Visual Ethnography

İstanbul’un imgelerini ele almak istediğim bu yazıya Türkiye’nin modern dönemi ile başlayacak olursak, 19. Yüzyıl’da yaşanan dönüşümlerin Osmanlı Devleti’ni daha sonraki yüzyıla taşıyan önemli bir dönemeç oluşturduğunu söylemek gerekir. Esas değişim Tanzimat’la başlar, kabaca 1840-1880 arasında hemen hemen tüm hukuki ve idari düzenlemeler yapılmıştır. Hele yüzyılın son çeyreğinde değişim kentin günlük yaşamında gözle görülür bir hal almıştır. 1908’den itibaren ise belediyecilik ve diğer kentsel işlevlerde günümüzde tartıştığımız tüm değişkenlerin mevcut bulunduğunu söyleyebiliriz.
İstanbul’u Avrupa kentlerini referans alarak modernleştirmeyi hedefleyen
Şehremini Dr.Cemil Topuzlu anılarında Gülhane Parkı’nın yapılmasından, kaldırımlara, temizlik işlerinden kent planına uzanan geniş bir çerçevede görevini modern bir kent oluşturmak ve işletmek olarak tarif eder.
Kentin nüfusu 1896’da bir milyon 181 kişidir. Yani İstanbul eskiden beri büyük şehirler kategorisinde yer alır.
Cemil Topuzlu 18 Ağustos 1912-7 Kasım 1914, 28 Ağustos-15 Aralık 1918, 5 Mayıs 1919-28 Şubat 1920 arasında İstanbul Şehremini olarak hizmet eder. Şehremini, günümüzün belediye başkanlığına tekabül eden bir idari mevkidir. Daha sonra 1946’ya dek İstanbul Belediye Meclis azası olarak çalıştığı bir dönem daha vardır.
Cumhuriyet döneminde İstanbul’un yaşadığı dönüşümleri modernleşme
hamlesi, sanayileşme çabalarının kentte yarattığı dönüşümler, 1980 sonrası ve AKP dönemi olarak incelemek yerinde olur. Aynı zamanda her ne kadar çerçevemizi aşsa da her dönemi elbette kendi içinde sistematize ederek, alt dönemlere ayırarak incelemek gerekir. Her dönemin kendine özgü, özgül mücadeleler ve küresel dinamiklerle etkileşim halinde ilerleyen iktisadi, siyasal yapısı ortaya çıkmakta, böylece kentin dönüşümü ile bu dönüşümün imgelerle ifadesini tartışacağımız bir zemin oluşmaktadır.
* Böyle bir yazı yazma düşüncesini uyandıran fotoğrafçı Seyit Ali Ak’ın anısına. Yardımlarını esirgemeyen değerli dostum İrfan Ertel’e ve aydınlık, güzel bir İstanbul’un mümkün olduğunu hatırlatan Haziran direnişçilerine saygılarımla.

Introduction to new English translation of an article by Jiří (Georg) Mordechai Langer  (Prague, 1894 - Tel Aviv, 1943): ''On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll (Mezuzah),'' first published in Freud's Imago Journal in 1928. Langer suggests an explanatory model for the ritual object in the context of compulsion neuroses and totem theory.

Errata: Note 3 should read: Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Note 14 should read: Mordechai G. Langer, Die Erotik der Kabbala (Prague: Verlag Dr. Josef Flesch, 1923).

Shifting from representationally-oriented analysis of images to analysis of practices—the production, circulation and consumption of tourists’ images, and from photos created by tourists to photos staged, produced and displayed by the industry, this article offers a qualitative, ethnographic study of tourism’s visual culture.
Through observations conducted on a cruise ship, the author offers up-close depiction of photo-taking routines, and of the public display of multiple images of vacationing tourists. The article critically accounts for tourists’ desire to be photographed and portrayed by the industry in terms of visual surveillance (Foucault) under contemporary neoliberal visual regime. It is further argued that public displays of tourists’ images create, through collective  ediation/mediatization, a commercially assembled touristic collective or public.

SUmmARY This article reviews the peculiarities of Lithuanian ethnographic photography from the middle of 19 th until 20 st c.c. On the basis of research methodology in visual anthropology, the paper analyzes the development of Lithuanian ethnographic photography. The problem is how visual images are used to produce ethno-graphic knowledge in ethnographic photography. The work is based on two groups of sources – Lithuanian photogra phers' collections and albums from the middle of 19 th until 20 th c.c. The questions posed by the author are as follows: What was the development of Lithuanian ethnographic photography from the middle of 19 th until 20 st c.c.?; What are the peculiarities of Lithuanian ethnographic photography in the context of visual anthropology? SANTRAUKA Straipsnio tikslas – aptarti XIX a. II pusės–XX a. I pusės lietuvių etnografinės fotografijos ypatumus. Remian-tis vizualinės medžiagos analize, istoriniu-lyginamuoju metodu, analizuojami lietuvių etnografinės fotogra-fijos raidos ypatumai. Nagrinėjama problema – kaip vaizdiniai naudojami etnografinėms žinioms perteikti etnografinėje fotografijoje. Keliami uždaviniai: atskleisti lietuvių etnografinės fotografijos kaitą nuo XIX a. II pusės iki XX a. vid.; išanalizuoti lietuvių etnografinės fotografijos raidos ypatumus vizualinės antropolo-gijos kontekste. Analizuojant problemą pasitelktos kelios šaltinių grupės – XIX a. II pusės–XX a. vid. Lietu-vos fotografų nuotraukų kolekcijos ir albumai. ĮVADAS Šiandien vizualinėje etnografijoje vy-rauja įvairūs požiūriai. Į vizualinę me-džiagą, ypač fotografiją, žvelgiama kaip į antropologiją, meną, kaip į socialinio

The idea of this visual essay is twofold; on the one hand it is a photographic commentary, an exploration of the increasingly central role that digital technologies have in our everyday life. On the other, it presents the beginning of a research agenda that is intended to explore ethnographic questions visually. It draws from a myriad of different disciplines and approaches, from cultural anthropology to art, from digital media to urban sociology. Using a transversal method that has its roots in participant observation, street photography and artistic practices, the aim of this visual commentary is to reflect on the relationship between the city, technologies and people.

Der Beitrag ist der Sammlung der deutschen Postkarten von Rafał Kubica aus Mieszkowice (Bärwalde), die fast 500 Sammelstücke umfasst, gewidmet. Die Sammlung wurde nach genauen geographischen und geschichtlichen Kriterien angelegt. Es handelt sich um die Postkarten aus dem Gebiet, das zwischen Cedynia (Zehden), Trzcińsko-Zdrój (Bad Schönfließ), Warnice (Warnitz) und Czelin (Zellin) liegt und die vor 1945 herausgegeben wurden. Wie der Sammler sagt, bedeutet das Sammeln der Postkarten für ihn „eine Reise in die Vergangenheit“, das Entdecken von Landschaften in der Neumark, die nicht mehr existieren. Die Kollektion ist ein umfangreiches ikonographisches Archiv, das das Kennenlernen, die Analyse der Kulturlandschaft und die Feststellung der Veränderungen in der Region in den letzten 100 Jahren möglich macht. Die Karten sind jedoch nicht nur Bildmaterial. Sie beinhalten auch die Texte, vor allem die Postkarten, die abgeschickt wurden. Dann werden sie zu einzigartigen Dokumenten, die aus Bild, einer Narration über das Bild, aus Informationen zum Autor und zum Empfänger der Karte, sowie aus genauen Informationen zum Datum und dem Ort des Entstehens, bestehen.
Alle diese Informationen haben dabei eine einheitliche und synthetische Form, was die methodische Untersuchung und Interpretation einfacher macht. Das sind die Gründe, für die die Sammlung von Rafał Kubica einen großen Wert für die die Forscher der Geschichte der Region hat.

En este artículo indago las tensiones, incertidumbres y expectativas
que emergen en el espacio-tiempo indefinido que transcurre entre la
concepción y materialización de un megaproyecto de carretera en el piedemonte Andino-Amazónico colombiano. Hago énfasis en la condición de suspensión como un estado inherente de la infraestructura que trastoca su sentido teleológico y configura un espacio material y afectivo en el que coexisten, en permanente estado de tensión y antagonismo, el presente, el pasado y el futuro de un territorio de frontera. El análisis presentado en el texto deriva del seguimiento etnográfico y fotográfico al proyecto mencionado por un periodo de diez años (2008-2019). A través de visitas de campo regulares, documento las transiciones temporales y materiales de la infraestructura, así como las reacciones, especulaciones y prácticas cotidianas asociadas a estas transiciones. Al describir diferentes eventos y conflictos alrededor de este proyecto de carretera, muestro cómo la noción de suspensión permite construir una narrativa diferente de las infraestructuras, que da cuenta de sus trayectorias inciertas y múltiples dimensiones. En este sentido, concluyo que la suspensión no es, como se suele concebir, un punto de congelamiento que interrumpe un movimiento lineal y cronológico, sino que constituye una condición inherente y activa de la infraestructura que revela la relación inestable y conflictiva entre los diferentes elementos que la componen. Desde una perspectiva histórica y etnográfica centrada en la materialidad, el artículo contribuye a la comprensión de la infraestructura como proceso más que como producto, así como al entendimiento de los diferentes actores humanos
y no humanos que intervienen en su ciclo de construcción y  descomposición.

Ethnography and photography are relational practices configured as two forms of writing with their own specificities that intersect. Considering the profound technological changes in the recent decades and the crisis of ethnographic authority and photographic representation, the attempt of this special issue is to generate an overview of the plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches relating to the use and production of images in social research.

In this article I consider the potential for combining multimodality and
anthropologically informed sensory ethnographic methodologies. I focus on a comparison between anthropological and multimodality approaches to the senses, the relationships between images and words, and ethnography. In doing so I reveal some of the tensions and fundamental differences between these approaches before then considering if and/or how these might, be reconciled.

Tulisan ini dimuat sebagai lampiran dalam buku:
Krisis Pangan dan "Sesat Pikir": Mengapa Masih Berlanjut? Yunita T. Winarto (peny). Yayasan Pustaka Obor Indonesia, 2016. hlm. 198--201.

Paper singkat ini adalah sinopsis beberapa video dokumenter mengenai peristiwa ledakan "hama elite" Wereng Batang Coklat yang terjadi di Jawa dan Sumatra tahun 2010-2011 saat terjadinya fenomena la Niña. Dalam situasi terjadinya variasi dan perubahan iklim, ekosistem sawah di Pulau Jawa berada dalam kondisi rentan oleh berbagai faktor, antara lain oleh penggunaan pestisida secara tidak bijaksana yang mengakibatkan punahnya musuh alami. Di sisi lain, petani—sebagai aktor utama dalam kegiatan pertanian—acap hanya menjadi sasaran pemasaran paket  teknologi pertanian tanpa bekal pengetahuan yang memadai untuk memahami kondisi ekosistem lahannya. Film dokumenter ini dibuat dengan tujuan untuk memberikan gambaran visual tentang Bio-Ekologi WBC beserta faktor-faktor yang terkait dengan fenomena ledakan populasi WBC. Selain itu video-video dokumenter ini juga menampilkan berbagai upaya kelompok petani untuk memperkaya pengetahuan mereka tantang pertanian ekologis dan mencari solusi pertanian yang tangguh dan ramah lingkungan tanpa harus bergantung pada penggunaan input kimia sintetik.

University of Oxford, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, on 17th-18th June (online and in-person).
This workshop invites participants to unpack the ideas of movement, mobility, and being moved in healing practices. ‘Movement’ in the religious field can be intended as moving into or through religions or practices – whether developing or not commitment — or as converting one’s health condition. It can also be approached in terms of a transnational movement of people and practices, shaping new geographies of spiritual healing. At a phenomenological level, movement can be therapeutic and transformative, by putting processes and bodies into motion, such as being moved by spirits in trance. Whether transnational, transcendent, or transformative, we ask how movement shapes healing and vice-versa.

The event is organized by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project THETRANCE, the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, and the HEAL Network for the Ethnography of Healing.

Funded by the European Union: This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895395.
Partner Universities: Sapienza University of Rome, Federal University of Santa Catarina, University of Oxford

Are the dancers’ skills interactive? Our pragmatic stance looks for the social roots of artistic skills in the communication and attention patterns of dancers in the studio. Dance is a setting to study distributed cognition through modalities other than speech. We look for distributed cognition not only at the communicative level, but also at a more phenomenological level of joint action and perception. Through a cognitive ethnography of a dance rehearsal and Conversation Analysis we are able to delimitate here the modalities in use such as speech, marking, gesture and space. Findings show how multimodal translation, incremental concretion, space management and listening are examples of artistic skills. We explain what
really happens when dancers act as experts in the field, with a culturally defined normative frame.

In this photo essay, we take you on a visual journey to Akina Village in Amami Ōshima, Japan, through the work of Futoshi Hamada, an award-winning island photographer and ecologist. Based on the artist's Mura (2001) photographic work that documented the natural cycle of the village's rice cultivation and the harvest festivals associated with it, we aim to explore the concept of the island's ecocultural identity as it manifests through the artist's and the community's unique connection with the island nature and culture. As Akina is the last remaining village on the island where rice cultivation is still taking place, and linked to the harvest festivals, the visual documentation of these practices provides us a rare glimpse into what was once an integral part of Amami's natural, socio-cultural, and spiritual/animistic islandscape before sugarcane was imposed on the islanders by mainland Japanese agricultural interventions and impositions.

In this article I discuss how visual anthropology methods are advancing in a contemporary environment where applied, activist, public and interdisciplinary anthropologies are increasingly central. In earlier work (Pink 2004, 2006, 2007a) I outlined the field of an applied visual anthropology, and discussed the potential of visual methods and media in the production of a public anthropology (Pink 2006). Here I build on this to suggest how recent visual anthropology practices might both contribute to and resolve issues relating to contemporary debates in applied and public anthropology and the relationship between scholarly research and social intervention.

My Mother's Village is a personal documentary response to The Sri Lanka Series (1980), a series of ethnographic films produced by the author's anthropologist mother, Sharon Bell, and filmmaker father, Geoff Burton. Four women, a community of fishermen, and a dance instructor were the 'subjects' of their three films. The feature length film My Mother's Village revisits the same participants in Sri Lanka and pursues the original themes and issues, such as economic conditions, the status of women, colonialism, religion, ritual, and inter-generational change. My Mother's Village explores how both the filmmaker and participants are navigating heredity and inheritance.

Supplementing the film, the exegesis component, Provenance in Personal Documentary interrogates the conceptual underpinnings of the creative research. 'Provenance', the key concept informing the production of My Mother's Village is a fine art term specifically ‘repractised’ and retheorised here. It is hypothesised that cross-disciplinary personal documentary production is a fertile environment that responds to increasingly accessible technologies and progressive interpretations of what contemporary ‘documentary’ means. This research project responds to the lack of a critical framework for interpreting and developing inter-disciplinary documentary praxis. The experimental methods employed in the provenance of My Mother's Village extend to the adoption of an auto-ethnographic and autobiographical mode of storytelling in this exegesis. This marriage of creativity and scholarly research is further reflected in the relationship between the exegesis and corresponding personal documentary film production.

The provenance of My Mother's Village reveals an historical convergence of 20th century documentary traditions of photography, cinema, and visual ethnography. The convergence of these traditions in the contemporary art context echoes Walter Benjamin's observations of the shifting nature of art in the 20th century. Provenance, in Benjamin's revolutionary context, transgresses the 'aura', market valuation, and ownership of art objects to a dynamic understanding of processes, intentions, and storytelling throughout artistic production. This investigation finds that personal documentary modes account for this shifting paradigm in visual arts and offer ethical and creative methodologies for inter-disciplinary visual research. In the current global technological landscape of data-streams and personal media devices, provenance encourages a sensuous topography of encounter, contingency, boredom, and experiment.

In this issue, we explore the use of visual materials in social sciences through experimental, creative and critical methodologies. Over the last twenty years, visual ethnography has transformed the way social scientists create and define knowledge. Therefore, we propose a series of articles in order to explore a variety of methodological and theoretical practices " in the field " .

This is an expanded version of the essay published in POSITIONS: ASIA CRITIQUE, (v28n1, Feb 2020, pp237-274. **This essay here is the pre-final copy-edited version, and it includes an additional case interview that was removed due to page limits, which I now put in the Appendix after Bibliography. This essay reports an on-going performative research conducted by an experimental historian who is also a fellow artist to my research subjects. A “performative research” is meant to be deconstructive: enacting the ‘what-if-we-talk’ point of departure, we re-open established conclusion and definitions, and examine (rules of) inclusions and exclusions in the local art paradigm. The main tasks and methods that form my performative research are (re-)naming, inscription, dialogues and thick description. I engaged female artists in conversations to solicit their self-portrayal as artists, the importance of womanhood to their life and art-making, and their use of feminism. The exchange with six artists reported discussed here reveals the complex positions Hong Kong women occupy in sustaining artistic creation and innovation in Hong Kong, which reopens such questions as ‘what is an artist’ and ‘what is art-making’. My research supports a picture of art as being more about the process and the here-and-now moment than the final art object. Women’s art as a search framework productively points to a pervading mode of artistic practice that highlights collaboration, the making of relations, events and situations. My performative approach also involved all artists to become theory-makers of their own practice.

Syrian documentary filmmaker, poet, playwright and translator Liwaa Yazji’s long-form documentary ‘Haunted’ (2014) follows nine individuals’ experiences of home, including a couple in Damascus that remain trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian of Palestinian descent who fled from Syria to Lebanon and a Syrian refugee family temporarily inhabiting a former prison. Similar to a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117), Yazji guides viewers through multiple digital, geographical and affective spaces. This article demonstrates Yazji’s documentary as concerned with longstanding anthropological questions about possession, kinship, remains, the everyday and the temporal and as a work of ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press) that emerges from the filmmaker’s personal experience of displacement and migration, and focuses on journeying, home-seeking, homelessness, rootedness and dislocation. It argues her film’s ethnographic way of seeing and sensing problematizes categories of poetic documentary and visual and sensory ethnography. The article explains its importance for scholars of forced migration, conflict and the after-effects of violence and for problematizing the definition of ethnographic film and its power in conveying the plurality of the world (Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, edited by Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press), one currently largely inaccessible to ethnographers, filmmakers and journalists.

""This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokaster with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics
constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic
point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

[roads, globalization, transnationalism, development, postsocialism, materiality, Albania]""

Esta etnografía visual es parte de una proyecto de investigación que documentó y analizó distintas fiestas de religiosidad popular en diversos territorios del Ecuador. La secuencia numérica con la que se ordenó el material documental fotográfico correspondiente es parte de una catalogación más amplia que incluye otras etnografías, por lo que inicia con el número 64 y concluye con el número 265. Parte de esta etnografía sirvió de base para mi artículo (2016) Investigar-crear desde la visualidad: los secuædros del viernes santo de Alangasí. en Estudios Artísticos: revista de investigación creadora, 1 (1) pp.120-140. DOI: 10.14483/ udistrital.jour. ear.2016.1.a08

Los métodos visuales, narrativos y creativos de investigación se están convirtiendo actualmente en temas de interés clave. Se reconoce que tienen sin duda el potencial de evocar una comprensión empática de las maneras que tienen otras personas de experimentar sus mundos. El libro examina las prácticas y el valor de los enfoques visuales como una herramienta cualitativa en el campo de las Ciencias Sociales y las disciplinas vinculadas a las mismas: antropología, sociología, psicología, educación y estudios culturales. Aunque se centra en el uso de los enfoques visuales, el uso en el título de los términos narrativos y creativos simboliza el compromiso de incorporar lo visual dentro de marcos más amplios. Las imágenes visuales, como formas emergentes de divulgación y creación, exploran espacios más allá de los académicos tradicionales. Además, buena parte del trabajo creativo se emprende para lograr proyectos de justicia social, tratando de involucrar la emotividad de la audiencia. El libro constituye una lectura esencial para quienes estén interesados en investigar con métodos visuales y creativos participativos. Basándose en una amplia bibliografía clásica y contemporánea, y excelentemente escrito, el libro ofrece a los científicos sociales –desde aquellos que están en los últimos años de sus estudios de grado hasta los investigadores cualitativos y otros académicos– una guía creativa y accesible sobre las posibilidades y retos de trabajar con estos métodos, con un enfoque multidisciplinar, y con especial atención a cuestiones ligadas a la teoría, la etodología, la ética y la difusión de materiales

The first aim of this research is to investigate the issues arising from the use of ethnography-orientated processes and research methods in contemporary artistic practice related with photographic images and especially creative photography. The thesis engages with the recent debates on ethnography and try to examine the fragile area where ethnography and art coincides. My view concentrates in the thinning of the line between these two interdisciplinary topics: ethnography and visual art. According to James Clifford, ethnography is “simply diverse ways of thinking and writing about culture from a stand point of a participant observation.” Could therefore an artistic medium when using ethnographic methods (observation, inquiring, or archives), provide us with an equally rich experience in terms of quality and depth of communication and understanding with the anthropologists’ one? The debate in discussion here is that even if creative photography is not a neutral or scientific medium, its contribution is unique and irreplaceable because through the lived experience that it incorporates, explicit and tacit cultural knowledge is transmitted. The second aim of this thesis engages with the liminal spaces that are to be found between the differing temporalities of the ‘archaeological’ and the ‘contemporary’, between the marked and marketed sites of archaeological study of the city of Athens and the city of Elefsina and its unmarked everyday outsides. Through several case studies that employ photographic and discursive methods the author-photographer has been questioning how and through which means these ‘borderline’ spaces might come to constitute and (re-)negotiate themselves. Drawing upon ethnographic methodologies, the spaces under investigation are approached as a uniquely signifying ‘borderline-research field’: by systematically re-photographing their traces of material cultures, over a period of five years, together with a series of interviews with those people who come to inhabit their spaces, a momentary human geography of the ‘liminal’ can be glimpsed. In the project the objects that are tracked down tell us little stories of sociopolitical situations as revealed in the everyday. They give visual evidence of behaviors, tactics and in consequence the present state of our culture. However, the ‘evidence’ gathered here cannot be claimed as ‘documentary’. Rather, a third space of constructed visualities of lived experience is opened up, together with the figure of the researcher herself. At the same time, a new, visually-discursive result has been created that was never before perceived or viewed. What comes into view thus in these borderline fields are the identitarian constructions of Greek nationhood vis-a-vis the ‘other’.

This article advocates for visual methods in researching work practices in the field of art photography. On the basis of an ethnographic study of two artists in Zurich, it emphasises the methodological creativity enabled by a visual approach to artistic production. After a review of the literature, the field is presented, as well as three techniques of inquiry. These are commented visits, photo documentation and video elicitation that were used at different moments of the study (negotiation of field access, relations of inquiry, analysis, restitution). We show that visual methods not only offer technical tools to “suspend” the flow of artistic work and gestures, but also permit to follow and highlight how artists make sense of what they are doing in moments of decision-making and creation, which lead to an art piece. Finally, and from a reflective stance, the authors discuss the heuristic value of a camera and a video recorder as sources of interaction between researchers and visual artists.

Cet article propose l’utilisation de méthodes visuelles pour l’étude du travail dans le champ de la photographie d’art. En se basant sur une enquête ethnographique auprès de deux artistes de Zurich, il souligne la créativité méthodologique permise par une approche visuelle dans le suivi de la fabrication artistique. Après une revue de la littérature, sont présentés le terrain et les trois techniques d’enquête : la visite commentée, la photo-documentation et la video-elicitation. Ces techniques sont interrogées aux différents moments de la recherche (négociation d’accès, relations d’enquête, analyse, restitution). Nous montrons que les méthodes visuelles offrent non seulement des outils techniques afin de suspendre le flux du travail et les gestes des artistes, mais qu’elles permettent de suivre et souligner comment ceux-ci produisent la signification de leurs actions dans les moments de décision et de fabrication qui mènent à une création. De façon réflexive, nous discutons aussi de l’intérêt heuristique de l’appareil photo et de la caméra comme ressources d’interaction entre un chercheur et des artistes visuels.

This doctoral dissertation extends existing frameworks of visual content analysis by coupling them with crowdsourcing technologies for international data collection and an iterative, interpretative visual analysis. In the age of information, imagery continues to be consumed and circulated at exponential rates, influencing and changing global flows of information that parallels Internet communication technology as it penetrates and gains ubiquity in new regions. To investigate the visual, media, and cultural phenomena that lie within these globalized pictorial exchanges, a flexible, visually-based inquiry is essential. This qualitative, visual-ethnographic survey was conducted over the Internet and aims to help inform visually-based literacy and media studies and further image-based research methodologies. The researcher collected over 2000 drawings from 61 countries diverse in geography and culture. The researcher revealed fresh insights into the visual-textual relationship, identity, and representation in a globalized context, specifically looking at emergent tensions between local and global ways of interpretation and meaning construction online. The researcher also considers the effects of a technologically mediated visual culture and its potential to influence or change deeply ingrained ideas once specific to geography and culture into new global trends and evolving material practices. The analysis is centred on a selection of drawings from 106 Asian participants who drew intercultural representations of the words meal, marriage, and home. The most striking discoveries indicate varying degrees of homogeneity and hybridity among the visual cultural representations received and reveals connections among language, the Internet, advertising, and identity. The findings break with more traditional views of globalization occurring in a direct West-East flow and highlight regional powers that can serve as cultural hubs of attention. These hubs act as filters, possibly creating and hybridizing new commercial and cultural trends and positioning themselves as beacons of modernity with considerable visual cultural influence. The researcher also makes suggestions for future studies using an extended multimedia visual methodology as well as the potential inherent in emerging technologies for exploring phenomena in artistic, educative, and academic contexts. *If you would like to read the full-text, please contact me.

In 1856, French sculptor Charles Cordier (1827-1905) was sent on an ethnographic mission to Algeria to produce racial typologies. One sculpture, the “Jewish Woman of Algiers” (Juive d’Alger) reflects and joins the works of Eugène Délacroix, Théodore Chassériau and other artists and photographers documenting Jewish women. If North African Jewish males famously served as the tarjumān or translator and dragoman for travelers, missionaries, military officers, artists and adventurers alighting in Algeria, the Jewish woman in turn was another gendered mediator and object of fascination, representation and substitution, or so it was believed, for the exotic interior feminine world of the native in the absence of Muslim women.
Open access: http://www.hesperis-tamuda.com/

Etnografi, belirli bir toplum ve kültürün yaşayışından hareketle, insanın toplumla kurduğu karmaşık ve çok boyutlu ilişkileri bütüncül bir bakış açısıyla ele almayı hedefleyen bir araştırma yöntemidir. Bu amaç doğrultusunda ele alınan toplumun ritüellerini, gündelik davranışlarını ve alışkanlıklarını derinlemesine inceler. Yirminci yüzyılın teknolojik gelişmeleri etnografik metotu geliştiren yeni araçların ortaya çıkmasını sağlamıştır. Etnografik film bunlardan bir tanesidir. Kültürler ve yaşayışlarını incelemede daha kapsamlı veriler sunan etnografik film, zamanla antropoloji disiplinin sınırlarını aşarak sinema alanında yeni bir kimlik kazanmıştır. Bu çalışma, bir yönetmenin alışılagelmiş film dilinin dışına çıkarak, sinemanın özünü oluşturan görsel formlardan hareketle kültürlerarası etkileşimleri, insan iletişimi ve deneyimlerini, tarih ve hafızanın ilişkisini nasıl yansıtabileceğini inceler. Bu inceleme için Fransız yönetmen Chris Marker seçilmiştir. Seçimde Marker'ın belgesel sinema ve deneysel film çalışmalarının yanı sıra sinemayla kurduğu bireysel deneyim ilişkileri de etkili olmuştur. Bu çalışmanın ilk bölümünde Marker'ın görsel antropoloji alanıyla etkileşimi incelenecek, ikinci bölümde ise bu bağlamda ürettiği, sinemada türler arası yönelimleri yansıtan Sans Soleil ve Trois Video Haikus filmleri ele alınacaktır.

As Therasiotes – residents of Therasia, a sparsely populated island sitting to the west of the globally iconic tourist destination of Santorini – engage with their landscape, they are haunted by a sense of stillness, which contrasts with Santorini’s reverberating modernity. By combining text with photographic imagery, this essay explores how Therasiotes experience quietness and its perceived antithesis, modernity, as well as the ways in which both are entangled in conflicting dynamics of pleasure and aversion, a condition invoking Derrida’s discussion of Plato’s pharmakon, with its inherent vacillation between the categories of cure and poison. The article examines peoples’ material practices and modes of looking in order to understand how they experience time and place and how they rework the island’s position in national and global hierarchies of value. It also proposes a peripatetic narrative structure that mirrors my own physical movements on the island in pursuit of photos and thus explores the ethnographic role of photography as a narrative strategy, an object of study and a research method.

[keywords: modernity, ethnography, photography, tourism, material culture, landscape]

The strongest presence of the SS Mendi is the story of her absence. A symbol for colonial neglect and erasure of history, the most revealing image at the Abantu beMendi exhibition, commemorating the centenary of the sinking of the Mendi, is an empty frame. The blank space echoes the medals not awarded to the more than 600 black South Africans who drowned with the Mendi en route to serve the British Commonwealth in the First World War.
Further, the empty frame materially and conceptually reflects the lack of historical imagery and the constraints of the contemporary context which informs the process of compiling a Mendi archive, making the curation thereof a conversation between reconstructed historiographies, novel interpretations, a plurality of artistic agencies, media and modalities. Situated at the University of Cape Town in the wake of the fallen Rhodes statue, Abantu beMendi is a critical project not only for commemorating the people of the Mendi but for decolonising curation and re-visualising forgotten history in a new frame.

Utilising visual ethnography as method, this project discusses the curation, commemoration and re-framing of SS Mendi to problematise as well as realise the potential of art and photography as democratising spaces for conversation and contestation.

This research project, Chain of Poverty, is generated from the lived experience of three families in Bangladesh whose life chances are significantly reduced through the impoverishment they endure. The exegesis argues that a more considered and immersive approach to photojournalism and documentary practice needs to be taken when telling stories of impoverishment, especially of those in the Majority World. To do otherwise is to perpetuate stereotypes of the Majority World as victims worthy only of pity. Both the exegesis and the visual outcomes of my research (presented as a photobook) acknowledge and celebrate the reflexivity in the processes I have undertaken, which has attempted to narrow the gap between the researched and researcher. I argue that these processes are necessary to acknowledge the people who are vulnerable and in impoverishment as multidimensional humans beings (rather than victims) and generate compassion (rather than pity) for those who endure great deprivation. Therefore, this research offers a collaborative and immersive process that aims to contribute to the realm of documentary practice and to help people in the Minority World to understand people with impoverishment beyond being merely a statistical cohort.