Three ideas lie at the heart of the traditional
scientific method: (i) that scientific theories are pre-
sentations of the extra-theoretical world, (ii) that
such theories have empirical content insofar as
they can be used to explain and predict aspects of
the observable world and, (iii) that these theories
can be tested for accuracy of representation on the
basis of their empirical content. This third idea
requires that the predictions regarding what will
occur made on the basis of the theory be compared
with what actually occurs; mismatch in this regard
mandates that the theory be discarded or at least
revised, whereas coincidence suggests that the the-
ory is accurate. Such comparison, in turn, requires
observation, and here lies the point of contact
between scientific theory and photographic theory.
It is important to the integrity of the traditional
scientific method that the observations of phenom-
ena with which the predictions of the theory are
compared be ‘‘theory neutral,’’ that is, that they
not be influenced by the theory being tested. This
is to say that such observations must be wholly
objective, and, as Eastlake argued, objectivity is
the essence of the photographic process. In short,
if a scientist is worried that the theory being tested is
influencing what she observes, then by incorporat-
ing photography in her activities she can expunge
such subjective bias and be assured she is testing her
theory in a rigorous way.
This traditional scientific method was first
applied in the natural sciences such as physics and
astronomy, but it wasn’t long before others applied
it to social sciences such as psychology and anthro-
pology as well.
An anthropologist, for example, might have a
theory about the nature of social organization in
some culture, a theory with empirical content tak-
ing the form of predictions regarding observables
such as manner of dress, contents of domiciles, etc.
In order to test such a theory observations would
need to be made regarding the actual arrangements
in this regard, and such observations would have to
be appropriately objective. Photography presum-
ably would be ideal for this purpose as photo-
graphs of the relevant aspects of the culture being
studied would display all relevant features, omit-
ting none that conflicted with predictions of the
theory and including none that were actually
absent but which would serve to confirm the the-
ory. Such is the basis for the practice known as
visual anthropology.
August Sander’sPeople of the 20th Centurycan be
understood in such terms. Sander, while not a social
scientist himself, felt there was value in a compre-
hensive photographic record of members of a parti-
cular culture, and chose his own, between-the-wars
German culture, as his object of study. His project
involved photographing German citizens from all
classes and professions dressed in the clothes and
situated in the contexts that were characteristic of
their day-to-day lives. Each subject was photo-
graphed in plain frontal pose, from head to foot,
in good light, and by means of a large-format cam-
era that rendered highly detailed images.
More formally, the American anthropologists
John and Malcolm Collier both photographed
extensively in aid of their research, and published
an influential book,Visual Anthropology, in which
they codified their theory and methodology.
From the theoretical point of view, the social-
documentarians and the visual anthropologists
were similar insofar as they both believed in the
objectivity of their images. They differed, however,
with regard to the role of normativity in their respec-
tive projects. The social-documentarians had a
strongly normative agenda insofar as they took the
moral wrongness of the social arrangements they
objectively documented as obvious, and had as
their overall goal the alleviation of such conditions.
The visual anthropologists, by way of contrast, did
not consider it their business to pass moral judg-
ment on the cultures objectively documented in their
images, and instead took mere development of
understanding to be their goal.Walter Benjamin
We have seen that the fine-art tradition in photo-
graphy dating back to Eastlake has subjective self-
expression at its core. By and large, this core
requirement served to keep the enterprise of fine-
art photography and that of documentary photo-
graphy (in both its social and anthropological
forms) almost entirely discrete. However, in the
1930s a Marxist-inspired movement emerged that
embodied a construal of art diametrically opposed
to that accepted by Eastlake and those who fol-
lowed in her tradition. The Marxist journalist and
critic Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, argued
that artworks, properly understood, should func-
tion, not as precious, unique, aesthetic objects cre-
ated as expressive acts of inspired individuals and
exchanged for their commodity value within a capi-
talist framework, but instead as catalysts for revo-
lutionary social change. Armed with this new
construal of art, Benjamin argued that photogra-
phy, rather than being a newcomer on the fine-art
block having to establish itself by meeting East-
lake’s challenge, was instead already paradigmatic
of art insofar as a photograph’s easy reproducibil-PHOTOGRAPHIC THEORY