Oldal 72 [72]
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Zbigniew Libera, Magdalena Sztandara
of arranged scenes depicting the daily life of the people surveyed. Photographic
postcards made in the studio and “produce” strongly categorized and idealized
presentations constitute the third type. Due to the very obvious fact of illustration
in photography, there is no mentioning of the documentation of artefacts. On this
level, the “photograph was an aide-mémoire to the scientist, equal to his pencil,
notebook, or typewriter” (Worth 1981: 194) and using a camera in the field pro¬
vided a visual supplement to the description. However, images that represent eth¬
nographers themselves, especially in the field, such as in meeting and talking with
the “locals” or even writing, are very rarely or not at all mentioned. At the same
time, these types of images are well known in the cases of Margaret Mead, Gregory
Bateson, and Bronistaw Malinowski. Generally, we are used to dealing with the
photographs in which the researcher is asking questions from the “natives”, posing
with the natives, or playing with children. Following James Clifford (cf. 1988),
one may argue that we became used to the classical reference discourse in pictorial
editions. It is also difficult not to remember that assumptions about invisibility
and objectivity needed to be challenged after Bronistaw Malinowski’s “program” of
participant observation and recognition that the anthropologist’s presence in the
field served as a filter of information (cf. Kaplan 2002). Despite that fact, photos
that showed the process and practices of collecting data in the field were not in¬
cluded in published monographs. The problematic status of these photographs can
have many reasons. One of them could be the potential openness of images to the
plurality of meanings attributed to them, which can be considered both as their
strength and weakness.
Making photographic records in the field in the 1950s and 1960s in research
camps had a lot to do with early contributions to the visual anthropology of Greg¬
ory Beatson and Margaret Mead and, in particular, in her positivist faith in the
truth of an image. According to Sol Worth (1981: 18), these ethnographers used
visual materials from the field as “illustrations to accompany verbal accounts or
as ‘evidence’ uncritically accepted as objective records of objects and events”. Ini¬
tially photography presented the facts about which there could be no doubt. The
dominant paradigm was a scientific and realistic one in which the most important
aspect was the objectification and generalization. Photos representing researchers
in a particular situation in the field imply that the ethnographers themselves are
the evidence, which validates their “being there” (Geertz 1988). In other words, the
photographs may be considered as a proof of participant observation, sometimes
painstaking and hard ethnographic work, and encounters with the Other, which
since Malinowski has become a hallmark of contemporary ethnography. However,
one may try to move beyond this simple decoding and look at it from a slightly
different perspective. In other words, as suggested by Grazyna Kubica (2013: 61),
one may try to “move away from dealing only with the issue of representation
per se, in favour of [a] complex of discursive and political landscapes” in which