Christopher Pinney’s analysis of the charged relationship between anthropologist, subject and camera is ambivalent but informative.
In the opening pages of Photography and Anthropology social anthropologist Christopher Pinney asks, in his inimitable style, whether in the “post-anthropological world” where everyone has a camera there is “a role any longer for the anthropologist with the camera?”
A provocative comment by a contemporary theorist who has done significant interpretive work on the little worked-on interface between the photograph and society. If Pinney’s ambivalence towards the camera filters through occasionally, it is only after he has provided the reader with a description of the grand sweep of the evolution of Western anthropology and its relationship with the photographic image.
Early anthropologists were primarily concerned with the physiognomy of those deemed to be savages. There was a congruence between the anthropologists’ interests and those of colonising powers. A fundamental belief in difference influenced the ideology of both.
Lamprey’s grid was one invention used to bring out physical differences between races. Subjects were made to stand before a large frame from which hung a grid of silk threads spaced at two-inch interval, thus forming squares. They were then photographed. The grid allowed comparisons to be made between these images and those of strapping six-foot models.
However, a self-conscious shift was around the corner. In the late 19th century, anthropology came to be known as E B Tylor’s science. Tylor was enthusiastic about the camera, writing that photographs were not “mere book decorations” but rather “object lessons”. He was among the earliest anthropologists to move from an obsession with the physical body to the wider notion of different cultures, an approach that was soon to be honed through Bronislaw Malinowski’s development of field work techniques.
Earlier, Sir Everard im Thurn had imperiously declared that he was not for the mugshot genre so popular then — humans were not to be photographed in a manner not dissimilar to “badly stuffed birds and animals”, but rather they were to be represented as active, working bodies. His photographs have a certain dynamism, unlike the impressive corpus of material developed in the closing years of the century by that prodigious administrator-cum-amateur anthropologist in the Andaman Islands, M V Portman. Portman’s photographs (incidentally, many of the albums are available in the Anthropological Survey of India’s office in Kolkata) reflected what Pinney calls “an austere colonial sensibility”, reflected in an “objective” representation of the subject people.
Three decades later, Malinowski — regarded as the founder of modern British anthropology — sought to reduce the subject-viewer divide by asking the reader to imagine being on the distant Trobriand islands, among the Trobrianders. He used the camera extensively, often inserting himself into images. As a “self-mythologizing perfector of ‘participant-observation’” who has influenced generations of fieldwork-based researchers, he had to be seen to be “there”.
That being photographed was not always readily accepted by the subject/“native” is discussed at some length by Pinney. He points out that recording discomfiture became almost a genre of photography. Coercive techniques were not unknown, reminding us of Roland Barthes’s belief that photography causes “disturbance”. As late as the 1940s, Pinney shows, Margaret Mead and Geoffrey Bateson chose to ignore this discomfiture, photographing without asking their subjects for permission, often using “an angular viewfinder to record their subjects unaware”.
Contemporary anthropological practice seeks to distance itself from the lack of sensitivity of its forebears. In a particularly telling image in the book, Australian anthropologist Nicolas Peterson overlays an early 20th-century image, of photographers avidly zeroing in on a secret aboriginal men’s ceremony, with a black rectangle. Thus we see a group of hungry, paparazzi-like photographers — but are no long privy to the focus of their interest.
The new imaging reflects an acceptance of what Peterson calls a “changing photographic contract”, where deference to aboriginal sensibilities replaces an earlier coercive regimen. Such paradigm shifts in the role of the photograph in anthropology lead us logically to the core of Pinney’s book. Mindful of Paul Rabinow’s angst at being the “rich” American anthropologist living in a “poor” village hut in Morocco (I would add that his unease has been experienced by many Indian field workers, thereby drawing attention to another dilemma, that of studying sub-cultures within one’s own culture), Pinney carries over this feeling to the domain of the visual. In part this is overcome by what he calls “indigenous media” — communities photographing or filming themselves. Interestingly, some years ago, the Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of Ahmedabad trained a group of documentary filmmakers from among its workers; the aim was to see and document their labour with their own eyes.
Finally, Pinney takes us on a tour of artist Pushpamala N and photographer Clare Arni’s “enactments”, where anthropological photographs are re-constructed — or indeed deconstructed — using many of Portman’s backdrops. Here is Pushpamala as a Toda woman, where there was an Andamanese man in the original. This encourages us to question the veracity of photographs and the photographic tradition.
If, at the end of the book, one is left feeling a little shaky, one has to remember that that is not Pinney’s intention. Rather, he hopes that we will learn to view the camera as “an intimate prosthesis of a local cultural practice” and not as an invasive instrument of oppression.
Malavika Karlekar edits the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. She is the author of Re-visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Author: Christopher Pinney
Publisher: OUP
Pages: 174
Price: Rs 1,595