Anthropology and Photography: A long history of knowledge and affect

This paper addresses the long history of photographic relationships in anthropology. It argues that the current concerns with multiple, relational and affective meanings in anthropological photographs are not simply the result of new approaches to photographic analysis, but were embedded in the relationships of the production of anthropological evidence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples from British field anthropology it examines, first, the relational histories of production of those photographs, and, second, argues that those relationships have enabled the new ethnographies of photographic engagement that mark late twentieth and twenty-first century anthropological concerns. It argues that photographic “affect”, as a mode of history, memory and identity, becomes the focus of anthropological analysis.