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Ethnographers’ Self-Depiction in the Photographs from the Field. Post-War Ethnology in Poland
photography is seen as a product of certain historical presences, meetings, and
ways of usage. Considering the metaphorical and rhetorical potency of image and
its implication in various representational programs and discourses, one might raise
a question about the testimony of ethnographers “doing fieldwork”. It seems that
they are something other than just a proof of the classical studies under the sign of
participant observation.
At this point it may be helpful to recall the already mentioned difference be¬
tween photography understood as a “record about culture” and as a “record of cul¬
ture” (see Worth 1981). Assuming the existence of such a difference, one should also
distinguish between using a medium and studying how a medium is used. In
term[s] of the camera, the distinction I want to emphasize is that between the
scientist’s use of the camera as a tool to collect data about culture and studying
how the camera is used by members of a culture (Worth 1981: 194).
This distinction is supposed to be the central one for the understanding of
the work done with photography and its cognitive and communication func¬
tions. Taking photos for “recording about culture” is similar to collecting the snap¬
shots, which could help us to remind what an artefact, house, or an informant
looked like. Photos can also—when the camera portrays the same ethnographers
at work—-serve as souvenirs and a witnessing of intense and collective fieldwork.
However, in that case they do not depict the culture that the research was about.
We need to emphasize that it is not the photographs’ representing ethnographers in
the field that is important, but rather the fact that they have been captured in spe¬
cific situations and are posed in particular ways. This can subsequently explain the
ways of archiving and analysing the visual materials or the lack of it. On this level,
as a “record of culture”, the photography does not act anymore as an aide-memoire
to the researcher but, as Worth suggested:
In the hands of well-trained observers, it has become a tool for recording not
the truth of what is out there, but the truth of what is in there, in the anthro¬
pologist’s mind, as a trained observer puts observations of ‘out there’ on record
(Worth 1981: 194).
That is the reason, as Stawomir Sikora underlines, that photography turns out
to be more interesting as a “record of culture” (2012). It seems that we become
increasingly aware that photography is not any longer a one-way registration, but
a more subtle record of what is happening on both sides of the camera. To put it
differently, there should be a tendency to treat the photography not as something
we call the “truth”, or “reality”, but rather as evidence, which could be helpful to
illustrate some patterns, to inform about them, or to use the photography to make
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