THE MANY LIVES OF IMAGES

Abstract

This article seeks to reflect about research challenges with vernacular photographic archives in human sciences, mostly in anthropology. On one hand, it reflects about theoretical-methodological complexities that these spellings (Ingold, 2007) inscribe as narratives and life stories, when expressed as “photobiographies” (Bruno, 2009), and, on the other hand, it places itself these same issues, when family photographs become anonymous, “orphan photographs” (Bruno, 2016), and add questions about the writing of other “anonymous” lives of photographs and people. The appearance of discarding family albums gives rise to almost unknown environments, in which these post-albums archives are left, hidden or ruined in the “limbus” of analogue pictures. A kind of “dead zone”, which problematizes the concept of trash archive (Assman, 2011) and points to powerful reflections about an anthropology of left-over (Debary, 2017) and from “an anthropology of unimportant images” (Samain, 2003).