Category Archives: Art and Visual Anthropology

Ed Webb-Ingall: Community video then and now: Looking backward to look forward

The period from 1968 to 1981 witnessed the development of a medium that carried on the tradition of direct cinema and cinema verité but with radically different form and content—that of community video making. The year 1968 marks the earliest known use of portable video equipment in the United Kingdom for community aims in a […]

Marcus Banks: Revisiting Raju

Raju and His Friends was released almost exactly a quarter of a century ago, and revisiting it now at the invitation of the FocaalBlog editor is something of a trip in a time machine for me. As I discuss below, ethnographic film and anthropological theory have moved on considerably since then. The question, therefore, is […]

Matteo Saltalippi: Pictures of class struggle

My fieldwork began with an image, a quite common image of violence broadcast by Italian television: Terni steel plant (known as AST) workers were protesting by the station, pushing the police block in order to occupy the railways. Terni is a small town in the center of Italy, and every time a strike occurs, the […]