Artist as Ethnographer

About

Artists have often acted as observers of other ways of life, recording dress, ritual, work and faces with an eye to classification. The role carries weight and risk. George Catlin painted hundreds of portraits among the Plains nations in the 1830s, and Edward S. Curtis's twenty-volume The North American Indian (1907–30) preserved a great deal while staging much of it, removing modern objects to suggest a vanishing people.

Photography made the survey method its own, from August Sander's typology of German society to Cristina García Rodero's España oculta (1989), a record of rural religious festivals. In the mid-1990s the critic Hal Foster named the tendency, and artists have since questioned the observer's position. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña exhibited themselves in a cage as invented ‘undiscovered Amerindians’ in 1992, and Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick photograph the New Orleans communities they belong to.