The Affective Lens

Abstract

Engaging in ethnographic fieldwork often requires overcoming considerable inertia and fighting back feelings of cynicism and alienation toward the place and people studied. Street photography can be one means of overcoming these setbacks. Requiring its practitioners to get out on the streets and directly engage with the people on them, it can fast track an ethnographer's emotional connection to a place, changing its affective landscape for them and redefining their experience of being there. This photo essay draws from the author's 2016 fieldwork trip to Jakarta, Indonesia to demonstrate how photography can serve not just as an aid to memory, a supplement to field notes, or a documentation of everyday life but as a tool for emotional investment. [affect, Indonesia, photo essay, photography, street]

Alien domesticity: representing home during a pandemic

“…To do so, I borrow from a visual tradition I have spent the last few years of my life learning, one that shares many of the conceptual ambitions of the aforementioned bodies of theory: street photography. Street photography, as I have written about elsewhere (Luvaas, 2017(Luvaas, , 2021, is an evolving photographic tradition devoted to candid documentation of life in public space (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994; see also Gómez Cruz, 2020a). Contemporary street photographers like Alex Webb, Carolyn Drake, Vineet Vohra and Ximena Echague seek to capture the lived complexity of everyday life, the accidental poetry of momentary encounter and the multiple overlapping worlds that compose and constitute a place.…”

Retro Nuosu: Reclaiming the Past, Present, and Future through Participatory Portraits in Southwest China

“…For example, while Shama Anyo wore my retro tunic, she urged me to wear her own Yynuo ‐style outfit and take a photograph with her. This process created an emotional experience of “being there” together in a specific ethnographic encounter (Luvaas 2017). We also worked together to consider clothing choices, posing, and finally editing and selecting photographs, and the final photographs became an “intersubjective creation of our realities together” (Bray 2015, 121).…”