Photography and Anthropology Christopher Pinney Oxford University Press Pages: 174 Rs 1,595 More than any other visual medium,photography has an extraordinarily complex relationship with many disciplines. Since 1839,when photography as we know it began,we cannot think of architecture,archaeology,medicine,forensics,astronomy,theatre,dance and anthropology without photography. This is one reason why the medium has had a problematic relationship with the art world. There are so many approaches to analyse the relationship of the medium to any of these disciplines that art critics flounder to get a grip on how to place the medium in an art-critical context. This is specially true in the Indian scenario,where scholarly and critical analysis of photography has been severely lacking. Christopher Pinney,professor of anthropology and visual culture at University College London,has been one scholar who has broken ground in the recent past,with his books and papers focusing on specific aspects of the medium,specially in the Indian context. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs,Photos of the Gods: Printed Image and Political Struggle in India and The Coming of Photography in India are some of Pinneys earlier books. They have all been marked by his wide-ranging interests art history,photography history,culture studies and,of course,anthropology. They have been eminently readable because while grounded in solid primary research,his obvious love for the medium is apparent in the writing. In an interview,he had said,My first book,Camera Indica,was divided into two parts. The first part was about colonial photography,which I argued was about surveillance and identification,often involving the imposition of identities upon Indians that they may well have resented. So photography,in its early Indian incarnation,came out looking like a villain. The second part of the book was a celebration of local Malwa village photographic practices: overpainting,fantastical backdrops,artisanal collage and montage work which,to me,represented a postcolonial Indian resourcefulness. His latest,Photography and Anthropology,is his densest so far. Pinney examines the intertwined histories of photography and anthropology and their parallel births and development in the context of world history. Not being an anthropologist myself,I was quite intimidated by a book that has a huge bibliography and almost five footnotes to every paragraph,and with most of the anthropology books quite unfamiliar to me. With its densely academic text,it is unlikely to be accessible to many practising photographers,but it will certainly be a big contribution to anthropologists,with Pinneys typically wide-ranging and unusual insights that cut across disciplines. The book is a history lesson in the shifting dynamics in the field of anthropology and on how photography was first seen as an objective recording of ethnographic evidence by researchers in the 19th century. That this was a colonial discipline complicates the current readings of both the text and the image. Pinney has an exhaustive discussion on the making and the meaning of the image. Typically,he brings into this analysis philosophical texts on photography ranging from Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes,Susan Sontag,Michel Foucault and Rosalind Krauss a breathtaking sweep. Discussing landscape oriented pictures,he writes about how the American dadaist and surrealist Man Rays photographic series Noire et Blanche exists in two forms,negative and positive. Reversing the black/white binarism renders Kikis white flesh electrically dark and the African wood mask eerily bright,reinforcing the formal as well as the anthropological tension. It is a discussion like this that reveals the breadth of Pinneys approach. I doubt that many anthropologists who have a deep knowledge of the history of their profession would have an equally deep knowledge of the history of photography outside its use in ethnographic studies. I am sure that this book will open up complex readings of the photographic image. Perhaps this book could also lead to scholarly studies on some recent work in India with an ethnographic bent: Sunil Janahs photographic record of the tribals of India,done in the 1950s and the 1960s,and the more recent photography of Theyyam and mother goddess rituals in Kerala by Pepita Seth.
