Seeing Through Pictures: The Anthropology of Photography By Jay Ruby

Ruby discusses the possible relationships between photography and social sciences. Ruby states that because studies of mass media and popular culture are either characterized by being critical evaluations by an elite scholar, or a quantitative survey that lumps masses together without taking into consideration nuances or cultural differences, one needs to understand how the media is used by ordinary people. He quotes Stanley Milgram as saying, photography will be examined as “A technology that extends two psychological functions: perception and memory. It can thus teach us a good deal about how we see, and how we remember.”
Ruby breaks down his study domain into six categories: professional photography, those that take pictures as a hobby (hobbyists), public exhibition events, historical photographs, photography in education, and family photographs.
Some of his questions that interested me a great deal were, “what constitutes an even worth photographing?” and “how are changes in conventions related to changes in technology and availability of equipment?” The popularization of digital cameras has decreased the significance of snapping photographs. The photographer rarely gives a second thought to what he or she snaps a shot of. This could be seen as another way in which thought processes are getting shallower and shallower.
Ethnographic Semiotics, a paper by Worth, suggested that more analysis should be put on ethnographic study of how people make meaning in their everyday lives, and less on anthropological texts. I agree with this fact. Merely reading texts will never give us the useful insight we need to understand how mass media benefits or harms us.