(6:30)

Jean Rouch:  “The camera is for me, if you will, what lets me go anywhere, what permits me to follow someone.  It is something with which one can live or do things that one couldn’t do if one didn’t have the camera. 

     “When my friends and I say today we use the ‘contact camera’ or ‘contact lenses,’ it means that we work with wide-angle lenses, so that we can be very close to the people we film.  It ends up reducing our action to an adventure that is the most perfect disorder, since we film with wide angles, that is, seeing everything, but reducing ourselves to proximity, that is, without being seen by others. 

     “We have become invisible by being close and by having an extremely wide angle view, that’s the model of disorder.   ...The paradox is that, maybe because I made films, I have never been possessed.”

            Jean Rouch,  Ciné-Ethnography  2003 p.154-55

     ... but to believe that a (phone) camera “permits” ethnographic claims to proximity, or abilities to distinguish possession, or that a camera itself (with or without a wide-angle lens) can simply somehow aid or enlighten ethnography is dangerously misguided, maybe even delusional. 

     Cameras ensure little more than typical visual ethnography.  For the camera apparatus itself is but one mystical form of possession obfuscating both subject and meaning.  As such, our cameras do reliably advance Rouch’s notion of a “most perfect disorder” -- for we do become “possessed” by the very essences of their technological ability, and so-called fidelity.  An ethnographer’s camera behaves little differently. 

     If the old ethnographer’s bromide holds true -- the familiar must be made strange -- then so too must an ethnographer’s perspective be occasionally shocked into new uncomfortable awarenesses.  If only to see our methods, our methodologies, and ourselves anew.  That is the premise of this project:  To amplify the absurdities of “true representation” feigned throughout everyday technological usage.  Indeed, proverbs often also ring true in oppositional directions: One deceptive picture is worth 1000 deceptive words.

      Are visual ethnographers pornographers as well?  Yes, they can be, particularly when we neglect the potential for abhorrent amplification resident within all technology.  It is most apparent this young ethnographer’s methodology needs challenging...exactly as Jean Rouch needs reconsidering.