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SUMMARY Engaging in ethnographic fieldwork often requires overcoming considerable inertia and fighting back feelings of cynicism and alienation toward the place and people studied. Street photography can be one means of overcoming these setbacks. Requiring its practitioners to get out on the streets and directly engage with the people on them, it can fast track an ethnographer's emotional connection to a place, changing its affective landscape for them and redefining their experience of being there. This photo essay draws from the author's 2016 fieldwork trip to Jakarta, Indonesia to demonstrate how photography can serve not just as an aid to memory, a supplement to field notes, or a documentation of everyday life but as a tool for emotional investment.
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Brent Luvaas (2017) studied this question.
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