Dr. Maximilian C. Forte
Visual Anthropology
LINKS
BROKEN LINKS? You may find copies of an expired website in the Internet Public Library’s archive at http://web.archive.org -- use “The Wayback Machine”, by pasting in the URL of the site that is no longer online.
The following resources are listed in alphabetical order. You may thus find more than one resource of relevance to a project of yours at different points in the listing below.
American Indians of the Pacific Northwest--This digital collection integrates over 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text relating to the American Indians in two cultural areas of the Pacific Northwest, the Northwest Coast and Plateau. These resources illustrate many aspects of life and work, including housing, clothing, crafts, transportation, education, and employment. The materials are drawn from the extensive collections of the University of Washington Libraries, the Cheney Cowles Museum/Eastern Washington State Historical Society in Spokane, and the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.
American Museum of Photography (includes history of photography exhibits)
"Arab Americans in Detroit" (Essay and photographs), by Steven J. Gold (Michigan State University)
Benedicte Wrensted, an Idaho Photographer in Focus—“Joanna Scherer of the Smithsonian Institution (and a former President of the Society for Visual Anthropology) has prepared a set of WEB pages describing the work of Benedicte Wrensted, a Danish photographer, who owned a studio in Idaho in the 1900's. Among her patrons were Native Americans living nearby.”
Companion Website for Marcus Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research.
Comite du Film Ethnographique--This is the site for the Comite du Film Ethnographique, available in English or French. It provides information about the Ethnographic Film Festival held yearly, gives a detailed description of the films and their themes, and providesinformation on the life and career of Jean Rouch.
"Crees of Northern Québec: A Photographic Essay", by Norman Chance and Paul Conklin
Dawn of a New Day (Arizona State University Libraries, Department of Archives and Manuscripts)--A photographic exhibition organized from six archival collections. Five individuals and one family who worked and sometimes lived among American Indians donated historical images that reveal cultural forces at work during the first half of the 20th Century.
Documents for a History of Visual Anthropology in the U.S.—contains numerous archived copies of back issues of the newsletter of the Society for Visual Anthropology, in PDF format.
Dread History: The African Diaspora, Ethiopianism, and Rastafari--essays and photographs by the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies
Early Photographers of First Peoples in British Columbia, "Notes" from the Royal BC Museum.
Edward Curtis--American Masters Series--pages on this site address the following topics: "Curtis Photography--Stealing the Soul or Preserving a Legacy?", "Dressing Up, Whose Idea was it Anyway?", "Shooting the Sacred," "Indian Life in Curtis' Time: Did He Show Us What was Really Happening?", "Who was Edward Curtis?"
Edward S. Curtis’s “The North American Indian”—resource prepared by the Library of Congress—"The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis is one of the most significant and controversial representations of traditional American Indian culture ever produced. Issued in a limited edition from 1907-1930, the publication continues to exert a major influence on the image of Indians in popular culture. Curtis said he wanted to document "the old time Indian, his dress, his ceremonies, his life and manners." In over 2000 photogravure plates and narrative, Curtis portrayed the traditional customs and lifeways of eighty Indian tribes. The twenty volumes, each with an accompanying portfolio, are organized by tribes and culture areas encompassing the Great Plains, Great Basin, Plateau Region, Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. Featured here are all of the published photogravure images including over 1500 illustrations bound in the text volumes, along with over 700 portfolio plates.”
Edward S. Curtis—“The Curtis Collection”: “The Curtis Collection has ownership of the world's largest, most extensive collection of Copper Photogravure Plates ever produced or assembled. These Copper Photogravure Plates represent the life work of Edward Sheriff Curtis and his massive documentation of Native Americans, ‘The North America Indian’.”
Ethnographic Photography: Photographing People in the World--A page put together by J. David Sapir, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, dedicated to ethnographic photography with an extensive photographic gallery and links to other Web sites of a similar nature. The site includes work by J. David Sapir himself on the Joola of West Senegal, a Web version of Frank Cancian's book Another Place and his portfolio of fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, and Sarah Wiles' photographic work on the Arapaho. There is also a link to a page on Jay Ruby's Secure the Shadow, a book on death and photography in America. Ruby's site further includes a slideshow gallery of photographic images from the book.
European Association of Social Anthropologists Visual Anthropology Network--The European Association of Social Anthropologists Visual Anthropology Network was founded in 1996. It aims to cover all aspects of visual anthropology, although the principal interests of current members focus largely on photography, ethnographic film and multimedia. The Network's web site gives information about general aims and activities, officers and meetings. There are also international links to audiovisual media libraries, institutions which run courses in visual anthropology and other associations in the field. A longer term, and on-going, project is to maintain a data base of all those invoved and interested in visual anthroplogy.
Film Images—online database of films of all genres
The Frank G. Carpenter Collection--Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) was a journalist, traveler, and the author of books on geography, including the Carpenter's Geographic Readers, standard texts used in American schools for forty years. Carpenter traveled throughout Alaska in the 1910s, where he took many photographs documenting the territory's stunning natural beauty, plants and wildlife, native peoples, and important economic activities such as fishing and mining.
Gallery of the Open Frontier (The University of Nebraska Press in conjunction with the National Archives)--Largely drawn largely from the collections of the National Archives, this web exhibit and database indexes over 23,000 images of life west of the Mississippi up to 1917. Work by individual photographers and government agencies, including over 2,500 photographs from records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Haddon: The Online Catalogue of Archival Ethnographic Film Footage, 1895-1945, University of Oxford
Hannah and Richard Maynard. (British Columbia Archives)--Database of about 110,000 photographs taken by Hannah and Richard Maynard in British Columbia during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some are of American Indians and Indian cultural artifacts. A keyword search using the term "Indian" retrieves more than 3000 images.
Images of Race Archive—“This site contains material related to my research interest in racial images in general and more specifically, racial images in the Australian popular press of the nineteenth century.”
In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960--Central African peoples through the eyes of photographers
Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains -- Online Image Database (Montana State University et al)--Includes photographs, ledger drawings, and other sketches of Plains Indian cultures from: the library collections of three Montana State University campuses ( Bozeman, Billings, and Havre); the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman; and Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, Montana. The digital collection was created in consultation with Native Americans, educators, librarians, and historians.
Jean Rouch—Documentary Filmmaker—list of pages and resources by Documentary Educational Resources
Jean Rouch, Filmmaker, Anthropologist—an excellent tribute site from Documentary Educational Resources
Jean Rouch, at Maitres-Fous.net—a website devoted to the study of Jean Rouch’s Films
John Collier Jr—photo exhibit
The John C. H. Grabill Collection--Grabill was an early Western photographer who worked out of Deadwood and Lead City, South Dakota. His photographs of frontier life in Colorado, South Dakota, and Wyoming are particularly valuable in documenting economic life on the frontier, such as the work of cowboys and miners, and the interactions between Native Americans and early white settlers.
Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, American Museum of Natural History
Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture--"To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Margaret Mead's birth, the Library of Congress presents a selection of materials from its extensive Mead collection, which came to the Library after her death. The corpus of notes and other field materials that Mead preserved are available to scholars interested in evaluating and building on her research. Totaling more than 500,000 items, the Margaret Mead Papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives is one of the largest collections for a single individual in the Library. The collection includes manuscripts, diaries, letters, field notes, drawings, prints, photographs, sound recordings, and film. For this exhibition, items have been selected from the collection to document major themes in Mead's life and work."
Native American Photographs: 19th century images from the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford—An introductory description to the collection of Native American photographs (with about 20 sample images) held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England.
Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875 to 1925—“It is about the history of photography in a small group of islands remote from the world's power centres. More broadly, however, it demonstrates the ability of photographs to inhabit multiple contexts and to speak to the interests of many disciplines. It is also an example of the power of photographs from another time to exist simultaneously as both historical documents of culture contact and remarkable aesthetic and informative objects. It brings together objects from more than 15 diverse collections and constructs a different context for them, melding past understandings with current voices from as far away as Apia and Pago Pago.”
Reading Photographs. (William Hammond Mathers Museum)--An illustrated essay exploring some of the potential uses of photographs as documents through an examination of the Wanamaker Collection of American Indian photographs at the William Hammond Mathers Museum in Bloomington, Indiana. Provides an extensive description of the history of photographic documentation of Indian life, including use of studio props and manipulation techniques. Includes bibliography.
Revealing Pictures: A Visual Culture Gallery, University of Alberta—“This website is a gallery designed for both professional and non-professional photographers and image-makers to explore, experiment, and discuss the work of visual representation in the world. The confluence, in the early 21st. century, of an advancement of digital photography, the quickening of internet communication, and the growing practice of visual communication by non-professional image makers, begs for a forum. We hope that Revealing Pictures & Reflexive Frames will present just such a place.”
Richard Throssel: Photographer of the Crows. (American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming)--Richard Throssel was a contemporary and colleague of Edward Curtis. This site contains sixteen images depicting individuals and scenes from southeastern Montana.
Robert J. Flaherty Page—home page for scholars, with numerous articles on the life and works of Flaherty, with especial attention to Nanook of the North.
Robert J. Flaherty, "Life Among the Eskimos" (1922)
Robert J. Flaherty How I Filmed Nanook of the North (1922) by Robert Flaherty
Robert J. Flaherty, "Picture Making in the South Seas" (1923)
Robert J. Flaherty The Handling of Motion Picture Film Under Various Climatic Conditions (1926)
Robert Joseph Flaherty - An Appreciation (1998) by Dennis Doros, see also:
The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-23 (1923) by Robert E. Sherwood
The Odyssey of a Film-Maker (1960) by Frances Flaherty
An Uncomprehensive Bibliography of Victorian Photography, by Thomas Prasch.
UR-LIST: Web Resources for Visual Anthropology—has not been updated in years, be prepared to chase up broken links through http://web.archive.org
Virtual Snow: Edmund Carpenter on the Web--a comprehensive resource, with free full text access to Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me, video clips, bibliographies, articles, and reviews.
VISTAS: Visual Culture in Spanish America—A concise and beautifully executed online display of the applications of visual cultural approaches to the study of colonial history.
Visual Communication/Visual Rhetorics—The University of Iowa, Department of Communication Studies—an extensive listing of online resources for studies in visual communication.
Women Photographers and the Native American Indian--by Peter E. Plamquist, in Rendezvous, Vol. 28, Nos. 1&2, Fall/Spring 1992/1993: Bibliography and some biographical descriptions of thirteen women who photographed Indian life in the late 19th and early 20th century. Some sample photographs
Yanomamö Filmography—descriptive list of films by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon
