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Paper short abstract

My paper proposal focuses on the making of an ethnographic film as part of a PhD in anthropology and questions, through feedback and collaborative cinema, how images can be used to negotiate the aesthetic and ethical issues of representation in a polarized and visually saturated world.

Paper long abstract

“It's our story, but it's your work.”With these words, my field partner T. pointed out a core issue when I suggested that she co-sign a film partly based on her story, as part of my thesis.

Researchers are more and more confronted with a proliferation of images in their fieldworks and must therefore take this visual ecology into account. How can we overcome this polarization between the production of a situated narrative and anthropological knowledge? Faye Ginsburg has called for a decolonisation of documentary cinema, inviting filmmakers to revive the principles of Rouch's “shared anthropology” in what she calls “relational documentary,” grounded on a “responsible aesthetic” (Ginsburg, 2018).

Faced with an increasingly abundant vernacular visual production – created and shared on social media, documentary or fictional creations by the “informants” – what place and status should be given to the images and sounds that the ethnologist-filmmaker produces her- himself ? What dialogue should be established between these different audiovisual and discursive registers, and what aesthetic choices should be used to encourage this dialogue?

If good images in anthropology are the result of a good ethnographic relationship and engage in dialogue with the iconographic conventions in force in the fieldwork (Leon-Quijano, 2022), the reflection about when and how to “take images” – or even to not take them at all – is not only aesthetic but eminently political. How then can we find a good balance between these two poles, and who should have the final say on the ethnographic narrative?