anthropology and photography

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The Indexicality of the Image: From the History of Photography to Photographic

Histories

David Rojinsky 2010

The most precise technology can give its products a magical value such as a

painted picture can never again have for us. No matter how artful the

photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels anirresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the

here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the

inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the

future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For it isanother nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: “other” above

all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a

space informed by the unconscious.

Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography (1931)

The historian of photography, Geoffrey Batchen (1999), distinguishes between

postmodern and formalist histories of the medium. The former, associated with Marxist

critics like Tagg (1988) and Sekula (1989), would deny any other identity to photography

than that determined by the historico-cultural context in which it is employed as a tool of

Foucauldian surveillance, discipline and social control. The formalists, meanwhile,

represented amongst others (according to Batchen) by André Bazin (1945) Clement

Greenberg (1966), and John Szarkowski (1966), focused on photography as an art form

that might be placed within a history of mechanized image production dating back (at

least) to the early modern camera obscura (Batchen 12-17). Batchen claims that both

approaches suffer from an essentializing impulse predicated on the traditional binary

logic which, at least in the case of postmodernists, was to be debunked in critical practice

(21). For, through their respective arguments, both formalists (nature) and

postmodernists (culture) actually reaffirm the nature/culture polarity identified with

visual technologies (ibid.). Consequently, Batchen deemed it necessary to resolve this

irony by writing a painstaking history of photography which, rather than tracing the

origins of the putative invention of the technology by select individuals, would excavate

the “ discursive formations of a desire to photograph within the European epistemological

field of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (Batchen 180). In effect,



Batchen adopted a deconstructive approach to the writing of history and thus, while

undermining the nature/culture binary in particular, he stressed, after Derrida, that all

‘origins’ are already fissured and all presence transfigured by difference (178-9).

Photography’s putative origins cannot, therefore, be based on stable ontological

foundations, nor can photography’s ‘identity’ be conceived outside the plays of

difference (202). To think otherwise, and hence, to conceive of photography in terms of a

logic of oppositions (nature/culture, real/representation, world/sign), is to reproduce the

“logocentric economy that sustains both formalist analysis and broader formations of

oppression such as phallocentrism and ethnocentrism” (200).

Bearing this premise in mind, it is difficult to disagree with Batchen’s argument

that those, like Tagg (1988) for example, who claim that photography “has no identity”

except as a vehicle for state or colonial power, should, then, also avoid the logocentrism

on which such power is founded for its legitimation when making their case. Similarly,

Batchen is right to point out that those who would adopt Peircean semiotics to signal the

photograph’s indexicality as the defining feature of photography should also be wary of

re-asserting facile binaries. Alluding to Derrida’s reading of Peirce, Batchen explains

that to continue to interpret the photographic index as a trace of ‘the real’ is to perpetuate

the notion that there is a pre-existing reality awaiting semiotic representation. Instead,

after Derrida, we cannot fail to realize that any real/representation polarity implodes

when we accept that “The thing itself is a sign…The so-called “thing itself” is always

already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence” (Derrida

quoted in Batchen 198). In other words, rather than paralleling traditional conceptions of

writing and simply inscribing ‘the real’, photography should instead be understood as

mediating a ‘reality’ which is always already a play of representations and hence, an

infinite system of signs.

However, while I am therefore aware that the real/representation binary is a

construct, my main concern in this essay is precisely that of exploring how a generalized

perception of the indexicality of the photographic image – that is, a faith in the power of

the photograph to somehow retain a “deposit of the real itself” (Krauss quoted in Batchen

196) – has underwritten the employment of photography as a tool of various forms of

power. In particular, I am interested in tracing the nineteenth century emergence of

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photography as a visual technology whose evidentiary and forensic potential was

mobilized to facilitate socio-political order in the major European metropolitan centres

and their colonies. In the latter case, I am especially concerned with how early

anthropological theories of racial hierarchy determined the use to which academic

(anthropological) photography would be put at the service of the imperial ethos. While I

also describe how, in practice, photography would often prove to be inadequate as a tool

for constructing either criminal or colonial subjectivities, and thus attested to the limits of

photographic indexicality, I consider, nevertheless, how popular faith in photographic

realism and popular uses of the technology might actually invert the hegemonic

discourses transmitted by the state, the colonial administration and the anthropological

institution. In other words, I focus on how photographic indexicality serves as a stimulus

for “mobilizing [collective] memory” (Poignant quoted in Peers and Brown 2009) in

communities once subject to colonial rule and anthropological classification. As a

specific illustration of this, I end the essay by describing an example of the contemporary

academic practice of repatriating material objects from western museums to their source

communities and how such objects – primarily photographs, of course, in this case - are

re-appropriated and resignified in opposition to the photographers’ original intentions.

First, however, let me return to the history of photography with which I began.

The State and the Pencil of Nature

Despite an apparent aversion to historical narratives emanating from mythical

origins, Batchen cannot completely forgo an event which, amidst the murky confusion

over who actually ‘invented’ the chemical process whereby images might be ‘fixed’, is

still generally regarded as an originary juncture in histories of photography. I am of

course alluding to the first public declaration of the state patenting of the Daguerreotype

by the physicist Dominique François Arago before the French Chamber of Deputies in

1839, and, perhaps more importantly, the first documented evidence of the (French)

state’s interest in exploiting the technology (Batchen 25)(Trachtenberg 1980: 15). On the

one hand, Arago’s celebration of the technology involves the mobilization of an

orientalist discourse to reveal its colonial potential in gathering cultural information: “had

we had photography in 1798 we would possess today faithful pictorial records of that

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which the learned world is forever deprived of by the greed of the Arabs and the

vandalism of certain travelers” (1980: 17). On the other, he underscores its importance to

furthering the institutionalization of national culture and to improving the economy: “ a

glance suffices to recognize the extraordinary role which the photographic process must

play in this great national enterprise; it is evident at the same time that this new process

offers economic advantages” (1980: 18). While Arago also appeared fascinated with the

universal potential of this ‘French invention’ to furthering scientific knowledge for all

French citizens, he celebrated its utility for all nations of the world. Nevertheless, despite

this apparent magnanimity, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the report implied the

conquest, after Heidegger, of an objectified “world as a picture” (Azoulay 2008: 153).

Whereas the premise to Batchen’s critique of previous histories of photography

was, as we have noted, an apparent opposition between formalist and socio-cultural

approaches, the nineteenth-century state’s intervention in the dissemination and

development of the new technology as an instrument of governance was in fact

predicated upon its capacity for reproducing indexes of reality. In practice, then, the

‘nature’ of the medium and its products were unavoidably linked , rather than opposed to

its mobilization as an instrument of state power. As Sekula (1989) argues in this respect,

photography (the ‘writing of light’) appeared to fulfill the Enlightenment desire to dispel

obscurantism through illumination, to complete the domination of techné over physis, and

by reproducing nature with mathematical exactitude, to achieve more precise knowledge

of the world:

For nineteenth-century positivists, photography doubly fulfilled the En-lightenment dream of a universal language: the universal mimetic language of

the camera yielded up a higher, more cerebral truth, a truth that could be uttered

in the universal abstract language of mathematics. For this reason, photographycould be accommodated to a Galilean vision of the world as a book “written in the

language of mathematics.” Photography promised more than a wealth of detail; it

promised to reduce nature to its geometric essence. (Sekula 1989: 352)

Having said that, we should also recall that the first commercially published book of

photographs, Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844), was, by its very title, unequivocal in

conveying to the public that nature itself, in the form of light, and without the

intervention of the human hand, was the sole ‘author’ of the images contained in the book

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(Trachtenberg 1980: 27-36)(Sontag 1977: 160).

From the very beginning then, photography was compared to a more primitive

technology: writing. It was thus also immediately treated with suspicion just as writing

had been in the ancient Greek (platonic) phonocentric tradition. If, in that same tradition,

the written word was a debased ‘image’ of a spoken word regarded as isomorphic with

unmediated ‘truth’ and referential plenitude, then photography came to be regarded as a

debased and threatening ‘image’ of nature which must, therefore, be the effect of quite

unnatural forces. Moreover, if writing thus constituted a derridean supplement and hence,

both a necessary addition and a menacing substitute for speech (and hence, for the

referent itself) then early photographs might at once reproduce nature, but they appeared

to simultaneously supplant it by ‘capturing’ the souls (‘shadows’) of those (the

‘substance’) portrayed in them.1 Despite Arago’s appeal in 1839 to daguerreotype’s

potential for contributing to science, therefore, early opponents of nineteenth century

photography would condemn it as an affront to Christian belief, or a form of magic and a

“black art” (Benjamin 1999: 508) (Mirzoeff 2003: 114)(Azoulay 2008: 158). By mid-

century, however, attempts to secularize the medium and present it as a scientific

technique under the control of the photographer, rather than that of necromancy, were

successful enough that its utilitarian potential began to be realized.

The Photographic Index

Having said that, the associations of sorcery and magic that greeted the advent of

primitive photography in the nineteenth century have not completely vanished:

1 On the one hand, Derrida describes writing as a supplement which adds to speech so as

to re-affirm the association of speech with phonic presence rather than difference: “Thesupplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest

measure of presence” (Derrida 1976: 144). Within the context of Derrida’s reading of

Rousseau’s Confessions, writing thus as supplement performs as a metonym for technè

(culture) in relation to nature: “It is thus that art, technè, image, representation,convention, etc., come as supplements to nature and are rich with this cumulating

function” (ibid.). On the other hand, the supplement (writing) threatens (speech) by

substituting in the very act of adding : “But the supplement supplements. It adds only toreplace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a

void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence”

(145).In alluding to ‘shadows’ as a supplement for ‘substance’, I am referring to the phrase

daguerreotypists used to sell their craft: “Seizing the shadow ‘ere the substance fade”

(quoted in Wright 2004: 82).

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The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which

was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the

duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being[…] will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links

the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a

carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. (Barthes1980: 81)

This famously poetic image of the almost carnal relationship between beholder and

photograph from the late twentieth century recalls and yet inverts Balzac’s notorious fear

that the daguerreoype would detach a layer of the sitter’s skin so as to capture their

likeness.2 Barthes, however, is simply expressing, albeit in slightly hyperbolic language,

the fact that the light which reflects off the photographed object is the same light captured

on the camera film (at least in pre-digital photography) and therefore that, through themediation of light, the image produced represents a material inscription of its referent.3

Despite the many years separating them, Fox Talbot and Barthes clearly had no

disagreement in this regard. This defining characteristic of the photographic image is now

more commonly understood as the indexicality or causal contiguity which guarantees the

veracity of its image of the real. In terms of C.S. Pierce’s semiotics, of course, the

photographic image is in fact both indexical and iconic: “They are iconic because they

resemble whatever was originally in front of the lens and they are indexical because it is

the physical act of light bounced off an object through the lens and on to the filmic

emulsion which leaves the trace that becomes the image” (Pinney 1997: 20).4

Portraying Social and Foreign Bodies

2 On Balzac’s superstitious response to photography, see Sontag (1977: 158-9)3 In opposition to Barthes’ (1980) focus on the indexical quality of the material

photograph, and hence, ahistorical approach, Tagg argued that: “The photograph is not amagical ‘emanation’ but a material product of a material apparatus set to work in specific

context, by specific forces, for more or less defined purposes. It requires, therefore, not

an alchemy but a history, outside which the existential essence of photography is emptyand cannot deliver what Barthes desires: the confirmation of an existence; the mark of a

past presence; the repossession of his mother’s body” (Tagg 1988: 3).4 Compare this with Rosalind Krauss’ definition of the index in 1985: “It is the order of the natural world that imprints itself on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on

the photographic print. This quality of transfer or trace gives to the photograph its

documentary status, its undeniable veracity” (quoted in Batchen 1999: 195)

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The denotative realism of photographs encouraged the blossoming of the self-

portrait, especially after the advent of the rapidly-reproduced carte de visite miniature

prints in the 1850’s, as a means to construct the subject as a ”moral self” and respectable

member of society (Jaguaribe and Lissovsky 2009: 180). While this “honorific” use of

portraiture suggested a democratization of image-making by making it available to the

burgeoning middle-classes and even working classes, it was paralleled by the

“repressive” use of photography as a means of identification and classification of the

deviant elements of that same (now visible) social body. In other words, the nineteenth

century witnessed the beginnings of the contemporary mediation of social relations

through visual technologies since the primitive camera modified “the way people are

[were] governed and the extent of their participation in the forms of governance”

(Azoulay 2008: 89). The camera appeared to promise the detection, surveillance, and

literal ‘arrest’ of criminals and social undesirables with the incorporation of “the panoptic

principle into everyday life” (Sekula 1989: 346-7). The concomitant development of

physiognomy, phrenology and, eventually, anthropometrics as an interpretative

framework for inscribing the social body, appeared to reinforce the faith in the

photograph as “an image of scientific truth” (363). Nevertheless, as both Sekula (1989)

and Pinney (1997) point out, by the end of the century, the myriad variations of facial

characteristics amongst any human population and the unpredictability of the “portraiture

event” meant that fingerprinting would replace photographic portraiture as the most

reliable indexical technique for identifying individuals unequivocally (Pinney 1997: 70).

The use of photography either as an assertion of individual subjectivity within the

social body or as a means for identifying the socially-deviant, however, might be

considered in conjunction with other contemporaneous technologies of vision or, more

specifically, what Bennett (2004 [1988]) termed “the exhibitionary complex” of the

nineteenth century episteme. Bennett argued that new forms of subjectivity were

interpellated during this period amongst the growing urban masses so as to create a body

of “observing” subjects who might interiorize the gaze of state power as a “principle of

self-surveillance and [….] self-regulation” (2004: 416). In contrast to Foucault’s

carcereal institutions of confinement, Bennett’s institutions of exhibition (museums,

dioramas and panoramas, national and international trade exhibitions, arcades,

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department stores), constituted heterotopia where desirable socio-cultural behaviors

might be internalized and citizens interpellated to conform with the normative

requirements of Victorian era nation-states (Bennett 2004: 413). Like the new

photographic technology, displays in museums proffered metonymic visions of an entire

world, ordered and classified according to strict scientific principles. The world could

thus be embodied in an array of material objects, artifacts, and images and observed in a

spectacular form. Given that this period was also the pinnacle of British imperialism in

particular, Bennett’s conception of exhibitionary culture as a site for inducing social

control must also be understood from the perspective of a metropolitan centre exercising

economic and cultural hegemony over a series of transnational networks connecting

colonies and the seats of colonial power. The Victorian “exhibitionary complex” was thus

equally predicated upon the promotion of cultural difference, but:

this was a difference within a highly normative framework in which a wholeseries of others - cast in the role of representing outmoded or degenerate habits,

custom, and traditions – defined that from which modern man (who is always not

quite modern) must distinguish himself in order to remain at the forefront of modernity’s advance. (Bennett 2006: 59)

If Bennett’s self-regulating urban masses were busy policing themselves when engaged

with display culture, the museums, universal exhibitions, fairs and even freak shows they

attended also provided the opportunity to encounter exotic artifacts, objects, art works

and even live beings from the distant colonies. On being presented with these visual

feasts of cultural difference, the metropolitan subject could also interiorize a patriotic

support for empire, absorb the ethnocentric ideology of an evolutionary racial hierarchy

and subsequently, constitute him/herself as pertaining to an advanced civilization

(Maxwell 1999: 6-7).

Visualizing the Colonies

The photographs of the exotic cultures staged in the great exhibitions formed part

of an emerging tourist industry which surpassed popular travel writing or colonial fiction

in disseminating the tropes of a savage alterity. Maxwell claims that by the 1880’s,

almost every home in the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand had a photographic

collection that included images of indigenous peoples (Maxwell 1999: 11) In effect,

photography sustained a fascination with cultural difference, but also, according to some

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critics, “a desire” to understand that same difference in terms of a racialized hierarchy

(Mirzoeff 2003: 118). According to Mirzoeff, the modern construct of ‘race’ has

traditionally depended on photography to make itself ‘visible’ and, more importantly, on

the indexicality of the photograph to confirm the physical attributes supposedly assigned

to each ‘race’ (2003: 111). Whereas in the contemporary world, the photograph

functions as a space where the viewer decides how to index the ‘race’ of the photograph’s

object (2003:111), in the nineteenth century, the indexicality of the photograph was

largely accepted as a scientific avowal of the distinctions between savage and civilized

‘races’.

In this regard, we might recall the irony of the fact that among C. S. Peirce’s own

examples of the indexical sign was a colonial image: “that footprint that Robinson Crusoe

found in the sand, and which has been stamped in the granite of fame, was an Index to

him that some creature was on his island, and at the same time, as a Symbol, called up the

idea of a man” (Peirce 1991: 252). As we have noted, by the end of the nineteenth

century, prints of fingers, feet and hands would be standard indexical techniques for

identifying individuals in the colonies and would form an integral part of anthropological

biometric method during the nineteenth century. However, when anthropology emerged

as a discipline in tandem with the development of photography during the mid to late

nineteenth century, photography was enthusiastically welcomed as potentially the most

objective means for recording scientific data. Unfortunately, the photographs taken by

early anthropologists between roughly 1850 and 1920 reflected the dominance of

theoretical paradigms informed by evolutionary theory, hierarchical racial classification

and, more generally, the power relations of nineteenth-century colonialism (Banks and

Morphy 1997: 7). In fact, in the early twentieth century, anthropological photography had

become so identified with the ideology of racialization that it would be largely abandoned

in favor of a post-evolutionary structural-functionalist paradigm with its emphatic focus

on participant-observer fieldwork and text-based ethnography (Banks and Morphy 1997:

9).

Nevertheless, for pioneering anthropologists of the nineteenth century,

photography was initially embraced as a technology that promised to surpass earlier

attempts to capture ‘scientific’ information in drawings, sketches and paintings. In

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colonial India, for example, where photography had arrived as early as 1840, just months

after its development had been announced in Europe, it was regarded as a new technique

for both understanding and registering the ‘authentic’ India by the colonial

administration. Whereas other modes of representation were thought to be inadequate for

capturing the ‘true essence’ of India, photography, precisely because of its indexicality,

was initially viewed as superior to “other more equivocal signs” and thus was granted

“such importance in the colonial imagination” (Pinney 1997: 20). Presumably, the

camera might allow the colonial administration to penetrate what they perceived as “the

symbolic vagaries of encounters with India” (21), to ‘translate’ those same encounters

into a more familiar epistemological framework and to stabilize a world of uncertain

signs by freezing them in a frame.

Pinney identifies two distinct paradigms with respect to an anthropological

photography complicit with colonial rule in nineteenth century India: the “salvage” and

the “detective” paradigms. Whereas the former was designed primarily for recording the

customs and characteristics of tribal communities thought to be on the verge of

distinction, the latter was aimed at thriving sections of Indian society and “stressed the

value of anthropological depictions and physiognomic observations as future

identificatory guides” (42). As in the metropolitan centres, the belief in the transparency

of the photographic image precipitated its employment as a new means of visual control

in the colonies. After the revolt of 1857, official uses of photography were intensified as

a means for identifying and documenting those groups which were either hostile or

acquiescent to British rule (32). While the photographing of subjects along with material

objects and costume pertaining to their regional, tribal or caste allegiance underscored the

influence of a museological discourse in totalizing ethnographic works like the eight-

volume The People of India (1868-75), it also suggested that anonymous individual

subjects (faces) might offer external signs of the essence of wider categories, groupings

and behaviours (41). By the same token, faith in the realism of the photographic image

meant that they were intended to function as forensic proof of the texts they

accompanied.

On the other hand, interestingly enough, within the “salvage” paradigm, an

aesthetic of primitivism often threatened to dislodge the official discourse of indexicality.

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An aversion to hybridity, a desire for a primitive authenticity and the concomitant denial

of coevalness (Fabian 1983) meant that, rather than capturing the complex reality of the

contemporary colonial contact zone, visions of the primitive on the verge of extinction

were staged for the anthropologist’s camera (Pinney 1997: 43). If the ‘theatricalization’

of the primitive in such instances clearly undermined the apparently scientific realism of

the photographic image, it was evidently designed to reinforce the conception of savage

societies as static and unchanging or, ultimately, as succumbing to extinction before the

inevitable advent of modernity. For, any acknowledgement of the subjects’ coevalness

would not only belie the notion that such peoples were in fact dying out, and hence,

would undermine a critical justification for the existence of the discipline, but it would

also suggest an intimacy between photographer and photographed. Intimacy and shared

temporality could not but challenge the ethnographer’s claims for objectivity (Poole

2005: 166).

The Excess of the Index

In recent years, anthropologists have placed more emphasis on the contradictions

inherent to early anthropological photography as in the case of Pinney’s salvage

paradigm with a view to re-assessing the colonial visual archive. While accepting the

traditional association of early visual anthropology with objectification, racialization and

colonial administration, attention has also been drawn to the suspicion and nervousness

underwriting much of the photography produced by anthropologists between 1850 and

1920 (Edwards 2001)(Poole 2005). In other words, instead of simply restating the

obvious and condemning the complicity between visual technology, anthropology and

colonial rule, it is now deemed more productive to emphasize the slippage inherent to

much of the early photographic archive and its practice.5 From the very beginning,

anthropologists were disturbed by the excess of ‘human’ detail captured by the camera

lens. The dialogic expression inherent to the inter-subjective photographic event, or

5 On the other hand, Poole, like Edwards (2001) before her, claims that early

anthropologists were not naïve enough to really believe in the transparency or objectivityof the photograph. In regard to the “type” photograph in particular,

anthropologist/photographers were clearly aware that their images of isolated bodies were

artificial abstractions supposedly denoting idealized racial categories. In other words ,“type” photographs were not “read by anthropologists as evidence of facts that could be

independently observed” (163). The photographs themselves were thus meant to

“constitute” the facts of anthropological theory.

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simply the beauty of the subject appeared as inconvenient ‘truths’ that disrupted the

desired clinical objectivity of even the most anthropometric poses. This was particularly

the case in those images designed to reveal ‘racial’ traits and to thus exclude all details of

gesture, expression or culture, which might, for instance, deflect attention from the

subject’s cranial structure. Perhaps the visual technology was not, after all, suitable for

the totalizing pretensions of nineteenth century anthropology (Poole 2005: 164). For,

while the photograph’s indexicality had underscored its evidentiary potential for the

discipline, in practice it also registered a surfeit of information that acknowledged the

coevalness and humanity of those depicted (ibid.). A germane example of this

phenomenon is that recently presented by Azoulay (2008) in her analysis of the portraits

taken by Joseph T. Zealey for the Harvard naturalist Dr. Louis Agassiz in 1850. Azoulay

interprets the photographic event that produced these daguerreotypes of female African-

American slaves as an opportunity for the depicted subject to transcend the “oppressive

limits” of the event and to transmit “expressions of an address extending beyond total

subjection and suspending it in order to express and utter” (2008: 184).6

These anxieties and suspicions about the reliability of the photograph would, then,

appear to suggest that the history of anthropological photography is not simply about a

‘successful’ and confident ‘fixing’ of the native subject as a racial type. Most critical

interventions over the last few years have however, according to Poole (165), focused on

such ‘fixing’ and on the construction of ‘race’ through visual technologies. Instead, Poole

suggests that we might further explore how photography also fractures ‘race’ as a visual

and conceptual fact through the excess of detail permitted by its indexical quality. Such

‘fracturing’ of archival colonial photographs can take the form of actually analyzing

precisely those multiple layers of meaning that early anthropologists struggled to contain

and to thereby “look past” the stereotypical way in which indigenous peoples were

portrayed in such images (Aird 2003: 25). In effect:

The photograph ceases to be a univocal, flat, and uncontestable indexical trace of

what was, and becomes instead a complexly textured artifact (concealing many

different depths) inviting the viewer to assume many possible differentstandpoints – both spatial and temporal – in respect to it. (Pinney 2003: 5)

6 It is beyond the scope of this paper to do justice to Azoulay’s reading of this particular

series of images, but see pp. 176-186 of her study.

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This invitation to explore alternative readings of the colonial archive constitutes a

challenge to the relationship of physical contiguity between image and referent and

hence, to the indexicality which had underwritten the truth claims of that same

photographic archive.

It is tempting to surmise that an engagement with the writings of Walter Benjamin

on photography has been influential in encouraging anthropologists to approach early

anthropological photography from such vantage points. As the opening quotation to this

paper illustrates, Benjamin’s notion of an “optical unconscious” which is activated by

photography presupposes similar opportunities for scrutiny of the hidden depths of an

indexical trace. For, paradoxically, if the capture of light on film does indeed produce an

image of what had been placed before the camera, it does so in a way that also produces a

surfeit of visual information. The camera lens does not and cannot discriminate so as to

filter out certain strands of information, but, precisely because the image produced is

indexical, it actually ensures the inclusion of an excess of detail which is vulnerable to

alternative interpretations, beyond those intended by the photographer: “However hard

the photographer tries to exclude, the camera lens always includes. The photographer can

never fully control the resulting photograph, and it is that lack of control and the resulting

excess that permits recoding, “resurfacing,” and “looking past”” (Pinney 2003: 7).

Consequently, ‘indexicality’ ceases to be a guarantee of stability, closure and identifiable

‘veracity’, and should instead be better understood as a marker of multiple signifying

surfaces and, in the case of anthropological images, of opportunities for undoing the

‘fixing’ of racialized subjects.

Of course, as Aird’s (2003) study of late nineteenth and early twentieth century

photographs (both popular and scientific) of Australian aboriginal peoples, some of the

more degrading anthropometric depictions would appear to be impossibly resistant to

alternative interpretation (Aird 2003: 28-9). However, even in the most apparently

extreme cases, Aird also found that once a photograph is reinserted into a family or

communal network, it can still be welcomed as visual evidence of a valuable

genealogical link by relatives of the subjects depicted: “I have, however, often seen

Aboriginal people look past the stereotypical way in which their relatives and ancestors

have been portrayed, because they are just happy to be able to see photographs of people

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who play a part in their family’s history” (2003: 25). “Looking past”, for Aird, does not,

then, mean to reject the indexical ‘truth’ of a portrait. On the contrary, the beholder is

adamant in accepting its documentary and evidentiary quality as a mark of the absent

loved one. However, that same beholder “looks past” the ideologically-charged framing

of the image and hence the photographer’s original intentions. Instead, in Barthian terms,

the beholder “looks past” the studium and seeks out the punctum of the photograph or an

emotional connection with the indexical trace as a stimulus to memory. It is this

relationship between memory, the index and “looking past” that I wish to explore in more

detail in the coda to this paper.

The Repatriation of the Indexical Trace

In 2001, the photographs and manuscripts department of the Pitt Rivers Museum in

Oxford began a visual repatriation project. Of the source communities chosen to receive

repatriated materials were the First Nations Kainai people or ‘Blood Tribe’ of southern

Alberta, Canada. The project to return 33 “referentially” anthropometric photographs of

the Kainai, taken by Oxford anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood in 1925, was overseen

and documented by currently-active anthropologists, Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown

(2006)(2009).7 For almost eighty years the photographs had been housed in the museum

along with accompanying captions which, even when they included the name of the

subject in question, reflected an earlier age of anthropological classification: “‘Mrs Ethel

Tail Feathers. Half Breed”; ‘Shot on Both Sides, Head Chief of the Bloods. Full Blood’”

(Peers and Brown 2009: 265). Many of the photographs are paired front and profile poses

of selected individuals, while others are designed to show ‘modern or ‘traditional’ aspects

of a Kainai culture in a period of social, cultural and economic transition. Under

governmental pressure to assimilate, they revealed details of material culture (dress,

adornment, daily activities) which Blackwood felt would capture their liminality between

indigenous and assimilated (modern) lifetstyles.

7 By “referentially anthropometric” the authors presumably mean that while the subjectsare obliged to pose in a manner that will facilitate scientific analysis and physical

measurement, no measuring rod is actually visible in the prints as was often previously

the case.

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Blackwood was especially interested in physical anthropology and hence collected

genealogies and body measurements to try to deduce how socio-economic change might

effect behaviours and physical appearance (267). In general, Blackwood’s

anthropological study itself intersected with the aims of the assimilation process, while

the style of her photographs reflected a perpetuation of colonial ideology. Having

previously worked in collaborative museum projects related to their culture, however, the

Kainai were familiar with this dehumanizing scientific discourse in which the

photographic images were framed and the original purpose of those same photographs

(ibid.). They therefore welcomed the return of the photographs and re-appropriated them

as elements of visual evidence, which until that moment had been missing from the

collective memory of a transitional period in their history.

As Peers and Brown point out, repatriation of material objects can play a crucial

role in a process of “reasserting sovereignty and strengthening cultural identity after

attempts by governments to assimilate indigenous peoples” (271). Moreover, in their

dialogues with the researchers over how the project would be conducted, the Kainai

insisted on an interpretative framework that would counter the original anthropological

discourse of the Pitt Rivers museum. Since, for instance, many of the photographs had

been intended as “types” and hence, remained largely anonymous, the Kainai emphasized

the importance of re-appropriating the images as evidence of local genealogical

knowledge by restoring the Blackfoot and English names to all the subjects photographed

(272-3). The names were crucial to indigenous constructions and uses of history since the

principal social structures through which history is experienced and then narrated are

families and clans: “In telling stories about the individuals in Blackwood’s photographs,

Kainai people recounted their community history in culturally appropriate ways with

deep ties to historic social practices” (273). The naming of photographed subjects was

hence part of a wider process of re-attaching individuals to their kin and thus of repairing

the rupture in a genealogical grid linking contemporary Kainai to their ancestors. Simply

by recounting the biographies of the individuals portrayed, they re-affirmed the

continuity of shared values, beliefs, tradition and knowledge. Similarly, individual

biographies served as ‘quotations’ which gave cohesion to a wider collective narrative

that transcended the lives of any one member of the community, and yet, in which the

15



whole community had participated (274).

Beyond their use as didactic tools for re-affirming a sense of collective identity,

copies of the photographs were made for display in family homes in such a way that an

animistic attitude towards them might be detected. Whereas to an outsider the display of

an anthropometric photograph in such a way might appear somewhat tragic, Kainai

families incorporated them alongside portraits of several generations of family members

that are generally regarded as ‘presences’ within the home (Peers and Brown 276).

Simply by being surrounded by ancestral images, it is hoped that future generations will

be aware of their roots, while “they [the portraits] are talked about as though the persons

they depict are with the speaker in the room” (ibid.). As the title of Peers and Brown’s

monograph of their project - Sinaaskssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa [paraphrased as

‘photos tell us stories or images or messages. Pictures provide us with messages; they

portray messages for us’] – demonstrates, the photographs were also fetishized in the

sense that they were regarded as media for relaying ‘messages’ from ancestors in the past

to guide life in the present. Despite being originally intended to refer to race and

acculturation within an anthropological discourse, therefore, Blackwood’s 33 prints have

come to assume a certain ‘personhood’, or at least a certain social agency approximating

that of a person, and have thus been radically transformed into indexes of historical

continuity and cultural survival.8

Peers and Brown’s observation that the repatriated photographs served as prompts

to stimulate an ancient oral tradition amongst members of the community may seem

somewhat banal given that, in all cultures around the world, photographs obviously

function as cues for the telling of family histories (276). Yet, it is worth reiterating that in

the case of the Kainai, the photographs are of individuals selected for scientific study and

biometric classification. In telling stories about the photographs and “looking past” the

8 In identifying the photographs as ‘persons’ or possessing ‘social agency’, I am also

thinking of the artwork as ‘index’ in the sense posited by Gell: “works of art, images,

icons, and the like have to be treated, in the context of an anthropological theory, as person-like; that is, sources of, and targets for, social agency. In this context, image-

worship has a central place, since nowhere are images more obviously treated as human

persons than in the context of worship and ceremonies” (1998: 96). When the artwork isthus viewed as an index, it can simultaneously be viewed as invested with agency or as

mediating agency between persons and objects within its environment of influence.

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primary intentionality behind them, the Kainai cannot, then, but also attribute a wider

significance to each photograph of each individual. For, despite “looking past”, the

anthropological framing remains, on some level, a reminder of a colonial past affecting

the whole community, while the return of the photographs serves to symbolize a re-

possession of a history that had been lost to them precisely because of the impact of

colonialism. In that sense, apart from the indexical trace of the persons imprinted on each

photograph, perhaps the photo-object itself serves as a material relic of the continuity

between the past and present of the community. Simply having the photographs returned

to them by the museum, then, symbolizes the restitution of a lost history in a material,

embodied form.

Bearing this premise in mind, we might ponder the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s

later writings on the relationship between memory, experience and photography.9

Benjamin had seemingly agreed with Proust’s disparaging association of photography

with the mémoire volontaire or an archival, intellectual memory severed from the depths

of collective experience ( Erfahrung ), and serving primarily as a psychic defense to the

senses form the “shocks and collisions” endured everyday in the mechanized urban

centres of modern mass culture. In contrast, Benjamin favored the mémoire involontaire,

the ‘true’ emotional memory connecting individuals unconsciously to the wellspring of a

shared tradition, which could only be stirred by a chance encounter with an auratically-

charged material object.10 Is it possible that if we regard the Kainai’s historical

photographs as photo-objects as well as indexical images, they can also assume the form

of ‘sacred’ objects linking past to present? The ability to view such anthropometric

9 Where Benjamin embarks upon a critique of photography as a dehumanizing threat to

inter-subjective relations is in his late On Some Motifs in Baudelaire essay (1939).

Whether he was in large part projecting the negative views of his literary mentors, Proust

and Baudelaire, towards visual technology or not, there is no question that Benjamin presents a view of the relationship between visual technologies and modern life, which

appears to diverge from that presented in Little History of Photography (1931) and The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).10 “Therefore Proust, summing up, says that the past is “somewhere beyond the reach of

the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object (or in the sensation which

such an object arouses in us), though we have no idea which one it is. As for the object, itdepends entirely on chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never

encounter it” (Benjamin 1985: 158).

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photographs ‘auratically’ would thus be tantamount to opposing magic to science.

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