Phototopies. Reconfiguration des ethnoscapes (original) (raw)
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TALES OF EPHEMERAL EXISTENCE: BETWEEN SCULPTURES, PICTOGRAMS, AND PHOTOGRAPHIES
CORVINUS JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL POLICY, 2008
This article, the purpose of which is to place photography into the discussion, has been developed through the different social sciences with which it particularly deals with the anthropological, historical and social significant elements that include tales of human groups, the means of defining their existence, and rituals and manners of constructing relationships with environmental, social and cultural surroundings. The paper has six sections, starting with an introduction. The following chapter provides some keys to understanding the possible connections between sociology and photography. The third part develops a discussion of the place of the anthropological field in recognizing photography as a human and cultural practice. The next chapter opens a debate about photography, through the results of a case study in Colombia involving a discussion about the family, the construction of visual speech, the tales that individuals create in a family album, and the possible distortions and interest in building particular dialogues about the past. We conclude with theoretical reflections about the important place of visual narration and the construction of collective memory in the institution of the family. In this way, we show the continuously constructed tales that unveil the human sojourn in the world. In the same way, the family as an institution is one of those human groups that uses tools such as photography to construct their stories and their official collective memories in oral and visual discursive narrative codes.
Visual Ethnography Journal -Special Issue
Ethnography and Photography are founded on relational practices which are based on encounter and storytelling. In such an observation, participation and representation space, these disciplines are configured as two forms of writing with their own methodological specificities, as well as zones of contact. Considering the profound technological changes in the recent decades (such as greater accessibility to photographic devices, the increasing production and circulation of photographs, the diversification of virtual spaces, the new digital ethnography), what are the current links between ethnographic research and photography? What kind of contribution do the visual languages offer to the production of anthropological knowledge? Which kind of relations are established between texts and images? How creative and/or authorial artistic research combines with scientific knowledge? The aim of this issue of Visual Ethnography, edited by Marina Berardi and Chiara Scardozzi, is to generate a critical reflection starting from intersectional points between the two disciplines and the plurality of visions and methods. It is conceived as a moment of thought and comparison on the role and the future of photography in ethnographic research, through a theoretical and visual approach, to start a reasoning about theoretical and practical tools of cultural and social anthropology, considering how photography and/or post-photography and its uses declined through the different devices, in addition to making the research contents visible, can also be considered as a real collaborative practice, methodology of intervention, restitution and/or autonomous authorial narration. The call is open to papers and photo essays focused on experiences of collaborative visual ethnographies that use photography to solicit specific narratives and / or include methods of participatory photography aimed at involving groups and communities in the research and co-production of visual contents; researches that explore the possibilities of creating subjectivity in the online life by sharing new forms of self-representation of the body, gender, identity; reflections that interweave ethics and aesthetics in the representation of otherness ; studies concerning photographic collections that are interpreted through their political and public use and inserted (or censored) within the so-called heritagization processes; researches relating to the most innovative and creative trends in contemporary photography that redefine the boundary between reality and fiction starting from the idea of "post-truth", using different media and methods.
Notes on camera obscura: three contemporary artistic perspectives on the path of photography
Arte, Individuo y Sociedad
In 1971, Rockne Krebs presented an immersive artwork composed of the optical phenomenon of the camera obscura, among other elements. Although this artist appears to be the first interested in this phenomenon, it was only from the 1990s onwards that the artistic practice of camera obscura as room installation became widespread. In the decades since, several authors have included it in their production—developing projects of a photographic nature through different approaches, mainly focusing on projected image or spectator participation. Through the method of media archaeology, it is possible to find three lines of contemporary artistic research on the phenomenon: camera obscura related to meta-photography in Abelardo Morell’s works; immersive installation pieces as proposed by Zoe Leonard; and projections of other worlds in the work of the artistic duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. This paper aims at a comparative study that intends to analyze these three paths, underlining the ...
The Photograph as a Site of Writing
2013
This research project considers the photograph as a common space, a space of encounter that unsettles the relations between word and image. It calls for a thinking of the photograph alongside notions of commonality at a time of increasing fragmentation and alienation in terms of what is communicable. The project is driven by different forms of description as a methodology and mode of enquiry. These methods of description constitute a series of experiments in writing and photography. They are presented in the thesis as image and text works and accompanying the thesis as an installation of photographic works and composition of voice recordings. The context of the research engages practices of space and everyday life along side ideas about community and commonality. Methods of description draw out the relationship between word and image, examining different particularities between writing as image and the construction of photographic sequences as a visual syntax in order to question the limits of description in relation to the photographic image and human encounter. The process of research is framed within a series of ongoing conversations that embed themselves within thinking about and making photographs. Sitting on park benches and considering the space of The Look and the work Jean-Paul Sartre, converses with a series of photographs and writings that describe a space of human encounter. The description of Charles Bovary's Hat in the opening sequence of Madame Bovary 1 by Gustave Flaubert, informs a descriptive method and thinking about the photograph as a kind of mute or stuttering face. A dialogue with Walker Evan's Labor Anonymous photographs emerges through experimental forms of writing and cropping. This concludes in a series of 150 sentences and photographic fragments that cover the entirety of the photographs in the Labor Anonymous archive, replacing editing with a process of cropping in order to approach an anonymous space within the photographic image. The thesis ends with photographs of discarded piles of organic matter constructed through a rigorous method of writing drawn out of the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas and a reading of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponges. Here the photograph is presented as an exhausted site where word and image exist alongside each other, radically passive, together-apart. Making a series of voice recordings enables an exploration of the incommensurability of word and image approaching problems surrounding a thinking of the face, and the face-to-face encounter through the photograph. Throughout the project a problem of pronouns is evoked, an uncomfortable sense of the relations between us all in looking and thinking about the space of the image and how it can be constituted and conveyed. Processes of description developed through the different forms of enquiry call us to the urgent task of considering the photographic image as a site of commonality and a space of community.
Photogenic Images: Producing Everyday Gestures of Possibility
Revista Brasileira de Sociologia da Emoção, 2017
Abstract: Images can be photographs, but they also can be the visual surroundings of everyday life. As images shape our daily settings, they choreograph the thoroughfares and backdrops that shape us. In the process, images can influence what we think, how we feel, and when and where we act. To explore how, I return to photogeny (Talbot, 1839), a past concept that involves the production of images (and how after-images can continue to produce affects, emotions, ideas, and wonder). Revisiting the concept of photogeny provides an opportunity to reconsider what images are, how they create, and how they have the capacity to activate others in everyday environments. To begin, I provide a brief overview of how the term 'photogeny' emerged and evolved. I then take up the concept of photogeny as method (per St. Pierre, 2014) through a series of images from an urban neighborhood area known for its irruptions of folk art. Next, I explore the productive—or photogenic—attempts that the images make to generate ethical futures and collective change (Guattari, 1995). After that, I discuss how, through a return to wonder (MacLure, 2013) in research and everyday life, ordinary images have the capacity to intervene toward a more peaceful, kind, thoughtful, and generative world, one minor gesture at a time (Manning, 2016). Resumo: As imagens podem ser fotografias, mas também podem ser o ambiente visual da vida cotidiana. À medida que as imagens moldam nossas configurações diárias, eles coreografam as vias e os cenários que nos moldam. No processo, as imagens podem influenciar o que pensamos, como nos sentimos e quando e onde atuamos. Para explorar como, volto à fotogenia (Talbot, 1839), um conceito passado que envolve a produção de imagens (e como as imagens posteriores podem continuar a produzir efeitos, emoções, idéias e maravilhas). Revisitar o conceito de fotogenia oferece uma oportunidade para reconsiderar o que são imagens, como elas criam e como elas têm a capacidade de ativar outras pessoas em ambientes coti-dianos. Para começar, forneço uma breve visão geral de como o termo "fotogenia" surgiu e evoluiu. Em seguida, considero o conceito de fotogenia como método (por St. Pierre, 2014) através de uma série de imagens de uma área de bairro urbano conhecida por suas irrupções de arte popular. Em seguida, exploro as tentativas produtivas ou fotogênicas que as imagens criam para gerar futuros éticos e mudanças coletivas (Guattari, 1995). Depois disso, eu discuto como, através de um retorno à maravilha (MacLure, 2013), na pesquisa e na vida cotidiana, as imagens comuns têm a capacidade de intervir para um mundo mais pacífico, amável, pensativo e generativo, um gesto menor por vez (Manning, 2016).
Rodríguez-Blanco, S. (2019). “Photography and Time Eternal”. Galembo, P., Mexico Masks Rituals, Nueva York, Radius Books, pp. 9-16. ISBN: 978-194-21-8557-4., 2019
Text in Spanish and English. The reification of mass culture, where man no longer participates but rather consumes, has emptied the ritual origin of many of the artifacts that surround us. The consumer society tends to devitalize and exoticize any object when it strips it of its meaning, and thereby guarantees its placement on the market, already transformed into merchandise, into an exhibition object, but devoid of meaning. This chapter analyzes the photographic work of Phyllis Galembo in Mexico, a photographer who, with her visual research, sought precisely to recover and capture from her photographic gaze the plastic values of indigenous and mestizo popular culture deposited in her ritual artifacts. Texto en español y en inglés. La cosificación propia de la cultura de masas, donde el hombre ya no participa sino que consume, ha vaciado el origen ritual de muchos de los artefactos que nos rodean. La sociedad de consumo tiende a desvitalizar y exotizar cualquier objeto cuando lo despoja de su significado, y con ello garantiza la colocación del mismo en el mercado, transformado ya en mercancía, en objeto exhibitivo, pero desposeído de sentido. Este capítulo analiza el trabajo fotográfico de Phyllis Galembo en México, una fotógrafa que, con su investigación visual, buscó precisamente recuperar y capturar desde su mirada fotográfica los valores plásticos de la cultura popular indígena y mestiza depositados en sus artefactos rituales.