ABSTRACT
This chapter considers perhaps the most ubiquitous and therefore invisible of material objects: a box with things in it in the reserve collections of a museum. It explores how, by enclosing specific photographs in conjunction with one another, materiality becomes integral to the meanings of images. We hope to demonstrate how, through seeing photographs as material objects to which things happen, we might come closer to understanding ways in which photographs operate as visual objects within the discursive practices of, in this case, anthropology and anthropological museums. 1
The art historian Norman Bryson sums up a methodological problem that is central to the concerns of this chapter when he writes about the way in which the act of looking is caught up between the conjuncture of a disappearing past and an emerging present:
Surrounding those forms of looking that have given rise to the discursive configurations that actually figure in the archive, are other submerged series of procedures that addressed other needs. Such series will include codes of viewing that represent residual practices edged out by the rise of those latter codes that are hardly yet formed, emergent ways of seeing whose coherence has not yet been established and whose energies have not yet taken root, still tentative and altering configurations that still have to find each other and lock together.
