Creative Creatures: Between Art and Anthropology

The visual capture of the world has been an integral part of the formation of ethnology and cultural anthropology since the beginning. It meant not only a source of knowledge of the local community, but especially of the time at which it was created. Sometimes photographs were taken accidentally during research trips as more or less documentary material, which were only superficially analysed and served to visually confirm the investigated state, or were a targeted photo documentation of disappearing phenomena, objects of material culture, ceremonies or genius loci of the researched area. At other times, photographs were created as a result of purposeful research and documentation of selected phenomena. The result of this is an interpretive openness and an effort to find and establish new analytical and interpretive processes that would be able to convey anthropological knowledge more effectively. Is art, or in our specific case artistic photography, usable for research or for interpretation of cultural or anthropological phenomena? We try to find an answer to this question by analysing the collection of photographs of the Creative Creatures project (subtitled Last Survivors) from Papua New Guinea, by art photographer Martin Machaj. We analyse not only its artistic rendering but also the ethnological, anthropological content and message of the work of art.