"Photography and Anthropology" share strikingly parallel histories. Christopher Pinney's provocative and eminently readable account provides a polemical narrative of anthropologists' use of photography from the 1840s to the present.
Walter Benjamin suggested that photography "make[s] the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable", and Pinney here explores photography as a divinatory practice. Though viewed as modern and rational, this quality of photography in fact propelled anthropologists towards the "primitive" lives of those they studied.
Early anthropology celebrated photography as a physical record, whose authority and permanence promised an escape from the lack of certainty in speech. For later anthropologists, this same quality became grounds to critique an imaging practice that failed to capture movement and process. But throughout these twists and turns, anthropology as a practice of "being there" has found itself entwined in an intimate engagement with photography as metaphor for the collection of evidence.
"Photography and Anthropology" reveals how anthropology provides the tools to re-imagine the power and magic of all photographic practices. It presents both a history of anthropology's seduction by photography and the anthropological theory of photography. This thoroughly researched book draws upon an intimate knowledge of the history of anthropology, photography and the world's major anthropological practitioners.
About author
Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. He is the author of "Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs" (1997) and "Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India" (2003), both published by Reaktion.
Reviews
"A masterful synthesis of his twenty years of explorations into the parallel histories of anthropology and photography, Chris Pinney's intellectual archeologies of image, observation, and evidence are at once deeply historical, deeply contemporary, deeply critical, and deeply provocative. I can't imagine a more vivid blow-up of how the photographic magic of realism mirrors and shadows the anthropological realism of magic" – Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music, The University of New Mexico
"Who better than Chris Pinney to adjudicate the magic of photography with the anthropology of the image, and do so in such a marvelously succinct, smart, and lively manner? With its cornucopia of wondrous accounts of how photography is set to work outside of Western culture, this book mightily expands both the meaning of the image and the power of a photograph. A tour de force" – Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University and author of Mimesis and Alterity and What Color is the Sacred?
