘revolutions’ have led to certain practices, uses, framings and, by the same token, methods. These developments sometimes even create paradigms, building on existing networks of actors and institutions. This is what we can see from the earlier history of the relationship between anthropology, ethnography, and photography, which started in a context of tensions between people’s experiences of long-distance travel, projects of scientific documentation, and compiling collections for museums. Today, the photo-ethnographic revolution of the smartphone remains largely undocumented, and along with it, the whole social and technical system on which it is founded, ranging from the limited frame of selfies with cat ears and whiskers, up to the ubiquitous shops which deal with and repair these fragile objects (Nova & Bloch 2020), not to mention the ways of controlling how phones are sometimes used in ways that are seen as deviant by society. This calls to mind the situation in South-Korea, where the act of taking a digital photo is always accompanied by a sound effect of a camera shutter closing; the government introduced this regulation on smartphone manufacturers to counteract the widespread practice of molka, or up-skirting (taking photos up women’s skirts without their knowledge), something which rather reduces people’s ability in that country to take photos discreetly with their phones.
27In the end, these handy, connected objects are however not systematically or definitively replacing the other photographic devices that some people are still drawn to –some artists are currently returning to use the view camera, both for landscape and portrait photography (Bertho & Nefzger 2020; Jouve 2015): will ethnographers take the same route? Contrary to the evolutionist idea that one technique will be replaced by another, here we are seeing rather a multiplication of techniques. Maïté Boullosa-Joly’s contribution to this issue is evidence of this. In her quest to capture the expressivity of distant faces, in her fieldwork in the Argentinian Andes, she chose to revive the technique and aesthetics of silver printing in black and white, despite the discussions –and sometimes disagreements– with her hosts who were fascinated by colour, in particular the shades of vegetation that struggles to survive due to the dry conditions at these high altitudes. As a 21st-century anthropologist, she actually situates her work in the line of her predecessor Jean Brunhes, a geographer who was directly involved in building a collection of photography on the line between human geography and ethnology: the Archives of the Planet (1912‒1931) (Castro 2018).
28Whether these techniques follow each other, accumulate, cross over, compete, or hybridise, they are constantly questioning the positions and methods of the photographer, in the field of anthropology amongst others. For this reason, it is interesting to note that several contributions to this issue also include drawings (see R. Bories, C. Borelli, L. Bell & J.C. Jackson, N. Jeanbart), and this seems like a call to accept a plurality of techniques and ways of writing.
29More than text, which can be frustrating to share with one’s interlocutors, photography helps make connections within the practice of anthropology. These dynamics can be observed at all stages of research. Just think, for example, of the process of negotiation and the shared engagement that emerges between an ethnographer and their hosts while taking photos; sharing memories when the photos are later distributed in the field –as demonstrated since Haddon’s expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898 (Edwards 2015); the reciprocal interest and curiosity evoked by photographs in collaborative projects which involve professionals from various disciplines or professions; the exhibitions which lead to dialogue and sharing of experiences with visitors. This list is not exhaustive: photography enhances links and creates new chances for interaction at all stages.
30Above all, photography plays an important role during a critical moment in the ethnographic process, namely when ‘breaking the ice’. Taking on the role of photographer often allows an anthropologist to find their place, something which does not just happen one time but which evolves over the course of fieldwork (Conord 2000), as M. Boullosa-Joly demonstrates well in her contribution. It was by acting as a photographer that she was able to gain access both to the very masculine world of the gauchos, and also to the milieu of the indigenous activists who felt that her activities helped their customs gain acknowledgement for being more ‘authentic’. M. Pénicaud also reports having regularly been accorded the status of group photographer when following a pilgrimage. M. Ottou, in his work, showed photographs of social scenes from within the mining world in order to break the ice with his informants and overcome their reticence; it is as if the photos taken in the field produced a sense of ‘already being there’ and thereby encouraged them to come out of their shells. As for P. Diatta, he directly involved citizens in his work on the local management of urban waste by getting them to participate in taking, selecting and interpreting the photographs. The connections he made in this way made it possible to define a public issue “from the inside”. As we can see here, photography offers ethnographers numerous means to develop relationships, in the field and beyond.
In this way, photography can be seen as one of the many means of exchange and participation which help a researcher doing fieldwork integrate into the group they are studying on a long-term basis. Alongside the small gifts, sharing food or drinks, dancing, or even more broadly, accepting that one may become fodder for the local gossips or allowing people to make jokes at one’s expense, the practice of photography definitely helps an ethnographer establish their position in the fabric of the society in question. But photography is unique in that it introduces a specific temporality in relation to others: a time suspended from the present and typified by waiting and retrospection.
- 4 Naturally, things have taken a different turn with the increasing ubiquity of smartphones, making p (...)
31The photographic images offer a concrete way to figure out the depth of time in the ethnographic relationships, leading both the ethnographer as well as those who host them to become conscious of this temporal aspect. The images that M. Boullosa-Joly or M. Pénicaud brought back with them from their time in the field, trip after trip, are a token of continuity within something that is discontinuous, a kind of loyalty and personal investment in a relationship, despite being separated. Photographs were also at the heart of the correspondence between Monique Roussel de Fontanès and her interlocutors and colleagues in Italy: these images often featured the ethnographer herself, thus introducing an element of symmetry into the rather documentary-style research project that was being conducted at the time (see the article by R. Bories).4
Figure 4.
Inhabitants of the village Houay Yong are being given some photos (mostly portraits) taken during a trip the previous year.
Pierre Petit 2009.
Figure 5.
Inhabitants of the village of Thongnamy are laughing and watching with nostalgia some footage filmed a few weeks previously in Houay Yong, the village where they come from, situated 800km from their current village.
Pierre Petit 2009.
32Within anthropology have largely under-estimated the roles and potentialities of separation and meeting again within anthropology. For, as Johannes Fabian puts it strongly in his reflection on the construction of memories in the ‘field’ over time,
copresence, to be experienced consciously, needs a shared past, and it is during absence from each other that we find the time to make pasts that can be remembered (Fabian 2007: 133).
33Photographs that are brought back to the site of fieldwork play a crucial role in evoking the ‘shared past’ which facilitates copresence in an ethnographic situation. There is a paradigmatic illustration of this in figure 12 in the article by M. Boullosa-Joly, where we see the display put together by a friend of the ethnographer, including all the photographs received over the twenty years they have known each other.
34The theme of temporality also comes up in the two articles in this issue that discuss the collaboration between anthropologists and photographers. Photographers who take this approach end up living in the field for a long time, often returning very frequently and entering into in-depth exchanges with local communities (see also Maresca 2007). This is true, for example, of Camilla de Maffei, who spent eight years travelling around the delta of the Danube, trying to understand how the inhabitants of this labyrinthine region experience space. Then there is Felipe Romero Beltrán, who spent many years photographing migrants whose bodies are marked by the process of waiting, his work eventually forming a “relational aesthetic” (Hjorth & Sharp 2014) (see the article by C. Borelli). This is also true for J.C. Jackson who believes that one of the major contributions of his collaboration with the anthropologist L. Bell is the value he will henceforth place on having a long-term presence in-situ; both Jackson and Bell hope to continue the project by returning to present their exhibition in Hay River, the town which is home to Mackenzie Tower, the subject of their ‘collusive’ research.
Besides this specificity of temporality, the exchanges and interactions which are enabled through photography, in relation to other forms of relationship, are marked by their sensorial, aesthetic, affective, and emotive aspects. Regardless of the information it contains, a photograph always harbours relevant details that can capture the attention of those who are looking at them –as Roland Barthes (1980) evoked in his concepts of studium and punctum. M. Pénicaud describes this development of photographic interaction beyond the dual-relationship of the anthropologist and their informants, moving towards a third element, namely those who view an image. Photography invites viewers to foster empathy and subjectivation, with a certain ‘letting-go’ on the part of the anthropologist which helps the viewers cultivate a personal and critical way of tackling a subject. This is one of the issues that Nguyen V. M. addresses in relation to the exhibition ‘Asian youth in public spaces’, which he discusses in his article. Whether during formal presentations or impromptu visits with colleagues, students, or members of the public, the photographic relationship gets carried over into the discussion and leads to new and enriching interpretations.
35Yet we can perfectly well conceive of circumstances in which images circulate even more widely, and where the anthropologist-photographer’s intentions have evolved even further. This brings to mind, for example, the postcolonial restitution of historic corpuses which have led to a radical shift in the status of photography from the sphere of documentary towards that of affect (Edwards 2015). The agency of images persists beyond that of the photographs and subjects, as shown by N. Jeanbart in his contribution on the contextualised use of photography of a late Sufi Sheikh. In the religious spaces he explores, images can have an impact too, as in the juxtaposed portraits of the Sheikh and of Queen Elizabeth II; or pictures that circulate commercially, as the images are reproduced, copied, and sold in various formats; or images that bear witness to more intimate relations if they are on display in a family context. By immortalising moments, and making them persist in time, photography creates a kind of permanence which is both material –through the object, the document– and memorial –through images or references in one’s mind (Le Gall 2014). Anthropologists, ethnographers, and photographers thus work with a ‘condensed’ temporality, charged with sense and intertwined relations, which can be revealed by a single image that shows a single moment in time.
36What makes a ‘good’ photograph? There are so many possible answers to this question within the field of photography itself, and there are also multiple opinions from the point of view of anthropology and social sciences. For example, the answer is extremely different if we are talking about participatory fieldwork (as in P. Diatta’s work on urban waste) as opposed to an exhibition aimed at visitors from the academic world (as described by Nguyen V. M. in his work on youth in public spaces in Asia). The numerous discussions that we have had about this issue of the journal –for example, deciding which photographs should be chosen over others for the full-page spread– are just one indicator of this plurality of interpretations, and how difficult it can be to make decisions. Looking back at some important texts on the topic from within socio-anthropology, we can, however, set out some useful key divisions within the discourse: ‘good’ photography, if indeed it exists, should be both proof of something real –an image from the field– while also being significant –i.e., something that is full of meaning– but also aesthetic, because it is able to transmit and generate emotions, as outlined above (Collier 1967; Becker 1981; Pink 2001; Conord 2002; Edwards 2015). Indeed, earlier authors who reflected on the value of photography as a research tool have demonstrated the extent to which scientific logic in relation to regimes of truth or veracity has overlapped with aesthetic concerns linked not only to perceptions of beauty but, above all, to the emotional charge of images. While there is still sometimes talk of the hypothetical contrast between “photographical purity” and “artistic impact” (Joseph & Mauuarin 2018), it is more generally accepted that a photograph’s visual qualities are at once “aesthetic, explicative and emotive”, according to the “primary criteria” of the “l’Anthropologie en partage” (Sharing Anthropology) photography competition launched by the CNRS in 2022.5
37In the present dossier, this call for hybridisation is particularly strong in the article from C. Borelli who reminds us of an urgent warning previously expressed by James Clifford (1988: 1) “pure products go crazy”. This should not prevent us from taking into account the specificities of the work of the researchers and artists, as L. Obadia invites us to do. In his article, he describes the different photographical habitus that characterise the different social and professional groups as they take photos of robots: ethnographers, visitors, robot engineers, professional photographers amongst others, people don’t take photos from ‘nowhere’. To have a fusion of genres, we have to deal with this diversity of situated points of view.
38In addition to these different elements attempting to ‘square the circle’, there are also aspects of ethics, and even politics, if we reflect for example on Susan Sontag’s polemical writing about photography: a relation of “voyeurism” towards the world that, in her opinion, relies on the consumption of reality and domination of the Other through the image (Sontag 1977). This question arises in this issue in the text by L. Bell and J.C. Jackson, who precisely refrain from photographing intimate scenes in order to avoid reproducing the (neo)colonial “right to see”. If Sontag’s plea “against photography” was written in the tragic context of the United States’ war in Vietnam, which was also a war of images (Nudelman 2014), her words also have the merit of shedding light on the moral dimension which relates to the question of what is ‘good’ photography –or a ‘good’ photograph. In line with this critical perspective, the anthropologist and photographer Camilo Leon-Quijano argues that “a good picture might challenge the politics of visual representation of the imaged subject through both a photographic and ethnographic engagement” (Leon-Quijano 2022: 592). For photography to be considered good from an anthropological point of view, it would therefore need to draw on “‘good’ ethnographic encounters” (Leon-Quijano 2022: 573).
Figure 6. Excerpt of the graphic novel Days of Sand by Aimée de Jongh
The graphic novel Days of Sand by Aimée de Jongh (2021) elegantly tells the story of a fictional photographer who is hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the Dust Bowl, a human and ecological catastrophe whereby certain agricultural regions in the United States were covered in sand during the Great Depression, between the two World Wars. The main character of the novel is torn between the duties of his job which requires to take impactful photos that should both inform but also shock the public, as opposed to the relationship he develops over time with the inhabitants of this devastated region. Reading between the lines, the novel makes us think of the major work of the photographer Dorothea Lange, who immortalised the destinies of these exiles from the Anthropocene, long before that term even existed.
All rights reserved – De Jongh / Dargaud 2021.
39What should one say, then, about the photographs by Merlin Ottou, whose contribution to this edition puts a finger on a sensitive (if not taboo) topic within ethnographic practice, namely the act of secretly collecting data and making images of research participants? His reflexive approach to the ethnography of mining bureaucracy in Cameroon brings up certain ethical and scientific controversies, but he also invites us to reflect on possible ethical positions. He draws on the existing literature on so-called ‘sensitive’ topics to reflect on the limits of the ethnographical pact, and on the inaccessibility of some fields of research where there are high stakes nonetheless, and which thus also deserve the chance to be observed and analysed. In describing the mechanisms of negotiating his access to the field, the explicit or implicit agreements that he obtained; the manner in which he assumes his right to be there, to observe; the way in which he also oversteps the mark, by giving himself the right to photograph what he sees; and then uses these images during his interviews to encourage people to talk, and perhaps free them from their inhibitions; he thus forces us to question our own ethical limits. Does one always have to have permission to investigate, in order to do so? Does one always have to have permission to take photographs, in order to do so?
40What should we do with all the spaces and institutions that close their doors to ethnographers (and photographers!); what about countries where research is not free, or even violently supressed, but where it is still necessary to keep investigating (Fassin 2023)? The moral question thus goes further due to the imperative necessity to document what is happening, perhaps beyond the limits: a sort of ethnographic need to show, through the use of photography, the “underlying drama” that is uncovered by research (Becker 1981: 11). Howard Becker also tells us if we really have to define what is a good photograph in our field then it is simply whatever will afterwards lead us to say “[that] was worth photographing”.
41The photographic approach thus merges with the broader aim within the social sciences to step away from stereotypes and clichés, decentre our gaze, and put forward a critical perspective on the world (Lahire 2016), that can render visible the invisible, and question the social space of a discourse, of images in circulation. Other contributions to this edition embrace this same project and defend it by calling into question mainstream representations, for example as M. Pénicaud does, showing us “shared religiosity” of pilgrims from different religions who visit the same sanctuaries, as opposed to media coverage that is saturated with references to tensions and even conflicts between religions. In the same vein, in their contribution L. Bell and J.C. Jackson call into question the “politics of representation” of the too-often exoticized regions of Northern Canada. Their work shows the extent to which architecture and urban planning point to an economy which is modernist, capitalist, and extractivist.
- 6 Usually translated as “the distribution of the sensible”, Rancière’s expression relies on the many (...)
42The sensitive dimension of photographs thus ends up supporting arguments based on ethnography, and focusing on social issues. In this way, we come back to the work of Rancière who defined a “partage du sensible”6 between aesthetics and politics (Rancière 2000), and –we might add– in a scientific and ethical approach. This “partage” both reveals the borders but equally transcends them. In this way, photo-ethnography cannot escape the rules: it is not a way of writing that touches on and satisfies everyone equally. How it is received also remains a matter of sensibility.
43We trust that this issue offers a sufficiently broad range of approaches to the intersection between anthropology and photography to elicit reflection and emotions from a broad range of readers.
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