Mr Alagiah spoke openly about the experience of living with cancer, joining a videocast for the charity Bowel Cancer UK in 2020 in which he said he sometimes felt he had the "easy part," living with bowel cancer while his loved ones had to watch. (Bowel Cancer UK 2020).
This special issue is about the connection between seeing and care. It is about visuality in the context of illness, suffering and death and other places where seeing and care intermingle. It is about the watching of carers like the Alegiah’s loved ones, who stayed close while he was doing his “easy task” of living with cancer. But also about the wa...
]]>This is a slightly unusual commentary since it was written in response to three oral presentations at the EASA 2020 meetings of “Illuminating Futures of the Life Course through Visual and Digital Media” should be of which only one appears in written form within this volume. I felt, however, that the points I wanted to make here are better explicated by reference to all three papers which as will become apparent have many complementary features in relation to each other. I hope that the way the material has been incorporated within this commentary has allowed readers to at least gain the gist of what those additional oral presentations were trying to achieve. For the same reason the commentary itself has the tone of an oral presentation.
First to say many thanks for inviting me to discuss these three excellent papers. I am going to start with my own Road to Damascus moment. I have been fortunate over the last ten years to have been responsible for two large scale projects: t...
]]>My first impression was that The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video was the third broad-based overview of visual anthropology, so I requested a review copy. However, I had to adjust my impression to some extent when the publisher published the book on the online application Bookshelf. Nevertheless, I still take the monograph Principles of Visual Anthropology (Hockings 1975, reissued in 1995 and 2003) as a point of departure, as it has greatly contributed to the establishment of visual anthropology as a special subdiscipline, and is probably the most frequently cited book in this field. Its sequel, Memories of the Beginnings of Ethnographic Film (Engelbrecht 2007), is a valuable testament to important figures and methods of visual anthropology and its development. The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video was edited by Phillip Vannini, who specializes in social and cultural geography, cultural studies, and sociology, ...
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