Most folks who ask you that question aren’t attempting to provoke an existential crisis; they simply want to know how you live with a camera. Are you a photographer that specializes in elephants, icebergs, or weddings? They’d appreciate a general sense of what you do for the purposes of discussion. It appears harmless enough, yet it has the potential to cause some psychological. What we do and who we are can both feel like defining traits. The majority of us will spend half of our lives attempting to define who we are, and the other half attempting to find out who we are when we are not doing the thing that defines us. It’s a unique situation.
Since the beginning of time, societies have grappled with a complicated human predicament. When someone asks us who we think we are, we can experience a wide range of emotions. The query revealed a void in my work career for me. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what I was doing. I used to call what I did “documentary photography” for a few years, but the phrase never sat well with me. It never appeared to get to the heart of my work, or provide light on my method, which I’ve always considered as distinct from documentary work due to its lack of objectivity. People’s perspectives intrigue me, thus I strive to express my ideas from their perspective.
Cultural anthropology is a discipline of anthropology that studies human cultural variety, as opposed to social anthropology, which views cultural variation as a subset of the anthropological constant. Participant observation (commonly referred to as fieldwork because it entails the anthropologist spending an extended amount of time at the research site), interviews, and surveys are all part of anthropological technique.