Photos: Again and Again

September 22, 2020

I just ran across the Facebook post I put up in 2013 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Marek's and my arrival in Simbai, Madang District, New Guinea, one month after our wedding in Seattle in 1963:

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=4366939014737&set=a.4366945134890.2149969.1325772342

The photo shows Marek greeting a local elder who had come to visit us at our house in Gunts.  I posted the photo several months before Shiva and I initiated our 2014 return trip to the Maring.  My heart was already pulling me toward the idea of a return and, at several anthropology meetings, my colleagues teased me with rather pointed questions as to when I might go back. 

Looking at that Facebook post now six years later, I find, to my astonishment, that the 1963 photo appears not on its own, but as the first in a series of 2014 photos. How did this happen? Would I really have presented dozens of photographs with no "sound track," no commentary?  What can viewers who were not present at the events make of such images? 

What kind of "glitch" was this?  It is certainly evidence of my rather frail command of ever-changing internet technologies!

But a "glitch" can be used to advantage, so I'm taking it as an opportunity to introduce here the idea of what I have called "visual notes."  

I developed this practice from 1998 - 2004, when I was a mentor at the Summer School of the Visual in Nova Gorica, Slovenia.  The director, Nasko Kriznar, together with other invited colleagues, gave classes in camera technique, history and theory. It was my privilege to lead a workshop in the use of the video camera as a basic "note-taking device."  My aim was to untether students from the necessity of thinking about the complex details of making a film and free them up to explore and dig into questions that occurred to them as they looked around at the immediate social environment of the town.  Their attention was caught by a variety of interactions and locations  -  the customers and local farmers at the weekly market, toddlers and care-givers in a public square, the kitchen crew in the student center, bunjee jumping into the Soča River, the ticket seller at the railway station, and local teens perfecting their skateboarding skill on the steps of  City Hall. Their "visual notes" allowed them to "look again," to unpack details, to let the images pry new questions from their minds and expand their anthropological thinking.

The photos and screen shots in this blog can be used in the same way.  What thoughts occur to you, the viewer, as you look?  What, exactly, in the photo leads to that thought?  What questions would you ask of the photographer (me - who took all the images with four-digit numbers) or my daughter (numbers beginning with xxxx) or the videographers (numbers beginning with JQ8A or 0I xxxx).  What would you like to ask particular people in the photos?  What story would you tell as you begin to unravel threads of what is evident and what may lie behind "the evident"?