Directions and Diversions
in Visual Anthropology            
  1. Introduction
  2. Objects of Affect
  3. The Burden of Representation
  4. Uncertain Evidence
  5. Digital Media Infrastructure

  6. Collaboration
  7. Sovereign Vision(s)
  8. Opacity and Refusal
  9. Alter-Futurisms
  10. Visual Anthropology beyond the Visual

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CC BY-NC-SA 2024 Isaac Marrero Guillamón

2. Objects of Affect


One of the most important contributions that anthropology has brought to the study of the visual is an orientation towards analysing the “social life” of images, that is, an approach based on inquiring what images do, rather than what they are or mean. We will unpack questions of materiality and affect, central to this expanded analytics.

Required reading:
  • Campt, Tina M. 2012. “Family Matters: Sight, Sense, Touch.” In Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
  • Edwards, Elizabeth. 2002. “Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs.” Visual Studies 17 (1): 67–75. doi:10.1080/14725860220137336.

Part 1/2 (19’): photographs as objects; the social lives of photographs; reading identification photographs against the grain.



Activity: explore Susan Meiselas’ Nicaragua project and consider how the circulation of these photographs has created different kinds of meanings and affect for them: https://www.susanmeiselas.com/nicaragua-home

Part 2/2 (18’): the ethnography of photographic practices; beyond the Western realist paradigm; haptic images.



 
Suggested films:
  • Baichwal, Jennifer. 2006. Manufactured Landscapes. Canada, 86 min.
  • MacDougall, David and Judith MacDougall. 1991. Photo Wallahs. UK, 60 min.
  • Meiselas, Susan, Alfred Guzzetti, and Richard P. Rogers. 1992. Pictures of a Revolution. US, 93 min.
  • Wendl, Tobias and Nancy du Plessis. 1998. Future Remembrance - Photography and Image Arts in Ghana. Germany, 54 min. https://vimeo.com/133272148

Further reading:
  • Bajorek, Jennifer. 2020. Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Buckley, Liam. 2014. “Photography and Photo-Elicitation after Colonialism.” Cultural Anthropology 29 (4): 720–43. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca29.4.07.
  • Campt, Tina M. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Edwards, Elizabeth. 2012. “Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (1): 221–34.
  • Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart, eds. 2004. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London; New York: Routledge.
  • Glass, Aaron. 2009. “A Cannibal in the Archive: Performance, Materiality, and (In)Visibility in Unpublished Edward Curtis Photographs of the Kwakwaka’wakw Hamat’sa.” Visual Anthropology Review 25 (2): 128–49. doi:10.1111/j.1548-7458.2009.01038.x.
  • Haney, Erin. 2010. “Film, Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photographs.” History of Photography 34 (2): 119–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087290903361464.
  • MacDonald, Richard L. 2017. ‘Projecting Films to Spirits: On Shrines as Conjunctural Space and the Ritual Economy of Outdoor Cinema in Bangkok’. Visual Anthropology Review 33 (2): 152–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12133.
  • Mazzarella, William. 2013. Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Morton, Christopher. 2018. “Photography, Anthropology Of.” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 1–14. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1621.
  • Morton, Christopher, and Elizabeth Edwards, eds. 2009. Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.
  • Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Envisioning Asia. London: Reaktion.
  • Pinney, Christopher, and Nicolas Peterson, eds. 2003. Photography’s Other Histories. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Rasmussen, Anders Emil. 2015. ‘Images as Things: Photographing and Filming Kastom in Papua New Guinea’. Visual Anthropology 28 (4): 336–50. doi:10.1080/08949468.2015.1052325.
  • Wright, Christopher. 2013. The Echo of Things: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands. Durham: Duke University Press.