As potencialidades do estudo da imagem fotográfica na antropologia visual

Abstract

In an increasingly visual society, it becomes understandable that disciplines such as anthropology have started to show a growing interest in the questions of visibility. Although this concern is not exactly recent, the question of “What to do with the image?” has been a source of constant anxieties. For decades visual anthropology remained confined to traditionalist and limitative practices that understood visual technologies as mere research tools or as a way to present their studies. Nevertheless, recently, by abandoning the methodological stubbornness that limited anthropological study to the Malinowskian method, the study of images of varied provenances has emerged as a valid field for the ethnographic immersion, with the potential to reveal perceptual, historical and sociocultural processes.
From the countless forms of imagetic production, in this essay I focus on the potentialities brought by the analysis of the vernacular photographic image. Like image analysis itself, necessarily multidisciplinary and multi-methodological, also this essay emerges from the crossing of several texts and points of view, from various disciplines.
This essay intends to point some of the potentialities brought by the use of a photographic corpus, emphasizing the already existing affinities between the photographic and the ethnographic activities. From its apparent apodictic character to its necessarily subjective visions, passing by its performance capacity – photography has the potential to offer the anthropologist precious material to understand, in a non- intrusive way and from the perspective of the studied subject, the most diverse social dynamics.