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Paper Short Abstract:

Based on a photography-driven ethnography of river swimming, I present dynamic tensions and bridges between photography and ethnography on the topics of consent vs permission, the impulses and temporalities of collection (of data vs image), and compositional conventions of ethno- vs photo-graphy.

Paper Abstract:

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.