In Nancy Lutkehaus and Jenny Cool's article about ethnographies, I appreciate their statement about how "...the very act of representing others not only bears with it moral responsibility, but, more sinisterly, is a form of domination" (434).
So, they present a shift in the form of the ethnography. No longer is it an objective narrator narrating his/her subject, but rather, trends are shifting towards the indigenous and autobiographical or towards the global/transnational (436). In these forms, "subjects" have voice over their experience as they are filmed. Moreover, "...autobiographical films and videos ... make the Self the focus of the camera" (443).
The camera is problematic in terms of enacting an unframed, unboxed subject because the camera is one tool that always binds its subject (or a tool that the filmer/photographer uses to bind his/her subject) within the frame of a viewfinder.
As Donna Haraway writes in Primate Visions "The eye is infinitely more potent than the gun" (43).
And with her insight, I see the potential danger and limitation of the visual:
"To make an exact image is to insure against disappearance, to cannibalize life until it is safely and permanently a specular image, a ghost" (Haraway 45).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against visuals - I just don't automatically assume they are the answer to eradicating the pure, sacrosanct notions about text. With every new solution, comes a new consequence.
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