Reprinted from HUMAN ORGANIZATION, Vol. 23, No.1, Spring 1964
Still Photography in the Systematic Recording and Analysis of Behavioral Data Paul Byers* Every anthropologist goes into the field with at least
a notebook and a still camera. He will have had yeal'S of training in the special literacy with which he will handle the observational, conceptual, and interpretive aspects of his discipline in the words he will write. But he may have . had little, if any, systematic training in seeing, under­
standing, taking, or u~ing the materials he will get with his camera.
The camera ha's become an important part of the an­
thropologist's instrumentation, but there is, as yet, al­
most no photographic equivalent of a literacy with which
to handle photographic observational materials syste­
matically and communicatively.. There have been numer­
ous more or less successful attempts to handle ,this prob­
lem but each time photography ,is used in behavioral
science beyond simple illustrations-with-captions, a new
invention is required ,to deal with the material meaning­
fully and communicatively.1
• Paul Byers teaches photography at Columbia University and
is a 'professional ·photographer specializing in photographic work in
behavioral science.
The author is indebted to Dr. Ray L. Birdwhistel1 et al., at
Temple Research Division, Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Insti­
tute, Philadelphia, for insights into human communication and
micro-cultural 'analysis and for training in linguistic-kinesic analy­
sis of behavior on sound-film.
1. Probably the most important of these inventions for the an­
thropological use of still photographs, including discussions of the
procedures used, are: Gregory Bateson .and Margaret Mead,
Balin~1I: Characttr, A Photoflraphic Analysis, New York Academy
of Sciences, 1942; and Margaret Mead and Frances C. Macgregor,
Growlh and Culture, A Photoflraphic Study of Balinese Childhood,
G. P. Putnam's, New York, 1951.
Discussions of still photography in anthropology may be found
In: Margaret Mead, "Some Uses of Still Photography in Culture
and Personality," in D. G. Haring (cd.), Personal Character and
Cultural Milieu, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1956, pp.
79-105; and Margaret Mead, "Anthropology Among the Sciences,"
American Anthropoloflist, LXIII (1961) 475-432.'
If photographic information is to become systematic­
ally useful to behavioral scienti&tS, special training must
be acquired not only in photographic tedmology but also
in under&tanding the potentialities of the tool as much
more than a recording or illustrating device. There is a
vast world of visible but "unseen" information that can
be accessible to photography and it is possible to develop
a literacy or sy.stematization by which photographs can
be taken and used in behavioral observation and in the
currency of communication among scholars.
In order ,to understand the kind of useful information
that can be handled with some precision it is necessary,
first, to understand something of the relation of photog­
raphy to the several bumanbehaviors involved in pro­
ducing photographs. As a starting point there is a useful
parallel in lingui<stics. H. A. Gleason begins his Introduc­
tion to Descriptive Linguistics2 with the paragraph:
As you listen to an unfamiliar Iangua~e you ~et
the impression of a torrent of disorgamzed nOises
carrying no sense whatever. To the native speaker
it is qUite otherwise. He pays little attention to the
sounds, but concerns himself instead with some situa­
tion which lies behind the act of speech and is, for
him, somehow reflected in it. Both you and he have
failed to grasp the nature of the phenomenon.
Neither the casual observer nor the usual native
speaker can give any real information about a lan­
guage. To be sure, some people, Americans perhaps
more than most others, have decided notions about
language. But the ideas held and discussed come far
short of giving a complete picture of the language
and sometimes have very lIttle relationship to the
2. H. A. Gleason, An Introduction to Descripti'fll! Linguistics,
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1961.
HUMAN ORGANIZATION
facts. Even people with considerable education are
often wholly unable to answer certain quite simple
questions about their language. For most people
language is primarily a tool to be used, rather than
a subject for close critical attention.
79
As a professional photographer who has worked with
anthropologists for many years, I have been obliged to
explore the tools I use and photography as a whole in
terms of its human uses, in terms of current under­
standing of human communication, and as a cultural in­
vention. I am repeatedly surprised to find that whereas
writers (professional or scientific) do not ,suppose that
the value of their writing is significantly related to pen­
cils, alphabets, or typewriters or their technological skills
with these instruments, they do behave as though photo­
graphic skill is somehow importantly related to cameras
and photographic technology. So at the outset of this
paper I must suggest that photography is not the product
essentially a matter of technology (and cannot be suc­
cessfully taught as one) than speech is a matter of
physiology.
For the past few years, both for the Institute of In­
tercultural Studies and at Columbia University, I have
taught behavioral science photography to graduate an­
thropology students in New YQrk City. This article is
partly a product of that experience.
In scanning the available literature and current prac­
tices in the teaching of photography one finds that the
inherent aim in such teaching, and consequently the
methods used, are determined by an historical two­
headed view of still photography as 1) an art and 2) a
precise machine-made record of a scene or a subject. In
the first view the primary concern is the vision of the
phot~grapher-artist who uses the technology to produce a
creative photograph of which the photographer is the
" source. "1 n t he secon dview
'
'
. t he
th
e primary
concern IS
accuracy with which the subject is recorded on film in
which case the subject is the "source." This second view,
however, presupposes that we have some acceptable
criterion with which we can measure the relationship be­
tween 1) a three-dimensional, colored (and perhaps smell
and sound-producing) subject moving in real time and 2)
a photographic translation as a two-dimensional 8 X 10
inch, black-and-white representation of a l/loOth of a
second's worth of subject/time. Furthermore when we
show .almost any photograph to several different people
and ~Iscover that they see different things and meanings,
we fmd we have no real criterion with which we can
even. iden tify what is meant by "the subject" except in
the Simplest orders of classification.
The truism that the same photograph has non-meas­
urable, different meanings to different viewers implies a
semantic impasse which has led most observer,s to discard
the photograph as a possible object of scientific study or
analysi,s or as a useful vehicle for precise and/or com­
municable information. It is often clearly understood
what cannot be done with photography because of the
semantic problem. But it is the task of the photographer
working in behavioral science to discover what observa­
tional and communication purposes photography can
serve in behavioral science.
At the beginning of a behavioral science photography
course the class is asked to discard the concept of "ob­
jects" or "people" as photographic subjects. When, for
example, a simple exercise-assignment in camera handling
and light asks for pictures of a brick, the ,students are
asked to decide, individually, what hypothetical signifi­
cance they chose to assign to the brick. Since "brick"
is a generalized word wherea,s a brick itself may be
conceived in a variety of ways depending on its con­
ceptual context, each student is required to describe a
of a technology but i" the product of the -various hutnan
"ign'i'GanGe; that he i" photographing. There are innu­
interactions involved: people being photographed,
people taking photographs, people looking at photo­
graphs. Pencils and paper do not write and cameras do
not take pictures. Behavioral photography is no more
merable ways to photograph a brick artistically. But, if
one conceives that a brick is significant, for example, be­
cause of its relation to the weight-bearing structural
value of a wall, then this quality or relationship must
Inherent in this point of view of the descriptive linguist
is the recognition that there is more information in hu­
man speech than meets the untrained ear. There is also
more information in photographs than meets the un­
trained eye. We can increase the information available
and thus the useful value of still photography in be­
havioral disciplines if we understand photography in
terms of the human behavior of which it is a product and
in terms of the information which these behaviors con­
tribute to the photograph. I would paraphrase the above
paragraph of Gleason in relation to photography:
As you look at a series of unfamiliar photographs
you may get the impression that what you are seeing
is simple and evident on the face of the photographs.
To the photographer who took them it is often quite
different. He pays little attention to the light rays or
the minute details but concerns himself instead with
recording some scene in terms of the meaning it has
for him and which is somehow reflected in the photo­
graphs. Both you and he have failed to grasp the
full informational nature of photography. Neither
the casual observer nor the usual photographer is
likely to give much scientifically 'significant infor­
mation about the behavioral content of a photo­
graph. . . . The ideas held and discussed come far
short of giving a complete picture of photography­
as-information and sometimes have very little rela­
tion to the significant behavioral information in
photographs. Even people with considerable educa­
tion are often wholly unable to see quite simple in­
formational elements in a photograph. For most
people photography is primarily a tool to record or
illustrate concrete objects or convey abstract feel­
ings, rather than a subject for close and critical
attention.
80
HUMAN ORGANIZATION
somehow be evident in the photograph. Other possible to deal explicitly with useful kinds of information in
brick-significances might be: the shape (as related to photographs.
other shapes used, to the completed structure, or to the
From another point of view all this serves to teach
available manufacturing tools), or the substance (as re­ students to translate (and, indeed, teaches them what
flecting the use of raw materials), non-utilitarian design, can and cannot be translated) from event to photograph.
etc. The order of significance is required in words and the They begin to learn how to see like a camera but, in this
significance itself has to be available in the photographs. course, like an anthropological camera. This is not the
Photographs are criticised and informally valued in terms same as "seeing like an anthropologist." Information go­
of their success in showing specifically stated signifi­ ing to a brain i-s not recorded or "processed" the same
cances. This produces a useful separation between that way as information going through a lens onto a film. The
information that can be handled verbally (the students limiting factors are different.
are required to write their orders-of-significance before
In the past photographs have commonly been used to
taking pictures) and that which is most effectively record or illustrate what the observer has already seen
handled photographically.
and already knows. Photographs are usually taken and/or
When in the course we proceed to the photography of selected because they support an idea or prior image of
human interaction, we do not think of people-as-subjects the observer. But the camera can also, and perhaps
but, instead, of some aspect of the interaction that has most usefully, be used to find out what we may not
some possible hypothetical significance. Each student is know and have little visual access to. To do this, how­
free to imagine a project to which some aspect of be­ ever, we must learn how to see what we do not know
havior might contribute significantly: how people shake :ve a:-e going to see in photographs. It is more important
hands, how children of three years touch each other, how In thIS aspect of photography to learn to see information
mothers feed babies, etc. When this order of significance in photographs than to be able to see the same order of
is stated in writing, the class as a whole can evaluate the information at an everit. Our culture provides consider­
photographs. In practice such significances are likely to able training in seeing what we already know in photo­
be of a kind that requires multiple pictures in series or graphs. We tend to use pictures as experiential re­
juxtaposition. For human interaction we commonly work rundancy. For example, we reject photographs of our­
in terms of shooting one 36-exposure roll of film per as­ selves or our children if those pictures do not support
signment.
our own theories about the subject-ourselves or our
Introducing the concept of significance to replace sub­ chi~dren. We see actions in photographs in terms of
ject serves several purposes. It removes the common actIOns we know about and are already familiar with un­
temptation to take "good" pictures that reflect one's own less we are ~ontr.adicted by. ~ caption. \Ve have no easy
pictorial or artistic cleverness. Art does not count. It way to ratIOnalIze unfamIliar actions to make them
'
shifts the photographer's attention to levels of informa­ predictable to us.
tion that are appropriate to photography while providing
One. goal in the cour-se is to exploit the capacities of
the necessary verbal cross-referencing that enables the the stl~1 camera to see more than our eyes alone will.
viewer to know exactly wha t to expect to see. It serves Early In the course students make event-discoveries in
the purpose, also, of training the students to see the P?otographs that are important to them but which they
world in front of their cameras in increasingly subtle and dId not see at the event they photographed. When it
refined patterns. Human behavior is patterns of patterns ?ecomes . clear th.at photography can record significant
of patterns, decreasing in size beyond what we normally mformatlOn that IS not seen with eyes, students can begin
use in social seeing. As the students move back and forth to use photography to search for information about hu­
between looking at the material in front of the cameras man interaction that is unavailable to their eyes.
in terms of anthropological significance and looking at
We tend to forget that the photograph represents
great numbers of photographs,. they gai~ a considerable a kind of visual infonnation that must not be confused
measure of increased observattonal acuIty. Except for with what eyes normally see. We may look at a photo­
those few students who may be unable to accept the idea graph and see only the u<sual eye-available information.
of seeing on new levels, the students can learn to see new But there is always more. If the telescope and the micro­
kinds of information on new levels in both human inter­ scope gave us new kinds of visual information (which
action and in photographs.
we had to learn to see with these instruments) based on
The significance concept is also u<seful because it di­ new orders of magnification, the still camera gives us a
vides our materials into a dichotomy appropriate for the new order of seeing based on a change in time. Seeing
course. Anthropological thinking (i.e., the significance) is learned and culturally influenced. We learn what to see
is left to the anthropology students and that which is and what not to see. We see in human time and in some
photographic per se is the province of the teacher-photog­ relation to human rhythms. For this reason we find
rapher. The class as a ""hole judges the communicati,:e
movies easier to see than still pictures. Movies are pro­
value (and, to wherever extent we become systematIc jected, normally, at a human-time rate. But the still
in a project-context, the data value) of the photographs. photograph holds a scene motionless for our continuous
Thus the class simultaneou<sly learns and teaches itself involvement-in-time with a non-time representation. We
HUMAN ORGANIZATION
see relationships frozen that are, in life, too fleeting for
our eyes. There is, therefore, more information available
to us in a still photograph of a scene than was available
at that moment at the scene itself. In the photograph we
can examine the complexities of a single exposure-moment
as long as we like. At the scene itself we had only
1/100th of a second in which to experience that 1/100th
of a second. If 1/100ths of a second are not critical in
behavioral analysis with our present analytic techniques,
it can be demonstrated that 1/10ths of a second some­
times are.
The important point for the behavioral scientist is not
that the photograph has more information but that it
has different information. This different information is
available to the person trained to use photography to this
end and who is trained to find and analyze this informa­
tion in a collection of photographs.
In order to describe more meaningfully what new orders
of significance or information we learn to deal with in the
photography class, it is necessary to describe briefly
some of the demonstration-experiments we carry out.
The equipment we use is minimal. We use 35 mm
(Ieica-size) cameras, medium price lenses, drugstore film,
available room light sometimes with newspapers a's re­
flectors. We use light meters carefully and keep records of
procedures. Film processing is carried out in kitchens or
bathrooms-as is the making of contact sheets of all rolls.
We begin by exploring the inherent limits of the materials
to undel'Stand the possibilities of present day photo­
graphic technology and materials. Few students know, for
example, that it is possible under these "field" conditions
to photograph a page of a newspaper from the normal
minimum focussing distance of about three feet with
ordinary fast film (Kodak Tri-X) and produce a print
in which all the text is readable. (They also discovered
that carelessness at any of several point,s in the process
can degrade or destroy the newsprint "information" in
their photograph.) Students do not themselves make en­
largements in the course but enlargements are made else­
where to illustrate the degree of detail that could be
handled photographically with our equipment.
For the first human-subject demonstration we pose­
or simply sit-a person in front of a camera on a tripod.
We use a lens (90 or 135 mm which enables us to fill
each frame with a head-and-shoulders. The camera is
focussed and the shutter and diaphragm settings are de­
termined and set. The ,subject is given no instructions
except to keep in range of the camera in both lateral and
focus distance directions. The subject, a student, is usual­
ly embarrassed and uncomfortable, but willing. The class
may try either to sooth or needle the subject but this
is not important to the results. One student is instructed
to step to the camera and, watching through the view­
finder. take a half-roll of pictures of the subject. The
student-photographer gives no instructions to his subject
who is mostly engaged in interchanges with others in the
class. Photographs are taken fairly quickly-perhaps as
rapidly as one-per-second or as slowly at one-per-ten
81
seconds. When the first student has taken half a roll,
another steps to the camera and takes another half-rolL
(Although the students are encouraged to bring
cameras to class and photograph each other and class
proceedings casually, it is important not to use class
members as subjects in demonstration-experiments.
Analysis and discussion of a set of photographs can seem
uncomfortably like analysis and discussion of the subject
person. This either inhibits analysis and discussion or pro­
duces possible embarrassment. Subjects should be people
outside the class.)
The class also discovers that whereas they can often
recognize and handle -small "informational" differences,
they can usually not talk in other than loose and sub­
jective-interpretive language about what they are seeing.
As we proceed, individual students are able to derive
"meaning" from these comparisons or contrasts but it is
always "meaning" in terms of some particular conceptual
framework. It is not a simple inventory of observations
that is equally meaningful to others. Sometimes several
students can agree among themselves on what they see
but none can be precisely verbal about it.
We have experimented with father-vs.-mother pictures
of a child, man-vs.-woman pictures of a man, man-vs.­
woman pictures of a woman, etc. We have even intro­
duced series taken by a "machine" in which the shutter
was repeatedly set .to operate by self-timer (the photog­
rapher or operator released the self-timer and the ex­
posure follows about 15 seconds later). This produces a
series of pictures for all intents and purposes humanly
unselected as to exact moment.
Eventually most of the students can examine two or
three sets of photographs of the same subject (same
"pose," exposure, angle, etc.) and analyze differences
to the point of saying
This series was taken by the woman and that by the
man, [or] These are the machine shots and these are
the child's shots.
I t is less important that the student learn to identify
the photographer than that he learns to see minimal but
significant differences and that he can find pattern and
meaning in these differences.
The question then arises: are the differences those of
the subject or the photographer? When we can establish
informational difference in two sets of photographs, what
is the source of the information? One can say that the
information must be introduced by the photographer
since the subject was the same for both with only "ran­
dom" possible differences. It is probably not important
to answer the question in this form, but it is important
to understand with some explicitness that photography is
a human transaction and not" simple record. The par­
ticular fraction of a second one selects to push a shutter
button is partly culturally conditioned and partly the
product of an idiosyncratic personality. Even if two skill­
ful and intelligent photographers are instructed to take
82
HUMAN ORGANIZATION
precisely the same kind of photographs of some inter­
action, the results will be different to a skillful analyst.
This suggests not only that refined analytic techniques
can be applied to still photographs but that the nature of
the photographing or being-photographed process can
offer a new possible use for still photography in behavioral
science. If an adequately capable member of a group
under study (whether an African Bushman, a city youth­
gang member, a child, or an upper-middle-class parent)
is given a camera with instructions to take an ample series
of photographs of a given subject (subject, here, need
not be very specific), the trained photograph-analyst
will be able to make inferences of the views, images, or
theories that the photographer is wittingly or unwitting­
ly trying to support. What of all the possible time-slices
and angles does he select by pushing the shutter button
at one moment as against another? Americans, for ex­
ample tend to take "American" pictures of people look­
,
.
B
ing like Americans with American expressIOns. ut we
then attempt to get a pictorial representation of, for ex­
ample, African Bushmen by filtering the record through
the cultural conditioning of the non-Bushman photogra­
pher. This has meant that we have had to limit the uses
of still photography in anthropology to those kinds of
pictorial record that are not significantly influenced by
the special cultural filters of the photographer. (Without,
for the most part, any systematic way to determine
whether the record has or has not been significantly
changed by the photographer.) And for those kinds of
recording in behavioral research that involve micro­
analysis or analysis in terms of more subtle or smaller
bits of behavior, still photography has been almost useless
because the special bias of the photographer is known to
skew the results. If a student or researcher has a more
precise understanding of photography in terms of the
nature of the human transactions involved and has ac­
quired skill at sorting for comparable data in multiple
still photographs, he will be able to design useful and
specific data-gathering procedures by planning in advance
to analyze the differences by shifting the relations of
control and variable and thus changing "skewing" to
possible data.
All this is to say that the city youth-gang member or
the African Bushman may offer the researcher a more
precisely structured and accessible interpretation of his
culture through the photographs he will take of it than
through the words he may talk about it or, perhaps, even
through the inferences the observer may make from his
behavior. At least it is possible to investigate new kinds
of cultural or sub-cultural material in this way.
.The class "experiments" are not usually carried out
in strict experimental style. Instead they are designed to
help the students discover that:
1) Small, minimal and often obscure differences
may be significant.
2) One can learn to "see" these differences.
3) These differences are not significant per se but
become significant when they can be related to a
pattern.
4) All photographs are products of an interaction
between photographer and subject and all view­
ing is interactional between viewer and photo­
graph.
S) Information reported by any single viewer may
have been introduced by anyone or more of the
several interactional entities involved (subject,
photographer, viewer, or even anyone outside this
trio who exerts an influence indirectly such as
an editor, the requests of a colleague, the effort
to please a subject, etc.).
6) The information in a still photograph exists on
many levels but training and the systematic
relating of photographic information to a careful
analytic technique can keep the levels separated
and the information available and useful.
In the class we usually avoid discussions of meaning
and interpretation but sometimes these orders of state­
ment are offered and there is often disagreement. Often
it is possible to point out that they are not disagreeing
about the information but are reporting discoveries on
different levels or relating them to different conceptual
frameworks. Finding information in a photograph is not
a matter of finding objects but rather in finding mean­
ingful, patterned reia tionships.
Since different viewers, in the absence of a common
hypothesis or framework may see relationships of differ­
ent shapes, it becomes necessary to evolve some syste­
matic way to cross-reference the informational material
so that a photograph is not a problematic assortment of
information but becomes specific in meaningful scientific
communication. Photography, to the class, becomes
more than a recording or illustrating tool. It becomes
observation itself.
When one has learned to use a camera to abstract from
an interaction particular moments that are relevant to
some analysis of that interaction, the -still-photography
technique can be expanded to embrace a more or less
broad spectrum of levels-events, photographically speak­
ing, that are taking place simultaneously or are over­
lapping. That is, the anthropological photographer can
approach a scene with a more generalized sensitivity and
take a relatively large number of only semi-specific
photographs for later sorting and analysis. With this
body of still photographs (perhaps several hundred)
of such a thing, for example, as brief courtship encounters
on street corners, it becomes possible to sort them for any
number of particular aspects such as gestural echoing,
postural parallelism or complementarity, location of
events, stance, behavior of passerby or onlookers, etc.
This is a matter of relatively quick shooting geared to a
photographic response that is not quite calculated at each
shot but geared to affect or movement rhythms. One
will discover that fingers on a shutter-button will record
HUMAN ORGANIZATION
small significant fragments of time that culturally con­
Jitioned eyes may avoid or censor.
It is sometimes said that entire continuous events can
most easily be swept into the record with a moving-pic­
ture camera. But this will be a record in the same time­
dimension as the original event against which, on viewing
it, one must again match his culturally conditioned see­
ing. And the movie record is not one that can easily be
chopped up to re-sort single frames in search of new in­
sights or to compare non-contiguous bits. While single­
frames can be viewed by stopping a projector, it is diffi­
cult to arrange to view several single frames simultaneous­
ly for comparison or contrast. The movie record is used
for a different kind of data recording.
All this is, perhaps, a far cry from the point of view
of the simple field "illustration" and is in contradiction
to some of the mythology about photography. In an
excellent survey-report of common attitudes toward and
uses of photography in anthropology made by Oswald
Werner for a masters degree thesis,3 he says that
The aim of good field photography is an undis­
torted view, as close as pos'sible to the undisturbed
"reality" of the people under study.
This presupposes that there is an undistorted view. It is
probably more useful to regard behavior as an infinite
succession of views among which "distortion" is simply
a moment that is atypical to the informant viewer. There
are, of course, no real atypical moments unless one uses
some statistical criterion and mistakes behavior-in-time
with the learned way we usually see behavior. The nodal
points in human rhythms that we pull out to "see" are
what we call typical. For behavioral analysis it is often
the in-hetw('('n mom('nts that we would find most useful.
Margaret Mead, in this regard, has cautioned photog­
raphers to remember that the camera pointed at the
rooms and contrivances built to demonstrate human
perceptual distortions will record the same effects that
eyes see: distortions. The camera will itself neither "dis­
tort" nor "correct distortion."
Pictures and photographs for publication or communi­
cation are often selected or rejected, called typical or
atypical, good or bad in terms of some criteria of the
investigator, not in terms of the behavior itself. Typical!
atypical are more often statements about the people who
use them, or about contexts, than about behavior or
photographs of behavior. If/when we study "seeing"
cross-culturally, we are almost certain to find that the
nodal points of behavior that are "seen" are not only
somewhat different individually but very different cross­
,culturally. As every professional photographer knows,
the so-called accidental photographs taken at the "wrong
moments" are often more revealing about subjects than
the "right" ones. One may think in terms of distorted­
3. Oswald Werner, Ethllograpllic Photography, (abstract of M. A.
thesis), Syracuse University, 1961.
83
un~istorte~, right-wrong, typical-atypical for purposes
of Iilustrauon. But for the analysis of behavior we can
profitably find a way to study the in-between moments.
The anthro~ol.ogical pho~og~aphe.r may be trained to get
them even If It means lInkIng hIs camera to a machine
or giving his camera to one of his subjects of study.
'Verner also reports that
Good. re~?rding techniques should enable the anthro­
pologIst to brIng part of the field home" for further
study by him as well as by other scientists.
This is certainly true, particularly in relation to movie
records. But to integrate direct observation with photo­
graphic observation in the field one needs to go beyond
the "bring it home" use. It is astonishing to find that
many field anthropologists do not process their own still
photographs to the point of seeing them (making contact
prints) in the field and are, therefore, unable to relate
their photography to their personal experience of the
photographed event more closely than the weeks or
m~nths it may take to send film away to a lab and get
prInts. back. If one uses photography only for illustrating
what IS already seen and recorded, it is not essential to
have the print immediately.. But insofar as photography
becomes ?bservation itself, it is a great disadvantage to
have avaIlable only part of one's observations, the other
part having been seot away unseen until months later.
To bring part of the field home is one thing. To send an
important part of one's observations home unseen is
another.
A third common vIew of photography IS reflected In
this sen tence:
Tt ta kes an extremely skillful person (anthropologist)
to record an event photographically without serious
disturbance of the natural rhythms and smooth flow
of events.
This problem and the nature of the skill involved is
greatly misunderstood. We tend to suppose that cameras
are inherently frightening or interfering instruments
whereas notebooks, pencils, and observing anthropologists
are not. It is not the camera itself that interferes or dis­
turbs, it is the photographer using one who has not
learned to put his camera activity into social situations
easily and comfortably. If the photographer regards his
camera as a mechanical instrument that exists outside
himself, he must interpose it between himself and his
subjects. With this interposition he can interrupt, change,
or destroy situations. He can ridicule, irritate, or em­
barras people. Or he can admire, support, and reassure his
subjects. What the photographer does with his camera
is not essentially a matter of his technical facility, it is a
matter of his own feeling about the photographic process
and how he communicates this to the subject. If the
photographer feels that the camera is a privacy-invading
machine, the subjects will respond accordingly. Anthro­
pologists could, as some journalists do, frighten people or
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HUMAN ORGANIZATION
embarrass them with only notebooks and pencils. But
they learn to present these things as extensions of them­
selves, and to the extent to which the anthropologist
succeeds in relating himself to his subjects, his instru­
mentation can become related, too. But if the anthropolo­
gist (or any camera-user) feels awkward about the use
of his intrument, the instrument will relate badly to the
subjects.
Photographers do not always realize the effect they
may have on their subjects. In the photography course
an effort is made to sensitize the students to the manner
in which they are relating to subjects and sometimes the
students take pictures of each other taking pictures in
group situations by way of discovering how they are re­
lating to their subjects. 4
In the course students are urged to carry their cameras
constantly from the beginning. They are forbidden to
"sneak" pictures, but at the end of the course many of
them are taking pictures in libraries, on subways, and in
crowds with some ease. But it is not a simple matter to
acquire the ease and learn the subtle signals that make
subjects comfortable and "deliberately unaware." The
problems are essentially psychological, not technological,
4. For a discussion of the sensItive use of the camera in the
photographer-subject relationship see: Paul Byers, "Ken Heyman,"
in Tom Maloney (ed.), U. S. Camera '62, U. S. Camera Publishing
Corp., New York, 1961, p. 88.
and they are problems of the camera-user, not the sub­
jects. It is my opinion that there is much symbolic be­
havior involved in using cameras and that learning to
use one in a useful anthropological way requires the in­
dividual guidance of a teacher-observer who can recognize
what a student is doing to his subjects with his camera.
Conclusion
Training in photography for the behavioral scientist,
then, should include competence in the technology, learn­
ing to see as a visual acuity related to the photographic
search for information, understanding the interactional
involvements of subject-photographer-viewer, translating
visual images into their photographic counterparts, seeing
new kinds of information in photographs, learning to
search photographs for comparable pieces of data and to
handle them systematically, understanding what others
see as part of the semantic problem in photographic com­
munication, and relating to cameras and thence to sub­
jects in the process of taking photographs.
When the tools and results of still photography arc
handled in these ways, it will be possible to deal syste­
matically and communicatively with behavioral taxo­
nomies beyond the reach of words alone with a validity
that can ultimately be expressed in the verbal literacy
of the discipline.
The photograph will become an event to be acquired
and analyzed for its own kind of information and data.