Paper short abstract:

This communication relates the experience of the collaboration between a Malian photographer and a French ethnologist in Mali. It focuses on the specificity of art photography, and its common ground with ethnology.

Paper long abstract:

In 2019, a French ethnologist working on the notion of cultural capital in Segu teamed up a Malian photographer in order to see the town through his eyes. Neither of them had experienced such a collaboration before, and neither of them published the photographs that resulted from the experiment. Far for being a failure, this first experience was the beginning of a continued dialogue between them on the practice of art photography and the common grounds between their fields. In what ways can an artistic perspective of photography enrich both the work of the photographer and of the ethnologist?

In the first part, we look back at the beginning of our collaboration to understand how our different points of view as photographer and ethologist permuted in the work we created. In the second part, we explore the difference between the images the photographer took for our project and his work as an art photographer. The photographer explains his artistic work, and analyses the difference between what he calls art and documentary photography on the basis of two photos he took in the same place. In the third part, I link his analysis to the use of documentary photography in ethnology. We propose to encompass these dualities to look at some common ground: the work on attention to details, and the exploration of the imperceptible. We anticipate that this discussion will open new paths of collaboration that we have yet to explore.