Summary Gillian Rose - Visual Methodologies
Chapter 10 - An Anthropological Approach
1. The social life of images: an introduction
- Importance of exchange relations → importance of objects that are exchanged for social relations
- Visual materials not as something to be decoded but as objects with which things are done
- Interest in the practical mediatory role of visual objects in the social process
- Claim that visual objects and the people who do things with them are mutually constitutive
- Studying visual images in the context of colonial and postcolonial social relations
2. The social life of things: materiality, materialization and mobility
This approach has three key characteristics:
- Treats images as material objects
→ materiality = how they (photos) look and feel, their shape and volume, weight and texture
- Its understanding of how the material qualities of an image intervene in the world, particularly the world of people
→ the significance of an object does not pre-exist its social life; what is done with an image rather than its inherent meaning, that gives it significance; there is a range of potential meaning which are latent until mobilized in a specific context
→ BUT the significance of objects are not entirely determined by the meanings people place on them
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- The recontextualization of objects (Thomas) = in its social life and travels an object passes through different cultural contexts which may modify or even transform what it means
- Visual economy (Poole) = the notion of an economy in which photographs are central - conveys a sense of both the circulation of images between places and the structured effects of that circulation
3. How to observe the social life of images
- Reliance on ethnography and interviews of contemporary anthropological work
3.1 Finding your images
- The anthro. approach chooses to work with images it thinks will have effects in the world
- Limitations to sort of images → focus on solid objects that don’t usually change
1. The social life of images: an introduction
- Importance of exchange relations → importance of objects that are exchanged for social relations
- Visual materials not as something to be decoded but as objects with which things are done
- Interest in the practical mediatory role of visual objects in the social process
- Claim that visual objects and the people who do things with them are mutually constitutive
- Studying visual images in the context of colonial and postcolonial social relations
2. The social life of things: materiality, materialization and mobility
This approach has three key characteristics:
- Treats images as material objects
→ materiality = how they (photos) look and feel, their shape and volume, weight and texture
- Its understanding of how the material qualities of an image intervene in the world, particularly the world of people
→ the significance of an object does not pre-exist its social life; what is done with an image rather than its inherent meaning, that gives it significance; there is a range of potential meaning which are latent until mobilized in a specific context
→ BUT the significance of objects are not entirely determined by the meanings people place on them
MISSING PAGE
- The recontextualization of objects (Thomas) = in its social life and travels an object passes through different cultural contexts which may modify or even transform what it means
- Visual economy (Poole) = the notion of an economy in which photographs are central - conveys a sense of both the circulation of images between places and the structured effects of that circulation
3. How to observe the social life of images
- Reliance on ethnography and interviews of contemporary anthropological work
3.1 Finding your images
- The anthro. approach chooses to work with images it thinks will have effects in the world
- Limitations to sort of images → focus on solid objects that don’t usually change