Visual Anthropology

Visual anthropology is the use and analysis of photography, film, video, and other visual artefacts both as ethnographic evidence about a culture and as a means of representing anthropological knowledge. It encompasses images the researcher makes in the field, images that members of a community produce themselves, and images already circulating within a society, and it studies all of them as social objects with meanings and effects. As Marcus Banks frames it, every image carries an internal narrative — what it depicts — and an external narrative — the social relations of its making, circulation, and use — and visual anthropology attends to both.