ideas of context and the photographic experience
Homestay with Adrian and Rosalea in Amaru, Peru
The study of visual representation is the study of power. Through the investigation of how photographs are produced, interpreted, circulated, appropriated, displayed, and reproduced, acts of agency and decision-making are revealed. In this post, I’d like to describe a situation of image production I encountered during a homestay visit in the Amaru community, located outside of Pisaq, Perú, in the Sacred Valley just beyond the city of Cusco. This scene is a clear example of the complicated nature of context when trying to understand the production of images. While a single physical photograph may be the recording of a fraction of a second of light bouncing off of subjects before a lens, the production of the photograph may have spanned a much longer length of time. More people than just the subjects and the photographer may have experienced the production of the image, and may have acted or influenced this process. This is exactly what occurred during a photographic experience in Amaru.
I first discovered the possibility of visiting Amaru while passing by a restaurant on the plaza in Pisaq. A pamphlet was posted on the wall, which detailed–in English–the homestay program in Amaru. At the time I was living in Cusco, attending Quechua classes in the mornings, and investigating uses of photography in various quotidian circumstances in and around Cusco. The homestay program attracted me because, as I learned from the pamphlet, the host families in Amaru were Quechua-speakers. I noted a webpage advertised on the brochure, which sits on the Peru Treks tourism company website. Both Peru Treks and Adrian–president of the Amaru homestay group–told me that the program is a community initiative, and that the tourism company receives no fiscal benefit for the promoting it does for the group. Peru Treks served as a mediator, and helped me organize a homestay visit for a friend and me.
The photograph included at the beginning of this post was taken in the courtyard of Adrian and Rosalea’s house the morning before we left. While I had been taking photos throughout my stay, as well as sharing my small point-and-shoot digital camera to Adrian and his kids, this photographic experience proved different from the others. The production of the image involved four people, each with different language capabilities: Adrian, Quechua and Spanish; Rosalea, his wife, Quechua; my friend, English; and myself, Quechua, Spanish and English. We had said goodbye to our hosts and were preparing to leave the community with Adrian and his daughter when Adrian made it clear he wanted one more photographic session. This began with his asking his wife to go change her clothes. While she had already been wearing the woven clothing many women in the area wear, Rosalea changed into a skirt with more detail, a pristine white ruffled shirt, and a bright red jacket. She brought with her an armful of weavings which she and Adrian had made, and hung them over a railing. Although my friend could not comprehend the verbal instructions Adrian offered to his wife, he understood that the preparations were intended for a photograph and stood ready with the camera. Adrian explained to me his idea for the image, and kindly asked if my friend could take a photograph of me acting as if I were buying weavings from Rosalea. I translated Adrian’s plan to my friend who took a few photographs accordingly.
Each of the four participants exercised some amount of power in the production process, negotiating our actions in relation to our own ideas as well as according to the requests of others. Each of us experienced the process from our own perspective, incorporating conscious and unconscious, premeditated and spontaneous behaviors into the interaction. We also each had our own hopes for and feelings about the images, many of which I do not and could not know, but which may have affected the photographs produced. Of particular note is the role that Adrian played in the production of the images taken during that session. Although he was neither a subject in the photograph nor the photographer, it seemed to me that he had the strongest influence over how the image was constructed. The photograph has the potential to serve multiple purposes for Adrian, but he voiced two of them to me. First, not only was this photograph (posted above) the only photograph for which Adrian gave me permission to publish on the internet, but he specifically asked me to do so. Well after we had taken the image, Adrian asked me if I would consider writing about my stay with his family on the internet, with the hope that it might bring more business to the homestay project. Second, Adrian could add this photograph to his family’s photographic collection, where the family kept various images of their guests, friends and family members. Adrian and I had already agreed earlier in my stay that I would leave him a disc at the tourist office in Cusco which would include of all of the photos I had taken during my visit. While it doesn’t seem to have been updated in awhile, there is a website being built about homestays in the area called My Peru; there is the potential for this site to become another use for some of Adrian’s photographs.
Although he didn’t personally use the internet at the time that I stayed with him, Adrian knew that it was an important tool for his community’s program. But he also knew that he was part of a larger tourism initiative in Peru that connects tourists interested in a more personal, familial travel experience with rural, indigenous families. Adrian wanted to show me a particular image of not only his family, but also of his community. He knew that the photographs that I took would be connected to a narrative, and that he had the power to influence both the narratives and the images they accompanied. Several times throughout my stay, he spoke against specific stereotypes against indigenous people, offering me alternative visual and aural information. It was rewarding to be able to participate in the Quechua conversations that involved parents and kids alike, and I wonder how effective Adrian’s messages might be to tourists who speak only English. Regardless, in this instance, Adrian told me specific information, and requested that I publish it on the internet for the international online community.
Placing photographs at the center of a historical research project and at the core of an anthropological study are ideas that are still gaining legitimacy in academia. There is much debate about how to analyze photographs, how to distinguish them into categories or genres, how to uncover the layers of meaning ascribed to them, and how to decipher the kinds of effects that photographs have. Scholars have attempted a variety of investigatory approaches. In relation to the production of images, some studies have privileged the photographer, attributing a photograph’s qualities to decisions that the photographer made (or supposedly made). These studies may take into account the placement of the camera, the framing of the image, even the positioning of the subject. Other scholars have focused more on the subject, trying to show agency, and emphasizing ways that the subject might have been actively complicit in the production of the image as such or showing signs of resistance either in their facial expressions or body language. As made evident through this brief encounter with the production of a photograph, the question of context is exceedingly complicated, especially in the case of the analysis of historical photographs when perhaps none the participants of the photographic experience are present. In light of these thoughts, it appears prudent to leave space for the the activity existing beyond the frame of the photograph, and to avoid analyzing a photograph from a perspective that gives excessive weight to the actions of the photographer or the subjects. It might make more sense to support work that recognizes or tries to discover a wider sense of experience of the production of an image while also leaving room for the many influences that we could never know.
