The Joy of Looking: Early German Anthropology, Photography and Audience Formation

Krautwurst, Udo

doi:10.1525/var.2002.18.1.55

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…Apparently the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin had earlier on raised the same desire to be supplied with copies of the ''rogues gallery'' in Cape Town, and had got a negative response, allegedly because the Cape authorities considered the wider circulation of the photos as an ''infringement of the feelings of those natives, who have been photographed.'' On efforts to acquire ethnographic and anthropometric collections in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see Krautwurst [2002].…”

Section: In Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

Rizzo

2013

Visual Anthropology

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This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th-and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body-physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground. Police photography as discursive practiceTime and again police photography captivates the social imaginary. Images of surveillance seem to provide a tangible sense of what Jean and John Comaroff [2004] have referred to as the metaphysics of disorder, the intense preoccupation with crime and, concurrently, the state's means of restoring public order and society's ability to explain the roots and causes of social deviance. The past decades saw innumerable mug-shots and photos of crime scenes escaping the closure and secrecy of barred filing cabinets at police stations and entering a variety of new discursive spaces-among them the internet, the museum

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Section: In Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

Rizzo

2013

Visual Anthropology

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Picturing Culture: The Photography of Muttappanteyyambetween 1920 and Today

Müller¹

2017

Visual Anthropology

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The Eickstedt Archive: German Anthropology in Colonial India

Mueller

2018

Indian Historical Review

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The Eickstedt archive is an inventory of a German anthropologist’s perception of India of the 1920s through photographs and written accounts. His understanding forms the leitmotif of this reading of the archive, which as such is a reading along the grain. This article attempts to locate the archive’s rationale, which vacillates between expectations of the ‘primitive other’ and a rising racial anthropology. Exploring the relationship between the archive’s content and the context allows one to trace the intentions and preoccupations that influenced the archive, without neglecting the agency of the photographic subjects. Juxtaposing the archive and the published accounts as well as the related artefact collection further substantiates that the archive is constituted by the multiple influences of German anthropology of the 1920s, a conventional nationalism, and European orientalism.

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The Joy of Looking: Early German Anthropology, Photography and Audience Formation

Cited by 5 publications

References 13 publications

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

Picturing Culture: The Photography of Muttappanteyyambetween 1920 and Today

The Eickstedt Archive: German Anthropology in Colonial India

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