Visual diary. Photo Wallachs — what can we do with photographs?

Photo Wallachs, an anthropological film directed by David and Judith MacDougal, searches for the various meaning of photography as both medium and material artifacts. One of the film’s aims is to search for the cultural and social meaning of photography. The film’s location is Mussoorie, the Himalayan part of northern India, a famous tourist spot since the 19th century.
The film itself represents so many attitudes on how photography, as a medium and the process, could be positioned in the further societal (power) structures, memory making, etc. In this blog post, I will concentrate my attention on some of the observations about it. I will also try to connect “Photo Wallachs” with Roland Barthes’s well-known book “Camera Lucida.”
Firstly, in the film, we see how photography could be a ritual of trying some roles you could not try in real life. For some minutes, you can become whoever you want — “a thief” or a member of the royal family. In the class, we discussed that act of the symbolic travesty, which was also popular in the ’90s and ’00s in the post-soviet countries. It shows the way photography as a medium is more about performing/constructing self than “mirroring” your “authentic self” — photography is not a mirror, but more an invitation to imagine oneself.
Secondly, this film provides an excellent illustration of the idea of photographs as actants — not only a medium. As soon as photographs are material things — we could ask “what they do” instead of asking “what they are?”. In this film, we see how photographs are — tools to find a wife/husband, collect the memory,
Thirdly, considering Roland Barthes’s text, I think this film is also about the temporality of the photographic medium — photograph as “a commentary to the time.” It is interesting to observe how the act of remembering is often tight with photo albums. When I want to remember my childhood — I re-watch my old photos. When I want to learn more about someone I consider close enough — I ask them to see their “childish photos.” This act of sharing photos is very intimate. One of my favorite moments of the film is watching rich women showing pictures from her young years — and giggling.
Lastly, even though I am not super happy with how visual anthropologists searched for “exotic others,” mainly in India, this film was not annoying. I watched it as an invitation to think about the Ukrainian context of photography and photography making. Thus, I believe that the issues of colonialism and orientalism could be found there, but it is not the point. For me, this film is about how visuality, especially in seeing/presenting oneself through photography, is central to modernity.
And lastly-lastly, I would like to mention that maybe the most enjoyable part of the film is reflections of the photographers about the medium — how do they feel it, how to approach their subjects, etc. It is also a big compliment to directors, who decided to insert these voices in the film.