Raw Histories

Photographs, Anthropology and Museums

Elizabeth Edwards

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000181296
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Anthropology

Photographs have had an integral and complex role in many anthropological contexts, from fieldwork to museum exhibitions. This book explores how approaching anthropological photographs as 'history' can offer both theoretical and empirical insights into these roles. Photographs are thought to make problematic history because of their ambiguity and 'rawness'. In short, they have too many meanings. The author refutes this prejudice by exploring, through a series of case studies, precisely the potential of this raw quality to open up new perspectives. Taking the nature of photography as her starting point, the author argues that photographs are not merely pictures of things but are part of a dynamic and fluid historical dialogue, which is active not only in the creation of the photograph but in its subsequent social biography in archive and museum spaces, past and present. In this context, the book challenges any uniform view of anthropological photography and its resulting archives. Drawing on a variety of examples, largely from the Pacific, the book demonstrates how close readings of photographs reveal not only western agendas, but also many layers of differing historical and cross-cultural experiences. That is, photographs can 'spring leaks' to show an alternative viewpoint. These themes are developed further by examining the dynamics of photographs and issues around them as used by contemporary artists and curators and presented to an increasingly varied public. This book convincingly demonstrates photographs' potential to articulate histories other than those of their immediate appearances, a potential that can no longer be neglected by scholars and institutions.

one
Introduction: Observations from the Coal-Face

Perhaps the first thing that reached me about photography was the punctum, the inexplicable point of incisive clarity, although in those days I had not yet put a name to it. In my case it was the carefully tied knots in the lashings on a bamboo palisade erected around the canoe house at Makira in the Solomon Islands. The photograph was taken by one George Smith, for C. F. Wood on his yachting cruise of the Pacific in 1873. There was a sense of presence – of fingers that had tied those knots in other times – that filled the whole image and gave it meaning. This first recognition was a strangely prescient metaphor for the threads wrapped around, entangling photographs and making histories.

Over the years many theorists and writers on photography, such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, John Tagg, and John Berger, and historians such as Greg Dening, Carlo Ginzburg, and Hayden White, to name but a few, have left an indelible mark. However, my primary interests have also come from another direction, from many years working as a curator of photographs within an anthropological museum and teaching critical history and theory of still photography within visual anthropology to students in anthropology, history, art history, contemporary arts practice and museum studies. During the hours, days and months spent in many places, working with photographs, looking at photographs, talking about photographs, thinking about photographs and thinking about their relationship with history, I have talked to people looking for 'history'. This history has been both the actuality of evidential inscription, and their own particular 'realities'. They are looking for their own history or someone else's history, for the history of their discipline, or confronting the nature of their colonial past, both the colonised and the colonisers; people looking for their ancestors, people making, re-making or even imagining histories. Such experiences are of eradicable subjectivity. Photography here cannot be reduced to a totalising abstract practice, but instead comprises photographs, real visual objects engaged with in social space and real time. In such contexts, the analysis of photographs cannot be restricted only to sorting out structures of signification, but must take into account that signifying role of photography in relation to the whole nature of the object and its social biography.

The essays in this volume recollect not those experiences as such, but the need for historiographical contemplations on the relationship between photographs and the way in which pasts are made in both inscription and archiving. Photographs here are as much 'to think with' as they are empirical, evidential inscriptions. A concentration on content alone, ethnographic appearance – the obvious characteristics of a photograph – is easy, but will reveal only the obvious. Instead, one should concentrate on detail. It is more revealing, not merely in the detail of content but the whole performative quality of the image (Ginzburg 1983:82). Thus one moves beyond surface description, beyond originating context itself, beyond the homogenising rubrics of disciplinary action, or of overarching explanatory systems. In many ways the arguments here follow Geertz's methodological statement (1973:28), by using theory to make thick description more eloquent and to draw, or at least point to, larger conclusions from the smaller case-studies. These are developed to support broader assertions about the role of photographs in intersecting histories through engaging precisely and exactly with complex specifics. Similarly, the arguments draw on de Certeau's 'Recipe for Theory' by undertaking 'an ethnological isolation of some practices in the form of case studies, enabling focus on a distinct yet coherent corpus'. Such action dissolves unity, without denying the power of that unity, but allows, within it, that which was 'obscure, unspoken, culturally alien, to become the very element that throws light on the theory and upon which the discourse is founded' (1980:190). Rather than starting from a series of observations and assumptions imposed on a body of material, the starting-point here is always with photographs themselves, the entangled histories and their significations, to look for an intelligible structure that will recognise both possible closures of meaning, and open spaces of articulation (Levi 1991:98), in an attempt at methodological exploration.

A detailed consideration of the many theoretical underpinnings that have been variously forged into tools is beyond the scope of this volume, although they resonate throughout the arguments, and in any case they have been admirably dealt with and analysed by others. For instance, it is not intended to analyse in detail the relationship between photography and the forces of domination and repression, the operation of capillary power and asymmetries within colonial relationships that saturate many of the photographs discussed here. This is not to underestimate, diminish or overlook them; they too have been admirably dealt with elsewhere (for example Pinney 1997: Chapter 1; Sekula 1989; Green 1984, 1985; Lalvani 1996; Ryan 1997) and I take them as axiomatic. They will be accorded an active and foregrounded role in the argument as appropriate. Where they are silent, they are still very much present, informing and shaping the photographic practice explored in these essays. While proceeding from and building upon those elements, which have been the focus in much critical writing, I shall argue that photographs cannot simply be reduced to signifiers of social forces and relations, premised solely on models of alterity, nor to models of spectacle within a socio-political matrix, although they are indisputably active and potent, as both makers and sustainers within these discourses. The mechanisms of photographs are too complex. They are more ambiguously dynamic as they function in the real world, and within daily experience, not merely in some imagined or reified theoretical world. As Jenks has argued (1995:13-14) there is a space between theorised vision and its relations to the real world of everyday empirical experience. The close-up view, based firmly in ethnographies of photography, allows us to grasp what eludes the broader more comprehensive viewing, and vice versa (Ginzburg 1993:26-7). This echoes Kracauer's view that the micro-view (like the cinematic close-up) is capable of modifying more comprehensive views (Barnouw 1994:254).

Consequently the arguments explore specific photographic experiences: how photographs and their making actually operated in the fluid spaces of ideological and cultural meaning. These cannot always be encapsulated precisely through the mechanisms of reception theory, semiotics or post-colonial deconstruction, yet, at the same time, carry their mark. Perhaps, as Hoskins has suggested, it is because 'many of the "grand" narratives of science, progress and politics have lost their credibility', that 'little' narratives, situated in the particular experience of individuals, have resurfaced (1998:5). Photographs, those visual incisions through time and space, constitute such 'little narratives', yet at the same time are constituted by and are constitutive of the 'grand', or at least 'larger', narratives. Consequently the intention here is not to produce a grand theory of photography, ethnography and history as abstract practices, but to look at specific photographs and specific acts of photographic involvement, collecting, displaying and intervening. These essays are small vertical samplings in a rich and varied field, which are nonetheless conceptually linked. From this I hope to suggest, following Geertz, the general within them, which might be extended to other bodies of material and to contribute to a broader understanding. Any one of the essays could serve as the basis of a book in itself.¹

Museums and Archives

Underlying all the essays is an idea of 'The Museum' and 'The Archive'. Although there is a difference in focus, in practical terms, in the means by which they produce public statements, here, for the sake of argument, I slip between the two, for as far as photographs are concerned, they are closely related, often being inseparably linked sites of disciplinary regulation. The 'Archive' and 'The Museum' have become a privileged site of critique in recent years, especially in relation to ethnography (see for instance Bennett 1995; Coombes 1994; Ames 1992; Sekula 1989; Richards 1993; Bal 1996; and McQuire 1998). However, it is not only a place of disciplinary regulation and enclosure, although it is of course that in one register. It is also a place of potential, open to new historical frames of references where photographs can interrupt dominant narratives (Hartmann, Hayes and Silvester 1998: 2, 8-9; McQuire 1998:133-4). There is a fluidity, heterogeneity and even serendipity to both making photographs and their preservation in 'The Archive', for neither making nor preserving is a unified practice. It is important to move away from the reiteration of an almost predictable catalogue of stereotypes, which frequently exaggerate the homogeneity of archival action and which confuse consumption with production. Such overdetermined models both reify 'The Archive' as an inactive space after the first act of appropriation, and at the same time, paradoxically, close precisely the space in which alternative voices might emerge, whilst doing nothing to displace or destabilise the power of 'The Archive'. I shall argue instead that within the archive and the museum there is a dense multidimensional fluidity of the discursive practices of photographs as linking objects between past and present, between visible and invisible and active in cross-cultural negotiation. Meanings come in and out of focus, double back on themselves, adhere silently. Indeed, as will be suggested in Chapter 8, in considering the role of photography in the ethnographic museum, photography has the potential for critique in precisely those spaces to whose representational practices it has contributed so forcefully in the past.

I want to consider particular roles of photographs in inscribing, constituting and suggesting pasts. Contained within this is the way in which photographs termed 'ethnographic' or 'anthropological' have been used to define cultures. But embedding this within history allows the photographs to perform on a broader stage in space and time, not necessarily confined to specific cultural pasts. Further, it intentionally blurs the canonical categories that designate photographs as 'ethnographic' or 'anthropological'. My basic question is: what kind of past is inscribed in photographs? What is the affective tone through which they project the past into the present? How can their apparently trivial incidental appearance of surface be meaningful in historical terms? How does one unlock the 'special heuristic potential' of the condensed evidence in photographs, representing, as they do, intersections? Egmond and Mason have recently described these intersections as 'cross roads of morphological chains, as the intersection of numerous contexts and actions, or at the nodal point where both contemporary and modern preoccupations reflect and enhance each other' (1999:249). Do photographs have their own agency within this? If there are performative qualities in photographs, where do they lie? In the thing itself? In its making? In its content? While one can only summarise the complex arguments here and amplify in the case-studies, suffice it to say that such strategies move us beyond the surface level evidence of appearance, so that 'if it can be recognised that histories are cultural projects, embodying interests and narrative styles, the preoccupation with the transcendent reality of archives and documents should give way to dispute about forms of argument and interpretation' (Thomas 1997:34).

Photographs are a major historical form for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and arguably we have hardly started to grasp what they are about,² and how to deal with their rawness. Photographs are very literally raw histories in both senses of the word – the unprocessed and the painful. Their unprocessed quality, their randomness, their minute indexicality, are inherent to the medium itself. It has been suggested that anthropologists, and for that case historians, are worried by still photography because, lacking the constraining narratives of film, still images contain too many meanings (Pinney 1992:27). Photographs present a levelling of equivalence of information, with the trivial and the significant intertwined and shifting places. 'Photography is a vast disorder of objects . . . Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurrences . . .' (Barthes 1984:6). It is also a function of the photograph's infinite recodability. They are ultimately uncontainable, there is an incompleteness and unknowability of photographs. There is seldom a 'correct interpretation': one can say what a photograph is not, but not absolutely what it is. It was this unknowability, lack of absolute definition and completeness that, for Kracauer, placed photography with history as 'the last things before the last', in the 'anteroom' to understanding, which is found only in philosophy (1995a:191).

Yet the inclusive randomness of photographs as inscriptions, the heightening theatricality of their nature, and the mutability of their meaning, contain their own future, because of the near- infinite possibilities of new meanings to be absorbed. Their inclusiveness also has the potential to be unsettling. Photographs are painful, not only in their content matter sometimes (we can all think of such examples); but sometimes their truth-telling, their performance of histories, their reality has a painfulness – rawness. All the photographs discussed here, whether as exchanged objects, colonial documents or cross-cultural explorations, were intended to present some closure within a specific body of practice, but, as all these essays suggest, they present, instead, points of fracture, an opening out. Through the photograph's points of fracture, the rawness, we can begin to register the possibility of a history that is no longer founded on traditional models of experience and reference.

Before going on to outline further the theoretical concerns especially relevant to the arguments, I want to turn briefly to the essays themselves. They address some of the themes I have found interesting within these concerns. In many ways they themselves are like snapshots, arranged in an album, of the dense possibilities that seem significant in that relationship between photography, ethnography and their analytical sisters, anthropology and history. The essays in the volume are arranged into three sections, 'Notes from the Archive', 'Historical Inscriptions' and 'Reworkings'. The balance and emphasis are not the same throughout, for there are many ways to explore photographs, and each section concerns itself with certain ways of thinking with photographs. Different theoretical stances, for example, cultural politics, post-colonial critique, identity and memory and differently premised historical narratives, which resonate within the essays variously, could just as well have been pulled into sharper focus in differently nuanced readings of the photographs. The first two essays are vertical samplings into 'The Archive'. The first looks at the mechanisms of collecting, while the second examines the relationship between photographs and objects in the collection of culture and the culture of collecting. My intention here is to point to the differentiated, and sometimes fortuitous, nature of 'The Archive' as a series of micro-intentions, as much as a universalising desire. The second part of the book, 'Historical Inscriptions', looks at the production of photographs within anthropology or at photographs absorbed into anthropology, and explores some of the theoretical and historiographical issues raised by these particular examples. Further, all have been subject to the poetics and politics of collecting discussed in Part I, changing meaning and value. These four essays also point to the complex and blurred discourses that constitute anthropological photographs within a system of visual equivalence (Poole 1997:133-4) that was a crucial enabling factor of "The Archive'. The two essays in the final section return to the museum to look at the potential role of photographs and photographic engagement as a site of self-reflexive critique within the public spaces of museum and contemporary arts practice. The final essay, on the work of the Finnish photographer and artist, Jorma Puranen, brings the key themes of this volume together, those of performance, social biography, mutability, recodability and the space for alternative histories.

The focus could have been different, but these were groups of photographs that, for me, had a particular resonance and density as nodal points. To a greater or lesser extent such an analysis could be undertaken on all photographs or groups of photographs; however, I have found these especially articulate and co-operative as 'photographs to think with'. Concern is not necessarily for a grounded reading, the decoding of the image to reveal a truth. The interest is not only with the surface of the image, but with its cultural depth as an inscription; that is, how photographic meaning is made in the precise intersections of ethnography, history and the past, both as a confrontation with the past and as an active and constituent part of the present.

Photographs and Histories

The deconstructive stresses of post-modern analysis have served to defamiliarise the past and the photograph through revealing its political, psychological and thus representational discursive practices and instrumental procedures. While such analyses concentrated on exposing the inadequacies (from myopia to fantasy) of colonial representations, they did not engage, on the whole, with how photographs might have operated within ideas of historically specific legitimation. Nonetheless, such analyses opened a critical space from which differently figured interrogations might emerge. Before going on to discuss this potential in more detail, I want to consider briefly this relationship between history and the nature of the photograph in theoretical terms, for it weaves itself through these essays. Such considerations should inform any serious attempt to use photographs as historical sources and form the basis of any critique of those sources and assumptions that we might have about them. If what follows is rather ambiguous and occasionally plain contradictory, this is to a large degree a reflection of the ambiguous nature of photographs themselves.

The starting-point must be the very nature of the photograph, for this is the site of its a...