This article explores the use of photographs and photographic methods in qualitative anthropological analysis. With a point of departure in the W. Baldwin Spencer and Francis J. Gillen collection of photographs, I discuss archive mining, photo repatriation, and collaborative photographic re-enactments of the original material during fieldwork in Central Australia. The combination of these methods through an interventionist approach generates a stimulating environment for cross-cultural and cross-temporal dialogue, centered on productive collaborations that invite cultural critique through juxtaposition and defamiliarization.

Based on a series of conversations with Colin Young that have taken place over more than thirty years, this article explores how a certain set of practical and institutional circumstances, in combination with a series of philosophical and aesthetic ideas about the nature of cinema, first led to the emergence over the late 1960s and early 1970s of the approach to ethnographic filmmaking that would become known as “Observational Cinema.” Although it was those whom Colin Young trained, inspired or simply influenced who worked out the practical filmmaking applications of his ideas, it was he who initially formulated the foundational concepts underpinning this approach to ethnographic filmmaking. As such, although he has been a “filmmaker-maker” rather than a filmmaker himself, Colin Young has a rightful claim to be considered, in the sense defined by Roland Barthes, as the original “author” of Observational Cinema.

How do we see Southeast Asian and diasporic visual culture today? This is the central question we ask in the Introduction to this special issue of Visual Anthropology. To answer the question, we trouble the geographic designation of “Southeast Asia” and how the region’s arts and culture have traveled and are received at the present moment. We posit that we need to see Southeast Asia and its diasporas differently. Most notably, we argue that through the lens of gender and sexuality we can better visualize and analyze the critical and creative strategies of artists and writers situated in many parts of the world. We foreground the collected essays, art pieces and poetry that query what it means to labor for the state, the art world or the academy. And as we emphasize, the collection brings together—in color, in varying compositions, in long and short form—the dynamism of art and media texts in all of their complex circulations.

In recent years several monographs have appeared in Italy, though even more abroad, as a report of ethnographic research into the everyday life practices of marginal urban social groups; all fall under a disciplinary subfield the author calls “Anthropology of urban marginality.” The authors of these works have increasingly been using technologies other than written representation, as for instance the medium of photography. There is a question at the core of this article which could be summed as, Why and how can this medium aid in a better understanding of the phenomena being investigated?

Three different appropriations of a 1928 photograph from South India allow insights into German anthropology in the 1920s, contemporary German museum practices, and present-day ritual forms in northern Kerala. Juxtaposing these readings as what Edwards named evidential strategies, power of representation, and re-experiencing demonstrates the possibilities and limits of visual representation. The article contributes to a Picturing Culture debate that considers entrenched visual economies of archived photographs, and opts for an understanding of different aspects of cultural knowledge transported through photographs.

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Western Hemisphere early in the 16th century the extravagant culture of the Aztecs dominated central Mexico, while the Incas controlled a sprawling empire ...