A Historical Analysis of Photography and Anthropology

Photography, since its invention in the mid-nineteenth century, has been considered and used in many modern scientific disciplines and has been able to develop and advance various scientific goals. Anthropologists and ethnographers used photographs to discover, capture, and study various societies, and photography became virtually an integral part of the study and research, and much later in the third decade of the twentieth century,various branches of social photography (such as social documentary photography) arose from these surveying, geographical, ethnographic, and anthropological photographs. The question, however,is to what extent did anthropological photography adhere to the inherent characteristics of this emerging medium (objective and direct recording)?The answer to this question seems important because we look at some of the results of the purposeful use of such photographs in the fields of Orientalism and colonialism in Western societies. For this purpose, and to achieve a more accurate answer,in the present study,we will define and study anthropological, humanistic and ethnographic photographs using the method of historical analysis, and critically analyze it in the context of social studies of history.We conclude that the different interpretations of the photographs are generally and largely the result of the obvious interests pursued by Western anthropologists.