Journal article
Opaque encounters: Leaving the strange strange in ethnographic field photography
Visual anthropology review
09 Dec 2025
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Theory, articulated through text, is the primary means through which anthropologists understand the communities we engage through our work. It is a critical part of the discipline, but it is also a mode of abstraction, and extraction, that rips us from the immediacy of sensory experience and too often replicates existing power relationships. This article explores the potential of photography to serve as an alternative mode of theorizing. Building on 7 years of learning from, and making images alongside, street photographers in the United States, Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia, I argue that the value of photographs to ethnographic work lies precisely in their inability to effectively illustrate ethnographic ideas. It is, rather, the complexity, opacity, and ambiguity of photographs that makes them rich ethnographic material. Perhaps, I conclude, the most valuable thing an anthropological image can do is allow the essential strangeness of the ethnographic encounter to remain strange.
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Details
- Title
- Opaque encounters: Leaving the strange strange in ethnographic field photography
- Creators
- Brent Luvaas - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Visual anthropology review
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Number of pages
- 18
- Grant note
- Drexel Scholarly and Creative Activity Award American Indonesian Exchange Foundation
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Global Studies and Modern Languages; Center for Science, Technology, and Society
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001632742700001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-105024225366
- Other Identifier
- 991022146935304721
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InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Anthropology