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| Editado
por Tomo Editorial e Palmarinca,
Porto Alegre, 1997. |
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| AN
ABSTRACT OF MY M. A. THESIS. Departamento de Antropologia/UFRGS
Brazil in 30/04/1996. |
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| The
title of the thesis was "Photo-ethnography:
A Study of Visual Anthropology about Everyday Life, Trash and Work
at a Slum in Porto Alegre City". It is divided in two parts,or
two types of text; the first part is a verbal text and the second
is a kind of exercise in the shape of a visual text. |
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| The
chief point in my research is to work with the possibilities of
articulating the making of photographic images under the perspective
of the anthropological thought. My goal is to circumscribe a specific
field, still in the process of construction, that I call PHOTOETHNOGRAPHY.
By that I mean a study of a specific kind of photography informed
by the anthropological knowledge and, as a consequence, engaged
in making a detailed list of the cultural and social elements of
human groups. In the first chapter "History: Photography and Ethnography" I search for some elements common to photography and ethnography - practices which began about mid-XIXth century in the period of European Colonialist Expansion. Both practices arise as a means to portray, somehow, the other . I list the first common points between the practice of photography and that of ethnography; the camera as a means to provide the anthropologists with equipment in their field work.. I describe how the so-called Documentary Photography was consolidated in the USA. I talk about its repercussion and importance to the point it influences the first papers that would become the cradle of the Visual Anthropology. I never had as a goal the other possibilities that are encompassed by what one understands as Visual Anthropology. Without disregarding the importance of the contribution of those that undertook the enterprise in the movie field or ethnographic video, I would like to contribute with the amplification of the field of the Visual Anthropology made possible in terms of a good use of the "photographic act". For twenty-four years, I have worked as photographer. |
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In
the second chapter, I deal with issues connected with LOOKING: how
it can be social and technically determined. The several kinds of
looking and modifications that occurred with the photography. I
also try to record this new phase of "re-education of the look"
that is taking place now, because of the development of a virtual
"new world" where all of us are affected somehow. That
happens because it is due to the kind of look one finds in a certain
period of time that the kinds of images are determined as well the
way people relate to one another. |
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In
the third chapter, I apply myself to the Photography and its possibilities.
I make a detailed list of the changes the computer and its virtual
consequences are bringing to Photography and to the beliefs concerning
the photographic objectivity. I suggest that is precisely at the
present moment that the photograph should be undestood as something
which is constructed and not merely "a mirror with memory"
as Daguerre put it. One should formulate the potentialities and
possibilities of a photographic look, instructed by the anthropological
assumptions. I try to see how one can aesthetic and technically
construct a photograph to, as professor Samain said, "help
men to talk about men." I make apparent some of the possibilities
of the construction of narratives through contextualized photographic
images that include cultural data under an ethnographic perpective.
To do so I introduce the term PHOTOETHNOGRAPHY. Finally, I point
out some of the elements that can transcend what one understands
by Visual Anthropology, leading to an Anthropology in multimedia
in a near future. Anthropology in multimedia is a polysemic and
polyphonic way of grasping and discussing anthropological subjects. |
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In
the second part of my thesis, I present an exercise of Photoethnography
that composes a visual text. In a way, I dare to subvert the tradition.
I make use of excerpts from field work diary as a photographic negative,
a means to put captions in my visual text. Thus, it was far from
me to make an ethnographic text in the classic tradition. I focus
on working women from a shantytown in the peripheral area of Porto
Alegre (originally, a place to deposit garbage and waste) as the
target of the construction of my ethnographical text. That community,
the working women who live there and their familities have their
everyday life, their survival strategies as well as their perception
of the outside world pervaded by the trash, waste and garbage from
the City. The shantytown is located near CEASA a center of redistribution
of goods such as fruits and vegetables. The left-overs of the products
that are sold there are used as food for the people living in the
"vila (shantytown)". The working women joined in a cooperative
society of garbage scavengers. In a shed, they select the garbage
(which nowadays comes from selective collecting done by the Mayor
Hall). In its orgin, the cooperative society was not predominantly
"female", but due to conflicts between men and women,
the latter decided to take over the administration. As a result,
the society passed, mostly, to the hands of the women. |
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Another
singularity about that community is that is mostly composed by migrants
of rural origin from the region of the German colonies in Rio Grande
do Sul - agricultural worker "without land" that wear
their cultural and ethnic characteristics on their faces and habits.
In spite of the precarious conditions of the living, the cooperative
society of garbage scavengers can be regarded as a successful example
of organization and mobilization, and also as a model to be followed
by others concerning the use and transformation of the garbage.
By mobilizing the members of the community, the people managed to
get a communitary first-aid and health station, a daycare center
and an elementary school which is being built. |
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To
approach photo-ethnographically workingwomen who "live from
the garbage and in the garbage, in a place to where society as a
whole turns its back, is to reveal a specific reality related to
popular urban groups. There is a certain tendency to reject everything
that is connect to trash - if it is there, we do not want to be
there. Using an ecological-preserving perspective, one can find
recycling strategies of non-biodegradable (indestructible) material.
According to this perspective, we will find no longer the end of
the line or the end of the chain of consumption in the garbage -
we will find the end of wastefulness and modern solutions for the
preservation of the environment. We will find a true source for
the production of matter that could used to make other products.
Through this point of view, the work of the women from Vila Dique
can be considered of utter importance and situated in the core of
a complex productive process. By means of a descriptive approach
where the main kind of narrative is the use of images, I try to
investigate the elements by means of which that people build traits
of their identity. I try to investigate the kind of appropriation
that community, i.e., the other, makes with the trash that we create
and we reject. I attempt at visualizing how the process of selecting
the garbage takes place, the organization of the physical space
of the houses in the making of strategies for social reproduction,
and, finally, to map and portray those women. Using the photography
plus the anthropological work field techniques, and having as object
that community interacted with and in the garbage, I try to to reason
about and to develop a modality of Visual Anthropology as language
and look capable of, in the process of knowing, presenting us with
data and information that will lead us to a deep reflexion. |
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As
it has already been said by Leal (1983) " photography is a
kind of learning composed of patient observation, minute elaboration
of different strategies of a approaching the object, development
of a selective perception, a constant surveillance and in readiness
to grasp the event in the moment it takes place. The double capacity
of the camera in subjectify and objectify the reality and the ever
present conscience that one is responsible for this process and
for a technique of apprehension of reality, that one is the subject
of this knowledge, all these contribute to an epistemological learning
and also another way of making Anthropology". |
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