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HISTORY The origins of visual anthropology are located in the invention and application of photographic technologies to the study of human Culture and diversity (Ruby 1996). Some of the earliest Photography and Filmmaking was trained on traditional anthropological informants. Anthropologists and non-anthropologists conducted much of this work in the spirit of Salvage Ethnography or attempts to record for posterity the ways-of-life of societies assumed doomed to extinction (see, for instance, the Native American photography of Edward Curtis {Link without Title} ). The history of anthropological filmmaking is intertwined with that of non-fiction and documentary filmmaking. According to film historian Erik Barnouw (1993), some of the first motion pictures of the ethnographic other were made with Lumière equipment (''Promenades des Éléphants à Phnom Penh'', 1901 ). Robert Flaherty , probably best known for his films chronicling the lives of Arctic peoples ('' Nanook Of The North '', 1922), became a filmmaker in 1913 when his supervisor suggested that he take a camera and equipment with him on an expedition north. Flaherty focused on “traditional” Eskimo ways of life, omitting to that end any signs of modernity among his film subjects (even to the point of refusing to use a rifle to help kill a walrus his informants had harpooned as he filmed them, according to Barnouw; this scene made it into ''Nanook'' where it served as evidence of their "pristine" culture). This pattern would persist in many ethnographic films to follow (see as an example Robert Gardner's '' Dead Birds ''). By the 1940s, anthropologists such as 's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography (Ruby 2001). At present, the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) represents the subfield in the United States as a section of the American Anthropological Association . ETHNOGRAPHIC AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL FILMS A few influential ethnographically-minded films and filmmakers include:
POPULAR CULTURE Visual anthropology (and ethnographic films made by anthropologists) have also influenced films in popular culture such as:
VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY PROGRAMS
SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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