Field, and particularly ethnographic and anthropological, photography, began to develop in Russia in the 1870s. A particular surge of interest in visual documentation of culture can be traced back to an ethnographic exhibition held in Moscow in 1867
Early Field Photography and Visual Documents of Northern Indigenous Cultures
Ivan Poliakov’s Collection, 1876
Ekaterina B. Tolmacheva
Photography, Identity, and Migration
Controlling Colonial Migrants in Interwar France and Senegal
Johann Le Guelte
This article examines the politics of interwar colonial identification practices put into place by the French colonial state in order to curtail the mobility of colonial (im)migrants. I argue that photography was used as a tool of imperial control in both French West Africa (AOF) and metropolitan France, since colonial men’s inability to provide the required photographic portraits often prevented them from moving around the empire. In response, colonial subjects appropriated photography in alternative ways to subvert these administrative restrictions. Moreover, they took advantage of metropolitan racial stereotypes to contest Western identification practices.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 27–52
Geographical Imagination, Anthropology, and Political Exiles
Photographers of Siberia in Late Imperial Russia
Tatiana Saburova
, persuading entire villages to pick up and move there in search of a better life. This article focuses on themes connected with the history of photography, exile, science, and representations of Siberia, and is part of a broader discussion about how Asia was
On Photography, History, and Affect
Re-Narrating the Political Life of a Laotian Subject
Panivong Norindr
This essay considers the role of personal, affective history in shaping historiography, and more precisely, a post-colonial history of Laos. Relying on a variety of sources, official and family photographs, US diplomatic documents, telegrams and personal notes, and against the backdrop of multiple losses, this article problematizes the questions of biography and the complex links between the personal and the "historical" by narrating my father's professional trajectory over three decades as a civil servant and career diplomat. Pheng Norindr represented Laos at the 1962 Geneva Conference and became the Laotian envoy to the United Stated during the Vietnam War. His entanglement with French colonialism and Cold War politics offers a point of entry into a Laotian historiography that is critical of a monolithic Western history of Laos.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2008
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 89–103
A Resolute Display
Culture, Life and Intersectional Identity in Israeli Druze Photography
Lindsey Pullum
/Palestinian photography and visual archives to mobilise the photograph as a form of cultural critique on Israeli visual history and speak back to forms of erasure conducted by the Israeli state after 1948. The decolonial project of photography seeks to make visible the
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 87–107
Nicole Hudgins
present day. 3 The avalanche of ruin photography in the archives, albums, publications, and propaganda of World War I France challenges us to understand what functions such images fulfilled beyond their use as visual records. Did wartime images of
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 51–70
(Dis)Connecting Tourism and Photography
Corporeal Travel and Imaginative Travel
Jonas Larsen
Many connections between mobility and photography are traced and established in this article. It is shown that photography entered discourses of tourism before photography was even invented. Sketching and image hunting were central to pre-photographic tourists and they voiced passionate desires for a machine that could easily fix the fleeting and elusive image of the camera obscura and Claude glasses. The difficulties that Talbot experienced while drawing a foreign prospect with the camera obscura led him to invent photography, while Eastman reinvented photography after realising through his own body that holiday picturing meant 'travelling heavy'. The early history of photography is intimately linked to travel and tourism: pre-photographic tourists desired photography and it became designed with the tourist in mind and later for 'travelling light'. Lightweight and reproducible, photographs were designed for movement too. They were crucial in putting the world on display and globalising the 'tourist gaze'. At a time where travelling was associated with fatigue, hassles and risks on the one hand and visual pleasures on the other, photographs seamlessly transported distant places to the convenient and safe armchair. They allow touristic visual consumption where no actual tourism takes place.
Noa Hazan and Avital Barak
Almost immediately after the invention of photography, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount became an object of observation and documentation for European photographers, adventurers, and scholars, who considered the site and its surrounding population relics
The Return of the Republic
Crowd Photography and the Liberation in Toulouse, 1944–1945
Hanna Diamond
During the Liberation of Toulouse, crowd photography dominated the local press rather than the scenes of combat and barricades that marked coverage in Paris and elsewhere. This article shows how crowd photography contributed to a common construction of republicanism across the Toulouse press and exhibitions. It argues that the circulation of these images not only communicated the message that the “people” were once again sovereign, but also implied that these populations had been instrumental in their liberation, thereby contributing to the mythology of “la France résistante.” Editors mobilized crowd photography to convey to viewers the importance of adopting their republican roles at a time of community reconstruction. Reading the photography of the Liberation of Toulouse reveals that while photographic messaging in Liberation France varied in line with local circumstances, it nonetheless played a potent role in contributing to democratic resurgence.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 90–116
Images, Selves, and the Visual Record
Photography and Ethnographic Complexity in Central Cape York Peninsula
Benjamin R. Smith
This essay addresses anthropological engagement with photography in indigenous Australian contexts. Following the work of Gell and Edwards, and drawing on the history of photography and ethnography in central Cape York Peninsula, I explore some ways that photographs may exceed relations of objectification and exoticism. Many ethnographic photographs have continued to circulate within and beyond Cape York Peninsula, while others have been returned to the descendants of those portrayed. This process of circulation may be accompanied by shifts in the meanings drawn from images, and increasing numbers of photographs are being taken by Aboriginal people themselves. Both these photographs and the engagement of earlier photographs by Aboriginal people demonstrate differences with the ways that photographs are dealt with in ‘Western’ contexts. Whether as ‘social things’, as objects, or as distributed aspects of the agency of those taking or featuring in them, photographs remain active in their interaction with viewers and demand a more nuanced analysis of colonial relationships.
