Doors to Knowledge

Essay on visual anthropology

As part of a course on Visual Anthropology at the University of Aarhus, I conducted research activities in Godsbanen, a creative development area in Aarhus. While using photography and film I struggled to understand at what point I was doing visual anthropology. How is this different from what an average photographer or filmmaker tries to do in his work? Or a photojournalist? Not only does visual anthropology have to generate knowledge in order to be appreciated as science, the visual also needs to generate a different kind of knowledge than the non-visual. If it was simply science by other (more beautiful) means, then this would not say anything about its complementarity to other disciplines. Therefore I wrote a paper called “Doors to Knowledge”, discussing what distinct kind of knowledge is generated through visual anthropology.