1 New Possibilities of Visual Anthropology

This essay explores the use of visual material in anthropology and some of the problems it has raised both historically and in the present day. By tracing the common source of anthropology and photography as they respectively developed in the context of nineteenth century Positivist epistemology, it argues that anthropology did not develop a coherent way of approaching visual material because it misrecognised the particular qualities inherent to visual information and came to treat it merely as an adjunct to the textual exposition. With the explosion of visual media that has followed the enormous advances in technology that have occurred since the 1980s, visual anthropology has re-emerged as an important aspect of anthropological investigation, but it is argued that traces of earlier Positivist expectations remain prevalent in the way that visual material is both produced and analysed. The work of the photographer Eugène Atget is considered as one example that suggest possible approaches by which this problem ca