field is that surrounding the influence of linguistic
semiotics on the ‘‘reading’’ of the pictorial sign,
widely disseminated through the writings of Roland
Barthes. Martha Rosler’s widely-reproduced work
The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems
(1974) is one of the most effective expositions of the
relationship between visual and verbal signs.
Also important has been the interest, in both
theory and practice, in photographic archives, sys-
tematic or haphazard. Archives present vast episte-
mological puzzles over the relationship between
original meaning and meaning discovered or im-
posed subsequently. Christian Boltanski’s works
have drawn on the photographic archives of con-
centration camps. These overwhelming memorial
displays rescue individuals from archival anonymity.
Memorial museums also knowingly restore human
values suppressed by the inhuman surveillance re-
gimes that formed such archives: Tuol Sleng, the
former prison in Pnom Penh, displays photographs
of thousands of victims of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge
taken by those who were going to take their lives.
Lothar Baumgarten critiques the classifying obses-
sion, inseparable from the natural history roots of
anthropology, in one of its classic manifestations, the
typological and functional display of objects in the
Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. His photographs of
its spectacle of culturally disembodied objects classi-
fied by type and function are overprinted with words
implying how the sorting and interpreting far from
being neutral and objective is inevitably driven.
Jeff Wall’s staged cibachrome dramas provide
critical updates of Mead’s idea that photographs
of social behaviour, body language, and gesture
provide a timeless record by demonstrating with
penetrating clarity that seeing and understanding
are shaped through social conventions, including
the conventions of art history. Equally, Nan Gold-
in’s photographs may appear to record the dress
and demeanour of sub-groups, but the extent to
which she alerts the viewer to the dialogue between
her subjects and her camera is the extent to which
they exceed, by puncturing its delusion, the objec-
tivist account called for by Mead, and participate
in a new ethnography.
Feminist scholarship has done much to explain
the interiority of the construction of the female
point of view—from within. Susan Macheachern
is amongst the photographers whose work, depict-
ing the care and maintenance of the domestic inter-
ior, has illumined this understanding while keeping
open the question of its accuracy or its over-deter-
minism. One of anthropology’s enduring projects is
the deconstruction of gender and racial stereotypes.
It is ironically inverted in Richard Ray Whitman’s
serial workStreet Chiefs, which turns the honour-
ing gaze of the portrait mode on to the remarkable
faces of native people as seen drunk or destitute on
urban sidewalks. In a related project, Mark Good-
man’s A Kind of Historypublishes the 20 year
record, from 1971–1991 of photographing the chil-
dren and young adults encountered on the Main
Street of Millerton, New York. It serves as a remin-
der that anthropology has as much to do with the
apparently unremarkable and close-to-home as
with the supposed exotic cultural other.
Debates within contemporary visual anthropol-
ogy around this issue make it an important sub-
discipline with much to contribute to the broader
field’s understanding of its own epistemological
foundation. It is also this history which makes
anthropology’s self-critique and open borders a
compelling site for self-reflexive debate of the
human and social consequences of the technologies
of vision. Photography is being deployed in an un-
precedented variety of ways making visual anthro-
pology one of the most far reaching and revealing
modes of inquiry currently available.
CharlotteTownsend-Gault
Seealso:Archives; Barthes, Roland; Boltanski, Chris-
tian; Burgin, Victor; Family Photography; Feminist
Photography; Goldin, Nan; National Geographic;
Photographic ‘‘Truth’’; Postmodernism; Representa-
tion and Race; Rosler, Martha; Semiotics; Social
Representation; Visual Culture; Wall, JeffFurther Reading
Banks, Marcus, and Howard Morphy, eds.Rethinking
Visual Anthropology. New Haven/London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1997.
Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. ‘‘Margaret Mead
and Gregory Bateson on the Use of the Camera in
Anthropology.’’Studies in the Anthropology of Visual
Communication4, no. 2 (1977).
Becker, Howard S., and John Walton. ‘‘Social Science and
the Work of Hans Haake.’’ In Hans Haake and Kasper
Koenig, editors.Framing and Being Framed. Halifax:
The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design/New York: New York University Press, 1975.
Collier, John Jr., Malcolm Collier, and Edward T. Hall.
Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.
Devereaux, Leslie, and Roger Hillman.Fields of Vision:
Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photo-
graphy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Edwards, Elizabeth, ed.Anthropology and Photography.
New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1992.
Ginsburg, Faye. ‘‘Institutionalizing the Unruly: Charting a
Future for Visual Anthropology.’’Ethnos63, no. 2
(1998).
Hockings, Paul, ed.Principles of Visual Anthropology. Ber-
lin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995.VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY