Visions and Voices of Donsin

Few technologies have been as misused as cameras in the encounter with the "other." Photography has provided travelers, journalists, and, indeed, anthropologists with a tool to bring distant cultures and landscapes closer to home audiences. Entailing a process of selective framing and focusing, it has enabled practitioners to construct views of "exotic" people and worlds, building upon preconceived ideas about what they are like and how they differ from us, by stressing either the "picturesque" or the "pathetic" according to what feelings the images were meant to arouse. These are often shaped by the larger context of ideology and politics surrounding our relationship with such groups, as Jane Collins and Catherine Lutz (Reading National Geographic. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993) show in their seminal and spirited critique of the National Geographic. But are reifying or alienating the subject inherent effects of photographic practice? Not necessarily. Parallel to conventional photography that uses indigenous people as mere objects of representation, there have been some notable efforts by visual anthropologists and communication specialists to directly involve minorities and marginal populations in producing images of themselves, their social and physical landscapes, and in using photography for bolstering their status and their claims in society

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