In Photography and Anthropology, Christopher Pinney presents an account of the parallel histories of anthropology and photography. Combining historical and contemporary photographs with insightful analysis of secondary sources, Pinney recounts the changing perceptions and uses of photography within anthropology while simultaneously suggesting an anthropological theory of photography. Building on the work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and James George Frazer, Pinney argues that anthropological photography is a divinatory practice that draws anthropologists closer to their subjects. What’s more, Pinney illustrates that “anthropology [has always and] continues to define itself—through and against—the nature of photography” (154).
Photography and Anthropology is organized into five chapters. Each chapter focuses on a different historical shift in anthropological perceptions and uses of photography between 1840 and the present. The chapters are organized chronologically, with each one building on its predecessor. The prologue is largely conceptual, and within it Pinney establishes his theoretical orientation and introduces his argument that photography has a divinatory quality. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are historical. They recount photography’s role in the emergence and development of the field of anthropology. In the book’s epilogue, Pinney considers the present state and future of anthropological photography vis-à-vis Roy Wagner’s notion of holography. From prologue to epilogue, the reader is provided with ninety high quality images that not only are beautiful and inspiring to look at but also augment, supplement, and support Pinney’s historical and conceptual analysis.
The greatest strength of Anthropology and Photography is Pinney’s careful and detailed analysis of photographs produced during the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. Examining the works of Alfred Haddon, Edward Horace Man, Maurice Vidal Portman, W. H. Flowers, to mention only a few, Pinney argues that nineteenth-century adopters of photographic technology were drawn to the camera for two reasons: (1) The camera served as a useful metaphor for the kind of positivistic science that early anthropologists were trying to fashion during the emergence and professionalization of the discipline. Because of this, (2) the camera itself was conceptualized as an instrument capable of producing objective visual data for the science of anthropology, which, Pinney notes, was “little more than a form of comparative anatomy” (15) during much of the nineteenth century. The camera was used to create what was thought of as raw, quantifiable, and unbiased data of the human form (phenotypic variation) and material culture. The camera didn’t lie. It was a kind of “technical perfection. . . [that] superseded the deficiencies of speech,” (154) which many early anthropologists felt was an unreliable source.
Pinney suggests that after fieldwork emerged as an anthropological methodology late in the nineteenth century through the efforts of Alfred Cort Haddon, Franz Boas, James Mooney, and Bronislaw Malinowski, anthropologists began to internalize the camera into their fieldwork practices by conceptualizing themselves as cameras that were “being exposed to the reality that they sought to record” (154). At this moment in history, the camera became a metaphor for the process of collection of ethnographic evidence and transformed how ethnographic research was conducted. As anthropology became a field science, doubts began to grow about the camera’s abilities to create accurate representations of lived experience. Although photography had superseded speech in the nineteenth century as the preferred form of analytic data, when post-Malinowskian anthropologists made the “linguistic turn,” photography virtually disappeared from ethnographic monographs (61). Pinney looks to the photography by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Claude-Lévi-Strauss, as well as Paul Hyman’s photographic work in Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), in order to illustrate this turn from photography as an objective instrument, to a subjective, powerful, and intruding force that fell out of favor with many anthropologists between the 1960s and 1990s.
During this time, the critique that Martin Jay called “ocularcentrism” (108) sparked new interests in vernacular media production and indigenous photography. Pinney suggests that late in the 1990s and throughout the first decade of the new millennium, ethnographic photographers began to question ethnographic authority, a move he links with the publication of Clifford’s and Marcus’ Writing Culture (1986). As this change took place, anthropologists began to experiment with cameras. They began collaborative projects with their informants, tried new techniques, and became reflexive image-makers. In the end, Pinney suggests that contemporary anthropologists have and will continue to move away from photography. Despite this trajectory, he reminds us that anthropology has always been intertwined with and defined by its relationship with photography, and that this isn’t likely to change.
Photography and Anthropology is an impressive and thought-provoking book. While there are many works about the history of anthropological film—for instance Karl G. Heider’s Ethnographic Film (1976), Jay Ruby’s Picturing Culture (2000), or Peter Loizo’s Innovations in Ethnographic Film (1993)—and a handful about ethnography and audio-recording technologies—see Erika Brady’s A Spiral Way (1999) or Richard Bauman’s and Charles Briggs’ Voices of Modernity (2003)—there are sadly too few volumes about the history of photographic methodology in anthropology.
Photography and Anthropology is a much-needed addition to the history of anthropology, one that complicates our understanding of technology and the production of anthropological knowledge. Pinney’s analysis is strong, well written, and well researched, which makes this book an excellent resource for those interested in the history of anthropology and/or photography. Although Pinney’s theorization of anthropological photography as a divinatory practice is innovative and interesting, it unfortunately gets somewhat lost within the polemic narrative that Pinney is trying to tell, and it never feels like a fully formed argument. One can only hope that he will develop these thoughts into a separate monograph. Despite this, Anthropology and Photography is a beautiful and thoughtful work that should be required reading for all graduate students studying visual anthropology. Pinney’s words and the ninety images included within the text have inspired and troubled my own perceptions and uses of photography, and it’s likely to do the same for others.
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[Review length: 969 words • Review posted on February 13, 2013]