ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how shifts in assumptions about the role of photography, especially in ethnographic museums, can function as an interpretative strategy or as a site of translation within the public space of the museum. While genre, in photography, is often used in the sense of formalist categories and approaches to subject-matter, it is more usefully conceptualised here as a social contract for expressing appropriate forms for different kinds of statement. These invite certain shapes of expectation. While it is arguably more didactic in intention than the other photographs discussed, it is an image of another order in terms of the expectations of the ethnographic gallery. In line with the critical and reflexive agendas of contemporary museum practice, it is essential to open up the 'horizons of expectation' that determined the questions asked and the answers given.
