Fotografia come antropologia

If the first photographers involuntarily collected material of ethnographic interest, using the photographic tool to document various local situations (such as daily life, people, Risorgimento movements, delinquency and prostitution), the first anthropologists instead consciously made use of the new medium, which began to become an indispensable kit in the baggage of those who, especially in the last twenty years of the 19th century, went "into the field" on study missions. Even in an isolated reality like the Aosta Valley, photography made its entrance at the end of the nineteenth century and was immediately adopted by mountaineers, scholars or simply curious people, as a faithful and immediate means of reproducing reality. Each author appears to us today as an autonomous organism - having sometimes come into contact with this instrument by chance - and a witness of their time in an always personal and different way, in terms of training, culture and sensitivity. Each of them, therefore, provides us with a precious document: often resulting from amateur or commercial use of the device, other times the result of a more explicit awareness. Today it is Visual Anthropology - a discipline only recently systematized and promoted - that theorizes photography as an integral part of a research process, without neglecting the value of an ethnographic investigation developed starting from images of the past.