Opaque encounters: Leaving the strange strange in ethnographic field photography

Theory, articulated through text, is the primary means through which anthropologists understand the communities we engage through our work. It is a critical part of the discipline, but it is also a mode of abstraction, and extraction, that rips us from the immediacy of sensory experience and too often replicates existing power relationships. This article explores the potential of photography to serve as an alternative mode of theorizing. Building on 7 years of learning from, and making images alongside, street photographers in the United States, Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia, I argue that the value of photographs to ethnographic work lies precisely in their inability to effectively illustrate ethnographic ideas. It is, rather, the complexity, opacity, and ambiguity of photographs that makes them rich ethnographic material. Perhaps, I conclude, the most valuable thing an anthropological image can do is allow the essential strangeness of the ethnographic encounter to remain strange.