may not identify themselves as photographers,
though the camera and the photograph are integral
to their practice, have submitted photography to the
most rigorous scrutiny. In doing so they have helped
to redefine art, even though there is little consensus on
what that means in the conditions of postmodernism.
In consequence, the boundaries between art and other
modes of enquiry became more porous. Thus just as,
in the 1960s, anthropologists were asking how the
objects of their study were constituted, and how
brought to their attention, so the NEThing Company,
in Vancouver, B.C., photographed the way in which
matter of all kinds is brought to our attention—in
piles. This ‘found’ way of structuring the world was
presented inPortfolio of Piles(1967) mimicking a
business company’s mode of presentation. This semi-
nal photographic work related to Ed Ruscha’s influ-
ential serial works such asThirty-Four Parking Lots in
Los Angeles(1967) andEveryBuildingontheSunset
Strip(1966), combined the analytical remove of influ-
ential avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp with
extreme self-awareness and parody. With other con-
ceptual artists such as Ruscha and Douglas Huebler,
the NEThing Company was pushing at the limits of
neutral visual information-gathering about the obser-
vable world and observable social behaviour.
The social behaviour in question in these works
is, either explicitly or implicitly, that of the person
whose eye is at the viewfinder. The role of the
observer, just like that of the anthropologist, is
understood to be constructing as much as finding
what is observed. Allan Sekula has been exploring
the ideological implications of this position in his
photographic work since the 1960s and through his
influential theoretical and critical writing.
Increasingly, the empiricist approach to the objec-
tivity of knowledge acquired by ‘just looking’ came
to be understood as privileging looking as an instru-
ment of knowledge making, and thus of control and
surveillance. The work of the French philosopher
Michel Foucault, investigating the inseparability of
the control of knowledge from the exercise of power,
has wide currency in this field as in others. Hans
Haake is well known for his determined pursuit of
this notion in photo and text works that have inter-
rogated the structures of power determining what,
where, and how art is shown. He reveals the art
world as a system of power relations. Victor Burgin,
like Haake, sets ‘art’ in the broader field of cultural
representation, which he shows to be controlled by a
politics of looking, and the gender of the gaze. Their
work is interdependent with that of theorists such as
Laura Mulvey and John Tagg, of contributors to
Visual Anthropology Review, and of anthropologists
such as George Marcus on the Getty Museum in Los
Angeles and Christopher Steiner on the African art
market and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet on pop-
ular culture and mass media.
Photo-based art works combining didacticism
with display have contributed to the analysis of
post-colonial relations widespread through the hu-
manities and sciences since the early 1980s. In parti-
cular they have lead to an increased awareness of
western forms of knowledge as biased towards the
occularcentric. Its name notwithstanding, visual an-
thropology tries to self-correct for this bias. It parti-
cipates in a wider anthropology’s self-critique and
greater openness to the multitude of ways in which
cultures represent themselves. Thus anthropology is
being taken over, for example in the work of Marcia
Langton and Zacharias Kunuk, and reconfigured in
those parts of the world that have been traditionally
othered by it. Now, with camera in hand as a sign of
power, the former object of anthropological study
becomes a subject in her own right, constructing
knowledge for and about herself, determining how
she is known by others. Her use of western technol-
ogy to do so shows the complex and entangled na-
ture of cross-cultural relations.
Through its understanding of photographs as in
themselves cultural representations, anthropology,
with aesthetics and psychology, is able to make its
contribution to the investigation of what makes an
image, a photograph, compelling, troubling, or tran-
scendent in a given cultural context. These issues are
debated and expanded in professional journals, in
the academy, in leading museums, and in art gal-
leries. Paradoxically however, on a more populist
level, anthropology is still linked to the kind of
images that promote the very positions towards a
cultural other that anthropology itself works to dis-
credit. These images have currency in travelogues,
National Geographic, tourist postcards, with certain
groups of people designated as colourful ethnic
minorities, providing a visual spectacle for others.
A post-colonial analysis, as in the work of Faye
Ginsburg and David McDougall, leading exponents
of visual anthropology, shows that images framed in
this way represent unequal ‘‘looking relations.’’
A selective list of subjects to which visual anthro-
pology has attended includes: the response of Bali-
nese people to the way in which they are represented
on television, experiments with narrative in ethno-
graphic film, critical analyses of computer software,
body painting, gesture, facial expression and spatial
aspects of behaviour and social interaction, a com-
parison between the bodily representation of Jains
and Indian Buddhism and Japanese gardens as a
mode of international communication. Important
amongst methodological debates animating thisVISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY