Ethnographic photography

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Black Forest wood splitting lesson in Antogast (Renchtal, Numa Blanc 1863)

Ethnographic or anthropological photography describes an application of scientific photography to support or supplement ethnographic / ethnological or anthropological field research .

History and Development

Black Forests in a fruit distillery in Gutach (inked photography, Ludovico Wolfgang Hart 1864)
Jewish woman with child from Damascus in the garden ( Ludovico Wolfgang Hart 1865)

The origins of ethnographic photography can be found in travel photography , which was already developing in the first years of photography, quote: “The colonial penetration of the overseas world and the new means of transport enabled various travelers to share their scientific, to realize business or even just tourist trips. For many, photographic equipment was an indispensable part of their luggage ”(Theye 1989).

Early anthropological photographs can be found as early as 1872 in Charles Darwin's book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals , which contains some pictures by Oscar Gustave Rejlander . The numerous expeditions to explore the western territories of the USA as well as the Near and Middle East - i.e. in the region of today 's Israel , Palestine , Syria and Egypt as well as the Indian subcontinent - and the colonies also fall during this period ; On these long-distance trips, not only were the human artefacts captured in photographs, but the customs and traditions of the (original) inhabitants were also documented.

For example, the Briton Ludovico Wolfgang Hart photographed in 1864 for the portfolio Galerie universelle des peuples (Strasbourg, Paris, London 1865) in Alsace , Baden , Württemberg and Switzerland , and in 1865 in Lebanon , Syria and Egypt . The British John Thomson took photographs in Cambodia , Malaya and China in the early 1870s ; he published a selection of his photographs in the four-volume work Illustrations of China and Its People (London 1873). The Sophus Tromholt collection on the Sámi culture in Norway, created between 1882 and 1883 , has been part of the world document heritage since 2013. In the USA, the bookseller Adam Clark Vroman photographed a documentary about the Indians of the American Southwest between 1895 and 1904 .

As sophisticated ethnographic photo documentation of the turn of the century, however, the life's work applies Edward S. Curtis ' that with the financial support of the banker John Pierpont Morgan , the monograph The North American Indian created, each consisting of twenty text and picture books with photogravures there, and between 1907 and 1930 published has been.

The common feature of this early anthropological and ethnographic photography is the belief in the precision and the undoubted accuracy of photography - skepticism about the truthfulness of photography only emerges later.

"The abundance of illustrations in scientific reports at the turn of the century stands in clear contrast to today's ethnological publications, in which evidence and evidence are provided by diagrams, curves and statistical figures" ( Markus Schindlbeck : The ethnographic lens - photographs from the Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin , 1989, p. 9).

Claude Lévi-Strauss , for example, is one of the more recent representatives of critical ethnographic photography , who illustrated his report Sad Tropics on the Indian peoples in Brazil's Mato Grosso with numerous photographs.

See also

literature

  • Banks, Marcus; Morphy, Howard (Ed.): Rethinking Visual Anthropology . New Haven: Yale University Press 1999. ISBN 978-0300078541
  • Collier, Malcom et al .: Visual Anthropology. Photography As a Research Method. University of Mexico 1986. ISBN 978-0826308993
  • Edwards, Elisabeth (Ed.): Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920 . New Haven, London 1994, reprint. ISBN 978-0300059441
  • Engelke, Henning: Documentary film and photography. Image strategies in English-language ethnology 1936–1986. Mann, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3786125464 .
  • Gürge, Peter: Cultural studies filming in transition. The film work of Edmund Ballhaus. Norderstedt 2000, ISBN 978-3-8391-0616-7
  • Husmann, Rolf (ed.): With the camera in foreign cultures. Aspects of film in ethnology and folklore . Emsdetten: Gehling 1987. ISBN 978-3890490083
  • Krech, Hartmut: Photographs of people. From type picture to anthropological photography. In: Photo history . 4/1984, issue 14. Full text (HTML)
  • Krech, Hartmut: A picture of the world. The requirements of anthropological photography. (Dissertation, University of Cologne, 1984). Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1989. Foreword and introduction (HTML)
  • Lederbogen, Jan: Photography as a people show. In: Photo History, Vol. 6, Issue 22, 1986, pp. 47-64.
  • Mead, Margaret : Anthropology and the camera. In: Morgan, Willard D. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of photography. New York 1963.
  • Pink, Sarah: Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. London: Sage Publications Ltd. 2006. ISBN 978-1412923484
  • Pinney, Christopher: Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaction Books 2011. ISBN 978-1861898043
  • Scheurer, Hans J .: On the cultural and media history of photography. The industrialization of the gaze . Cologne: DuMont 1991. ISBN 978-3770121083
  • Jürg Schneider, Ute Röschenthaler, Bernhard Gardi, ed .: Fotofieber: Pictures from West and Central Africa. The Travels of Carl Passavant 1883-1885. Christoph Merian Verlag, Museum der Kulturen, Basel 2005, ISBN 3-85616-251-8 ( review on msu.edu).
  • Henrick Stahr: Photojournalism between exoticism and racism - depictions of blacks and Indians in photo-text articles in German weekly illustrated 1919-1939. Kovac, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-8300-1450-3 ( review on msu.edu, review on hsozkult.de).
  • Steiger, Ricabeth: Photos create new images. About the usefulness of photography in ethnology. In: Brauen, Martin (ed.): Strangers-Pictures. A publication accompanying the exhibitions Early Ethnographic Photography; The exotic flood of images. Völkerkundemuseum Zürich 1982.
  • Thomas Theye (ed.): The robbed shadow - Photography as an ethnographic document. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich 1989, ISBN 978-3765806469 ( introduction as full text on lmz-bw.de: PDF, 684 kB).
  • Wiener, Michael: Iconography of the wild. Images of people in ethnography and photography between 1850 and 1918. Trickster, Munich 1990, ISBN 978-3923804443 .

Examples of anthropological and ethnographic photography:

  • Claude Lévi-Strauss : Sad Tropics. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1978, ISBN 3-518-06736-2 (French first edition 1955: Tristes Tropiques ).
  • Carol Beckwith, Angela Fisher: Africa - Cults, Festivals, Rituals (2 volumes).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Theye: A world tour in the mirror of ethnographic photography. In: Derselbe (Ed.): The robbed shadow - The photography as an ethnographic document. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich 1989, ISBN 978-3765806469 , p. 25.