The peasant and photography
Abstract
Drawing on an ethnography of the author’s childhood village in southwestern France, this article analyses the social uses and meaning of photographs and photographic practice in the peasant society of Béarn in the early 1960s. Photography was first introduced on the occasion of the great ceremonies of familial and collective life, such as weddings, in which it fulfills the function of affirming the unity, standing, and boundaries of the lineages involved. Such ceremonies can be photographed because they lie outside the everyday routine and they must be photographed to solemnize and materialize the image that the group intends to present of itself. Thus photos are read and appreciated not in themselves and for themselves, in terms of their technical or aesthetic qualities, but as lay sociograms providing a visual record of extant social roles and relations; and they are typically stored away in a box as it would be indecent or ostentatious to display them in one’s home. Peasants use photography strictly as consumers, and then only selectively. The rarity of photographic practice among them is explained not by the negative determinisms of income or technological familiarity but by the fact that taking pictures is regarded as a frivolous luxury associated with urban ways and an innovation suspect of manifesting the will to distinguish oneself and to rise above one’s rank, which doubly violates the ethos of the group. The mandatory photographic posture itself, with its stress on conventionality, fixity, and frontality, is an extension of the peasant ethic of honor that sharply limits the taking and using of photos and stands in direct affinity with the style of social relations fostered by a hierarchical and closed society in which the lineage and the ‘house’ have more reality than the particular individuals who compose them.
Cite this
Pierre Bourdıeu, Marie-Claire Bourdieu (2004). The peasant and photography. Ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138104050701
@article{pierre2004the,
title = {The peasant and photography},
author = {Bourdıeu, Pierre and Bourdieu, Marie-Claire},
year = {2004},
journal = {Ethnography},
doi = {10.1177/1466138104050701}
}Citations in this library
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