Thoughts about the possible visual project

I want to do a photographic essay, but the one that would combine visual images produced by people and those taken by my collaborator and me. There is a web that represents the project of a golf-club, intended to be built in the vicinity of one Hungarian village. The project started before the Global Financial crisis in 2008 and after the bankruptcy left the unfinished landscape of the golf club. The territory is fenced and abandoned. The web site shows photos of the construction as evidence of the potential of the project to attract investments and sell apartments that were planned to build nearby. Through reconstructing the photographic process by trying to produce photos that would be a double to the authentic initial ones we do not only create the classical pair of before and after, but also would analyze how project presentation is built up, and what constitutes the world of dreaming about neoliberal projects, such as international golf-clubs in Hungarian countryside. 

Bad Photos, Moments of Resistance

During our fieldwork among Evenki we had an interesting problem. There were moments that we desperately wanted to document and make a photo, because we knew in advance that we will write something about them and it would be nice to have a picture to put into text as illustration. But we constantly failed to make such pictures. For example, every morning in the Evenki camp started with sprinkling fresh tea into the fire. I planned to make a picture of this everyday ceremony for almost a month, and although I got the opportunity to make it every day, I never managed. Somehow, this simple act was to such an extent part of awakening process of the whole family including us that I was never prepared to use a camera. I lived in a same rhythm with other members and never could step outside this flow to document it. I always remembered about the camera, when the ceremony was already in progress. It was systematically unremarkable event, routine and not pompous at all. Finally, once the same ritual was conducted for other purposes and in other time. But now this was not about starting a day, the same sequence of actions was conducted before sending hunters on their trip. So although, actions were the same but surrounding elements differed, the context was different. The light was bright and the contrast of the picture was harsh. No any trait of those mystic twilights in which this was usually done in the morning. There was snow melting on the stove, when usually there is a pot there in the morning. It was already warm, and you cannot see the stiff figure of the praying woman. From this photo you do not have the impression of how cold it is in the morning, how anticipated is this fresh warm tea is. So on a close inspection, although this photo provides all the formal resemblance with what I intended to document, it showed a totally different mood. And was a bad photo, a wrong one. Perhaps, sometimes we need to accept that some moments are impossible to make a photo about. ‘Reality’ shows its resistance.

caricatures in anthropology

Adam Reed used caricatures specially produced for his book Papua New Guinea's Last Place as illustrations, instead of photos. I find that sometimes they captured the message better than any photo could probably do. They are provocative and humorous. I suspect you nave less nominal ethical issues by using caricatures instead of real photo images. This is like pencil drawings from courts. And to some extent caricatures are more honest, they do not pretend that they show something totally authentic and real. So I like it. The only problem is that I can't draw :(

in winter all your photos are black-and-white, sometimes with an additional sepia effect :)

aesthetics embedded in technology

An important problem was raised in both Edwards’ and Sontag’s papers: the challenge that photographing poses for the researcher, notably its aesthetics. Photograph is a result of selection (we decide when we make a shot, what we put into focus and which photographs we include in the final publication). But how we do these choices is very often almost impossible to recognize, because it is vey difficult to treat photos as something else than pictures. Photos seduce us to make them beautiful. I think that Sontag makes a masterful critical argument about the way Nazi images become associated with pornography, but it is not only the content (repressed desires) that makes this association possible, the technology itself is not free of pornographic associations. The photographer is looking into the world through a photo camera, as if through a keyhole, and this turns the world into a closed private bedroom. Those that we look at do not know how many people will finally see them documented in this one particular moment. Photograph is always a form of intrusion, no matter how accustomed we are to this intrusion both as cameramen and models. In this respect, photographing itself is driven by a desire: desire to see and then to share the image and to show. We are also aware of the fact that we will be judged by the audience: our skill, taste and luck will be evaluated by those who will see our photos. Anthropologists are not free from this context when they do their photos. It seems to me that the attempt to produce provocative or realistic photos as described by Edwards, are two strategies to deal with this context. Realist photos are produced with a pretension that images are documents of something that exists independent of the photographer. The provocative photos are the products of the conscious play with the limits of aesthetics. 

I have not yet formulated, what exactly I want to do for the final project, but I think that I would like to understand how the realistic stance works. And my question is also how our models and informants contribute to the production of realistic photos.