PORTFOLIO the necessity inherent in the discipline itself for the ethnographer 132 to understand his role as an intermediary between cultures. He is an “author” who constructs identities based on an interpretation that always has some degree of bias.4 As such, there is little surprising about the fact that one of the most important books on this subject is Clifford Geertz’s L’Anthropologue comme Auteur (The Anthropologist as Author).5 In this work, Geertz examines the manner in which anthropologists write, and he analyzes and reveals the rhetorical strategies they use in their texts in order to give credibility to their analyses. This discourse, in its most extreme and relativistic form, went as far as to question the possibility of there being such a thing as a scientific anthropologist. This had consequences for photography. If an ethnographer uses a camera as a methodological instrument in his field work, must not what he sees be influenced by a host of prejudices— the canons of photographic representation of his time; the modes and theoretical precepts of schools; or, to use more familiar language, simply different ways of seeing things—that would determine both how photography was practiced and, ultimately, what appeared in the photo? It would be absurd to contend otherwise. Back to the Box: Challenges and Goals The Boîte d’Arts Graphiques project’s very strength lies in the perceptions of the creators of the works it displays. This change assumes an epistemological redefinition of the object, be it an engraving, a watercolor, or a photograph. The representation is no longer considered a reflection of reality. That is to say, the metaphor of the mirror no longer applies and the work is instead seen as the expression of a particular subjective view of the world. Given that the collection that will be displayed in the boîte is primarily historical, what will be seen there essentially is a critique of classical ethnology and the ways in which it has treated the documents preserved in museum archives. As much as the classification system used by the Musée de l’Homme addressed the principles of logical documentation, this approach is precisely what will be changed here. A potential risk inherent in this transformation is that we might go from one extreme to another. The fact of knowing the limits of photographs as documents, of asserting that they need to be considered in the context of the conditions in which they were produced, and of accepting the fact that the creator’s view and his eye lie behind each work does not automatically imply that they are works of art. There are several reasons for this, especially in photography. First of all, for several decades, ethnography museums published books and pamphlets that they distributed to travelers and ethnologists, which gave directives and instructions on how to photograph and even draw in such a way that the creative act was subjugated to the exigencies of pure documentation.6 Secondly, it turns out to be difficult when dealing with historical collections to renounce the “studium” dimension of photography, that is to say, the idea that we can comprehend information on the subject from the photo representing it. Whatever the case, that which is fixed on the photo negative is not an illusion or a mental construction, but something that was really in front of the camera’s lens—and that means that what we see “really was.”7 But I detect another problem relating to the reception of such works by the general public. An example of this is the “ambiguous image,” that is, an image that one person sees as a duck and another sees as a rabbit. Sometimes, the person who sees the duck will see it that way so obviously that, as Ludwig Wittgenstein would say, he does not even consider the possibility that it might be a rabbit. In this case, forcing him to see the rabbit might not be the best solution. And the main reason for this is that the duck and the rabbit are two inalterable aspects of the same figure. For me, this summarizes the biggest challenge the boîte faces— that the relationship between the document and the creation must be understood like the two sides of a coin or as aspects of the “ambiguous image.” That will enable us to understand a work’s multidimensional nature and keep us from falling into either a banal documentary approach or a biased aestheticization. NOTES 1. Barthe, Christine. “De l’échantillon au corpus, du type à la personne,” Journal des anthropologues. Questions d'optiques. Aperçus sur les relations entre la photographie et les sciences sociales, 80–81, 2000, p. 78. 2. See Christine Barthe and Anne-Laure Pierre. “Photographies et ethnologie. La photothèque du musée de l'Homme,” Gradhiva, no. 25, 1999. 3. Benjamin, Walter. “La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica,” Sur la photographie, Pre-textos, Valencia, 2004, p. 94. 4. See James Clifford. Dilemas de la cultura. Antropología, literatura y arte desde la perspectiva posmoderna, Editorial Gedisa, Barcelona, 1995. 5. Geertz, Clifford. El antropólogo como autor, Editorial Gedisa, Barcelona, 1997. 6. For England, see any edition beginning with the third of Notes and Queries on Anthropology. For France, see Marcel Mauss, Manuel d'ethnographie, éditions Payot, Paris, 1967; Instructions sommaires pour les collecteurs d'objets ethnographiques, Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro et Mission Dakar-Djibouti, Paris 1931; Marcel Griaule. El método de la etnografía, Editions Nova, Buenos Aires, 1957. 7. See Roland Barthes. La Chambre claire, Note sur la photographie, Paris, Seuil, 1980. Installation 5 Folded/Unfolded: Clérambault and the movement of fabric. 17 September– 17 November 2013. A series of photographs of Moroccan women wrapped in their veils then revealing themselves, taken between 1917 and 1920 by the psychiatrist, physician, and anthropologist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault is the most recent installation. FIG. 9: Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, untitled, 1918–1919. © Musée du Quai Branly. Copy photo: Claude Germain.
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