Turning around the camera: Self-portraits of an anthropologist on Instagram

Abstract

This photo essay explores the practice of digital self-portraiture as an epistemological practice. Drawing on the well-established role of photography within the anthropological canon, this photo essay looks with a new criticality on the act of self-portraiture by an anthropologist as both performative praxis and ethnographic tool. Employing a series of digital photographs taken in Venice, this essay explores how the practice of taking self-portraits to enrich an Instagram self is a vital step in the ethnographic research of social media. Allowing the researcher to engage with the practices of their interlocutors through performing the same actions as they do.