What the Camera Does – #RoR2018

This series – #ROR2018 – has taken a backseat for several months. I’ve been mostly active on Twitter while I navigate state bureaucracies, assemble a research team, begin the process of data collection, management, and analysis, build a house, do my part to getting Footnotes off the ground, deal with #hautalk, fast for Ramadan, and focus on my visiting partner. Things have been hectic, but I found a fleeting moment to address something. Recently, I received an email from a student. Here is an excerpt:

I would be very curious and interested to read something about how you engage in what you named “visual ethnography” and how photography interacts in your practice in anthropological research: what use do you make of the camera? What place holds photography in your project? How does it change it?

I want to begin by noting that “visual ethnography” is not my term nor is it my invention. I want to first clarify how I think about ethnography. The suffix of ethnography should not denote that it is just about writing, but that it involves description, representation, and record more generally. It can be written and it can be recorded as a photograph and video, but it can even be a soundscape or illustration. The term “visual ethnography” may then seem redundant, but I think it’s necessary in order to distinguish a particular sensory engagement from the accepted standard of reading “written ethnography.” Importantly, I don’t think that any form of ethnography should stand alone: just as visual ethnography should be paired with text (or something else), so too do I believe that text should be paired with non-text. My hope is that we can move toward a significantly more mainstream “multimodal” model of anthropology, to use a hot new word. Multimodality describes just that: anthropology that engages with the world by many different ways. Text and photos and video, but also social media, art, experience, sense, and on and on and on.

Ethnographic photography, in particular, is practically as old as the camera,[1] but some of my favorite work comes out of the early to mid-20th century. While not deliberately ethnographic, you should spend some time perusing the documentary oeuvre of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw and portraiture of the Malian photographers, Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe. Among today’s active photographers, I admire the portraiture of Matika Wilbur and Omar Victor Diop, the street photography of Brent Luvaas, and the work of Jason De Léon. Not all of these photographers were or are “ethnographers,” but to say their work is not ethnographic or documentary[2] would be to undermine the expansive potential of ethnography itself.

To answer the above questions, it is tempting to say that the camera is another tool and photography another kind of data, but that would be a vulgar underestimation of what they actually can do. The camera is a tool, but also method, key, and weapon; photography is data, but also directive, generative, and educational.

The camera both opens doors and closes them. In my experience, people want to be photographed during the events for which they are dressed to the nines, like naming ceremonies and marriages, which I attend frequently, but also religious holidays like Korité (Eid al-Fitr) and Tabaski (Eid al-Adha). Being known as a photographer means being invited to these events which are so important to peoples’ lives and it means sharing in celebration with them. The camera has been at the center of conversations which jumpstart of new friendships.

Most of the people I photograph begin as strangers and become my friends. I help with the farm work, go through all the annoying ethics documents with them, and ask for their input into the creative process. (Kate Schneider, personal communication)

People do not always want to be photographed as they walk through the market, drive to work, or take part in other quotidian tasks – the kinds of things one captures in the genre of “street photography.” As a result, while I’m regularly told to take my camera everywhere, I’ve actually been taking my camera to fewer and fewer places. People treat me differently, sometimes as an interloper (one who invades private and personal spaces), other times as a tourist (one who is not significantly invested in the care and attention to the experiences of the community around me). Common sense is helpful: I would never raise the camera to my eye in the thick of a hospital waiting room, consultation room, or delivery room, even if childbirth lies at the center of my dissertation research. Those are moments best left to the memory of the attendees.

One reason I chose anthropology, as opposed to journalism, was because anthropology allows me to put my camera down. I don’t always need to “get the shot.” (Jeffrey Schonberg, personal communication)

The key, of course, is to be respectful and to ask permission, and to engage in a collaborative project and to pay or barter when appropriate. A collaborator’s time, labor, and voice are important to the development of strong ethnographic photography. When in doubt, one might ask themselves what they might do as not to embody the naked entitlement and privilege from which Diane Arbus and Susan Sontag have drawn.

“Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do,” [Diane] Arbus wrote. The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed. The whole point of photographing people is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them. The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear. The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects—to fight against boredom” (Sontag 1977, 33).

Move slowly and with caution. Compose carefully. If possible, use film. Take the time to listen to those with whom you engage, or at least make yourself conspicuous to them, as well as your audience.

Take your time, shoot film. Publish photos, lest we keep our interlocutors invisible. Be visible in your work. (Jason De Léon, paraphrased from my #displace18 notes)

I like to joke, perhaps to the chagrin of my committee, that if “a picture is worth a thousand words,” then I should be able to submit a portfolio of 100 photographs as my dissertation. What it really means is that photos can be coded (if coding is your thing). Codes are thematic keywords, which are akin to hashtags, that one can assign to words, phrases, paragraphs, but also photos (or parts of photos), video, sound – anything really. The codes I use have been collaboratively developed and defined (in Wolof, French, and English) with the assistance of two Senegalese graduate students. I use these same codes to organize my photography in order to tie visual representations of themes, ideas, or just memories to those that are written (i.e. notes) and spoken (i.e. transcriptions). Like notes, not everything can be coded and photography is therefore also generative; it gives way to new ideas, directions, and questions, particularly when they don’t fit neatly into categories. Photography gives me pause for reflection. It provides visual cues from which I recall details that I might not have put into words at the time, or maybe I can catch things that I had not seen before.

So, then, back to methods: Photographs can also be cues to others. With a method called “photo elicitation,” we may present a photograph to someone and ask, “Can you tell me about this?” With another called “photo voice,” we call on a group of participants to take photographs and then present them to each other in a focus group-style interview session. In both cases, though to varying degrees, what we’re seeking is the perspective of the participant in a different way than we might in informal conversation or formalized interviews.

My journey with photography – like the rest of my work and my approach to it – is still unfolding, but I know that it will occupy a significant portion of my dissertation. (Editor’s Note: Dear Committee, Not 100%. Sincerely, Dick.) There’s only so much of the story that I can tell in writing.

[1] Early examples of photography that told us something about people and their relationships to histories, experiences, and power can be found in the works of Augustus Washington, a Black American portrait photographer and daguerreotypist who worked in Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone and opened a studio in Liberia in 1853; the Lutterodt brothers, Ghanaian portrait photographers of the late 19th century; Alphonso Lisk-Carew, the Sierra Leonean portrait photographer of the early 20th century. Even though they came after some of those listed above, the following three White Dudes™ tend to be a starting point for the history of ethnographic photography in Visual Anthropology curricula and “household names” (at least in the house of North Atlantic Anthropology): Franz Boas was using photography as early as 1894, the photographer Edward Curtis began his career in “salvage ethnography” in 1895, and Bronislaw Malinowski was photographing during his research between 1915-1918.

[2] In my Visual Anthropology course in college, we were asked, throughout the semester, to ponder the difference between visual ethnography and documentary. The best answer I could come up with was that it depended on whose voice was most apparent – researcher, collaborator, participant. As filmmakers and photographers collaborate with ethnographers, or as students seek dual training in ethnography and film/photo, I’m not so sure it’s a question worth asking any more.