A thousand words

I just bought my first camera. Now as an anthropologist I can record life…Or can I. All this learning and thinking about ethics has in effect cramped my style or at least the style I thought I would have, as I saw myself snapping pictures of everything whilly-nilly. Elizabeth Edwards in her essay, Beyond The Boundary: a consideration of the expressive in photography and anthropology, adds to my dilemma by asking me to think not just pointed out the cool part of photography, “it's potential to question, arouse curiosity, telling different voices or see through different eyes from beyond,” but also to recognize the inherent anthropological responsibilities to attempt to inform(Edwards:54).  

"While the results of such enterprises might not necessarily be' anthropological 'in the terms of fully informed and integrated theoretical position, they nonetheless constitute documents of culture or culture documents whose legitimacy is drawn from the fact that their creators are attempting to communicate values and negotiated realities which are integral to human experience and consciousness"(Edwards:54).

Edwards quotes the words of Edward Weston reminding us that ultimately the photo will give a message, it will inform the viewers of something. She quotes Weston as saying" learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacity of his tools and processes so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in the scene before him into the photograph he wants to make" (Edwards 1997:54).

“Only through a photographic practice so informed, which presently might appear interesting and intriguing from within the discipline, in the empirical basis of these possible approaches the strengthened” (Weston 1980:173 as quoted by Edwards 1997:55).

Edwards is seeking for photography to become more regarded as having an empirical foundation. In an anthropological world of context information, can you correctly give contextual information in a photo? This essay emphasizes the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. Edwards offer a challenge to create photos that speak a thousand contextually informative right words.