Real cameras, irreal things: Image‐making and ethnographic insight

Abstract This article explores the effects of image‐making on ethnographic insight. The topic is approached within the epistemological framework of recent revisions of anthropology's reflexive turn. Empirical observation, photographic experiments, and the work of anthropologists, historians, and philosophers are employed to argue that photography—and, especially, experimental techniques—brings together different modes of knowledge and make communicable an array of irreal things. By working with data gathered serendipitously outside of the author's ethnographic project, the arguments of this article extend further and recover older theoretical assertions that ethnographic knowledge production involves the whole self.