While photography has a long history of being used by anthropologists, not much has been written of the use of anthropology by photographers. Based on my personal experiences of two distinct... Show moreWhile photography has a long history of being used by anthropologists, not much has been written of the use of anthropology by photographers. Based on my personal experiences of two distinct ethnographic fieldworks, I argue that these two practices, photography and anthropology, overlap in several ways and one can combine the skills, techniques, knowledge, insights, and objectives from the two disciplines. Throughout my master’s and PhD research I was constantly navigating back and forth between my anthropological and photography skills, which led to a blurring of the boundaries between the two. Both practices fed into each other and my anthropological work gained advantage from my photography. Specifically, anthropology can benefit from the art of photography in a way that expands and deepens meanings and ways of looking. In this article, I will provide examples of how I combined these skills and will present my argument in three steps: firstly, I will focus on mediation; how looking through the medium of a camera affects what and how we see. Secondly, following the idea of “the affective lens” developed by Brent Luvaas (2017), I will delve into how photography helped me bridge distance in the field and facilitated an easier engagement with research participants. Finally, I will spend some time explaining the state of “heightened awareness” presented by David MacDougall (2006) and will expand on it by drawing on Jean Rouch’s concept of ciné-transe (Rouch 1978). I will also refer to the concept of kinok by Dziga Vertov as a useful metaphor for understanding the relationship between the camera and the body. Show less
The article investigates urban gardening in Turin with ethnography, historical analysis and photography, using both the authors’ photography and sources from social media and private archives. The... Show moreThe article investigates urban gardening in Turin with ethnography, historical analysis and photography, using both the authors’ photography and sources from social media and private archives. The authors collaborate to analyse ‘community’ gardening through a critical anthropological perspective which centres on the hegemonic power of aesthetic assumptions about the urban green. As a post-industrial, multicultural city, Turin illuminates the dialectic of gentrification vis-à-vis socioeconomic and cultural diversity, which is a crucial dynamic of many urban renewal trends towards ‘green cities’. We highlight the homogeneity of an aesthetic regime vis-à-vis the diversity of ‘skilled visions’ of social actors and its restraining effects on participatory governance. We contribute to ongoing debates in urban anthropology and visual studies, concerned with urban regeneration agendas in the de-industrializing cities of the Global North. Show less
Based on an ethnographic approach as well as on cultural critique of relevant digital projects, this article confronts visual ‘ecologies of belonging’. Building on my ‘skilled visions’ approach, I... Show moreBased on an ethnographic approach as well as on cultural critique of relevant digital projects, this article confronts visual ‘ecologies of belonging’. Building on my ‘skilled visions’ approach, I propose a critical study of everyday visual apprenticeship of social and cultural stereotypes about looking. The main finding is that the act of looking and categorizing self and others should be understood as a form of relational and situated learning, rather than as a problem of (facial) recognition. The self-assertion with which we orient ourselves in a social environment on an everyday basis is telling of the enchanted quality of ‘making-believe’, as our own skilled vision makes us believe that it is indeed possible to sort and chart sociocultural groups on the basis of phenotypic classifications. However, the evidence of such ‘mugshot aesthetics’ is at best ambivalent. The mugshot view reduces our social abilities of reading complex and cultural cues to standard mechanisms, and ‘makes us believe’ that a perspicuous view of human types is achievable and indeed operationalizable in technologies of vision. The article proposes a more complex attitude to this issue based both on ethnographic interaction – including fieldwork, in-depth interviews and visual analysis. Show less
