ISSN 1472–586X print/ISSN 1472–5878 online/02/010067–09 © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/14725860220137336

Visual Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2002

Material beings: objecthood and ethnographic photographs

ELIZABETH EDWARDS*

This paper argues that the material and presenta-tional forms of photographs are central to theirmeaning as images. Drawing on work from theanthropology of material culture, it explores thesignificance of the materiality of ethnographic photo-graphs as socially salient objects. The argumentsuggests that, while the analytical focus has been onthe semiotic and iconographical in the representationof race and culture, material forms of images areintegral to this discourse.

INTRODUCTIONVisual Studies have always, as is reasonable and asthe name suggests, had the visual as both the definingobject of study and the defining methodology.However, the purpose of this paper is to suggest thatthe visual does not stand alone, especially in relationto historical still photographs. Photographs are bothimages and physical objects which exist in time andspace and thus in social and cultural experience. Theyhave “volume, opacity, tactility and a physical pres-ence in the world” (Batchen 1997:2) enmeshed withsubjective, embodied and sensuous interactions withthem. Writing on photography for many decades hasresonated with the photograph as object, especially inrelation to the “fine print” on one hand and conserva-tion concerns on the other. Despite the clearrealization of this physical presence, the way in whichmaterial and presentational forms of historical photo-graphs project the image into the viewer’s space isoverlooked in many analyses of historical images orcritiques of “the archive”, whatever their nature. Thetransparency of the medium is such that “in order tosee what the photograph is ‘of’ we must first suppressour consciousness of what the photograph ‘is’ inmaterial terms” (Batchen 1997:2) – in such analysesphotographs become detached from physical natureand consequently the functional context of a materi-ality that is merely glossed as a neutral support forimages rather than being integral to the constructionof meaning.

Patrick Maynard, one of the few critics to haveengaged in an extended fashion with the “thingness”of photographs, as sets of marks on a surface, argues

the resulting limitations: “Perhaps what has … mostobdurately stood in the way of our understanding ofphotography is the assumption that photography isessentially a depictive device and that its other usesare marginal” (Maynard 1977:24).1 Therefore, as aheuristic device, I shall argue that there is a need tobreak, conceptually, the dominance of image contentand look at the physical attributes of the photographwhich mould content in the arrangement and projec-tion of visual information. My argument is notintended to attempt the impossible – to divorce themateriality of the photographic image from the imageitself. Just as Barthes argues that the image andreferent are laminated together, two leaves that cannotbe separated – landscape and the window pane(Barthes 1982:6) – photographs have inextricablylinked meanings as images and meanings as objects;an indissoluble, yet ambiguous, melding of image andform, both of which are direct products of intention. Ishall shift the methodological focus away fromcontent alone, arguing that it is not merely the imagequa image that is the site of meaning, but that itsmaterial forms, enhanced by its presentational forms,are central to the function of photographs as sociallysalient objects and that these material forms exist indialogue with the image itself to make meaning.2

Thus our understanding of photographic repre-sentations is not merely a question of visualrecognition or semiotic but that visual experiences aremediated through the material nature and materialperformances in the formats and presentations ofvisual images.3 Photography is not merely the instru-ment of indexical inscription, it is a technology forvisual display experienced as meaningful. Materialitytranslates the abstract and representational of“photography” into “photographs” which exist in timeand space. As Porto has argued, we should think interms of representational, imprinted objects ratherthan an imprinted representation. The possibility ofthinking about ethnographic photographs rests on theelemental fact that they are things – “they are made,used, kept, and stored for specific reasons which donot necessarily co-incide … they can be transported,relocated, dispersed or damaged, torn and cropped

*Elizabeth Edwards curates photographs at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford and teaches in visual anthropology and museum studies. Shehas written extensively on the relationship between anthropology, photography and history. Her most recent book is Raw Histories (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

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and because viewing implies one or several physicalinteractions” (2001:38). These material characteris-tics have a profound impact on the way images are“read”, as different material forms both signal andenforce different expectations and use patterns.

As I shall maintain throughout this paper, experi-ence of the image component alone is not to beconfounded with the experience of the meaningfulobject (Gaskell 2000:176), just as experience of thematerial cannot be confounded with or reduced toexperience of the image. For instance, the experienceof looking at an historical image on a computer screenis profoundly different in the understandings it mightgenerate from the experience of, say, looking at thesame image as an albumen print pasted in an album ora modern copy print in a file. I shall draw on workfrom both photography and the anthropology of mate-rial culture. Indeed in many ways there aresimilarities between both material culture studies andvisual studies in that they do not necessarily respectdisciplinary boundaries and secondly the “grammar”of both image and things is equally complex. Whileclearly my argument could take a number of theoret-ical turns, for instance, in a phenomenologicaldirection, I want to keep the theoretical close to theground and consider the materiality of specific formsof kinds of objects, ethnographic photographs, ratherthan develop a theorized vision which might simplyreproduce an abstract photographic discourse. Theclose-up view allows us to grasp what might alludethe broader view, while, at the same time, detailedempirical studies can advance theoretical understand-ings (Ginzburg 1993).

Finally, considering the ethnographic photographas material culture might point to new understandingsin an area of study in which the semiotic and the ideo-logical instrumentality of such imagery has been anespecially strong analytical focus. The colonial andanthropological archive has been a privileged site ofcritique in post-colonial and post-modern analysis.4

Yet “the archive” is not homogenous in either itsstyles or its forms. Further, the way in which imageswere absorbed into anthropology and described as“ethnographic” or “scientific” reveals the archive as amaterial object it its own right. While saturated withsocial, economic and political discourses, the archiveas a material object projects images to the viewer incertain ways. Consequently, I want to explore thepotential of material culture approaches to a body ofmaterial which in some ways has become analyticallyentrenched, dominated by the semiotics of image andreified notions of “archive”.

MATERIAL MATTERSMateriality, as I am using it here, takes two broad andinterrelated forms. First, it is the plasticity of the

image itself, the paper it is printed on, the toning, theresulting surface effects. Such technical and physicalchoices in making photographs are seldom randomeven if they are not fully articulated. For instance, asSchwartz has argued, “…the choice of ambrotypeover paper print implies a desire for uniqueness, theuse of platinum over silver gelatin intimates anawareness of status; the use of gold toning a desire forpermanence” (1995:58). Second are the presentationalforms – carte de visite, cabinet cards, albums, mountsand frames – with which photographs are inseparablyenmeshed. Both these forms of materiality carryanother: the physical traces of usage and time.

Materiality is closely related to social biography.This view argues that an object cannot be fully under-stood at any single point in its existence but rathershould be understood as belonging in a continuingprocess of meaning, production, exchange and usage.As such, objects are enmeshed in, and active in, socialrelations, not merely passive entities in these proc-esses.5 Resonating throughout this paper are twoforms of social biography, relating to the forms ofmateriality I have just outlined. First is the socialbiography of image content, such as different prints,publication formats, lantern slides and so forth, all ofwhich involve changes of material form. Second isthe social biography of a specific photographic objectwhich may or may not be physically modified as itmoves through space and time.

Throughout the history of photography the visualproperties of the surface of the image have dependedon the material. They have exceeded the direct index-ical visual use, and created, literally andmetaphorically, another dimension to the image. Thearrival of new photographic techniques, formats andmaterial forms demanded different poses anddifferent spatial arrangements, both within the frameand, importantly, in the act of viewing the materialobject. For the objecthood of photographs isconfirmed by the act of viewing, the eye as a bodilyorgan functions within a larger somatic context. Thisimplies specific relations with an embodied viewerand thus viewers’ responses to photographs.6 Materialforms create very different embodied experiences ofimages and very different affective tones or theatresof consumption. For instance, framing devices distin-guish relations between photographic space and theviewer’s space, some, like the photographic frame,accentuating the space; other forms, like a stereo-graphic card in a viewer, elide them.

Thus choices matters. Choices are affective deci-sions which construct and respond to the significancesand consequences of things and the human relationswith which they are associated. In this contextBourdieu’s concept of “habitus” is useful for it allowsindividual discretionary action within a structured setof dynamic dispostions (Bourdieu 1977:81). It not

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only suggests a framework for the fluidity of of mate-rial choices but also helps avoid the over-determinismwhich has characterized many analyses of ethno-graphic photography and “the archive”. It is, Millerargues, often when objects are assumed trivial and notto matter that they are most powerful and effective associal forces. However, it is only in relation to materi-ality that we can address the actual contexts in whichobjects are made to mean. “Through dwelling uponthe more mundane sensual and material qualities ofthe object, we are able to unpack the more subtleconnotations with cultural lives and values that areobjectified through these forms, in part because of thequalities they possess” (Miller 1998:9–12). Even themost pragmatically engendered materialities, such asphotograph frames and albums, come to havemeaning through the habitual reiterations of engage-ment with them (Pellegram 1998:109). While suchchoices, however, cannot be reduced to a singlepurposeful expression, they are redolent, latent andincidental meanings, forming bridges between mentaland physical worlds, conscious and unconscious(Miller 1987:99).

In a brief overview one can only summarize thevarious influential theories of material culture, manyof which have also resonated through writing onphotography. Many Marxist-derived critiques ofmaterial culture, and of photographs, have beencouched in terms of the modes of production, thealienating qualities of the mass-produced object or theideological instrumentality of photographs, objectsfetishized and embedded in the superstructural. At thesame time the semiotic turn has subordinated theobject qualities and privileged representational. Herethe influence of theorists such as Saussure has posi-tioned photographs in relation to quasi-linguisticforms, with debates over the sign, symbol and degreesof iconicity. While these debates are key to thinkingabout photographs, they tend to reduce photographsto passive vehicles of meaning at an abstract level.Yet the translation of abstract photography intophotographs is a fundamentally material processmanifested through specific objects which have phys-ical and concrete presence outside an individual’smental image and usage of it. This process has had aghostly presence in some influential work. Forinstance, Tagg, writing of the photography of slumclearance in Leeds, points to the material forms –“The albums were in the room. They passed fromhand to hand” – but he does not use the performativequalities of those photographs as active participants inthe discourse (1988:145). Likewise Sekula, indiscussing the formation of “the archive”, states: “thecentral artifact of this system is not the camera but thefiling cabinet … In structural terms, the archive isboth an abstract paradigmatic entity and a concreteinstitution” (1989:353). The “archive” in Sekula’s

model is depended not only on the repetition of styleand iconographical form but on the affective tone ofsystematic material presentation, premised on mate-rial proximity.

The “material turn” in anthropology in recentyears has stressed increasingly the centrality andcomplexity of social meaning in relation to materialobjects. It is concentrated on their mundane socialexistence rather than on a fetished object-other(Miller 1987:3–5, 10). Miller, drawing on Langer’swork on discursive and presentational forms, hasargued for discussions of artifacts to be explicitlyseparated from linguistics models which he sees astoo clumsy and restrictive. Rather material cultureanalysis, proceeding from an anthropological positionof direct observation, allows us to question ingrainedassumptions concerning the superiority of languageover other forms of expression such as visual andmaterial forms, and constitute the objects as importantbridges between mental and physical worlds (Miller1987:96–99). Recent developments in visual anthro-pology, as identified by Banks and Morphy, alsopoint in this direction, arguing that there is a sharedmethodology and theoretical framework betweenvisual recording, its analysis and material culture,both being concerned with material visual phenomenaand social action (Banks and Morphy 1997:14).Objects, consequently, are not just stage settings forhuman actions and meanings but are integral to them.Indeed Gell has argued that objects themselves can beseen as social actors, in that they construct and influ-ence the field of social action in ways which wouldnot have occurred if they did not exist or, in the caseof photographs, if they did not exist in this specificformat. This allows for a theory of objects whichallows us to think about how new forms of objectsand new sets of social relations are linked (Gell 1998;Gosden and Knowles 2001:17–19).

The interrelated concerns of the material andthose of social biography have been convincinglyargued by Deborah Poole as a “visual economy”. Thismodel moves analysis of photographs beyond “repre-sentations” to focus instead on the image’s “exchangevalues” and its performative possibilities at a givenhistorical moment. It extends Tagg’s model of“currency of photography” in which “…items [were]produced by a certain elaborate mode of productionand distributed, circulated and consumed within agiven set of social relations: pieces of paper thatchange hands, found a use, a meaning and a value, incertain social rituals” (1988:164). As Poole argues, itis important to give equal weight to representationalcontent and to the use value and material formsthrough which groups of images were exchanged,accumulated and thus given social value. Value is notrestricted to image value but is integrally related to

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the power of such images accumulated as objects(Poole 1997:11–12).

While the political functions which have definedthe analytical concerns of broadly Foucaultian orpost-structuralist work remain, Poole’s model allowsus to modify and refine this view by asking a verydifferent set of questions. The significance of materialform, the very physicality of photographs, is one ofthose questions. Such questions also allow us toconsider differently the performative, phenomenolog-ical and experiential qualities of photographs andtheir social biography as socially salient objectsmoving through space and time. Materiality mediatesother aspects of a visual economy which allows us tothink not only of ethnographic photographs as definedby content but, also, the social and material mecha-nisms through which they become ethnographic.

The forms in which images are displayed andused follows their function in a discourse of culturallycircumscribed appropriateness. This cultural expect-ancy engages photographs in the most profounddiscourses of form, aesthetics, science, social distinc-tion and appropriateness of form (Miller 1987:8). Formaterial culture and social biography require anethnography of photographic practice itself. How arephotographs are actually used as objects in socialspace? How are they acquired and accumulated? Bywhom? How are they displayed? Where? To whom?Which remain in small private worlds intentionallyhidden? How do these link with the performativematerial culture with which the photographs arelinked such as frames and albums? If objects serve “toexpress dynamic processes within people, amongpeople and between people and the total environ-ment” then the production, accumulation and socialrelations of ethnographic photographs as objects isopen to such analysis (Csikszentmihalyi and Roch-berg-Holton 1981:43).

As in other classes of photographs, these proc-esses of material dynamics in ethnographicphotographs lead to increasing integration on onehand or an increasingly specific differentiation on theother. These in their turn are inflected through thesocial biography of photographic objects. One mightcharacterize anthropology in the nineteenth century asa period of integration when, through a privileging ofcontent, photographs from many sources in manymaterial forms became “ethnographic” through theact of consumption within emerging yet specificdisciplinary paradigms. On the other hand, increasingdifferentiation of images of scientific intention isfound with the emergence of a proto-modern anthro-pology around 1900. The technical possibilities of thesmall quarter plate contact print with no dark roommanipulation beyond what was need to achieve atonally balanced print, which was produced byanthropologists such as Haddon or Spencer, provide

the material expression of the truth values of directfield observation. In other cases scientific photog-raphy required a print form adequate to theperformance of precise visual information, namely aclean sharp paper as opposed to a textured paper – thedesire for legibility being materially expressed. Whatis important is the way in which intellectual shifts aremirrored in material changes, in a way which cannotnecessarily be reduced to a crude technical deter-minism. These examples suggest that cultural notionsof photographic styles and object forms appropriate tothe expected performance of photography in a givencontext operated within anthropology as much as inwider photographic practice.

SOME OBJECTS OF ETHNOGRAPHYWhile the arguments outlined above are applicable toa wide range of historical photographs and their pres-entational forms, I am going to consider now thismateriality specifically in relation to some ethno-graphic photographs. I am using this term toencompass both photographs made and circulatedwith ethnographic intention from the moment ofinscription and those which, in the nineteenth centuryespecially, became absorbed into anthropologicalspaces of consumption. The analytical focus on repre-sentation of race and culture has concentrated on thedeconstruction of the image on iconographical, semi-otic and instrumental axes, largely within theparadigms of the colonial gaze. However, followingthe position outlined above, considering the materi-ality of ethnographic photographs and the latentmeanings in those forms might suggest more nuancedand differentiated readings of “the archive”, in turnallowing for a more thorough excavation of their fullsocial, cultural and historical significance.

In this particular excavation I shall start bydiscussing whole collections and then move towardsspecific photographic objects. First are two exampleswhich demonstrate the way in which the filing cabinetand the plasticity of the photographic object cometogether as material forms central to making theimage-bearing surface of photographs more visible asscientific anthropology.

Between 1935 and 1940, the Cambridge Univer-sity Museum of Archaeology and Anthropologyundertook a project which materially transformed itsphotographs (Boast et al. 2001:3). The museum hadcollected photographs from its foundation in 1884.Like so many anthropological “archives” this was notso much a systematic development of the “thesaurusof culture” and undifferentiated appropriative desireas a serendipitous accumulation of images from trav-ellers, scientists, explorers and missionaries forinstance, transformed into a collection through the“visual economy” in which the photographs operated.

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This intellectual coherence was articulated throughseveral thousand photographs which were eithercopied or had prints made from original negatives.These prints were mounted on 20.5 cm ´ 25.5 cmgrey cards and numbered, with area divisions, on thetop left-hand corner in black ink. None wascaptioned, the captions are filed separately typed on7.5 cm ́ 12.5 cm cards.

This new object had little relation to the originalbeyond content. The coherence and equivalence ofthe photographs was created through copying,printing and mounting them identically. While thereis some variation to accommodate substantial sizedifferences between original images, many arehomogenized. The standardized surfaces of the photo-graphs and the unifying tonal range of the black andwhite glossy silver prints suggest uniformity, compa-rability – a mechanically controlled rather thanmediated inscription. This reinforces the taxonomicreadings of the images, creating a cohesive anthropo-logical object rather than a series of images with theirown semiotic energies. At the same time theembodied relation between the viewer and the imagesshifted. Instead of sitting with small loose prints theresearcher stood at the large, specially designedwooden cabinets and flicked through series of iden-tical objects. The archive effect is achieved onlythrough the creation of a new material object.

A similar material rhetoric of image presentationcan be found in the Photothéque at Musée del’Homme in Paris, cohering an accumulation into asystematized archive. On the founding of Musée del’Homme in 1938, material collected since the 1850sthrough various bodies with anthropological interests,such as Muséum d’histoire naturelle and Le Labora-toire d’Anthropologie, was brought together andsystematized. In this case, original historical photo-graphs or those printed from original negativesespecially for the project were used (Barthe 2000:73).While it lacks the surface unity of the Cambridgeproject, the presentational forms create a juxtaposi-tion and seriality which constructs atemporalanthropological object, suppressing the historicity ofeach photograph. Each photographic print wasmounted on a 22.5 cm ´ 29.5 cm grey board withspace for basic content captioning and classification.As at Cambridge this mount was not to enhance thephotograph, but to support it, creating an object whichcould be manipulated to create individual scientificnarratives, yet maintain visual comparability. Further,the mounts were colour-coded, signifying continentor region. The colours chosen have a mnemonicquality, reflecting the racial classification of theperiod: there was a black tab for Africa, yellow forAsia, blue for the Pacific, red for South America, pinkfor North America, and oddly green for Europe. Therewere also some combination colour classifications,

for instance the Arctic was represented by pink andyellow (Barthe 2000:77–78). The regularity of thephysical arrangement of image, text and object unifythe collection. Like the Cambridge project, individualauthorship of the images is suppressed through pres-entational form to create an anthropological narrative.It is significant that this control of material disorderand the systematization of photographs occurred at amoment when photography was moving from thepublic spaces of a centralized resource to the privatespaces of individual fieldwork.7 Both these casescreated an equivalence between images, forming anarrative through material translations, spatial render-ings and shifts in somatic relations with thephotographs. It is the material object which sets scien-tific parameters on a wide range of photographicmaterial and which thus demands the preferredreading of the photographs.

This is equally clearly articulated in relation toalbums where the material form dictates both thenarrative and the embodied relationship with thephotographs. As Poole has argued, photographsformed their “own sets of objects separate and distinctfrom the objects they portrayed” (1997:115). Materialforms literally created the object of study through thegrids of rows and columns to which the formats ofphotographs lent themselves. The grid echoed thearrangement of objects in scientific engravings andthe seriality of the file, all mounted in the same waycreating the cohesion of the visual collection. Thelarge loose-leaf portfolios of the Anthropologisch-Ethnologisches Album in Photographien, producedby Hamburg photographer Carl Dammann inconjunction with the Berliner Gesellschaft forAnthropologie between 1873 and 1874, gatheredcarte de visite and cabinet format photographs into aracial taxonomy (Theye 1994/5). Similarly, theBritish Association for the Advancement of Scienceracial survey of the British Isles developed a compar-ative rhetoric through the juxtaposition of materiallysimilar images (Poignant 1992:58–59). Their equiva-lence of format was integral to production ofethnographic “types” and the preferred racializedreading of the images. Indeed, arguably the rhetoricsof equivalence were as much a result of the photo-graphic formats of the mass-produced carte de visiteand the spatial dynamics of that format (whichproduced certain forms of poses made with certaintypes of camera), as it was to the intellectual construc-tion of representations of the racialized other (Poole1997:11).

The creation of scientific material forms, such asthe grid, are both constituting and constitutive of theintellectual spaces in which images were expected toperform. This can be used as a register against whichto measure the making of the anthropological object.For instance, the personal fieldwork album of

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Diamond Jenness who worked in Massim, NewGuinea between 1911 and 1912, measures thedistance between the personal and scientific renderingof anthropological experience. While the albumpresents a formal grid of nine images to a page,arranged in a narrative of functional sequences, fromviews and “types” to funerals, it is neverthelessinflected with the individual, both anthropologist andislander. The scientific series, on the other hand, ismore distanced in its captioning and homogenizing inits registry order, reproducing “type” behavioursrather than individuated moments. In the album wesense the private response as opposed to the scientificresponse and the relationship between the two.8

However, looking at albums was also a social act.The nature of an album dictated, to a degree, the kindof images within it, the social relations of viewing andthe appropriateness of format for the intended readingof the photographs in the album. For instance, largeprints require large albums with heavy mounting cardand substantial bindings, objects designed to performimages in the public space. To be “read” they have tobe supported on a table or suchlike. Viewing them is amarkedly different experience from the small albumsfor carte de visite or single small images which caneasily be viewed held in the hand or laid on a knee.They are designed for more individual or restrictedviewing. Hence one can argue that the difference inthe material forms of the Dammann albums reflectnot only differently focused objects but differentexperiences of viewing. The large portfolios of theGerman edition invited a distanced viewing, a displayof comparative taxonomy, whereas the popularEnglish version domesticated the scientific consump-tion of images in the size and format of theirpresentational form – a green embossed buckramalbum with gilt-edged papers.9

The material forms of photographs also refer toother object forms, with a dual function; first, to rein-force what is present in the photographs as imagesand second to refer beyond the object and the imagein a mutually reinforcing sign system. Many colonialethnographic albums and their decoration literally setthe scene for the photographs. For instance, an albumfrom Dutch East Indies, dating from c.1890–1900,has a wooden cover and a half-leather binding whichis shaped and painted in imitation of local rice-barndecoration. This underlines the “ethnographicness” ofthe images within the album and coheres the complexintersecting ethnographic and exotic discoursesaround them.10 Other such albums use local craftsstyle and materials, from silverwork to ikat to performthe images they encapsulate, focusing their semioticenergy towards preferred readings of the images as anessential South-East Asia.

Likewise, commercially produced nineteenth-century albums from Japan, such as those sold to visi-

tors in their hundreds by Farsari of Yokohama,combine material and visual signifiers. The artifactualextension reinforces the Japanese, enhancing exoticexperience (Odo 1997). In one such example, photo-graphs are mounted one to a page in a large lacqueredalbum inlaid with mother of pearl. This object in turnis kept in a padded printed cotton box, closed withtraditional Japanese silk and bone toggles. Many ofthe albumen prints were hand-tinted, a surface inter-vention shifting the reality-effect of the photographsbut one which, in its link to Japanese watercolourpainting, also signifies Japan. Unpacking the boxsuggests not only the resonances of the exotic experi-ence,11 but reinforces the readings of the imagesthrough these inflections. Like the South-East Asianalbum, it was made specifically for the display ofphotographs. The extended wrapping of the surface ofthe image sets up the cognitive approaches to thatimage. Display functions not only to make the thingitself visible but to make it more visible in certainways to function as statements of both locality andalterity (Maynard 1997:31–32).

If intellectual anthropological ideas and the mate-rial forms of photographs existed in a symbioticrelationship, the corollary is that it is possible to gainsome understanding of the intellectual processes ofanthropology through a consideration of the materialforms of photographs. This is demonstrated throughaspects of the photographs of the Torres Strait Expe-dition of 1898. As I have discussed elsewhere(Edwards 1998), visuality was key to the Expedition’sagendas. What concerns the argument here is the wayin which materiality reveals the intensity of anthropo-logical visual intention. Expedition accounts showthat many more quarter plate than half plate negativeswere purchased.12 A sizable proportion of the latterwere used to record sites of major ritual significance(which the Expedition anthropologists saw as the keyto traditional Torres Strait society). These photo-graphs duplicated the quarter plate images. Thetechnological choice of a larger half plate with, in thiscase, slower emulsion and linked with a short focallength, allowed a finer inscription on the photo-graphic plate, detailed in every nuance of texture andshading which the orthochromatic plates of the timewould allow. The choice of the half plates, it can beargued, reflects the importance and intensity withwhich the Expedition viewed sites of ritual and myth-ical significance, reproducing intellectual desiresmaterially through the choices of photographic tech-nology; they are very literally things that “matter”.

Single images without the performative base ofeither the collection or the album can still be redolentwith material significance. Material marking of thephotographic object is always integral to the materialevidence of the photograph, representing the marks ofhuman interaction with the object, and the actions of

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agencies on the surface of the image through use(Maynard 1997:25). Viewed as socially functioningobjects, the scars on photographic objects are testi-mony to their historicity and social biography. Thedog-eared album, the photograph with surface inter-ventions, lost corners where images have been rippedfrom albums, photographs cut in pieces, scratches,missing emulsions, photographs marked up for publi-cation, with cropping marks in blue pencil,annotations, stamps and labels on the back piling up:these material accretions present an archaeology ofuse and point to shifting perceptions of the imagesand their performance within an anthropologicaldiscourse. For instance, Cambridge anthropologist A.C. Haddon used photographs to trace off specificcultural objects represented in photographs (tracingthe trace): he overpainted photographs with colour,cut them up, or pasted them together in differentconfigurations. This was more than merely looking atphotographs, but a making of anthropologicalmeaning through surface interventions on the image(Edwards 2001:56–57). Similarly, although lessdramatic, are the cropping marks on photographicprints. Through such interventions with the surface ofthe image one sees, for instance, Evans-Pritchardconstructing his visualization of the Nuer for some ofthe most influential ethnographies ever produced.13

As these examples suggest in merging materiality andsocial biography, we see photographs as activeobjects in the making of anthropological meaningthrough the material interventions made to them –wilful marks pushing images towards a differentsignificance through those interventions (Maynard1997:31).

Material form gives access to the social biog-raphy of the photograph in a way that can revealpossible readings of individual images as well as indi-cating shifts in use from the “popular” to “scientific”image.14 Thomas’ argument in relation to otherclasses of objects can be equally applied to photo-graphs as objects: “As socially and culturally saliententities, objects change in defiance of their materialstability. The category to which a thing belongs, theemotion and judgement it prompts, and the narrativeit recalls, are all historically refigured … Somethingwhich effaces the intentions of the things’ producers”(Thomas 1991:121). In the Pitt Rivers Museumcollection there are two apparently identical photo-graphs entitled “Apache Bathers” showing a group ofNative American Apache men and women waist deepin a pool.15 However, the square format albumenprints (8.3 cm ´ 8.3 cm) and the very slightlydifferent camera lens angle reveal the photographs tohave been originally one object – a stereographic pair.The photograph(s) had been taken with the specificintention that it was viewed in a certain way – througha hand-held stereoveiwer. This places the isolated

viewer within the stereo’s enclosing completeness,unaware of the surface and edges of the print.However at some time, probably the late 1880s, thestereo pair were soaked off their mount and separatedout to be viewed as single images within an anthropo-logical discourse. One image was owned by E. B.Tylor, the distinguished nineteenth-century culturalanthropologist and the other by his close colleague,Oxford biologist, H. Moseley. The change in materialform not only changes the affective tone of viewingfrom the encompassing stereo to the consciousness ofthe pictorial edges and image surface of the photo-graphic print, it allowed different possibilities toemerge from the original object as the single imagesmoved into different interpretative spaces. Enteringthe museum collection they continued to be seen assingle images, each resonating differently with thephotographs with which they were juxtaposedthrough mounting on card. The shifting material formof a single object, its division and then partialreunion, can therefore be read as an archaeology ofshifting perception and social saliency of thephotograph.

Inadvertent marks to the object can be equallycompelling, for the study of physical traces on photo-graphs suggest their relation to other senses. Thetactile qualities of the image leave their trace in themarks of handling. For example, a photograph of aZulu woman is known to have been owned by asoldier in the South African wars of the late nine-teenth century.16 The print is severely worn, it hasfinger marks on the surface of the image and on thepaper of the reverse, a much worn fold mark, tearsdown the edges and dog-eared corners. One has avery strong sense of the embodiment of the colonialgaze, of an image actually being handled – touchedexamined, put away, brought out. While such projec-tions must, of course, remain conjecture, the physicaltraces on an image nonetheless testify to its activerole in social experience.

However, the same image, produced in differentways, can have very different affective tone,demanding subtly different readings. An example is aportrait of a young Samoan woman which wasproduced simultaneously as both albumen print andplatinum print by Apia-based photographer ThomasAndrew in the 1890s.17 The differences in tonal rangeand print texture of the two objects invite verydifferent responses from the viewer. Platinum not onlysuggests a desire for permanence but the exploitationof its much-admired velvet tones permeating thesurface of the paper signifying an element of precious-ness, transforming the representation of the subject. Itis the more commonplace and cheaper albumen printwhich appears in most ethnographic collections.Possibly the slightly harder-edged clarity of albumenwas a more appropriate material for the scientific

74 E. Edwards

function when compared with the softer grey tonesand the texture of the image permeating the paperfibres in the platinum print. One does not wish toover-read this, but the fact that Andrew was producingthe image simultaneously in two very differentprinting papers suggests that they were aestheticallyand informationally differentiated at the time ofproduction.

Such images, despite their commercial origin,were collected by nineteenth-century anthropologists.However, they were seldom arranged in albums.Rather as collected, such photographs were looseprints or single images on mounts. This suggests theneed for photographs to operate within multiple narra-tives – series created and refiguration according to theinterpretative demands upon them. Such images couldeasily be realigned in different narratives, passedaround the classroom, lent to friends and colleagues.In this context carte de visite become very differentobjects from, for instance, those in the DammannAlbum discussed above, they dictate the embodiedrelations of viewing and create different forms ofappropriative and miniaturizing action through theirmaterial forms. For instance, a series of hand-tintedcartes of Sami people collected by archaeologistArthur Evans in 1873 were stored in small leathercases (rather like a cigarette packets). In this highlyportable presentational form they become privateimages, to be brought out and handled, demanding adifferent set of relations with the viewer. Indeed, ingeneral one might argue that the material forms ofphotographs also played a significant role in thescientific sociability and the establishment of an inter-pretative community in proto-modern anthropology,as the availability of cheap prints and, later, the easeof making small effectively disposable images, meantthat there was a massive flow of images amongstanthropologists (Edwards 2001:27–50). Such photo-graphs functioned not merely as images but objectsthat entered the realms of reciprocity and exchange asmarkers of social relations of the material world. Inmany ways the Cambridge and Paris projects wereresponses to this unstructured “archive” as it becamereproduced at institution level through accumulation.

CONCLUSIONThere are many ways in which the idea of photo-graphs as material culture might be developed –phenomenologically, through enhanced readings ofthe subjecthood of the viewer, studies of consump-tion, history of collecting and so forth. The intentionof this paper is to outline possible material cultureapproaches and their potential for re-engaging with“the archive”. Maynard has argued that other theoriesof photography and vision have failed to provide aframework for understanding this crucial and central

technology and imaging system. Contrasting thematerial surface and “marking technology” with moreusual approaches, for instance communication, infor-mation, instrumentality, can open new questions andunderstandings (Maynard 1997:55). It allows lookingat and using images, as socially salient objects, to beactive and reciprocal rather than simply implicationsof authority, control and passive consumption. Theymay be these things too, and the examples I have usedundoubtedly function in this way at an importantlevel, but they cannot be reduced unproblematicallyto them. The material social lives of photographicobjects, the restoration of materiality to the archive,forestall such a reduction.

With material culture a central analyticalapproach, we can start to see the precise formation ofthe colonial archive, the precise relation betweentechnology, format and representation, and the way inwhich there was an interplay between anthropologicalideas and the material forms of photographs. Theacknowledgement of the material force of historicalphotographs in anthropology and beyond is an inte-gral part of their historicity and of major importancefor our understanding of them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI should like to thank Jeremy Coote, Chris Gosden,Clare Harris and Janice Hart for the discussion onmaterial culture and photography, and SudeshnaGuha and Christine Barthe for answering my queriesso patiently.

NOTES

[1] Many of the ideas of this important study, especially fromChapter 2, saturate this paper. Their full exploration in rela-tion to ethnographic photographs will have to wait foranother time.

[2] These issues will be explored at length in Edwards and Hart(forthcoming).

[3] Indeed one of the challenges of the digital world is the verylack of materiality in photographs. Light is transformed notinto a photographic negative but a series of invisible elec-tronic pulses. Further digitalization is seen as the cure-allpanacea to photographic collections, especially those thatfall outside the cultural categories of “fine art”, but the wayin which it creates an entirely new visual object is seen asunproblematic.

[4] See, for instance, Lalvani (1996), McQuire (1998), Green(1984, 1985), Richards (1993) and Ryan (1997).

[5] See Appadurai (1986), Edwards (2001:13–16) and Gosdenand Marshall (1999).

[6] While concepts of embodied subjecthood, perhaps in aLacanian model, are clearly part of this argument, they arebeyond the scope of this paper.

[7] A not dissimilar project systematizing photographs was alsoundertaken by Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford in1930–1931.

[8] I have considered this collection in detail elsewhere(Edwards 2001:83–105).

[9] Pitt Rivers Museum, Album 60.

Material beings 75

[10] Tropen Museum, Amsterdam, Album 282.[11] This analysis could be extended through the consideration

of wrapping and unwrapping in relation to Japanese culture(see Hendry 1993).

[12] Invoices show sixty dozen quarter plates and eighteen dozenhalf plates (Cambridge University Library Haddon PapersItem 1022).

[13] For example Pitt Rivers Museum EP.N.1.48. [14] Here I do not mean the way images are reproduced in publi-

cations, which are indeed different material renderings ofthe same image, but the physical changes in a photographicobject.

[15] Pitt Rivers Museum Photograph Collections B54.13b,B54.28c.

[16] Pitt Rivers Museum Photograph Collections B1A.36.[17] Pitt Rivers Museum Photograph Collections B60.1,

B36.20d.

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