Building on Ethnographic Terminalia’s art-anthropology experiments at off-site locations, we decided to return to the American Anthropological Association annual meetings site in 2016 to re-examine the photo-essay within anthropological, photographic and publishing communities within the format of a workshop. ‘The Photo-Essay is Dead, Long Live the Photo-Essay!’ emulates our recent workshop and rapid-publication projects (Vancouver 2015). To achieve this within the framework of the AAA meetings, we issued an open call and invited participants to actively consider how experimentations at the intersection of art and anthropology might function as prototypes for thinking about the future of the photographic image in anthropology.
The workshop was organized around presentations by international contemporary art photographers, photo-journalists and anthropologists, in three parts. Part One began with provacteurs Stephanie Sadre-Orafai and Jordan Tate (University of Cincinnati). Part Two featured Lee Douglas (New York University), Kate Schneider(Ontario College of Art and Design), and Teresa Montoya (New York University). Part Three featured Aubrey Graham (Centre for Humanities Research, South Africa) Donna DeCesare (University of Texas, Austin) and Jeffrey Schonberg (San Francisco State University).
Before the workshop, presenters were asked to submit creatively designed and critically engaged page-spreads featuring photo-essays and discussions they would present during the workshop. Participants in the workshop were encouraged to print photographs from their own photo-essay works in-progress and bring them to work with, throughout the day. We documented the event and the spreads and notes and included a selection of them in the zine publication. Sam Gould of Beyond Repair created the cover.
While photographs have been a component of anthropological practice since its earliest formation as a discipline, there has been little sustained and critical engagement with modes of presentation and publication in the context of visual anthropology. As a result there has to date been little clarity around the definition of a photo-essay especially within the context of anthropology. This reality is precisely what interested us. Our academic conventions for sharing photographs have been cemented around a limited number of typically black and white images in a journal article or monograph.
We also believe that still photographs and their entanglements with other media are on the cusp of finding new importance in anthropology in the form of the photo-essay, in particular as the serial nature of photography is being tested out within digital infrastructures on the Internet. We were interested in a workshop that could be a testing ground, and so we encouraged making and working on the photo-essay by the workshop participants: To disrupt, to re-define, and to work within and beyond the photographic frame. ET provided simple supplies such as scissors, sharpies, post-its, and invited participants to use these to explore new modes presentation, to include new formats, to create a record of questions and comments that arose over the course of the day.
[Bio c. 2017] Craig Campbell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. He received his PhD in Sociology (Theory and Culture) from the University of Alberta in 2009. He is actively involved in producing works that span the range of expository writing, art exhibition, and curation. These function as companion works to a thematic interest in archives, photography, documents, and the anxious territory of actuality. Craig Campbell’s ethnographic, historical, and regional interests include: Siberia, Central Siberia, Indigenous Siberians, Evenki, Evenkiia, Reindeer hunting and herding, Travel and mobility, Socialist colonialism, early forms of Sovietization, and the circumpolar...
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