Associate
Five Colleges Inc.
Abstract
Photography is a valuable ethnographic method for recording the everyday lifeways of a modern community and culture. This paper examines the people and landscape of Edo North through photographs taken during ethnographic fieldwork in 2002 and 2004. Photographs reveal ethnoarchaeological data useful for understanding physiography and settlement patterns, resource use, and subsistence patterns; some relating to historical slave trade operations, and early technologies brought to the Americas. Taking pictures also includes human subjects and their image awareness and viewpoints. The photographic challenges in recording image contexts and their attached values are discussed. Landscape, village houses, shrines, work contexts and peoples are used to illustrate this paper.