Strange Fire

Navigating Alterity

InHae Yap | August 20, 2020

CONTENT WARNING: This essay accompanies an educational resource on the ethics of photographing racial and ethnic “otherness” in contemporary photography, which brings together a locus of Strange Fire Collective artists whose work traverses, defies, and plays with the notion of the white gaze. It contains photographic portraits of indigenous people taken by 19th century anthropologists, and touches on colonial legacies in natural history museums, namely dioramas and archived material culture that has yet to be repatriated. It is crucial to add that I am a non-indigenous person, and I acknowledge that my perspective is severely limited by this fact.

The history of photography is too often blithely narrated as the development of technology and modernity, with little acknowledgment of photography’s hand in reinforcing colonial regimes of genocide, land removal, and objectification, through its status as a tool of science and anthropology. On the other hand, those discussions that do exist regarding colonial photography frequently reduce the photographed indigenous subjects they were meant to valorize as completely disempowered and passive. Through the lens of early ethnographic photographs of indigenous peoples in the Bering Sea region, I tease out moments of individual agency and subjectivity, asking how ‘photographic intentionality’ entails a more dynamic degree of involvement from photographed subjects than we might expect under the circumstances of colonial violence. I then turn to a broader discussion of what it means to engage those who are other to us (and the limitations of the us/other dichotomy, even as it remains a necessary paradigm) as well as some strategies from anthropology for contemporary artists and photographers to navigate alterity, both meaningfully and ethically.

This essay represents a means of opening up Strange Fire as a forum for discussing visual ethics, and I hope others will respond, engage, or rewrite these ideas accordingly.

-

See Works Cited, and the accompanying Navigating Alterity classroom resource for more.

i.

Between 1897 and 1902, the Jesup North Pacific Expedition traversed coasts on both sides of the Bering Straits, ostensibly to prove the Bering Strait Migration Theory by examining physical and cultural features shared between peoples of the two coasts. But the expedition, funded by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and led by the so-called father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, also served to record what the expedition regarded as “vanishing cultures.” Many indigenous groups in this region, in a tale of colonization that is disturbingly familiar, had been ravaged by European-borne diseases and were under pressure to assimilate to Russian and U.S. societies. With a sense of urgency, then, Boas’ anthropologists split into teams and salvaged what they could: observing social practices, the teams made wax-cylinder recordings of folktales and oral literature, amassed data measurements on anthropomorphic “types,” collected artifacts, and took roughly three thousand photographs. 

For all this, as Thomas Ross Miller and Barbara Mathé write, the researchers’ determination to collect all they could of a “dying culture” ironically “hastened the demise of the very things they sought to preserve.” 

ii.

The discipline of anthropology was, and arguably still is, complicit in European and North American imperialism. For today’s generation of anthropologists, this fact is well known to the point of being a platitude, and conscious recognition of this history is built into contemporary methodologies and theory. Even undergraduates are familiar with the pitfalls of Boas’ salvage anthropology, the dangers of leveraging outside ‘academic knowledge’ over ‘native discourse,’ and the need for critical assessment of the ‘West and the rest’ paradigm upon which the discipline was built. Still, anthropology is the symptom, not the cause: as the Haitian-born thinker Michel-Ralph Trouillot observed, “[the discipline] inherited a field of significance that preceded its formalization … Anthropology fills a pre-established compartment within a wider symbolic field, the “Savage” slot of a thematic trilogy that helped to constitute the West as we know it.” For the West to be the West, it had to construct for itself an Other, a symbolic condition of being base and savage against which its own utopian progress could be measured; the formalization of anthropology as a field of study was simply the culmination of these ideas, which Trouillot traces through the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

At the risk of oversimplifying Trouillot's more complex point about anthropology’s epistemological inheritance and trajectories, I’ve taken this to mean that “we see what we want to see.” Photography plays no small role in creating images that affirm what we already believe, what we want to believe. The vast visual and photographic record left by the Jesup expedition clearly indicates how photography, understood as a scientific instrument of complete objectivity, valorized the anthropologists’ quest to unmask and explain an objective “other” by collecting its culture. But in this pursuit of cultural purity, expedition members “tended to privilege signs of indigenous identity over the telltale hybrid” and even edited out signs of colonial presence–and thus its accompanying violences. 

What lies beyond the frame?

iii.

The project of decolonizing archives has typically been one of articulating its guilt: how archives’ structure and content reflect dominant (i.e. Eurocentric, patriarchal, heteronormative) narratives, regulating who has access to knowledge production. Meanwhile, writings on the ethics of photography, shaped profoundly by the writings of Susan Sontag, have focused on the asymmetry of the photographer-photographed relationship; they argue that the photographers’ beliefs and visions, encompassed in the gaze, run roughshod over their subjects. All this is true, and more, but I wonder if it is possible to invert the narrative, instead asking how archives may also reveal the autonomy and agency of those they objectify. Christopher Morton writes that “the agency of the collective [indigenous] group in shaping the activity of the participant-photographer and the resulting archival record is crucial.” It is with this in mind that I want to recognize how photographed subjects may have had their own agendas, which elude the photographic gaze and transform the archive into a kind of co-creation between photographers and subjects–even while acknowledging the imbalanced scientist-native power dynamic. 

The Jesup researchers were intent on capturing images of “traditional” culture without Western taint, but their mission may have been mirrored in indigenous peoples’ own preoccupation with a recent remembered past and uncertain future. Many of the people represented in these photos had already been subject to colonization, whether through military conquest or forced assimilation by western merchants and missionaries. Trading their everyday Western clothes for the garb of their recent ancestors, indigenous subjects perhaps enthusiastically asserted their history, “witnessing with their armor, weapons, and body postures,” AMNH curator Laurel Kendall suggests, “a time that had only recently become ‘past.’” To the Chukchi, who had successfully fended off Russian armies for more than 250 years, donning traditional clothes and role-acting for the camera may have been a way to ensure the perpetuity of their history for the future.

A more capacious understanding of these photographs as a kind of collaboration does not, to be clear, relieve the Jesup anthropologists of their role in the destruction of culture, nor have any illusions about the coerced nature of indigenous peoples’ “choice” to work with the anthropologists under circumstances of colonialism. However, it allows us to parse out moments where the anthropological gaze is disrupted, creating tensions in the archival narrative.

iv.

Western liberal discourse typically understands “agency” as the freedom to make a choice; under structures of subordination, “political autonomy” becomes the reclamation of agency through resistance to social norms. The problem with this model is that only those who actively, that is, visibly, resist patriarchal norms have agency, while everyone else does not. In other words, subaltern agency must be somehow “proven” to a liberally-minded observer. Secondly, beyond the fact that many subjects simply do not have the means to enact such agency, it is equally important to recognize that the contemporary Western liberal framework for what autonomy looks like may be culturally and historically very different for other subjects.

In her work on an Islamic women’s piety movement in Cairo, Saba Mahmood argues that “agency” needs to be understood as separate from a mode of thought aligned with modern Western liberatory politics. “What may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view,” she writes, “may actually be a form of agency—but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment. In this sense, agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms.” Mahmood’s proposal opens up the possibility of other forms of agency that are more elusive, sensory, and contingent than, say, a series of performatively defiant actions.

Let me illustrate what an affective reading of agency could look like, using a triptych of photographs from the Jesup collection. “Man seated” is stiffly rigid within three poses dictated by the photographer, reflecting the early anthropological framework of classifying indigenous people through anthropometric measurements. This typically resulted in three to four photographs: one frontal shot, one three-quarters shot, and two profile shots, left and right. (This system, tellingly, owes much to Bertillon’s mugshot system of categorizing 19th-century Parisian criminals, yet another form of alterity, based in socioeconomic class.) The typically ‘neutral’ backdrop preferred by anthropological photographers for purposes of objective clarity, however, is disrupted by a woman standing at the doorframe, who watches as her [brother? husband? friend?] rotates for each shot. Her laughter in one image is startling: smiles are rare in early portraiture around the globe, given how long it took to take a photograph, and her candid expression allows the flows of everyday life to seep into this stern portrait. But it is her gaze, particularly in the frontal image, that is the most striking: it makes us aware that there is a three-legged contraption standing before this man, with a bulky black cloth under which the cameramen disappears for periods of time. Unlike other subjects in many of these photos, she flits in and out of the frame, unconfined to the formality of the process. To the 21st-century viewer, signifiers of ethnographic photography, like the neutral backdrop or subjects’ solemn expressions, are nothing but standard visual convention. But her presence and movement makes us realize that the anthropologists’ methods of pursuing scientific rigor are unnatural, odd. That is to say, contrived.

v.

The Jesup archive contains several images of AMNH’s 19th-century exterior facade and exhibition halls, as well as portraits of the anthropologists themselves in New York. This was because the indigenous people who encountered the Jesup researchers wanted to see photographs of the museum and people in New York; only if sufficiently impressed by these photos would they allow their own visual representations to be made. 

I am particularly struck by a series of photographs featuring a man named Three Crows. There are seven photos of him, all taken by an unnamed photographer within the museum’s ethnology department. There is little information about him, nothing to suggest why the researchers picked this particular man to photograph. All that is left of who he “is” are the terse, clinical labels written by the museum’s curators:  

Portraits

Indians of North America 

Museum buildings 

Ethnology 

Ethnography 

Clothing and dress 

Anthropology

As discussed above, the images of Three Crows follow the typical visual template for anthropometric photography of the period, with the subject positioned in front of a “neutral” white backdrop and most shots taken from the shoulders up. However, in order to photograph Three Crows’ entire body, the “unknown photographer” is forced to step backwards, and in so doing reveals the museum’s anthropology storage, full of cabinets and drawers containing labeled indigenous material culture. In “Side view of Three Crows,” Three Crows stops posing, leaning on his cane and glancing away from the camera to observe the objects peeking out of the drawers–some of which he may recognize–with an unreadable expression on his face. Perhaps he knows that, as soon as he turns back towards the camera, his own photographed likeness is about to be classified, catalogued, and left in a storage unit.

But is it Three Crows’ inscrutable glance and slouching body language that lets us look beyond the white backdrop, or the photographer, who, by zooming the camera view out to view the subject’s full body, allows us to pay attention to these drawers? Likewise, with the Jesup photos more generally, is it Boas and his photographers, the subject, or both, who control the narrative of the photos? As Miller and Mathé note, “The collections tell a story, but its narrative possibilities are open-ended; a different version can be constructed by rearranging objects in a cabinet, reordering classifications, or substituting one item for another.”

So who is arranging the narrative? And more importantly, who is not?

vi. 

In the 1980s, the discipline of anthropology underwent a dramatic shift in thinking, responding to rising criticisms leveled against the anthropological claim to objectivity and ethnographic authority. One of the main results of this so-called “reflexive” turn was the idea that ethnographic writing could no longer maintain an innocuous veneer of objectivity, but had to proclaim the anthropologist’s own biases and subjectivity, making clear how information is necessarily filtered through personal experience. This approach was compelling enough to lure outsiders to the discipline; in 1995, Hal Foster first noted contemporary art’s “ethnographic turn” in his seminal essay “The Artist as Ethnographer?”, touching upon a new wave of artistic work that sought to engage alterity by aligning itself with anthropology’s new reflexive methodologies.

Oddly, Foster’s essay has most frequently been taken as a wholehearted commendation of the reflexive turn and its potential as a critical tool for artists; the essay’s title is frequently cited without its question mark, treating the “artist as ethnographer” as a mere observation, rather than the cautious query that it is. In fact, the essay makes several astute warnings about the danger of artists whose work forays into ‘otherness.’ Among these is the observation these artists are liable to impose upon or marginalize the very communities they claim to represent, all while maintaining the veneer of reflexive self-awareness of these risks. “I am skeptical,” Foster writes, “about the effects of the pseudoethnographic role set up for the artist or assumed by him or her. For this setup can promote a presumption of ethnographic authority as much as a questioning of it, an evasion of institutional critique as often as an elaboration of it.” Foster is speaking of artists from the 1990s, and yet his words are entirely applicable to anthropological excursions from a century earlier, like the Jesup expedition. For its time, the Jesup researchers’ mission, to collect the remnants of native cultures for posterity before it was “too late,” was an arguably progressive outlook, affirming non-western cultures as worthy of interest. But salvage anthropology took place at the cost of 1) failing to give credit to their informants’ intellectual contributions and 2) claiming ownership over indigenous property, moving the artifacts into museums where they would not be accessible or easy to reclaim (the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA, has been met with varying degrees of success, and no small amount of bureaucratic resistance). The Jesup anthropologists did not necessarily protect or support these communities in ways that they wanted to be, and they often accelerated the fragmentation of the very cultures in whose name they rushed to collect languages, artifacts, and data.

It would be easy enough to see this as a closed case from a distant past. But we only need to glance at the cultural landscape in 2020 to see how prescient Foster’s warnings still are, twenty-five years later. Artists of color, particularly Black artists, are tokenized by art institutions to evade criticism (not successfully, if the continued torrent of protests is anything to go by). Meanwhile, photographers continue creating work in the vein of National Geographic, without any acknowledgment or recognition of how the visual can uphold inaccurate tropes of marginalized communities. Dana Schutz depicts a seminal moment of violent Black history, one that she had not previously engaged, and ends up all the more successful for it. Such examples make gestures of solidarity with those who have been historically deemed “other,” but continue to fall within the asymmetrical framework of West/rest thinking upon which anthropology was founded.

vii.

How can a study of alterity become an instrument of radical change, inverting the peripherality of the “other”? Trouillot suggests an approach is pertinent to artists and anthropologists alike: “Anthropology needs to turn the apparatus elaborated in the observation of non-Western societies on itself, and more specifically, the history from which it sprang.” This so-called “anthropology of the West” could entail several tangible methods, some of which I’ve drawn on in this essay, and as seen in the work of some Strange Fire artists:

1. To literally reverse the gaze, as Myra Greene does by turning back the camera upon white subjects. Or, to subvert it: Didier William refuses to meet the expectations of the gaze by depicting black and brown bodies as queered anthropomorphic figures.

2. To reclaim the narrative, bringing “insider” perspectives: Kiliii Yuyan, as a Chinese and Nanai (Siberian Native) photographer, seeks to reclaim the colonial photographic gaze by using photography to advocate for issues that are near and dear to indigenous communities; Ada Trillo, who grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border, attempts to bring her own empathy and experience to bear upon images of immigration.

3. To critically examine, and reclaim, those institutions and practices which have been used to oppress: Lava Thomas lovingly creates painstaking graphite recreations of the Montgomery Bus Boycott women’s mugshots, emphasizing these women’s ability to retain agency against the anthropometric tools of surveillance and criminal identification; Elena Anasova questions how inmates in Siberian women’s prisons navigate issues of surveillance and privacy; Sebastián Calfuqueo utilizes indigenous Mapuche language and long hair in their work, reclaiming these mediums from colonial structures that have historically controlled their use.

But above all:

4. To leave people well alone, and to recognize that our intellectual interest in an ‘other’ does not give us the right to them. This is particularly true of those communities who have been historically subjected to the scrutiny of reporters, ethnographers, and the government apparatus. In fact, the subaltern’s right to ignore clamors and demands for engagement is crucial: “Sometimes silence,” as Mayanthi Fernando writes, “even when it is an effect of power, remains the only way to escape power’s grasp.”

viii.

I first came across the digitalized Jesup collection on the AMNH website four years ago (how or why, I do not recall). Yet time has not diminished my love for these photographs, and I find myself continually compelled every now and then to return to the archive. The manner of engagement has changed over the years. Sometimes, I focus on photographs that show unusual wear and tear, seeking pixelated recreations of these objects’ materiality (warps and dust and jagged edges). Sometimes, I am drawn to an individual face, and I pore over every sparse detail on the anonymous person that I can find on the museum website. Sometimes, rather than spend time with any individual subject, I scroll back and forth among dozens of pixelated thumbnails, watching these images blur across all twenty-six pages of the Jesup catalogue, my eyes glazing over with the repetitive conventions of the same anthropometric headshots.

Part of the joy of returning to this archive is that I can still be surprised by what it has to offer. For instance, while perusing the website in preparation for this essay, I was surprised to find an image that I could not recall seeing previously. The title of this photograph, “Korean men, Siberia, 1900,” reflects the same blandly descriptive treatment seen in the titles of all the Jesup photographs: it therefore utterly fails to capture precisely how remarkable this photograph’s existence is within the archive. It is not only that this is the only photograph of any Koreans in the entire collection, and one of a handful of photographs depicting non-indigenous and non-white people (some other subjects include Chinese sailors and Japanese fishermen). It is the fact that the photographer, Waldemar Bogoras, felt compelled enough by these men to expend precious film on them, sidetracking away from the indigenous subjects of the Jesup mission. Perhaps Bogoras felt that their mere presence was worth noting, since the late 19th century saw the beginnings of a Korean migration to Siberia (leading to their later dispersal across the Soviet Union in the 20th century). Beyond this, however, such a snapshot-style photograph would have been technically “useless” for any 19th century anthropologists: it does not follow anthropometric conventions of capturing biometric data, nor fully depict clothing and dress, nor demonstrate some cultural activity, like fishing or sewing. So it is remarkable for its banality, as well.

But none of these more esoteric connections to histories of photography and diaspora occurred to me upon discovering this image. Instead, I thought:

Who are you?

Are you related to my mother?

You look like me.

I find myself unreasonably annoyed that the AMNH curators, who have put together an exhibition and written a book on the Jesup photographs, did not say much about these men or seem to find them as fascinating as I do. I feel fiercely protective of these men, never mind how unlikely it is that we are related: I am protective of their frank, semi-amused expressions and sunburned cheeks, the simple shirt ties that I recognize from modern sartorial variants of the hanbok, and their scratchy, scruffy beards.

The potency of this encounter is no doubt heightened by the fact that these Koreans’ presence is so unexpected in a repository of indigenous imagery. Still, it is truly astonishing how different it is to gaze upon photographs of people you might share a connection with. And so it occurs to me that when looking at the indigenous imagery, I necessarily take on the archival gaze because I am not indigenous, and therefore able to muse upon these photographs from an entirely cognitive, academic perspective: the pressing urges of nostalgia and wonder do not first blur my thoughts. Thus, even as a person of color, I might perhaps identify more with the white “outsider” anthropologist’s gaze than the indigenous “insider” perspective. Yet here I am, neither inside nor outside, but somewhere between the two.

Works Cited

Edwards, Elizabeth. "Introduction. Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame, ed. C. Morton, E. Edwards." (2009): 3-17.

Fernando, Mayanthi. 2014. “Ethnography and the Politics of Silence.” Cultural Dynamics 26 (2): 235-244.

Foster, Hal. "The Artist as Ethnographer?" The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (1995): 302-309.

Kendall, Laurel, Barbara Mathé, and Thomas Ross Miller. Drawing Shadows to Stone: The Photography of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1997.

Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Morton, Christopher. "Double alienation: Evans-Pritchard's Zande and Nuer photographs in comparative perspective." Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives (2012): 33-55.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Springer, 2016.

Further Readings

Dizon, Michelle and Việt Lê, White Gaze. 2018

Hepner, Abbey. “Insider/Outsider: Photographing the Other.” Strange Fire Collective, 2017.

Sealy, Mark. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time. Lawrence & Wishart, 2019.