Today’s Photography Site of the Day (which, if you haven’t noticed, isn’t published daily) is photoethnography.com. This site is the work of Karen Nakamura, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies at Yale.
On her site, Ms. Nakamura says “Photoethnography can be considered both an applied methodology of an academic social science discipline (Visual Anthropology) as well as a form of artistic expression and social critique, akin to street photography or documentary photography.”
While not necessarily always dealing with photography, you will get a good sense of the person and photoethnography by reading her blog. As would be expected, she has photography and covers social justice issues. This is the part of the site that continues to be actively updated. The rest seems to not be updated often, unfortunately that includes the gallery. That’s OK though. There’s still some great info here.
She has a good, though short, links page.
I like her Equipment page. In it she recommends inexpensive equipment, mostly film based cameras, to get into photoethnography. There are some great recommendations here. I’d give you direct links, but the site is frame based so I’ll just mention some of the content available here.
-Buying classic cameras
-Recommendations
-SLR vs Rangefinder
-35mm vs. MF
-Instruction Manuals
-Batteries / Books
-Camera Bags / Tripods
-Light Meters / Finders
-Repairs / Humidity & Fungus
A few of the links are broken and most of the content is a few years old. But I think it’s still valid. There is a lot of information on this site.
She has a set of pages devoted to her camera collection. These include pictures and text describing the camera. Very nice work. Again, this is a link on the equipment page.
She talks about her favorite street cameras:
Canon P
Yashica Electro 35 GX
Olympus XA
Nikon FE
Nikon S2
Leica M3
Leica M7
and her favorite cameras overall:
Bolsey C22
Canon P
Canonet GIII QL17
Kodak Retina
Leica M3
Leica lenses
Nikon S3
Olympus XA
Pentax 6×7
Spotmatic II
Yashica GSN
While she lists these as her favorites, she has information on about a hundred cameras.
One thing that I wish she would promote more, is her video work. She has films available on Amazon that she mentions in her blog, but she doesn’t seem to have good pages devoted to them on her site. She might get more sales and bring more attention to the issues she has covered with some better marketing.
Her videos are:
Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan
and
A Japanese Funeral
I’ve spent hours here and will spend some more. I’ve only touched on a bit of the site. I recommend that you check it out.
