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Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds. London: Routledge Press, 2004. 222 pp.
For most of anthropology's 20th-century history, photography (whose convenient availability for amateurs coincided roughly with the expectation of fieldwork as professional training) has been theorized as a research tool (e.g., Collier 1967, a classic among many). In 1992, Elizabeth Edwards's edited volume Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 signaled a shift in the study of photography and photographs in our discipline by placing them firmly within colonial discourse, thus ushering in a new phase of sophisticated historical and ethnographic work on still photography that situated photographs' meanings within larger discourses of power and semiotic practices (such as Pinney 1997, Poole 1997, and more every year or so). Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, continues this trajectory by extending meaning explicitly to photographs' materiality. The book's premise, as Edwards puts it in the useful and wide-ranging introduction, is to treat photographs not only as two-dimensional images but also as three-dimensional objects-artifacts that circulate, are collected, have uses, are embedded in power relations, and are enacted and performed by the human body. Yet they are not just commodities either: The image makes the photograph a special kind of artifact. This is an ambitious and thoroughly welcome premise.
Most of the contributors to this volume hold positions as curators or archivists; they are people...