The history of humanity has its stories, and the faces of people reveal a hidden expression captured in the stillness of a photograph—a human art that seizes fleeting moments and immortalizes them with all their intricate details, emotions, facial expressions, and even the gazes that reflect the human spirit. These elements often bear the cultural, psychological, and certainly ethnographic traits of individuals. Photography, as an art form, has rendered the still image and its transient moments as a precise representation of human identity, along with cultural and racial compositions in their authentic contexts.
The camera has made its way into many scientific fields as a documentary tool, enhancing the precision of recording and preserving visual data for field and laboratory research. Its use has reduced research costs by saving time, replacing the labor-intensive sketches that anthropologists once used to document tribal members, their unique cultural and genetic traits, lifestyles such as hunting and farming, their tools, social behaviors, and jewelry. Additionally, the camera has been used to document discovered remains, burial sites, and associated funerary and ritualistic artifacts.
In this form of photographic documentation, utilizing the camera to capture cultural identities—reflecting their structural characteristics within their natural, social, and ideological surroundings—adds a profound humanistic knowledge to the aesthetic depth of the image. This is clearly evident in the work of French anthropologist and structuralism pioneer Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his photographs, Lévi-Strauss focused on faces and their distinguishing features, which reflect their ethnographic and cultural identities. These images served as both artistic and documentary tools within the context of his anthropological research on tribal peoples across various regions of the world.
Lévi-Strauss captured diverse photographs of tribal individuals, including general documentation of tribes in their villages and homes, as well as close-ups highlighting faces when necessary to document tribal jewelry and tattoos that signify social status, as well as the genetic structures of tribal members’ features.
Despite the unparalleled accuracy in documenting humanity achieved in Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropological studies, particularly during his fieldwork among remote tribes in Mato Grosso and southern Amazonia in Brazil, which culminated in his photographic book Saudades do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir, Lévi-Strauss expressed a surprisingly critical view of the camera as a scientific research tool. In one of his academic articles, he stated, “With all this advanced technology, the camera remains a dry and coarse tool compared to the human mind and hand.” This opinion is startling and seemingly contradictory, coming from a scholar whose field achievements were significantly enhanced by photography, and whose sensitive and refined mastery of the camera produced historically significant, scientifically accurate images of tribes such as the Caduveo, Bororo, and Nambikwara, among others. These images can also be evaluated as artistic photographic accomplishments, independent of the scientific purposes they were originally captured for.
In his famous saying, French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue described photography as “capturing the fleeting moment that represents truth.” While simple on the surface, this statement may well serve as the ideal definition of photography’s uses and significance, whether in artistic or scientific fields. In light of this, Lévi-Strauss's critique of the camera's role in anthropological fieldwork can be challenged. However, it is also fair to acknowledge an aspect of Lévi-Strauss's view, driven by his advocacy for human sensory and intellectual skills over dependence on machines. This aligns with his broader structuralist philosophy, emphasizing the primacy of the human mind and sensory abilities as the cornerstone of scientific inquiry, surpassing technological and industrial advancements.
With technological advancements, there has been a decline in human sensory and intellectual skills, such as memory strength and thinking mechanisms, as well as other manual and sensory abilities. Studies have shown, for instance, that the decline in human computational skills correlates with the invention of calculators, as humans have relied on machines to store numerical data, analyze relationships, and provide solutions, thereby reducing their ability to perform these tasks themselves. This observation extends to various professions, industries, and human skills.
Could Lévi-Strauss's reservations about the camera’s use in fieldwork stem from such concerns about the impact of technological advancements on human sensory and intellectual skills in anthropological research? Perhaps so. While his apprehensions may have their justification, they appear somewhat exaggerated.
In his article titled “Lévi-Strauss’s Photographs: The Anthropology of the Tangible Body,” Marcelo Fiorini, an American professor of anthropology at Hofstra University, critically analyzed Lévi-Strauss's ambivalent relationship with photographic images in his scientific studies of tribes. Fiorini, who firmly endorsed the importance of cameras in anthropological fieldwork, deconstructed Lévi-Strauss’s views on his photographs and their role as a research tool. He noted that Lévi-Strauss was reserved about his photographs, rarely writing about them and presenting them primarily as ethnographic documents, to be used as secondary material for cultural analysis. Fiorini argued that documenting tribal people in their environments through photography unintentionally became the central element in Lévi-Strauss's research on the rituals of life, death, and funerals among Amazonian tribes in Brazil. This was despite Lévi-Strauss's efforts to downplay the importance of photography, either by ignoring it in his writings or by undervaluing it compared to the human mind and hand as superior research tools.
Regardless of the motivations behind Lévi-Strauss’s perspective, what remains crucial is the invaluable photographic archive he left for the artistic and academic worlds. Comprising tens of thousands of remarkable images, this archive is a treasure trove that has paved the way for anthropologists to continue his fieldwork. Photography will remain a cornerstone and a fascinating scientific documentary tool in anthropological research, alongside the human mind and hand.
By Mohammad Hannon / originaly written in Arabic and published in Arabic newspapers.
Palestinian-Jordanian Photographer
Comments
What a strange article ~ that appears to present the argument that anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who utilised photography in a secondary documentary manner to sit alongside his penned or typed written studies, was, as it were, unaware of himself as 'a photographer'? It seems that 'a photographer' has been discovered of an antropologist who just happened to carry a camera around as an additional aid to his pen and paper or portable typewriter, during his fieldwork; has been told whether he was aware, or would have concured or not, 'You are now, albeit instated postumously, hereby regarded by the-great-and-the-good, a renowned photographer'.