Photographies

ISSN: 1754-0763 (Print) 1754-0771 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpho20

Anthropology and Photography: A long history of

knowledge and affect

Elizabeth Edwards

To cite this article: Elizabeth Edwards (2015) Anthropology and Photography: A long history of
knowledge and affect, Photographies, 8:3, 235-252, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2015.1103088

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2015.1103088

Published online: 30 Nov 2015.

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 Elizabeth Edwards

ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

A long history of knowledge and affect

This paper addresses the long history of photographic relationships in anthropology. It

argues that the current concerns with multiple, relational and affective meanings in
anthropological photographs are not simply the result of new approaches to photographic
analysis, but were embedded in the relationships of the production of anthropological
evidence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples from
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British field anthropology it examines, first, the relational histories of production of those
photographs, and, second, argues that those relationships have enabled the new ethno-
graphies of photographic engagement that mark late twentieth and twenty-first century
anthropological concerns. It argues that photographic “affect”, as a mode of history,
memory and identity, becomes the focus of anthropological analysis.

The exponential rise of interest in photography and photographs within anthropolo-

gical studies over the last 20 or 30 years has brought the medium’s practices and
objects into the centre of anthropological analysis. Photographs and photography act as
vital ciphers and prisms for a wide range of anthropological concerns, and serve as
increasingly complex forms of evidence, premised not on content alone, but on a
thinking through of the still image in relation to what it is to “do” anthropology. As
Anna Grimshaw has noted, anthropology can be “seen” as a project of visual imagina-
tion, rather than “read” as a particular kind of literature (Grimshaw 7‒8).
Visualisation has always been entangled with the anthropological. But in many ways
what appear to us as new questions and concerns about that relationship in the twenty-
first century can be found in the emergence of modern anthropology from the late
nineteenth century onwards. The framing and practice within this history might be
very different but the concerns about validity, translation and epistemology inform
past engagements with photographs within anthropology as much as they do today.
In this article I want to examine aspects of the long history of these concerns as
they perform differently within shifting epistemologies, and which are addressed
variously in the papers in this special issue. It has been assumed that for much of
the twentieth century anthropologists were not much interested in photographs, that
they failed the evidential test within an anthropology focus of apparently intangible
forms of culture, such as kin relations, spiritual beliefs and politics structures (for
summary see Edwards, “Tracing Photography”). However, I argue here that engage-
ments with photography have merely been submerged within anthropology’s own
shifting self-definition, where they have remained hidden in plain sight. It is important
to recognise such a history, because there has been a teleological tendency in this
received historical narrative that suggests that changes in anthropological

Photographies, 2015
Vol. 8, No. 3, 235–252, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2015.1103088
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
 236 PHOTOGRAPHIES

methodology, theoretical orientation and political entanglement have brought about

new, and in some ways “better”, photographic practices (Banks and Morphy; Ruby and
Banks). Consequently I want to suggest that the histories of these practices are long
and deep, and that they come in and out of historical and disciplinary focus according
the shifting epistemological frames of what it is to “do” anthropology and produce
credible anthropological statements. The examination of these sometimes submerged
practices reveals an ongoing relationship between photography and anthropology, and
more importantly the social relations of anthropology itself, in ways that do not
necessarily fit neatly into this teleological tendency.1 I should also state in these
preliminary comments that while debates in photographic theory form a substrata of
my account, and make an appearance when they can contribute to the argument
overtly, I do not intend to reiterate them here — they have been discussed ad nauseam
over the decades, and arguably one of the important contributions of anthropology to
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photographic studies is an unsettling of those assumptions and their attendant cate-

gories. But more importantly, an over-valorisation of the quasi-canonical categories of
photographic theory constrain as much as they illuminate. In particular they have, at
least in part, created what Lydon has described as “a hostile interpretative environ-
ment” within a broader hermeneutics of suspicion (Lydon, The Flash 20, Linfield 5‒
12) which has haunted commentaries on anthropological photography in ways that
have truncated the debate (a point to which I shall return briefly below).2 This essay,
and those of my colleagues in this special issue, all aim in their different ways at
confronting this problem.
The relationship between photography and anthropology can be characterised as
one that, almost from the start, has been tensioned between evidence and affect in the
production of knowledge. Both evidence and affect are, of course, heavily freighted
terms and the debate of both is extensive — for instance Sara Ahmed’s cogent
argument, in a very different context, on the matrices of the politics of affect in
relation to the production of social bodies in the circulation of emotional signs.
However, the term “affect” as I am using it here indicates a matrix of the subjectivities
of experience, embodiment and emotion of all parties to the anthropological encounter
— both observer and observed, as they intersect. Likewise, I am using “photographs as
evidence” to mean the making of disciplinarily defined anthropological knowledge,
however conceived. The practices of its production within shifting concepts of the
science of the discipline and its regimes of truth, and thus knowledge, produced what
have been called “epistemic images”, that is, images that are understood or perceived,
collectively, to define and stand for the core value systems of a body of knowledge
even if in practice their evidential force was less stable (Daston).
Neither of these categories is without its politics, instabilities or tensions, as I have
noted, but I shall argue that they are revealing instabilities and tensions. In the received
historiographies of anthropology, the critical engagement with the tension I describe is
usually located much later in historical accounts — in the postmodern moment that
challenged the strategies of documentary certainty and representational nirvana that
characterised the generations of Margaret Mead and John Collier. For these earlier
anthropologists, photography was used as a transparent recording medium to correlate
other documenting practices and assist with other methods. Importantly, though, this
tension is not simply the product of postmodern and reflexive disciplinary sensitivities,
 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 237

although perhaps our own heightened analytical recognition of the tension is a

consequence of that moment. While the balance and density of the relationship
between evidence and affect oscillate over time, the germs of our own concerns
about knowledge and affect are found within that history, played out in the anthro-
pological encounter since at least the last two decades of the nineteenth century. They
are part of the shifting dynamic of how anthropology makes its evidence, how it arrives
at its truths, what constitutes evidence, how it positions its objectivity, handles its
subjectivities and understands its intersubjectivities (Edwards, “Uncertain
Knowledge”). My account of the tension is thus an account of anthropological
relations.

The proto-modern dynamic

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Anthropology’s proto-modern moment, when the modern discipline becomes clearly

discernible, occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century.3 It saw a succession
of methodological proposals for the systematic collection of field data within an
emerging anthropological episteme. Attitudes towards anthropological data shifted
markedly in this period, demanding both quantitative and qualitative changes to
what constituted photographic evidence. It here that we can locate, perhaps, the
first tensions between evidence and affect.
Deborah Poole, in her influential essay in Annual Review of Anthropology (2005), on
photography and anthropological racial science, characterised management of photo-
graphy within anthropology as a management of the medium’s “excess”. Perhaps with
Barthesian resonance, she locates excess in random inclusivity of photographic inscrip-
tion which must be controlled because — a point to which I shall return — it is
importantly the site of “affect”, in that it offers a space in which other histories might
emerge. But it also became an affective site of suspicion in the fragile negotiation of
photographic evidence. Poole’s essay provides a productive starting point for my
concerns. But rather than employ the term “excess”, which, as Poole argues, implies
danger in what is beyond the necessary, I shall use the term “abundance”. For while
still grounded, like Poole’s excess, in the random inclusivity of photographic inscrip-
tion it implies plentifulness, plenitude and potential. These values, as they align with
photographs, are at the core of my argument.
The negotiation of the relationship between abundance and its control is exem-
plified by two papers, read at the Anthropological Institute in the mid-1890s, and
published in the pages of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. At the epistemolo-
gical core was what constituted evidence and, in particular, in our context here, the
shift from the threat of abundance and affect to its embrace as the focus and source of
the anthropological. In the first paper, presented in 1893, colonial polymath Sir
Everard im Thurn advocated “the use of the camera for the accurate record, not of
the mere bodies of primitive folk — which might indeed be more accurately measured
and photographed for such purposes dead than alive, could they be conveniently
obtained when in that state — but of these folk regarded as living beings” (im
Thurn 184). Im Thurn’s famous remarks, which refer to the quasi-anthropometrics
of so much anthropological photography of the period, and against which he positioned
 238 PHOTOGRAPHIES

his ideas, have been interpreted as marking the emergence of a more humanistic
approach to both anthropology and the production of scientific documents (Tayler;
Cox), and as part of a shift to an anthropological concern with the “quick and the
living” as opposed to the “still and silent” (Pinney, “Parallel Histories” 78; Photography
and Anthropology 36).
However, it also represents the cusp of an engagement that begins to make the
transition from an excess of information to be controlled and focused, to an abundance
of scientific possibility (Edwards, “Uncertain Knowledge”). For within im Thurn’s
largely anecdotal account, he marks the emergence of a visualisation of culture in
terms of the daily experience of, for instance, families, friends, homes, gestures and
body language, which make up social behaviours in ways that begin to insert affect,
both as an object of study and as a response. This sense of the potential of plenitude
and the valorising of abundance can be linked not only to debates about the very nature
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of visual objectivity in the period, but also to the crystallisation of new methodological
strands in field sciences, like ecology,4 with their stress on wholeness and systemic
interconnectivity. These are echoed in anthropology’s increasing concern with the
explanation of whole cultural systems, what in anthropological terms became classic
British functionalism a generation later. What characterised this expansive visualisation
was a shift in observational practice that demanded a methodological engagement with
the scientific potential of the messiness of everyday human existence rather than a
carefully managed attention of physical anthropology and its correlates.
This is made very clear when im Thurn’s proposal is compared with another
statement of photographic procedures three years later in 1896 by M.V. Portman, a
colonial officer in the Andaman Islands who had been making a monumental series of
photographs for the British Museum (Pinney, Photography and Anthropology 38‒41).
Here photographic procedures were rigorously circumscribed as he aimed to control
excess and abundance in the production of evidence (Portman). For him, the excessive
inscription of the naturalistic photograph obscured the scientific. With the exception of
a few necessary field photographs, such as obtaining wood from a specific tree, the
photographs are taken against a plain background and under careful lighting, in a way
that focuses the attention of the viewer, controls excess, and isolates the practice from
the abundance of everyday life, as a moment for scientific examination. Portman states:
“For ethnology, accuracy is what is required. Delicate lighting and picturesque photo-
graphy are not wanted; all you have to see to is, that the general lighting is correct,
and that no awkward placing of weapons or limbs hide important objects” (77). The
camera position was part of this clarity. It was not to be oblique but on the same level
as the subject, again giving a sense of directness of both observation and inscription.
The aim was a maximised scientific visibility. The attention, and thus understanding, of
the viewer was to be further directed by brief letterpress captions, for example, on
making an adze: “The blade is then placed on the haft” and so on. Even the printing of
the negatives, as cold-bath platinum prints, a process with considerable long-term
stability, speaks to a sense of “evidence”. The potential disruption of abundance was,
Portman hoped, entirely suppressed (Edwards, “Uncertain Knowledge”).
An extended account of the complexities, and the ebb and flow of photographic
practices within anthropology as they variously perform the tensions between evidence
and affect, cannot be accommodated here. However in the emergence of the field
 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 239

tradition the tension between evidence and affect, control and abundance, increasingly
becomes a core question for the relationship between photography and anthropology.
How can the messiness of human experience be translated photographically in ways
that might produce anthropological knowledge? Even allowing for shifting political,
ideological and disciplinary framings over time, the question then becomes one which
has haunted anthropological photography ever since: what is an accurate and equitable
account of that abundance? How can it be translated, visually, into evidence, and
evidence of what, and indeed for whom? (Edwards, “Uncertain Knowledge”). The
unsolvable tension that I have characterised as being between evidence and affect is one
of the reasons that photography becomes simultaneously naturalised, marginalised and
submerged within anthropology. What is desired is evidence, but what is traced is a
conduit for affect.
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Refiguring the tension

It was in the 1970s and 1980s, in the much-cited crisis of representation and the
growing ferment of cultural politics, that the seeds of the massive interest in photo-
graphs were sown (Edwards, “Tracing Photography”). The problem of observation,
and the production of evidence, shifted from being a challenge of restraining bias to an
epistemological quandary concerning the deep and intractable mutuality of observer
and observed and the politics of that relationship. Debates about photography
entangled with broader critiques of anthropology’s ocularcentrism and anxieties
about vision, especially in the contexts of anthropology’s collapsing scientific paradigm
(Grimshaw).
While these debates were productive in their challenge to entrenched forms of
authority and narrative within anthropology, at the same time they effectively paral-
ysed the relationship between anthropology and photography, as critiques slipped,
almost too comfortably, into a series of over-determined, reductionist, ahistorical and
reifying interpretations, manifest through a hermeneutics of suspicion. This paralysis
was, in terms of my argument here, located in the politics of the affective regimes of
evidence and its production. Conversely, haunted by anthropology’s colonial past and
uncertain of its role in a post-colonial and increasingly global environment, the visual
legacy of the discipline’s past became a rich prism through which to explore the
construction of anthropological knowledge (Edwards, “Tracing Photography”; Pinney,
Photography and Anthropology; Morton and Edwards). In many ways, photography and
photographs were at the frontline of this debate. Under the potent rhetoric of the trace
of the body of the Other under the colonial gaze of the camera, photography become
something of a scapegoat. It was the space, at least in one reading, into which
anthropological angst could be directed without disturbing the disciplinary centre.
Indeed, photography stood more for troubling and questionable predeterminations,
rather than as a promise of humanistic closure. This is exemplified by the strong
resistance, in some anthropological quarters, to the plans for what become the edited
volume, Anthropology and Photography 1865‒1920, published in collaboration with the
Royal Anthropological Institute (Edwards, Anthropology and Photography). Not only was
photography seen as being irrelevant to the concerns of contemporary anthropology
 240 PHOTOGRAPHIES

(Benthall vii‒viii); it was also an embarrassment. Photography, in an almost too

literal sense, faced anthropologists with the colonial entanglements of their own
history, which, in the cultural politics of the 1970s and 1980s, was a connection of
profound disquiet and anxiety (see Green, “Classified Subjects”, “”Veins of
Resemblance”) — as indeed it continues to be.
If such arguments of photographic irrelevance were premised on a notion of flawed
evidence within problematic regimes of truth, importantly they also opened the
possibility that affect was evidence, and that embodiment, emotion, materiality were
culturally dynamic modes of being in the world. The abundance of photographs, both
in inscription and the social act of making, opened the possibility of affect and, above
all, the recuperation of alternative historical narratives and voices embedded within
that abundance. In relation to anthropology this shift has two strands, which are linked
conceptually not only because they are both concerned with voice and agency and thus
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affect, but also because of the way in which affects themselves become “evidential” in a
newly figured visual anthropology. The first strand is marked by both the reengage-
ment with anthropology’s historical deposits as a focus of contemporary field research,
and second strand is marked by the ethnography of photographic practice across space
and time.
Photography has always been a social act, bounded to a greater or lesser extent by
power relations. This is a familiar argument. But photography was also part of the
sociability and affect of fieldwork (Edwards, “Performing Science”; Geismar and
Herle). It this connection I want to bring the concept of “presence” into play, because
it usefully both qualifies and concretises affect in the way that I want to develop it.
Philosophers of history have written extensively about presence. Indeed the tension
between evidence and affect, as I argue here, has some parallels with their debate
about the shifts in historiographical desire from meaning to experience (see for
example Ankersmit). Eelco Runia, in particular, argues that in the search for meaning
and the understanding of the mechanics of meaning, what is vehemently wanted is
“presence”. He states, “presence is being in touch, either literally or metaphorically
with people, things, events and feelings that made you the person you are”. It is the
“desire to share the awesome reality of people things, events and feelings, coupled to a
vertiginous urge to taste the fact that awesomely real people, things, events and
feelings can awesomely suddenly cease to exist” (Runia 5).
On one register, presence is embedded in the photograph. It is traced into the
very materiality of photographs, into its chemistry, and now its electronic bytes. It is
the ontological scream of the medium — it was there, present. That is the photo-
graph’s power and its symbolic significance. Such an idea of presence is not new in
writing about photographs. Roland Barthes’ famous contemplation of the Winter
Garden photograph is a contemplation not just of absence, but of presence (Barthes
67‒8). In particular, and central to my argument, a photograph is a moment, positive
or negative, happy or terrifying, that someone lived through — their being, their
presence. Their standpoint, literally a “standpoint” is traced in the image (Baer 1,
original emphasis). As such, “each image has the potential for disclosing the world — as
a setting for human experience”, a rippling out from the image itself” (Baer 5, original
emphasis).
 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 241

If, in this argument, photographs are not merely depicted and appropriated
occurrences and scenes, but an inscription of the moment which is that “experience
someone lived through”, then photographs mark not only the photographer’s stand-
point but a point of view of those in front of the camera, even if that moment is
asymmetrical. Subjects are never passive — they think, they experience. For even
colonial accounts are, as Ricardo Roque and Kim Wagner note, “rooted in spaces,
architectures, institutions, technologies, bodies, objects and practical activities” of lived
experience (5). Presence within the trace of the photograph is profoundly subjective
and profoundly personal, a reclaiming of a moment. This is perhaps exemplified in an
image taken by a British naval officer, Captain Acland, on the beach at Malakula, in the
New Hebrides in 1884 (Figure 1).5 In this photograph, on the surface an unremarkable
image of the colonial encounter in the age of gunboat diplomacy, details such as
touching arms, sandy feet, damp trousers and fingers pressed into flesh, can be thought
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through so as to excavate the possibility of the experience that someone lived through,
both coloniser and colonised (Edwards, “Der Geschichte”). The concept of presence
offers a way of capturing the possibility of fleeting affect. Whatever the dynamics of
the photographic events and photographic encounter, this is a photograph, like so
many others, redolent with presence and experience.
There is, of course, a “politics of presencing”, to use Jennifer Deger’s term (92),
because the power of the trace as presence, and its deep strata — social being —
immediately raises questions of access and ownership. A detailed discussion is beyond
the scope of this paper (see Brown and Peers; Geismar and Herle). Relevant, however,
is the way in which the concept of presence offers an alternative language to that of
agency. Agency, defined as a way of illuminating relations of intention and action,
cause and effect, and especially the agency of the sitter. This latter has become
something of a commonplace in writing about anthropological and colonial

FIG. 1 Malakulan men and the Royal Navy on the beach. Malakula, New Hebrides (Vanuatu). 1884. Photograph: W.
A.D. Acland. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. 1998.159.29.1.
 242 PHOTOGRAPHIES

photography, with discussions about how that agency might be recovered, the
fracturing possibility of agency within the colonial and so forth (see essays in Pinney
and Peterson). While this remains a valid exercise, at the same time there is perhaps a
problem with the way “agency” has become something of a reified category, entangled
on occasion with a quasi-romantic tone. Is the dynamic of “agency” necessarily what we
are looking at? There are some instances, anthropometrics taken in prisons for example
(Edwards, Raw Histories), where agency is entirely denied the subject, in that the
subjects of the photographs could have no alternative form of action. However, they
still have their presence in the way that I have defined it, their standpoint, it was an
experience they lived through, even in the most dehumanising situations.
The privileging of presence, however, within the abundance of photographs,
should not be read as a way of eliding difficult histories and the abhorrent realities
of the colonial, or freeing anthropologists from representational responsibility. Rather
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it is a way of thinking experience back into the historical equation, and of complicating
and layering the different actor-spaces from which photographs emerged. By thinking
about affect, presence and social being it is possible to retool some old analytical
warhorses, de-reifying agency, destabilising monolithic theories of the gaze, the latter
which, as many commentators have noted, simply shut down the debate, reducing the
life-worlds of people to the category of colonialised subject. As Margaret Dubin
argued, it “disempower[ed] tribal people who see their ancestors in these photographs,
oversimplifying specific and often complex human relations” (71)
But what of anthropology in all this? This sense of affective presence saturates
anthropological evidence at all levels. The gathering of evidence was an affective
procedure. Arguably photographs indeed gave concrete form to the illusionism of
anthropological representation, proclaiming, as James Clifford noted, “this is what you
would see had you been there with me — observing” (22). Certainly photographs also
become part of the self-fashioning of the anthropologists. A well-known example is
that of Bronislaw Malinowski’s visual and textual self-fashionings as he positioned his
authority to account for Trobriand Island culture (Grimshaw 53, Young 50). But
photographs also trace the embodied practices of fieldwork, the immersion in space
and time, the presence of the anthropologist, and as an experience that all partners to
the encounter lived through, both positive and negative. For Malinowski photography
was also a form of escape. It was often the excuse to get away from the immediate
irritations of fieldwork and spend evenings drinking with the trader Billy Hancock. On
24 December 1917, for instance, Malinowski wrote in his diary “talk with Billy about
photographs, a bottle of whiskey” — one of numerous such entries (Malinoswki 163
original emphasis). A notable example of the presence of the fieldworker can be found
in Edward Evans Pritchard’s series of an Azande abinza initiation, taken in the mid-
1920s in south-western Sudan, on the Congo border. As Christopher Morton has
demonstrated, these photographs carry a profound sense of the embodiment of the
experience as Evans Pritchard moves slowly closer and closer into the centre of the
action (Figure 2). Thus photographs become privileged sites for communicating a
feeling of cultural immersion. They mark the personal experience of fieldwork, giving
authority and credence to an account of what could have been seen.6
But the tensions between evidence and affect come into play particularly in cross-
cultural dynamics. Photographs are familiar sites of the social in interactions in the
 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 243
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FIG. 2 At a witch doctor (abinza) initiation. c. 1926–27. Photograph: E. Evans Prichard. © Pitt Rivers Museum,
University of Oxford. 1998.341.208.2.

field. They oil the wheels of fieldwork in acts of friendship, exchange and diplomacy,
and they stand for a communication in shared time, even in the contexts of political
asymmetries. The archive of the 1898 Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait, for
instance, is saturated with photographs marked by social interaction and exchange
(Edwards, “Performing Science”).7 The famous group photograph of expedition mem-
bers was very probably taken by an Islander (Figure 3), because a few minutes earlier
or later a photograph of the expedition’s Islander friends and assistants was taken. The
photographs were similar in both grouping and demeanour. Both sets of subjects were
effectively messing around with the camera. At the same time scientific photographs
taken by the Expedition were almost immediately recoded as affects of social relations.
In a different example, a photograph of Pasi, one of the expedition’s many assistants,
was made as evidence of the expedition’s scientific method and photographs of the
same style, even same photo-session on the Torres Strait island of Mer perhaps, appear
in the Expedition Reports. But the photograph also appears in Haddon’s personal
album, along with the two “messing about” group pictures (Figure 4), vignetted in the
oval spaces of the domestic, in a commercially produced album entitled “Sunny
Memories”.8
For the Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition, as for a multitude of anthropol-
ogists, photographs were exchange objects. They facilitated social relationships
across space and time. Anthony Wilkin, the Torres Strait expedition photographer,
acted as wedding photographer, and expedition members also acted as post-mortem
photographer when a baby died. They gave lantern slide shows, which became
absorbed into local systems of food exchange (Edwards, “Performing Science”).
Long after the expedition returned home, A.C. Haddon, the expedition leader, was
responding to requests for photographs from Islanders. For instance, in June 1901
he received a letter, via a pearler named Cowling, from Tommy, a Torres Strait
 244 PHOTOGRAPHIES
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FIG. 3 Friends and informants at Mabuiag: Gizu (seated) and (l to r) Waria, Peter and Tom. Cambridge Torres
Strait Expedition 1898. Photograph: A. Wilkin ? © Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
N.22988.ACH2.

FIG. 4 Opening page of A.C. Haddon’s personal album “Sunny Memories”. Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition
1898. © Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. A.177.ACH2.

man who had worked closely with the Expedition “Tommy wants me to ask you to
send him a photo of his family that you took as one of his daughters is dead, and he
wants to look at her again”.9 This exchange between Haddon and Tommy points to
 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 245

the long history of affect that lurks within the anthropological. For the reframing of
photographic abundance sets up the potential for other forms of affect which are
related to the trace of the image itself. In the final section of this paper I want to
consider this shift in more detail, because much contemporary work on the
intersection of colonial-period photographs, history, memory and identity is pre-
mised on this affective quality.

Return, recognition and ethnographies of practice

In a gradual realignment of the processes of cultural power and entitlement, a major
strand in work with photographs within anthropology has been “returns”.10 In projects
of “return” the practices of anthropology facilitate the reconnection of historical
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photographs with the communities in which the photographic act originally took
place and from which the photographs effectively constituted a form of removal,
both photographically and socio-politically. Returns acknowledge both the colonial and
asymmetric power relations of original collection, but also the intersecting histories
born of the recodability of the photograph. Two strands have emerged from this, as I
noted earlier: first, an historiographical realignment and reclamation of anthropology’s
visual legacy, and second, and related, ethnographies of the social practice of photo-
graphy. The practice of using photographs as conduits into the study of affect has
become a central strand of more recent studies on the effects of returns (see for
instance Brown and Peers). Such studies have not only opened up the possibility of
agency, presence and recuperation in the cultural historical domain, but also destabi-
lised the authority of both anthropology and its photographic production. This has
enabled the emergence of critical, reflexive and collaborative micro-histories of visual,
cross-cultural encounters and photography’s relation with the material and sensory.
These studies reveal not only complex orders of photography but, more significantly,
they use photography as a prism through which to think through other areas of
anthropological endeavour such as identity, exchange or globalisation.
Projects of return have become central to the strategies of cross-cultural collec-
tions in the UK and elsewhere, and epistemological framings and protocols developed
in, for example, New Zealand and Australia, have had major intellectual impacts on
the ways in which photographs are managed and the questions asked of them, as
photographs move into different analytical and affective spaces. Many institutions,
including the Royal Anthropological Institute, have been involved in such projects. For
instance, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, has collaborated with Luo in Kenya (Morton
and Oteyo) (Figure 5) and Kainai in Canada (Brown and Peers), and Cambridge
University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology with Vanuatu (Geismar and
Herle), and Torres Strait Islanders (Herle and Rouse) to name but a few UK
endeavours. These initiatives have resulted in long-term collaborative relationships,
and, in countries of settler colonialism, Australia, New Zealand and Canada for
instance, these practices are both institutionally embedded and in some cases legisla-
tively supported (see for example Pickering and Gordon; McKeown).
Thus the archive itself has been translated from a space of evidence to a space of
potential affect. Photographs provide a different kind of evidence as they are realigned
 246 PHOTOGRAPHIES
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FIG. 5 Ezekiel Onyango’s son (Charles Obewa) and Onyango’s grandson with framed copy of Evans-Pritchard’s
portrait of Onyango. Kenya, 2007 Photograph: Gilbert Oteyo. Copyright © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
PRM 2008.5.78.1.

as evidence of lineage, ancestry, rights to land, and as bearing witness to brutal

histories. But above all they constitute the affective at personal and community levels
as a form of historiographical capacity building, a process massively expanded in the
digital age. They literally and metaphorically move photographs, collections and
relationships into new dimensions. These processes reframe the very trace of photo-
graphic inscription. It is not simply “hidden history” of the old cliché, arguably these
histories were never hidden, merely the wrong questions were asked of them. The call
for “looking past” in photographs, the looking beyond the colonial surface of the
photograph in the work of Navajo Diné artist Hulleah Tsinnahjinnie and Australian
curator and artist Michael Aird, for instance, is a call for the reinstitution and
recognition of presence (Tsinnahjinnie 41; Aird 25).
But significantly there is a looping back, as this process itself has become the focus
of collaborative anthropological studies which extend an anthropological understanding
of what photographs “do”. Field-based work such as Haidy Geismar’s on John Layard
and Arthur Deacon’s photographs in Vanuatu (Geismar), Laura Peers and Alison
Brown’s work at Kainai in Canada, or Chris Wright in the Solomon Islands exemplifies
this shift. Responses to photographs themselves become evidence of affect and the
impact of presence, and crucially this process is itself the subject of anthropological
analysis. The material practices of photographs become significant in this context. The
trace of the photographic subject carries its own multi-channelled patterns of significa-
tion and its own affective demands, as people hold photographs in their hands,
weeping, kissing or singing to the photographic image as form and content merge in
the social object to become affective objects. In some cases there are unexpected
responses. For instance Liam Buckley worked with colonial photographs in the
Gambia. What emerged was not a “subaltern” account of the colonial past, but a
fascination with the evocative force of things — bicycles, trucks, buildings, even the
exoticness of the photographs themselves as “old things”. Traces of photograph are not
 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 247

just “recoded”, in terms of photographic theory, but re-categorised from evidence to

affect.
But the power of, and indeed desire for, presence, inscribed in the abundance of
the photographic trace, raises questions about how we think about photographs
because at one level it faces us with a theoretical and indeed methodological conun-
drum. At its heart is how we think about the indexical trace of the photograph as a
trace of social being and experience. All these projects that I have noted are premised
on an overwhelming indexical reality. But there is a very substantial body of critical
theory from Jean Baudrillard to John Tagg that has argued why such presence and
privileging of the indexical trace and its claim to “the real” cannot or should not be so.
Arguably, theoretical anxieties about the index have been vastly overworked analyti-
cally in photographic theory despite some recent useful revisions (see for example
Kelsey and Stimson). However, the analytical privileging of the index and trace that I
Downloaded by [Elizabeth Edwards] at 03:48 28 February 2016

describe here is not a retreat into a coarse, unproblematised realism, but an ethno-
graphic acknowledgement of people’s desires for image — the reclamation of histories
and ancestors. It is a refigured politics of presence.
More broadly, this refocused sense of the trace is another reason why the idea of
presence offers a kind of analytically progression. It moves away from the uncertainties
clustering around the concept of the index, and also perhaps provides a broader
historiographical landscape than the specific incisions of Barthes’ punctum (40‒41).
Presence is premised on the trace of the real, as I have noted already, the ontological
insistence of photography — “it was there”. It is also the location of that vehement and
vertiginous desire to connect in the contexts of fractured and dispossessed histories.
It can be argued that the concept of presence as it intersects with that of the trace
of the photograph opens a space where the affect of photographs can be allowed for
analytically. Importantly this shift is at the forefront of anthropological concerns in the
contemporary world, because presence adheres to the image. It accentuates the politics
of the image, the potential for reclamation, and it works through the context and social
practices of what it is to be someone, an experiencing human, over a multiplicity of
identities. But it can also be the site of abuse. For it is the power of presence, the trace
of the very being of the ancestor, that makes many indigenous communities anxious
over their images. This particular discussion lies outside the scope of this essay, but it
needs noting here because the seductive power of presence as an argument can also
strip out the politics and reduce “affect” to a form of romantic neo-realism, my
argument above notwithstanding. But where there is presence and affect, there
remains abundance, excess and the possibility of recoding. It does not let anthropol-
ogists, or anyone else, off the representational hook. Indeed it imposes even greater
ethical urgency.

Closing thoughts
The functions of photographs are not straightforward. The historiographical and
methodological challenge therefore is to reconcile the meta-levels of power and
ideology with the effective realpolitik which connected the representational power of
photographs within fluid modes of knowing and seeing, with the lived experience of
 248 PHOTOGRAPHIES

those involved in the photographic encounter, and with the simultaneously individual
and subjective.
One of the problems faced in writing about photography is to find a language with
which to expand thinking about photography beyond the categories which have
normally contained it. Indeed, my argument here is perhaps an example of where
analytical approaches to photography within anthropology can make a contribution to
theorisation of photography itself, disturbing the comfortable categories of photo-
graphic analysis. Anthropologists, whose work on photography is possibly not as
widely read outside the discipline as it should be, have been very good at these
kinds of disturbances. For instance the work of Christopher Pinney on India (Camera
Indica), Karen Strassler in Indonesia, Jane Lydon and Jennifer Deger in Australia,
Rebecca Empson in Mongolia, Craig Campbell in Siberia, Joshua Bell and Jamon
Halvaksz in Papua New Guinea, and Chris Wright in the Solomon Islands all furnish
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productive possibilities.
Arguably, given the kind of work being done on practices of photography,
materiality, digital environments, historical dynamics, the intersection of photo-
graphs with history, memory and identity, with cultural heritage and its refiguration
by artists, with ideas of ancestors and spirit worlds, with the desire for testimony,
with claims to land and rights, indeed with what it is to be human, photography
can no longer be contained within the box “visual anthropology” where it has been
conveniently shoved as a poor cousin to film. Photography and photographs can still
contribute as evidence within the discipline of anthropology, but the question
remains evidence of what? I would argue that photographs and responses to them
are woven into the very fabric of contemporary experience and the negotiated
relations between past, present and future, and living and dead, spirits and
ancestors, and places and spaces of connection. This is no linear trajectory, of
either anthropological method or representational practice, but a folding together of
anthropology’s own pasts and presents, for better or worse, with the pasts and
presents of other people.
Consequently it can be argued that ultimately photographs are evidence of
affect, of how people feel, and think and negotiate their worlds, and as such
photography and photographs are at the very heart of the anthropological endea-
vour. What was simply unproblematised evidence has become affect, and the
processes of affect have, in their turn, become an evidential force in anthropology
as a humanistic discipline. They exist in a mutually sustaining circle of evidence and
affect, the tension between the world out there and humanity in here (Kelsey and
Stimson xxv). Furthermore this is not, I have argued here, merely the concern of
illuminating postmodern reflexivities and a negotiation of methodological angst. It
has, with shifting emphases and shaped by the framings of specific historical
moments, a long and complex history that comes into focus differentially. My
account does not dispense with the nexus of power and knowledge and its
continuing asymmetries, nor with the fluid power of the trace. Rather it broadens,
layers and complicates those concerns in a way commensurate with an expanded
sense of the relationship between anthropology and photography, in which the
potential of both might emerge in new forms.
 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 249

Acknowledgements
This paper is based on a keynote address presented at the Anthropology and Photography
conference convened by the Royal Anthropological Institute, and held at the British
Museum in May 2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
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1 Given the scale of a short paper I am confining my discussion to British anthro-

pology, but the questions and processes explored could be applied to other, and
related, traditions of anthropological endeavour and photographic practice.
2 See also Rita Felski for a wider critique, building on Paul Ricouer’s work, which
has resonance here.
3 Anthropology had been emerging from a matrix of biology, anatomy, philology,
archaeology, folklore studies, history of religion and a range of applied sciences
since the early nineteenth century (see Stocking; Sera-Shriar). Enabled by colonial
expansion, these disparate elements were concerned with questions of human
origins and human culture and contributed to methodological, and thus evidential
thinking, within the emerging discipline.
4 The origin of the description of anthropology’s key method as “fieldwork”, emerges
from such field sciences.
5 Now Vanuatu. The photograph is institutionalised as anthropology in Pitt Rivers
Museum’s collection: PRM 1998.159.29.1.
6 Significantly, Evans Pritchard used these images extensively in his publications on
Azande belief systems.
7 This collection is held in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology.
8 University of Cambridge Library. Special Collections, Haddon Papers Envelope
1018.
9 Haddon Papers Envelope 1024.
10 The term visual repatriation is sometimes used for this process.

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Elizabeth Edwards is an historical and visual anthropologist with particular interest in photo-
graphs and the processes of history-making. She is Research Professor of Photographic
History and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University,
Leicester.