Photography In Advertising And Its Effects On Society

14 Pages 3610 Words

tography has assisted in the telling of life and history. However, the relationship between photography and anthropology has come under heavy criticism as a result of the techniques employed by some ethnographers. The most criticized type of anthropological photograph is the image that separates subjects from their environments. The supposed goal of the separation is to highlight the subject’s ethnicity and culture. If the goal, however is to highlight culture, it seems that displaying the subject in his or her own culture would be more effective. (Miller 135)
Irving Penn’s Two New Guinea Men Holding Hands is a common example of the subject being removed from the environment. (see fig. 1) The photograph taken in Penn’s studio is in a style popular among ethnographers; it has been used for years by E.S. Curtis and has recently been refined by Richard Avedon. The background and the studio settings have been criticized widely as “removing subjects from the daily flow of their lives… and cross breeding fashion and anthropology.” (...