Oldal 72 [72]
OCR
70 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 provided a visual supplement to the description. However, images that represent ethnographers 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 included 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 Gregory 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”. Initially 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
