Anthropology and photography have been integrally entwined since the emergence of both the discipline and the medium in the nineteenth century (Pinney 1992). The earliest photographic images used by anthropologists were seldom taken by them, but acquired from wide range of sources, such as commercial studios, travellers, or missionaries, and absorbed into anthropology. These photographs were, in their turn, legitimated by contemporary anthropological debates of questions of race, history, culture and origin. With the emergence of modern fieldwork methods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the role of photography shifted, from collecting data into centralized resources, such as the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK) or the Bureau of American Ethnology (USA), to the production of fieldwork material made specifically in the context of anthropological investigation. While almost all anthropologists made photographs, most, with some notable exceptions such as fA.C. Haddon (Edwards 2001), used them as visual notebook, a way of reassessing data, rather than analytically integral to anthropological investigation. This view was premised on a concept of an unmediated realism, in which the authority of the photographs was vested in mechanical eye of the camera used by the trained anthropologist (Grimshaw 2001). One of the most important attempts to bring photography into the centre of anthropology as an integrated methodology was Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s 1936 project on the socialization of children in Bali (Bateson and Mead 1942; Sullivan 1992). In this they conceptualized both their research and analysis in visual terms. They raised many of the issues which remain key questions in contemporary visual anthropology: the nature of the scientific document, the position of the research, the agency of the subject, the authority of the medium, for instance. It was only in the 1950s and 1960s that photography’s use began to attract wider systemetic consideration in an emergent modern subdiscipline of visual anthropology. John Collier’s Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (1967) addressed not only technical concerns, but methodological ones, notably questions of visual analysis — how does one read information from photographs? — and photo-elicitation, where the anthropologist uses photographs as interlocutors to stimulate the production of information. These methods, whilst subject to various refinements, set the role of photography in anthropological method. However, new mobile and lightweight film technologies soon offered a better tool for the inclusive and holistic concerns of anthropology.
Photographs, which fragment time and space, isolate from context, freeze action and map surfaces, looked increasingly inadequate against the ‘long quotations’ offered by film. Whilst it remained a ubiquitous visual notebook in the field, analytically photography became increasingly marginalized from mainstream anthropological concerns, to the extent that by the 1980s few social anthropology monographs used photographs even as positioning shots.
Since the 1980s new approaches to photography have emerged, notably as a critical re-engagement with the cultural practices of photography within anthropology. This embraced self-consciously reflexive field methodologies (Banks 2001; Pink 2001; Kratz 2002), studies of different cultural practices around photography, but also archival studies exploring the visual legacy of anthropology’s past and its institutional structures (Edwards 2001) and its historical potential for the subjects themselves. These approaches emerged from the hyper-reflexive and critical practices of anthropology’s ‘crisis of representation’ of the 1970s onwards. Haunted by anthropology’s colonial past and uncertain of its role in a post-colonial and increasingly global environment, photography became a rich prism through which to explore the construction of anthropological knowledge. A key theme in these debates was in relation to the politics of representation and the objectification of the anthropological subject. Photography and its signifying practices were the focus of an analysis of increasing theoretical sophistication and complexity in the context of a ferment of cultural and identity politics which challenged the Western hegemony. Following "Foucault’s work on the framings of power, discipline, surveillance, and the complex politics of knowledge, as well as a range of post-structuralist and Marxist-inspired debates, photography was understood as integral to ‘discursive regimes of truth’ which defined, appropriated, constructed and objectified the subject of anthropology (for example Green 1984). While the arguments and their theoretical tools were strongly informed by literary theory, post-colonial theory and cultural studies, theory of photography itself, through the work of John Tagg, Victor Burgin, "Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, provided the specific critical tools.
These debates positioned photography as a critical social practice. An influential model was that of ‘visual economy’ which argued that photographs operate not only as semiotic codes alone but meaning was made through the whole pattern of their production, circulation, consumption, possession and preservation, encompassing both the broad modes of production and the micro-levels of individual usage (Poole 1997). More recently studies of photographic practice have been influenced by material culture studies, and ideas around the sociability of objects, the phenomenological and sensory. These models proved especially relevant for photography with its multiple originals, and unstable, context-dependent signifiers. Rather than photographs being merely a record of anthropological interest, they have become understood in anthropology as complex cultural objects, entangled in human relations. Such studies have not only opened up the possibility of agency in the cultural historical domain, but also destabilized the authority of both anthropology and its photographic production. This has enabled the emergence of critical, reflexive studies which reveal the complex orders of photography; for instance, collaborative micro-histories of visual and cross-cultural encounters, critical engagements with the nature of photographic experience and specific photographic practices in a global environment (Pinney 2004). Increasingly photography is no longer confined strictly within a traditional visual anthropology but used as a prism through which to explore other anthropological questions, such as identity, religious contemplation, or memory practice. Photography is now one methodological and theoretical strand or one element of social practice, informing and informed by a broader ethnography. Photography’s flexibility and range has been enhanced by modern digital technologies which have enabled new ways of working with both contemporary and historical material, absorbing it into multimedia platforms in both making and delivery, and extending its applications in, for instance, community history and land rights debates.
