Cameras at Work: Dusty Lenses and Processed Videos in the Quarries of Hyderabad

Abstract

Ethnographic filmmakers have always looked for new ways to record lives. Drawing from Gilbert Simondon’s ideas on technology, this article explores the technical conditions of filmmaking through the materiality of environments, digital and optical devices, recording formats, and human actions. It considers the work of cameras as participants in the stone quarries of Hyderabad (Telangana, India), and discusses how infrastructures of digital videos are hacked and acted upon. This article suggests that to contribute to theories in visual anthropology, and understand practices of ethnographic filmmaking, we need to reveal how cameras work with filmmakers, but also through them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Vadderas who collaborated on the film Building Technologies. Brilliant colleagues proposed comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article: Setrag Manoukian, Paul Manning, Katherine Sinclair, Alonso Gamarra and Joshua Friesen. Special thanks to Darcie DeAngelo for her illuminating revisions and insights. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Visual Anthropology for their suggestions to improve this article.

NOTES

Notes

1 All translations are mine.

2 George Lucas popularized the 24P digital format in 1999 by filming his new Star Wars in that format with the Sony HDW-F900 (Prince 2011, 21). See the work of Jonathan Sterne (2003) on the significance of the MP3 format in the audio industry.

3 Because the PAL standard is 25 images/second (50 interlaced fields in accordance to electric voltage standards) before the appearance of 24 images/second cameras some low budget crews would film in PAL format and drop one frame (or slow the footage down only slightly) in post-production to recreate the film-like cadence.

4 The nearly obsolete interlaced 60i format (replaced by 30P or 60P) was the most “lifelike” format available. Digital cameras now almost always record progressive images because sensors are better at doing so than before. Charged-coupled devices (CCDs) and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors (CMOSs) can be scanned in one passage providing one complete image. The latter are mostly used these days, as they are cheaper to produce and consume less energy, thus extending battery life.

5 I do not give justice to this technically provocative film with this brief reflection: readers should explore the Visual Anthropology Review issue (31, no. 1; 2015) dedicated to a thorough analysis of Leviathan. Here I speak of “experience,” as the audience of Leviathan is not only “viewing” the sequences but audiovisually sensing them.

6 In the YCbCr color ratio of video (Y = luma, Cb = color sample blue, C r = color sample red), 4:1:1 is less capable of dealing with saturated color and differentiation than 4:2:0. Uncompressed footage offers a 4:4:4 sampling that can sustain heavy graphics and color corrections. The 4:1:1 of DV NTSC was one of the reasons why broadcasters would not allow it on air despite the sufficient lines of definition during the standard definition (SD) era.

7 See the work of Strassler (2010) in Indonesia on the impact of film brands on the development of photography there.

8 These characteristics and tendencies can be overcome by changing the various settings in-camera or in post-production, but the brands’ signatures are well imprinted and at times almost unavoidable.

9 The effect also points toward horror or action-packed movies in which the filmmaker will leave the blood stains in the shot, thereby reminding the viewers they watch a film while accentuating the “reality” by hinting at the very real stains actually on the lens. In Figure 5 the GoPro is held on top of the compressor digger rather than attached to one of them.

10 Readers should note that I leave aside diffractions and chromatic aberrations that in turn affect sharpness and/or resolution in relationship with the f-stops selected (i.e., the amount of light coming through the lens that will either be stopped or let pass to expose the sensor in the camera body).

11 Recently some smaller cameras attached to string above the fields and the drones that fly over sports games for specific shots are moving cameras into previously unavailable locations. One of the main differences is the much greater depth-of-field that the closer cameras can provide: the exact same frame gives a different feeling of the actions and movements unfolding on screen.

12 “Graininess” is actually inappropriate when one talks about digital video, as the pixels rather produce “digital noises” (which indeed somewhat look like film grain) that result from the pixels’ incapacity to form the desired image/color. Digital noises, like grains, are technically always in the picture but they are less (or not) visible in a well-lighted setting.

13 See also Fewkes (2008), on how color filters and automatic white balance construct cultural representations, and how this impacts visual ethnography.

14 This is also where the anthropology of media and visual anthropology can maintain their coherence as they remain enmeshed through different forms of technological mediations (Boyer 2012; Verbeek 2006).

15 Asen Balikci related such a story in 2007 during an interview recorded at the Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal. Back in the 1960s the veteran Berkeley filmmaker Samuel Barrett tried to avoid Amerindians in jeans, while picking up after them before shooting.

16 See Brian Brazeal’s (2013) and Jesse Dizard’s projects, notably based on the RED cameras at the Advanced Laboratory of Visual Anthropology (ALVA) at California State University, at Chico.

17 Experimental filmmakers have made video installations (notably around CCTV footage), but few works in visual anthropology have systematically investigated these projects. Yet there are some notable exceptions in visual sociology (Cardullo 2017), cinema (Russell 1999) and visual anthropology (Schneider 2016).

18 Building Technologies was also projected at Lamakaan Open Cultural Centre in Hyderabad in April 2016. Some of this footage was later incorporated into a video installation exhibited at the International Visual Literacy Association Conference at Concordia University, Montréal, in October 2016.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and by the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University.

Notes on contributors

Philippe Messier

Philippe Messier (PhD, McGill) is a FRQSC (Fonds Société et Culture) Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at Trent University, Peterborough. His previous work on Vietnam is published in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and Anthropologie et Sociétés.