dissertacao part 6

In both the pictures above there is a sense of performance from the sitter. Disguised by an anthropological and ethnographical gaze, it could be argued that the Nuba’s were the object in which both photographers could engage aesthetically. The discourse they adopted for the Nubas, a community pure and immaculate by society, allowed them to engage like that. In the case of Rodger’s, the search of this subject comes from a traumatic experience. Clearly he searched in the Nubas for signs of differences, opposite from his experience in Bergen-Belsen. Rodger used popular representations of ‘racial’ difference to reduce the cultures of black people and the Nubas to Nature. The Nubas were ‘primitive’ and not ‘civilized’. So portraying these people and their community would be no more immoral than portraying an animal. The exploitation of their image became acceptable. For Riefenstahl it was a self-confessed fascination for the beautiful, reducing the objects as a representation of naturalism where Nature and Culture coincided.


Rodger, George (1949), Kordofan, Southern Sudan, A young unmarried girl of the Messakin Tiwal tribe

When Rodger shot pictures of naked people during the war, the photos were mainly composed of rotten corpses on sidewalks or dead people being thrown at some collective grave. Arguably this would represent Rodger’s way of seen the evolution of western society, that in the end led to a mass-production of death. In his Nuba’s pictures, the naked people were portrayed as sexualised and strong well-built bodies, reassembling a natural estate that contrast with his western image of a ‘civilized’ society. The picture above, the woman was reduced to her body (sexuality) and her social condition – being unmarried and pre-disposed to being sexually active with a partner. It is the Natural and scientific gaze that allows Rodger this fetishistic approach: he relates her body with the difference of ‘races’; we can see her nakedness without being guilt because at the same time the fascination for her sexuality is being induced it is being denied by the discourse of ‘otherness’, her body was read like a text to compose a racialized analysis which associates her with the Natural order rather than to the Human culture.

This creates a connection between representation and power; a photograph creates a discourse that produces a form of racialized knowledge of the ‘Other’ deeply implicated in the operations of power. This is the core concept of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ thesis:

“Within the framework of western hegemony over the Orient there emerged a new object of knowledge – a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personalities, national or religious character” (Said 1991: 7-8).

Said uses the same relation between knowledge and power as Foucault; the ‘primitive’, declared to be ‘different’, becomes an object of study where everything can be done under the alibi of the search of the ‘truth’. This is what Foucault called ‘regime of the truth’, under the disguise of science research, Rodger and Riefenstahl can look at, classify and dissect the Nubas, given an excuse for an unregulated voyeurism.

“Power, it seems, has to be understood here, not only in terms of economic exploitation and physical coercion, but also in broader and symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a certain way” (Hall 1997: 259).

The power to represent someone in a certain way, which Stuart Hall speaks here, is a characteristic intrinsic to the photographic enterprise. In his book Camera Lucida, Barthes argues that because every photograph is contingent and outside meaning, “it cannot signify (aim at generality) except by assuming a mask” (Barthes 2000: 34). Arguably, in every photography the mask becomes the meaning, the representation becomes the discourse. That is why the invention of photography is linked with the creation of the first anthropological society: we don’t consume photographs politically but aesthetically. This gives the possibility for those anthropological societies to use photography as a tool for an anthropological study based on biology, the stress being on observation, recording and classification. It was what Said argued as the simplification of the Orient, generating the scientifically study of culture in which it was believed that culture was biologically determinant.
So photography was important to anthropology because of its characteristic of assuming a mask: photographing reduces, naturalizes and fixes the difference. It is this game of power and knowledge, “it is always something that is represented” (Barthes 2000: 28), which constitute the material of the ethnological gaze in photography, fixing the details of a person on the difference and reducing everything about that person and that culture to that single characteristic. This ethnographical gaze ends up by stereotyping the photographic subject.