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Paper short abstract:

Based on local studio conventions for portrait photography, mediations of visibility and invisibility, of exposure and containment in peoples’ photographic self-representations in the Tigrayan context of highland Ethiopia, have not only constituted and intake to local perceptions of personhood, but also to mediations of their own future.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will discuss the anthropological knowledge the process of photographing portraits in the Tigrayan context of highland Ethiopia has evoked. Photographing in Tigray has meant being obliged to share authority with a people who have demanded to take control over their own self-representation. At the base of this discussion is therefore a repositioning of the photographing anthropologist from a detached observer to a social agent in a photographic encounter. Through the provision of a space for self-representation, the photographic situation has been utilised by people for producing an ideal self-image based on local studio conventions for portrait photography with roots in close to universal conventions in photographic studio portraiture. Involving mediations of visibility and invisibility, of exposure and containment these photographs have, together with peoples' critique of the photographs afterwards, constituted and intake to local perceptions of personhood. Based on the ambivalence in photographic realism that makes fiction possible, the photographic portraits have also constituted an intake to how people mediate their past and aspirations for the future, not only in their lives in the present, but also before the camera.