This session explores some of the historical relationships between anthropology, colonialism and the production of images of non-Western people. Even though the starting point is situated in the past, the ideas we will examine in this session are very relevant to photography in our contemporary world. We will also introduce a perspective that will orient this whole block, one that looks at connections between photographic practices and practices of power.
Through this session you will have a chance to learn:
• How anthropology and photography had similar roles in making the colonial “other” known to the coloniser and were instrumental in their subjection/objectification
• To recognise some exoticist tropes that are still alive and well in recent photographic works: the noble savage, the lost Eden, the celebration of the body
• That creating a representation is never a neutral or objective process, even if it’s just "fixing light"
Critique exercise for today: select a famous photograph and research its histories of interpretation, any debates developed over its status, its different uses in different contexts - in other words its biography. You’ll briefly present it to your breakout group during class (up to 5 mins.).
Key Reading:
• Azoulay, Ariella Aisha. 2019. Extract from Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London and New York: Verso. 1-13.
Please note: the following video contains images of people who often did not consent to having their photograph taken or were photographed in problematically unequal conditions under colonial regimes. The reason to show them is to criticise them and deconstruct their ideological background, rather than to amplify their message or reinforce the involvement of anthropology in these oppressive photographic practices. I believe that in a critical context these images should be made visible, but if you object to the representation of an ancestor please get in touch.
1.1 Photographic Subjects
This video introduces some of the photographic practices during the colonial era, highlighting the connections with the development of anthropology, which was at this time especially concerned with race and evolution. We establish a first link between photographing and subjecting people on a political level.
Readings:
• Azoulay, Ariella. 2015. 'What is Photography?’ in Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. 11-27. London and New York: Verso.
• Edwards, Elizabeth. 1990. 'Photographic “types”: The pursuit of method’. Visual Anthropology, 3:2-3, 235-258, DOI: 10.1080/08949468.1990.9966534
• Faris, "A Political Primer on Anthropology/Photography” in Edwards, Elizabeth. 1994. Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 253-263.
• Landau, Paul S. 2002 'Empires of the Visual Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa’ in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, edited by Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin. 141-171. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
• MacDougall, David. 'Staging the Body: the photography of Jean Audema' Chapter 7 in The Corporeal Image. Princeton: Princeton University Press: 176-209.
• Pinney, C. 1992. The Common Histories of Anthropology and Photography pp. 74-91 in Edwards, E. ed. 1992. Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Pinney, C. 2011. Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaktion Books.
• Poole, Deborah. "An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies." Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 159-179.
Extra: watch Howard Walmsley's short film Savages. Howard, who has a background as an artist and filmmaker, made this work during an MPhil in visual anthropology. He uses the setting of the anthropometric grid to refer to the early practices of anthropology, but allows his subjects to speak back and reflect on how they felt.
1.2 Exoticism
The practices of representation we described in the previous section are not simply a thing of the past. Some of the tropes they are based on are still traceable in the work of contemporary photographers. We will look at images by Leni Riefenstahl, Sebastião Salgado and Jimmy Nelson, and to the discourses of exoticism they use to frame their work.
Readings:
• Ball, C. 2017. 'Let There Be Light: Wauja People and the Practice of Photographic Primitivism in Sebastião Salgado's Genesis'. Visual Anthropology Review, 33: 28–37.
• Franklin, Stuart. 2016. Chapter 2 'Lost Eden. Traces of the Colonial Legacy' in The Documentary Impulse. London: Phaidon Press.
• Sontag, S. 1975. 'Fascinating Fascism'. The New York Review of Books, February 6.
Extra: watch photographer Jimmy Nelson promote his work Before They Pass Away (Youtube link). What do you find problematic in his way of presenting the work and his relationship with the people he photographed? Can you detect stereotypes, or exoticist tropes? You can also read this critique of his work on Africa Is a Country and see if you agree.
1.3 Representation and Power
It is time we approach this relationship between representation and power through a theoretical lens that can help us understand why at some point it became so charged and how it works. We will use Edward Said's landmark idea of Orientalism and look at a striking example where photography is used to reinforce the powerlessness of African subjects: Renzo Martens' Episode III: Enjoy Poverty.
Readings:
• De Groof, Matthias. 2019 "Episode III: Enjoy Poverty from a Postcolonial Perspective (2015)", in Anthony Downey and Els Roelandt (eds.). Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty. Berlin-New York: Sternberg Press. 143-151.
• Hall, Stuart. 1997. Excerpt from ‘The spectacle of the “Other”’, in (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: Sage: 257–269.
Extra: I have put online a 30 minute extract from Renzo Martens' Episode III: Enjoy Poverty. Watch it and think about the point he is trying to make in relation to images. Do images belong exclusively to their authors?
Some Questions
• What assumptions do you hold on photography as a document, or a vehicle for truth, and have they changed after this session?
• Can you think of other examples of exoticist, or perhaps even neocolonialist photographic representations?
• What is the role of the beauty of the image in what we discussed? Can we separate an aesthetic appreciation of the beautiful photographs we saw in 1.2 from the things that are wrong in the discourses that surround them?
Critique exercise for next time: Select a photograph or a small series that enables you to analyse the relationship between the photographer and the subjects. What kind of relationship is that, and how do you understand it? Does it come across between the lines or is there a specific strategy put in place?
You’ll briefly present it to your breakout group during class (up to 5 mins.).
You’ll briefly present it to your breakout group during class (up to 5 mins.).