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.