SAVAGES

Journey into Anthropometry
Duration: 26 minutes

A re-examination of work that lies at the intersection of photography and anthropology: anthropometric photography, described as ‘the most overtly oppressive of photographic practices’ (Edwards, 2001, 9)

The first photographic representations of non-European peoples were of great interest to anthropologists. Anthropometry is the term used to describe the anthropological sub-discipline of the measurement of human anatomical differences. In Europe in the eighteen hundreds there was an emergent interest in images of the ‘exotic other’. The resultant photographs have since become ‘signature images, constantly reproduced and standing for the essential relations between anthropology and photography’ (Edwards, 2001, 131). 

Humans reduced to visual data.                                                         

This project seeks to ‘rehumanise’ the process by recreating a scientific environment of classification and objectification, and inviting into it willing subjects who provide testimonies describing their experience and offering insight into their complex interior lifeworlds during the ethnographic context of the recording. The film explores how participants respond to being photographed, comport for the camera, how they see themselves and express ideas of being seen.