Paper short abstract:

How might visual anthropology refract, as a question of its own media, the claim of fieldwork that "I saw this"?

Paper long abstract:

For Deleuze, what distinguishes art is its resistance to "communication", in foregrounding means that are not reduced to the service of ends. The visual medium is not simply a transitive engagement with a subject understood to exist beyond it, being "represented", but rather concerns the very act of seeing - as conceived of (as its subject) by the film. In the form of tourist photographs taken of museum collections, what is being appropriated and then circulated? What testimony to a (perhaps latent) cosmology is offered in the relation between technics and imagination here? What kind of "voice" is evoked - as the supposed "subject" - by this ubiquitous practice of image making? What kinds of "ethno-fiction" (Augé) become possible in the guise, then, of an essay-film thanks to digital media? For Bazin, the voice in an essay-film is in reflexive dialogue with the image, rather than being identified with it - exposing an anthropological dimension to the visual medium itself. In this presentation, I will reflect on these conceptual histories of practice, using some examples of my own work, and attempt to explore what it might mean to say (with Taussig) "I swear I saw this" in an anthropological context.