Summary
Contents
In contemporary Western societies, the visual domain has come to assume a thus far unprecedented cultural centrality. Daily life is replete with a potentially endless stream of images and other visual messages: from the electronic and paper-based billboards of the street, to the TV and Internet feeds of the home. The visual has become imbued with a symbolic potency, a signifying power that seemingly eclipses that of all other sensory data.
The central aim of this four-volume collection is to explore key approaches to visual research methods and to consider some of the core principles, issues, debates and controversies surrounding the use of visual techniques in relation to three key enterprises: 1) documentation and representation; 2) interpretation and classification and 3) elicitation and collaboration.
Volume 1: Principles, Issues, Debates and Controversies in Visual Research serves as a theoretical backdrop to the field as a whole. It introduces core epistemological, ethical and methodological debates that effectively cut across the four volume collection as a whole. Volume 2: Documentation and Representation illustrates approaches to visual documentation and representation, from classical documentaries to contemporary, state of the art modes of visual anthropology and ethnography. Volume 3: Interpretation and Classification examines core debates surrounding and approaches to visual analysis. Finally, Volume 4: Elicitation and Collaboration explores participative approaches to visual inquiry.
Technologies of Realism? Ethnographic uses of Photography and Film
Technologies of Realism? Ethnographic uses of Photography and Film
Introduction: Images in the Age of their Technical Reproduction
This chapter considers methodological and theoretical contexts for the employment of still photographs and moving film in ethnographic reports. It sketches these uses in light of the historical development of fieldwork, ethnography and participant observation in order to show how they reflect theoretical and epistemological concerns. On to our historical consideration of these methods we chart developments in photographic, film and video representational technologies. From within this framework we ...