ABSTRACT
As economic change exacerbates rural precarity, rural youth in communities like Adavisandra continue to be the focus of much image-making, which draws on colonial characterizations of the rural as primitive, backwards, and static and presents them as helpless, suffering subjects who are in need of help by outsiders who have the means and skills to lift them out of their sorry states. Anthropologists, and visual anthropologists in particular, have had a long and harried history with the epistemic violence that our visual productions have facilitated. The idea that the camera has been romanticized as the means to objectivity is not new. Galison, for example, historicizes this phenomenon, showing how technical innovations in the camera were attempts at pushing closer to seeing a social world more clearly and more objectively.
