Stuffing the Indian photographically

Abstract

Abstract Ethnographic photography is a play of mimetic surfaces: skin, cloth, faces, masks; plates, film, prints, papers. Every attempt to undress reality merely adds another thin layer of skin. In developing his film, the photographer is playing with subde and transparent veils. The transparency of the lenses, film and liquids makes it possible for the photographer to discover what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious of the subjects automatically and involuntarily reproduced. But unlike the analysis of the instinctive unconscious, photography does not plumb the depths; instead, it captures glittering surfaces, so that when the owner of a camera goes out to hunt images, his prey is similar to that of the hunter not only because the shots of his apparatus put him into a position of power, but also because the booty he collects may end up stuffed like paper skins in the taxidermist's workshop.