Photography and ethnography

This article discusses the Primera Exposición Gitana (1948) as paradigmatic of the instrumentalization of the Gitano in the conception of Spanishness in early Francoism. By way of an introductory close reading of the folkloristic publications Gitanos de la Bética (1951) and Gitanos de Granada (1949), I will carve out the special significance of the Andalusian Gitano within the Francoist creation of a new Spanish identity. The Exposición Gitana presented members of this ethnic minority in reconstructed cave dwellings as found on Granada’s Sacromonte and thus evidences striking parallels to the human zoos during the colonial era. My aim is to demonstrate that this representation of Otherness is deeply embedded in imperial power relations and the logic of the colonial gaze. Moreover, by comparing the imagery of the exhibition with contemporaneous pictures taken by the local photographer Manuel Torres Molina, I conclude that the Exposición Gitana reflected the visual expectations of the visitors and therefore contributed to the consolidation of existing stereotypes of the Spanish Gitano.

Page 1. Visual Resources Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 291-336
"From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image," Wendy A. Grossman.
Photographs of African and Oceanic sculpture performing under both artistic and documentary guise are examined in this article for the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way one reads and understands photographs. Unraveling the complex process through which conventional, anonymous object photographs of African and Oceanic sculptures gave way to self-consciously artistic compositions in the first decades of the twentieth century, this study elucidates the way in which these images functioned in the promotion of non-Western objects as modern art within an epochal shift in modernist aesthetics. This investigation into competing notions of a corresponding photographic aesthetic that arose provides new insights into the symbiotic relationship between and among galleries, museums and photographers in advancing modernist strategies of representation and the manner in which non-Western sculpture was transformed fom artifact to art to fit this paradigm. The trajectory explored here from anonymous object photographs reproduced in publications such as Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915) to modernist images of African and Oceanic art by photographers Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Man Ray (1890-1976) and Walker Evans (1903-1975) reveals how conventions and understandings of the medium and the context in which photographs were seen have inflected interpretations of both the images and the objects rendered.
Keywords: Modernist Photography; Primitivism; Surrealism; De Zayas, Marius, 1880- 1961; Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946; Guillaume, Paul, 1894-1931; Tableaux de Man Ray et objets des iles (1926); Museum of Modern Art, African Negro Art (1935)

In the Fall of 2019, doing my researches at the collection of the French Photographic Society, I found a dagerrotype with an outdoor image made in Hungary. It is a beautiful but strange object, the first known photograph of peasants and their animals in a small town of the former Hungarian Kingdom. According to the inventory, the photograph was taken by an Unknown Photographer in 1842. However, it has a hallmark of Christofle that was used from 1845. In the corner of the picture there is a name of a Hungarian merchant, Pál Anisits, who arrived at the city of Zalaegerszeg, Hungary in 1843. In this entry published for the first time on the site of Mafot (Hungarian Society for the History of Photography) I wrote about the object and the related investigation.

2019 őszén a Francia Fotográfiai Társaság gyűjteményében, az ismeretlen alkotójú dagerrotípiák között egy Magyarországon készült szabadtéri felvételre találtam. Erről a képről és a hozzá kapcsolódó nyomozásról szól az először a Mafot oldalán közzétett szöveg szerkesztett változata.

L’objet de cette étude est double. Il s’agit à la fois de décrire les usages populaires d’une forêt périurbaine (Ghabat Oued el-Maleh) et de les comparer à ceux des espaces publics de Mohammedia. La question est de savoir si les usages de l’espace forestier peuvent nous permettre de mieux comprendre les pratiques d’appropriation de espaces publics urbains. Grâce à une approche d’anthropologie visuelle combinant l’observation participante de longue durée, la conversation ordinaire et l’observation photographique, cette étude a permis de montrer qu’à travers les pratiques spatiales c’est une culture populaire qui s’exprime, en forêt comme en ville.

Terlepas atau tidaknya dari pertentangan pandangan menyangkut pernyataan mengenai “foto” antara pandangan realisme dengan antirealisme (idealisme), ataupun objektivitas dan subjektivitas. Mungkin barangkali ini adalah seperti apa yang dimaksudkan oleh Seno Gumira bahwa “teknologi fotografi memang terlahirkan untuk memburu objektivitas, karena kemampuannya untuk menggambarkan kembali realitas visual dengan tingkat presisi yang tinggi (Gumira, 2007:1).