Paper short abstract:

This presentation shares the first insights of the research on photographic archives and capitalism particularly in terms of the methodological and theoretical contributions that archive research may bring for taking on visual material in anthropological research.

Paper long abstract:

As I started to research digital archive photographs in order to empirically address the relation between capitalism and visual culture, I was confronted both with methodological and theoretical questions regarding the meaning of archives and its use in anthropological research. Taking on digital photographic archives in São Paulo showed me how much the instruments through which we access, produce or transmit visual material are webbed within power relations. As much as the digital archive broadens the realm of public access to knowledge, it also remains as a device whose contemporary origins date back to imperial nineteenth-century Europe. As academics of rhetoric have pointed out, the passing between analogical and digital technologies operated a profound change in the way we relate to materiality, affecting the relations of proximity – affective, geographic and virtual – between our objects of analysis and us. Digital archives multiply, for instance, the mutual access to different collections. In the case of photographs, it provides us with immediate reproduction. These structural changes demand a coherent perspective for addressing visual archives in both the methodological and theoretical levels. By contextualizing one of the archives of São Paulo, I will focus on presenting such perspective by addressing the changing relations of proximity, in the methodological level, proposing a critically engaged stance that allows us, through the archive to reassemble the visual in anthropology. This involves proposing of a consistent methodology for archive research, but also the meta-theoretical understanding of the archive that permits the awareness of its limits.