For this meeting on June 16, 2020, we read Elizabeth Edwards’s article “Anthropology and Photography,” published in 2015 in the journal Photographies. Edwards is professor emeritus at De Montfort University in Leicester, U.K., where she writes extensively about the role of photography in historical and anthropological research.
Photograph by Gilbert Oteyo in Kenya, 2007. Copyright © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
PRM 2008.5.78.1. Reproduced in Edwards’s article on page 246.
Edwards argues for the use of historical anthropological photographs—ones inevitably soaked in colonialist means of production—in present-day anthropological research. She cites concepts such as “presence,” “abundance,” “excess,” and “standpoint” to make her case. Key in this discussion is the notion of returning to locations and ancestors of the people appearing in old anthropological photos, aware of power asymmetries, and attempting to use the photographs for other intentions. We talked a lot about the idea of appropriation vs. re-reading, and about how a current anthropologist goes about ensuring that they are not merely repeating power asymmetries.