ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the exchange and collecting of photographs within the interpretative community that constituted the anthropology of that period. The focus is on the way in which images were made, collected and exchanged by individual scholars who authored collections of photographs according to their interests and networks. Although the exchanges that concern the author were informal, they either operated within, or overlapped with, institutions that were part of what Thomas Richards has described as an 'archive [which] took the form not of a specific institution but of an ideological construction for projecting the epistemological extension of Britain into and beyond its Empire'. The photographs of fieldworkers of the classic mid-twentieth-century British fieldwork period were not, on the whole, widely circulated, nor did anthropologists, especially those working outside the interests of material culture, collect from other sources; this for instance, is in part the reason why Diamond Jenness's photographs were treated as 'collection-specific'.
