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rw: Anthropologist uses Flickr as teaching-dataset (2005-blog) - Last year, when I was offered the opportunity to teach a course on anthropology and photography at Haverford College, I immediately knew I wanted to do something with Flickr. I had the students read a number of books and articles on the ethnography of photography, including Bonnie Adrian’s Framing the Bride, Bourdieu’s essay on “The Social Definition of Photography” (in Photography: A Middle-brow Art), and several articles in Pinney and Peterson’s Photography’s Other Histories. I wanted them to draw from these articles to attempt their own ethnography of photography using Flickr. -- int student papers:

• Two students looked at tensions between the individual and the group in specific subcultures (raves and Catholic nuns respectively).
• T-shirt irony was surprisingly wide-spread.
• Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital was well explored in relation to out-of-focus pictures from rock concerts. (And nicely compared with off-stage shots.)
• I was surprised at how many pictures of public displays of affection one student was able to find.
• People imitating fashion photographs made for interesting comparisons with Adrian’s book.

{flickr, gallery, photography, teaching, anthropology, visual anthropology}

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 16th, 2005 at 10:01 am and is filed under Culture, Academic, Education, Images