Five decades of visual fieldwork across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Mediterranean — now gathered for the first time.
Photography, video, and narrative from the field sites where Comitas conducted research over five decades.
Rastafari rites at the Dungle, fishing communities along the coast, Pentecostal worship in St. Thomas — and the unexpected connection to Bob Marley.
Coming Soon
Primary school classrooms in post-Revolutionary communities — documenting the integration of Aymara, Quechua, and campesino peoples into the national polity.
Coming Soon
Fishing cooperatives and coastal life at Tent Bay — among the earliest photographs in the Comitas archive.
Throughout his career, Comitas produced a voluminous record of ethnographic photographs taken across Barbados, Jamaica, Greece, Spain, Andorra, Bolivia, and Canada. Yet his visual materials remain much less known than his textual production — not only for the richness of the photographic register as ethnographic documentation, but especially because Comitas's photos have qualities that transcend his work as a social scientist, revealing a talented artist and a humane person with a camera.
Photographs provide information about the reality they document and about the photographer's point of view. Through Comitas's Caribbean and Bolivian pictures we see the perspective of a young anthropologist in the early moments of his career — one who paid special attention to his photographic production from the very beginning.
1 · Bolivia
2 · JamaicaComitas's photographic style incorporates the sophisticated visual compositions of Cartier-Bresson, the tender view of everyday life found in Doisneau, and the use of counter-light characteristic of Salgado's work. A good part of the photos were taken on diapositives — an expensive alternative to regular film, but one that registered color with higher quality and intensity, giving his images from the 1950s and 60s a color quality that negatives would not achieve until decades later.
3 · Jamaica
5 · JamaicaIn the Caribbean photos, one thing that immediately attracts attention is the proximity between photographer and subjects — both physically and psychologically. The preference for wide-angle lenses, evidenced by the great depth of field and luminosity, implies physical closeness. Subjects often make direct eye contact with the camera. They are relaxed, casual, smiling. The laughter that breaks through the usual sobriety of documentary photography shows how well Comitas navigated the local temporalities of the communities he studied.
4 · Bolivia
7 · JamaicaThe use of counter-light — shooting into or alongside the light source — creates depth and luminosity that elevates the ethnographic record. Combined with the wide-angle lens and its characteristic depth of field, both background and foreground remain in sharp focus. The photographic act places objects and themes with different temporalities into the same visual horizon — what the photographer and sociologist J. S. Martins calls the "time of photography," where social relations are deconstructed and reconstructed through the photographer's point of view.
6 · Bolivia
8 · Jamaica11 · BarbadosThese photographs are synchronized to the times of local work life, local family rituals, local social relations. They show a lack of hurry toward reaching anthropological or sociological conclusions — a rare and valuable ethnographic virtue that has sadly become a forgotten luxury in the publish-or-perish academic world. It is said that timing is everything in comedy. Perhaps that explains why documentary photographs tend to appear so sober and serious.
9 · BoliviaThe Bolivian series shares the qualities of the Caribbean photographic production — the artistic talent and command of the technical elements. But there is something else: the impact of the Andes' natural environment. Comitas is fascinated by the landscape, the open spaces, and the way local societies interact with their surroundings. The human figure sits within the vastness of the altiplano — a composition that speaks to scale, endurance, and the entanglement of people and place.
10 · Jamaica
12 · JamaicaIf photographs are witnesses of the physical encounter between photographer and photographed, these portraits are testimony to an extraordinary capacity for rapport. The subjects look directly into the lens — and through it, at us. For all the beauty and emotional content present in this photographic production, the images reveal almost as much about the photographer as about the photographed. Anthropological craft and poetic vision, it turns out, cannot be dissociated.
This article analyses the photographic production of Lambros Comitas as a way to discuss the linkages between photographic production and ethnographic experience. The foci of analysis are the building of rapport with local populations, the photographic imagination as an act of deconstruction and reconstruction of local reality, and the relationship between photographer and photographed. The text suggests that if we transcend the impetus to estheticize ethnographic photographic productions, photographic works, as Comitas presents to us, challenge us to evaluate our own capacity for rapport and for existential synchronization with the local realms we study.
In 2008, Lambros Comitas commemorated 50 years dedicated to teaching and research in anthropology. As a student at Columbia University, he had Margaret Mead and Conrad Arensberg as professors. He would eventually become their colleague, joining the faculty at Columbia in 1958, where his childhood friend, Marvin Harris, had also become a professor some years earlier. Comitas dedicated his career to the study of societies in the Mediterranean, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and to the anthropological research of drug use, education, and, lately, the anthropology of disasters.
Throughout his career, Comitas produced a voluminous record of ethnographic photographs, film footage and films taken in Barbados, Jamaica, Greece (the homeland of his parents), the former soviet republic of Georgia, Spain, Andorra, and Canada. Yet, as happens to most anthropologists, his visual materials are much less known than his textual production. This is unfortunate, not only for the richness of the photographic register in terms of ethnographic documentation, but especially for the fact that Comitas’s photos have qualities that transcend his work as a social scientist, revealing a talented artist and a humane, extraordinary person with a camera.
Comitas’s photographic style incorporates the virtues of some of the best photographers of the 20th century: the sophisticated visual compositions that we find in Cartier-Bresson, the tender view of everyday life of Doisneau, and the use of counter-light that we see in Salgado’s work.
In the Caribbean photos, one thing that immediately attracts the attention of the viewer is the proximity between photographer and subjects, both physically and psychologically. Comitas’s photos show a predilection for wide-angle lenses, as evidenced by the fact that the pictures have a great depth of field and luminosity. The use of wide-angle lenses to photograph human subjects implies physical proximity. Added to that, we can see that his subjects often make direct eye contact with the photographer and have a relaxed, casual, and smiling attitude. His Caribbean subjects were at ease with his presence. Experienced ethnographers and photographers know how much effort is required to get their subjects to display such a spontaneous and relaxed attitude.
Comitas’s attention to ordinary, everyday intimate dimensions of local life, in his photographic and textual production, demonstrates his facility for establishing rapport with local populations. It would not have produced those beautiful, intimate, yet never intrusive, scenes of family life, such as a mother breastfeeding her baby in Jamaica, in a society where the values of colonial elites attached the honor of women to their physical and emotional reclusion. Comitas’s photos provide clear evidence of the fact that the locals with whom he engaged distinguished his presence from that of the local white colonial elites.
Comitas’s photos give us evidence of his attitude towards the temporal elements of the ethnographic work: they seem to be synchronized to the times of local work life, to the times of local family rituals, to the times of local social relations. They show a lack of hurry towards reaching anthropological and sociological conclusions, a rare and valuable ethnographic virtue (that sadly has become a forgotten luxury in our publish-or-perish academic world). It is said that timing is everything in comedy. Perhaps that explains why documentary photographs tend to appear so sober and serious. The laughter that trespasses this norm in Comitas’s photography shows us how well he was able to navigate the local temporalities.
The Bolivian series of photos share the qualities of his Caribbean photographic production, especially in what concerns his artistic talent and domain of the technical elements of photography. But there is something else there, not seen in the Caribbean series: the impact of the monumentality of the Andes’ natural environment on him and on his photos. Comitas is fascinated by the landscape, the open spaces, and the way local societies interact with the local environment.
If we make the effort of transcending that impetus, we find ourselves, qua anthropologists, in the position of questioning our rapport capacity, the quality of our relationship with our interlocutors, our capacity to get in synchrony with the local temporalities we study. In that sense, Comitas’s photos are at once a visual delight and a challenge.
Bibliography
Comitas, Lambros. 1975. “The Social Nexus of Ganja in Jamaica.” In Vera Rubin (ed.), Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton.
Comitas, Lambros. 1976. “Cannabis and Work in Jamaica: A Refutation of the Amotivational Syndrome.” In Dornbush, Fink and Freedman (eds.), Chronic Cannabis Use. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 283, pp. 24–32.
Comitas, Lambros and David Lowenthal, eds. 1973. Work and Family Life: West Indian Perspectives. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Frehse, Fraya. 2005. “Antropologia do encontro e do desencontro.” In Martins, Eckert, and Novaes (orgs.) O imaginário e o poético nas Ciências Sociais. Bauru, SP: Edusc.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor.” In Interactional Ritual. Garden City: Anchor Books.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1961. A World on the Wane (Tristes tropiques). New York: Criterion Books.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1994. Saudades do Brasil. Paris: Plon.
Martins, José de Souza. 2002. “A imagem incomum: a fotografia dos atos de fé no Brasil.” Estudos Avançados, v. 16, n. 45.
Rubin, Vera, and Comitas, Lambros. 1976. Ganja in Jamaica: The Effects of Marijuana Use. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Rubin, Vera, and Comitas, Lambros. 1983. “Cannabis, Society, and Culture.” In Kelleher, MacMurray, and Shapiro (eds.) Drugs and Society: A Critical Reader. Kendall/Hunt Publishing.
Taylor, Lucien. 1994. Foreword. In Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory – Selected Essays From V.A.R. 1990–1994. New York and London: Routledge.
Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings, November 28, 2007, Washington D.C. The author thanks Kenny Broad for comments on an earlier version of the text.