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Paper long abstract:

This presentation takes the author’s experience as a photographer and anthropologist in developing bodies of work that articulate arts and anthropology and its challenges. Focuses on “A incompletude para além do fim”, a project undertaken for the last 18 months in Campanhã, a specific economically deprived area in the city of Porto, Portugal. Its objective is to address notions of identity and territory from the local population in a region currently going through what I have come to designate the liminality of urban time. It is an ongoing visual anthropology project, collecting and co-creating stories, memories, and experiences of its inhabitants by themselves and the author. It also inquires into the initiatives and good practices contributing to the social and cultural development of the territory. In between photographic practices, ethnographic itinerances, and collective participation, it was materialized into a website (a-incompletude.com), two fanzines resulting from two workshops with several presentations at the community level, and a traveling exhibition. We extrapolated structural and systemic issues that are linked to global economies and movements that manifest themselves locally, such as migratory movements, gentrification, cultural and creative industries, sustainability, public housing, and public space.

But what are the challenges and difficulties we face when using participatory practices? In what ways and moments might self-representation be adequate and whose expectations does it fulfill? In this presentation, I will give some empirical examples of the permanent and ongoing negotiations, doubts and events that come up in projects of this type, where practices are disputed.

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This paper considers how photographic practice can provoke anthropological reflections, specifically in the case of a community on the brink of disappearance. Drawing on the experience of being an anthropologist-as-curator (Sansi, 2020) for a photography exhibition on the Parsis (a minority community within India), this paper presents ethnographic data on how photographs can critically act as emergent spaces of unfolding possibilities.

The exhibition, held at a contemporary art gallery in Mumbai, sought to present new types of visual representation for a community experiencing a dramatic population decline due to low nuptiality, strict endogamy and high emigration. Integrating research from ethnographic fieldwork that highlighted how millennial Parsis engage in experimental photographic practices to fashion their identity, the exhibition emphasised the importance of “play” as a conceptual loosening of societal expectations around representation. In this context, curatorial decisions around the presence or absence of captions to accompany photographs, the materiality of physical photographs versus images on a screen, and choices around framing or “unframing” were considered from anthropological perspectives.

This paper proposes that it is the complex temporalities embedded within photographs themselves that spark an important relinquishing of reliance on established categories of anthropological analysis. In bridging the past, present and future, photography’s intricate reordering of time provides a space for the development of experimental approaches within anthropology and curation. Overall, this paper highlights the potential of photography, in particular its inherent temporality, to foster new forms of knowledge that decentre and destabilise, thereby also signalling new directions in anthropological discourse.

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The project entitled “The order of things. Relationships with pre-war objects in the western territories of Poland” (2019-2022) was dedicated to people-object relations in a particular context: in the regions incorporated into the Polish borders after World War II. The research process was focused on the objects that had originally belonged to resettled German citizens and remained in the areas successively inhabited by the newcomers. Seventy years after the establishment of the “new post-war order”, we asked the current owners how these pre-war objects are used, what practices they generate, and how they are narrativised.

In our research, we employed a combination of ethnographic and artistic tools. We – the ethnographers - collaborated with Łukasz Skąpski, an artist who used the medium of photography to reveal the relationality of people, things and places. Although our activities mutually fueled each other, our collaboration proved to be largely based on disparities and disagreement, at times resembling the management of conflict. Skąpski's work is being described as “trickster-like” (Wojciech Szymański) and based on mockery and irony treated as tools of artistic practice (Jarosław Lubiak), the effects of which are often interpreted in terms of social criticism.

In our paper, we will reflect on the difficulties that the mentioned strategy entails and explore their eventual potentials in the ethnographic research process. We will explain why this form of collaboration has directed us to approach the titular issue of the project from a class perspective.

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In this paper, I present dynamic tensions and fluid crossing-overs between photography and ethnography on the topics of consent versus permission, the impulses and temporalities of collection (of data versus image), and the compositional conventions of ethno- versus photo-graphy, emphasizing both the new permissions each give to one another as well as the ways ethnography and photography un-do and thereby re-do one another. I utilize my photography-driven ethnography of river swimming in Switzerland as the context for this discussion. Cheekily titled “Every Ass on the Letten: Leisure and Intimacy along the Limmat River,” the project documents the bathing culture of a popular swimming spot and the convivial, social, and (inter)corporeal intimacies on display there through scene photography (en masse portraiture), underwater photography, and several “floats” (composite photographs made while floating down stretches of the river). The project is, in part, an aquatic and personified homage to Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” (1966), the famed composite photograph of Sunset Boulevard presented in the form of an accordion-structure artist’s book. I discuss how drawing from Ruscha’s piece specifically and waterside photography generally, has permitted me to invite aesthetic, methodological, and philosophical influences from photographic artistic traditions to transform ethnographic practice in the two senses of ethnography, as an immersive form of research and data collection to the ‘writing’ of culture with consequences to the negotiation of consent and participation of subjects, the aesthetics and temporalities of documentation, and the very structure and form of ethnographic writing (presentation) itself.

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Paper short abstract:

Combining ethnography and visual montages, this paper analyzes photojournalist Federico Patellani’s photos from the Naples Colonial Exhibition in 1940. I aim to rehumanize the obscure lives of the indigenous people exhibited and to highlight aspects of colonialism's history and heritage.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores colonial visual culture, rethinking ways of doing anthropology by engaging with colonial archives. I analyze photojournalist Federico Patellani's work, which brings us into contact with the nameless indigenous people brought as living samples from Italian colonies at Naples Colonial Exhibition. My approach brings ethnography and visual montages into dialogue (Warburg, 2010; Didi-Huberman, 2010; Samain, 2012), enabling a curatorship of photographs arranged in panels that explore beyond the visible. I treat the images as agents with multiple expressions that have a fundamental role in shaping national identities, racism, and sexism, therefore as agents of the “visual construction of the social field” (Mitchell, 2002). Photography emerged in the late 19th century as a supposedly faithful technology of representation, establishing a new way of seeing and thinking about the world, birthing a new type of observer (Crary, 1994). Metropolises widely used photography to legitimize racist theories through anthropometric and anthropological studies. My effort is to rehumanize the “obscure lives” (Foucault, 1977) of those photographed for the Exhibition and to highlight colonialism's history, and heritage, which persists today in many museums, universities, cities, and scientific and literary forms. This work on a silenced event and easily forgotten subjects prompts an ethnographic reevaluation of what images can express and how we can sensitively deal with them, exploring what emerges from this experience and avoiding further violence in narration (Hartman, 2008). I argue, as in Glissant's reflections on black culture in archives (Glissant 1989), these images are not lost or found but undiscovered.

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Starting from the ethnographic research on the representation and perception of migrant women's bodies conducted in Siena, Italy, this study explores the combined use of photography and ethnography as collaborative research tools to discover new methods of collaboration between the two disciplines.

Paper long abstract:

Starting from an ethnographic research on representation policies and the perception of the bodies of migrant women residing in the province of Siena, in this intervention, I will focus on the combined use of photography and ethnography as tools that allow for the exploration and experimentation of new collaborative research methods. The goal I set for myself is to offer a nuanced perspective on the theme of the body and the experiences of migrant women, avoiding reducing ethnography to a mere "data extraction process" (Ingold 2014).

Ethnographic methods and the reflective drive they feed have indeed significantly influenced my artistic work. Tracing the trajectories of my training and research in the fields of photography and anthropology, in my contribution, I will emphasize the integrated use of visual and ethnographic representations as tools for interaction and the co-construction of meaning.

By combining the two perspectives I have moved in an attempt to "liberate" the stories of migrant women from the stereotypical representations in which they seemed to be trapped solely because of their migratory background, portraying them instead as the bodies of women narrating a story. Configuring real experiments of experience, these multimodal research practices allow us to view anthropology as a discipline interested in the "production of knowledge and ways of knowing, rather than... the collection of data" (Pink 2013, 35). From such a perspective, photography can be considered a conversational practice (Gunthert 2015), in which the captured images can be tools to initiate and sustain meaningful dialogues.

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I have devoted 20 years to photographing human trafficking in Asia, initially as a documentary photographer and later as a social anthropologist. This article addresses a question that has long preoccupied me: how does one simultaneously assume the roles of both a photographer and an anthropologist?

Paper long abstract:

I have devoted twenty years to photographing human trafficking in Asia, initially as a documentary photographer and later as a social anthropologist. This article addresses a question that has long preoccupied me: how does one simultaneously assume the roles of both a photographer and an anthropologist? This question arises from a persistent belief that photography and anthropology were incompatible, and that the latter could offer a more scientifically accurate portrayal of human trafficking than the former. To bridge this dichotomy, I propose an intermediate epistemological approach that emphasizes the alignment between photography and anthropology: ‘visual storytelling’. This concept encompasses the utilization of photo-ethnography to generate visual ethnographic data and narratives, which render social issues and invisible communities visible to both general and academic audiences. Moreover, it encourages a reflexive standpoint on epistemology, theory, and methodology. By presenting this argument, I aim to contribute to scholarly discussions on the reciprocal enrichment of photography, anthropology, and sociology.

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‘Revisited’ is a comparative research involving collaborations with indigenous communities in Central Australia, the Brazilian Amazon, and Far Eastern Siberia. The project employs photography as a collaborative mode of knowledge-production which affords plural articulations around complex themes.

Paper long abstract:

‘Revisited’ (forthcoming, SPECTOR books, Spring 2024) is a tripartite comparative research project spanning a decade of collaborations with indigenous communities in Central Australia, the Brazilian Amazon, and Far Eastern Siberia. Based in archival research and the reframing of dominant historical narratives through the repatriation and repurposing of photographic images with indigenous descendants, the project employs photography as a collaborative mode of knowledge-production which affords plural articulations around complex themes such as trauma, belonging, and hope.

In this talk, I focus on three photographic encounters from the ‘Revisited’ research project, which center on the collaborative making of individual portraits in dialogue with relevant archival images. By concretely unfolding these encounters, including aesthetical and technical choices made before, during, and after the encounters, I discuss how artistic approaches to photographic portraiture may challenge and nuance anthropological epistemologies through collaboration and dialogue, which in turn foster unanticipated questions and reflections.

The presentation will involve screening of photographs, behind-the-scenes/backstage film, and excerpts from exhibitions of the work in various museums and galleries.

www.christianvium.com

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This paper discusses a creative workshop organised for young people, second-generation migrants from Georgia in Moscow, in order to collaboratively explore their experiences of belonging through material memory: their family photographs, images from their Georgian trips, and Georgia-related objects.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper focuses on the intergenerational transmission of memories and imaginations of home among Georgian families who moved to Moscow after the collapse of the USSR. As part of my fieldwork, I designed a creative workshop for a group of young Georgians, inviting them to explore their sense of belonging through material memory: their family photographs, images from their Georgian trips, and Georgia-related objects. Family photographs in emigration are often discussed from the perspective of engagement. However, as I show in this paper, while they enact young people’s emotional responses, they also reveal the sense of detachment from their parents’ and grandparents’ narratives of the past.

This workshop was a methodological and existential investigation into second-generation migrants’ perceptions of their parents’ past experiences as these influence their understanding of themselves and their narrations of their personal experiences of growing up in Moscow against the backdrop of the geopolitical tensions between Russia and Georgia. To address these questions, I borrowed a term “postmemory” suggested by Marianne Hirsch for the study of traumatic and difficult pasts internalised by the second generation. However, this concept, although is in many ways productive for the analysis of the relation of young people to their family past, does not encompass the issue of the ongoing conflict. The workshop revealed the similarities and differences of young people’s experiences, the ambiguity of their (dis)connectedness to their homeland and their shared sense of temporality in Moscow that shape their imaginations of the past and expectations from the future.

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What can a photograph of a home collection of medicines tell about its owner? As part of a research experiment, I requested research participants to send me pictures of their home medicines collection. In addition to the artistic value of these images, they provide valuable ethnographic material.

Paper long abstract:

As a methodological experiment, I requested my research participants, with whom I had already conducted face-to-face interviews, to send me photographs of their home medicines collection. My research focuses on (dis)trust that Russian-speaking people in Germany experienced towards the German healthcare system. I discovered that this community has a high degree of medicalization, which means that medications play an essential role in their daily lives and healing practices. One of the manifestations of low trust in the system is the stockpiling of medicines imported from Russia and other post-Soviet countries, so the home medicine cabinet is an important object.

I have received pictures accompanied by text, anecdotes, and audio comments. Conventional approaches for analysing photographs (Bourdieu 1990) would not work in this case since these photos were not intended for public display or attention-seeking purposes but rather for personal or scientific use. Although these pictures do not possess any artistic value, like the photos we typically see on social media or in family albums (Panáková 2019), there is an entire world behind the captured material objects. This world is associated with a particular healing experience, and each medicine provokes a narrative about it.

Despite seemingly trusting the researcher when sending photographs (Canals 2020), participants still found artistic ways to fulfil the request by adjusting the composition of the photographs, such as removing or repositioning medications or other objects in the frame. In my paper, I would like to discuss the methodology used to work with this visual ethnographic material.

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This experimental collaboration between an architect-researcher and a documentalist photographer suggests that the homogenous aesthetics of massive urban peripheries in Spain can be read through an original cultural perspective that makes the meaning of heritage less dogmatic and more inclusive.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the aesthetics of those vast residential architectures that, in the context of Francoist developmentalism over the third quarter of the 20th century, were built on the outskirts of Spain's cities to accommodate the population migrating from rural areas. The result of said planning was the most significant urban transformation in the country's history, often embodied in homogenous and mundane buildings that remain unnoticed despite being a ubiquitous typology still today. Informed by a long-term online ethnography that has treated the Facebook group ‘Amigos del Toldo Verde’ as a participatory visual archive reviewed in multiple press releases (https://bit.ly/3HrCGGv) – together with a series of urban walks during which fieldnotes and more than 20,000 pictures were taken by photographer Kike Carbajal (http://bit.ly/toldo-verde) – this research combines textual descriptions with high-quality images to suggest a humble, yet authentic heritage understanding. Here, the term ‘heritage’ is stripped of idealism to become a sort of mirror – occasionally uncomfortable – that disorients the viewer by elevating strangely familiar urban scenes to the status of postcards; thus, this paper leads to a profound reflection on the paradoxes of our imperfect but real cities, oscillating between the advocacy of neighborhood culture and the questioning of the inequalities embedded in its spaces. The present work contributes to the broadening of anthropology by focusing on how experimental collaborations (Estalella and Sánchez-Criado 2018) are practiced between an architect and a photographer aiming to build a more democratic image of Spain’s heritage through the inclusion of working-class lifestyles.

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This paper considers the role of analogue photography in anthropological research concerned with the aftermath of debilitating state-sponsored violence.

Paper long abstract:

Over Summer 2023, I conducted ethnographic research in Paris, France, with photographers who are using their cameras to document instances of state violence during public demonstrations. In the context of my dissertation project, which focuses on the impact of protest injuries caused by non-lethal police weapons on contemporary social movements in France, the purpose of this research was: (i) to explore how the technical choices made by photographer-activists when taking, developing, or editing their images inform how state violence is processed—by themselves and the public at large; and, (ii) to learn from research participants how to craft my own photo-ethnographic method, one that would be suited to represent situations of violence in the field.

Building on the ethnographic materials collected and the methodological training I received, this paper considers the role of analogue photography in anthropological research concerned with the aftermath of debilitating state-sponsored violence. Specifically, it argues that one of the technical components of analogue photography—the film negative—can provide an "analytical protocol" to grapple with various manifestations of harm that may have been witnessed in the field but that were not immediately recognize as such. To assist with this endeavor, I will present three ethnographic vignettes that address the experiences of individuals who were permanently maimed by law-enforcement while protesting and are since engaging in projects of repair to find healing.

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We live in a time where media culture and pollution affect people and places in disproportionate ways. Drawing on fieldwork examining Kodak chemistry, I propose that photographic practices renew ethnographic methods by reforming how anthropologists engage with spaces impacted by chemical industries.

Paper long abstract:

As a photographic artist and researcher in visual anthropology, my ethnographic and artistic experiences often coalesce. My PhD follows the minerals and chemistries used to make photographic film. I consider the overlooked materials of photographic reproduction, to extend enquiries into what photography does. This perspective helps undo the mineral blindness exhibited by anthropology in its previous engagements with photography.

Fieldwork in Rochester, New York, home of Kodak, explores social and ecological worlds that are touched by Kodak’s chemical processing. Where do photographic contaminants pool and why? How is contamination narrated?

In my arts practice, I forage and research plants growing in Kodak-contaminated spaces. I explore their agencies by engaging with them visually, materially, and chemically. Plants can bio-indicate pollution or remediate contaminants. I use chemicals extracted from plants to develop photographic artworks of polluted landscapes. Plant-based chemistries are lower-toxicity and help undo the toxic legacies of analogue photography. I use these artworks to explore experiences of toxicity through one-to-one conversations, and exhibitions.

I discuss the value of adopting photographic methods to think with as an anthropologist. For instance, photo-walks, and the routes organised through the city, reveal how photographers perceive and respond to neighbourhoods affected by Kodak pollution and crime. Making plant-chemistry with local photographers reveals how people make sense of photo-chemical worlds. These approaches work restoratively, towards undoing photographic toxicity and redoing ethnography, that is both environmental and social.

The presentation includes plant-based photographic artworks inspired by ethnographic experiences, and photographs developed with plants growing in Kodak-contaminated spaces.

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A collaborative photographic project that connects copper miners from Chile and Ghana, examining the global trajectories of the mineral, elucidating its multifaceted roles across diverse value chains and contextual significances, andd discussing notions of wealth, health, and craftsmanship.

Paper long abstract:

“The lives of Copper” critically examines the global trajectories of the mineral, elucidating its multifaceted roles across diverse value chains and contextual significances. Copper, a pivotal mineral in modern industries and key for the decabornization process, traverses intricate pathways, interconnecting various economic, social, and cultural dimensions on a global scale. This research starts in Antofagasta, Chile, scrutinizing the extraction, production and distribution of copper, and unraveling its journey from mining sites to manufacturing hubs and sea ports. Along with interviews and participant observation, I produced a series of photos of the city and its inhabitants in relation with the copper geography. After that, and tracing the copper pathways to delineate its intricate web of global relationships, I moved to Accra, Ghana, where lies one of the largest e-waste dumps in the world, Agbogbloshie. Thousands of people work there, dismantling cables and electronic appliances to extract and sell copper by its weight. I took the Antofagasta photos there, and invited the workers to intervene them and send visual letters to the Chilean miners. The images were drawn and written upon, in ways that not only emphasized its economic value, but also its symbolic, ritualistic, and historical significance, embodying notions of wealth, health, and craftsmanship. This is an ongoing project that will continue to move around the world, and I would like to present and discuss the method applied and the preliminary results at EASA hoping to discuss the challenges of photographic participatory research, and receive feedback from the anthropology community.