Cultural Anthropology began publishing photo essays on its website in 2012, amid wide-ranging discussions about alternative forms of critical ethnographic expression. In 2016, this section was relaunched as a collaboration with the Society for Visual Anthropology known as Writing with Light. While further submissions are no longer being accepted, the peer-reviewed photo essays presented here testify to a fertile period of experimentation and engagement with visual scholarship.
Final Writing with Light Series
The Writing with Light collective was a SCA/SVA joint initiative which provided editors and authors the opportunity to focus closely on the photo-essay as a dis... More
Camps and Ruins: Notes from Greece on the Visual Representation of the 2015 “Refugee Crisis”
My grandmother had very few photographs from her childhood; I believe there were only two.1 The first photo was one taken in an unknown studio, depicting her en... More
“This is about racism and greed”: Photographs of Philadelphia’s Mass School Closures
After months of community opposition and protest, on March 7, 2013, the School District of Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission (SRC) voted to close twenty-t... More
Experiments in the Field
Farmers are either disappearing or rock stars (Weiler, Otero, and Wittman 2016; Phillipov and Goodman 2017). If a farm is not reaching economies of scale then i... More
Borderwaters: Conversing with Fluidity at the Dominican Border
Wind tugging at my sleeve feet sinking into the sand I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean where the two overlap a gentle coming together at other ... More
Connotative Memories
Recent events of violence in São Paulo, Brazil targeting Palestinian, Syrian, as well as Angolan, Nigerian, and Congolese bystanders during a protest against th... More
Debris n-1: Visualizing a Bullerman Erotics
In this photo essay I hope to extend the contemplative space of what Bruno Latour (1993, 144) calls a “parliament of things” through the juxtaposition and relat... More
Archiving Postcolonial Modernity: The Foreign Service Family Slide Show
My father worked for the Indian Foreign Service from 1955 to 1982. During this period our nuclear family lived in several countries across Africa, South America... More
Navigating the Anarchy of Debris: Observing the Loss of Material Sovereignty
This essay is an immersive exploration of an abandoned industrial site, which addresses the degeneration of materials and the imagery of ruination. By visually ... More
Repetition and Extraordinary Living in the Gaza Camp
On a winding two-lane road, just a few kilometers southwest of the ancient city of Jarash, a small refugee camp punctuates the Jordanian landscape. Established ... More