This photo-essay presents a complicated portrait of the Paiva River in Northern Portugal, treating it as an ethnographic subject. It is based on three weeks of fieldwork and forms part of a broader project that traces water in rural imaginaries. Here, however, I focus on underwater analogue photography to explore the material traces a river’s water can leave behind on the images I produced. The photographs presented are drawn from two different batches of film: one of them unaltered, and the other boiled in water collected directly from the river. By enacting an amphibious anthropology that surrenders to the materiality of the process, this study reveals the dynamic relationships between water, camera, and person. This techno-animistic approach teases out invisibilities and shifts our perceptions of agency in image-making. Additionally, I use collage elements to synthesise information and create new meanings. Reworking these photos constitutes a powerful experimental research practice that offers new anthropological perspectives. The combination of both strategies helps us rethink the dominant approach to how visual methodologies are applied in the discipline. Underwater worlds are often implied and discussed in water anthropology, but what do they hide that we have not yet considered? What can we uncover when we invite the creative, transformative capacities that are characteristic of water-led spaces into these portraits? What can these new modes of interaction teach us? The resulting images will allow us to co-create the identities of the Paiva landscape in ecologically critical ways.
Key Words experimental ethnography, visual methodologies, water anthropology, underwater photography, art practices

In the summer of 2023, I spent three weeks in the region surrounding the Portuguese River Paiva conducting fieldwork for my master’s thesis. I wanted to intimately get to know the river itself as an ethnographic subject, drawn in by landscape theorisation connected to memory (e.g. Cruikshank 2006) and by sensory ethnographic methodologies (Pink 2015). As a visual practitioner, I saw this as an opportunity to explore underwater photography in a research context.

Anthropology has a long history of reading and employing photographic images as evidence or proof of the world. Medeiros calls this the photo’s ‘documental status’ (author’s translation 2023: 74), and it is undeniable that it played an important part in the birth and conception of the discipline. In his book Failed Images (2018), van Alphen uses the term ‘straight photography’ to refer to this approach: one that aims to provide an objective depiction of a supposed reality, grounding itself in science by seeking truth. Straight photography, then, excludes not only anything that is ‘staged’ but also any stylistic decisions that might render photographs imperfect (e.g. blurriness or under/overexposure). Contemporary visual anthropologists have worked hard to denounce the many issues surrounding this interpretation of the indexicality of images. Nevertheless, when discussing how photography is utilised as a research methodology for ethnographic work, it seems fair to say that straight photography remains the dominant approach.

However, I believe that one of the camera’s greatest values to researchers is its ability to see differently from the human eye. In this project, this is perhaps made apparent on a first level by taking underwater photography as a focus. In fact, when I first started fieldwork, my use of a camera was justified by my desire to visually reveal the submerged world of the river, therefore allowing the camera to serve as a translator. Essentially, I wanted to see underwater as I saw above, by way of photographs. However, as time passed, my engagement with the river deepened and evolved. I began to question my mode of creation with a camera and the work it was really doing for/with me. Many of the photos I captured are what other anthropologists might call failed images. Yet I do not feel like they have failed me. I quickly discovered that these types of photographs could constitute helpful counter-practices in visual research. This the core of my argument.

By ‘counter-practices’ I borrow van Alphen’s framing (2018) once again. Generally, I apply it to mean that anything which disrupts the prevalent usage of photography in anthropology can be one. As Medeiros suggests in her book Animism and Other Essays, ‘it is necessary to understand photography … as a means of resistance to the discipline, mobilising new attitudes and ways of thinking’ (author’s translation 2023: 49). This sentiment seems to resonate with the idea of counter-practices. When I reflected on how important it was for the river to become more than ‘a supporting actor’ (Wagner and Jacka 2018: 7) in my research, I ended up searching for ways that these counter-practices could help me engage directly with it. Here, I must agree with Waterson that ‘anthropologists still have much to accomplish in this field’ (in Banks and Ruby 2011: 82). I worked with photography with the intention to harness its potentials that go beyond the visual mediation it enables, in an attempt to ‘[provide] access to otherwise invisible knowledges’ (Farnell in Banks and Ruby 2011: 15).

The first counter-practice I employed was what the analogue photography community calls ‘film soups’. Making film soups is an experimental technique that usually involves boiling/soaking film rolls in various substances: these can be anything, ranging from bleach to lemon juice. Film souping creates distortions upon the photographs, which are then developed to reveal the effects of the ingredients; these vary greatly, but can include hue and colour shifts, changes in texture or the appearance of patterns. Photographers incorporate this step into their workflow for several reasons. Katie Mollon, for example, expresses an inclination to experiment with ways to ‘describe the feelings associated with place’ (see Mollon website, 2024), whereas Patrice Baunov notes his ‘desire to play’ (see Lomography website, 2020) and Mark Tamer explains that he seeks to ‘find a balance between chance and control’ (see Tamer website, 2022). Of particular relevance to this essay might be photographer Polina Washington, who once experimented with soaking film in water from the Neva River in Saint Petersburg. She expresses being driven by curiosity about the effects its pollution might have on the photos, though few examples of her results were available online when I encountered her work (see Format website, 2017).

The photos I used as source material for this essay were all taken by me, but they come from different rolls. Some were left unaltered, while one was boiled in water I collected directly from the stream of the Paiva and left to soak for five hours. By infusing river water, with all its minerals, chemicals, and discharges, into the celluloid, the river’s complicated liquid reality imprints upon the photographs, leaving a trace and taking part in its own portrait.

When I was confronted with the results of this experiment at the end of my fieldwork, my material felt scattered; I struggled to make sense of it. As researchers, we are taught to want to untangle our findings. However, Banks’ point that ‘visual research methodologies tend towards the exploratory rather than the confirmatory’ (2007: 10) strikes me as important to consider here, and throughout the essay. Accordingly, I also decided to introduce collage as a counter-practice, working with it not only to synthesise information but also to further complicate and entangle meanings. I believe that these montages and sequences are ways of posing questions and revealing thought processes, rather than providing one concrete answer.

It is worth noting the concerns commonly raised vis-à-vis the subjective and artistic practices that anthropology has, as of late, leaned towards. However, it is my view that reflexivity regarding such methods is important and does not take away from the anthropological learning that can come as a result. Notably, it seems to me that ‘awareness of the interplay between analytical and artistic reflections might help the researcher make the interpretive processes more transparent, thereby strengthening the validity and relevance of the metasynthesis’ (Kinn et al. 2013: 1291). Although my visual renderings arguably make it more apparent, creativity and intuition are fundamental to all types of qualitative research (ibid. 1286), including ethnographic texts. In truth, Banks’ emphasis on the exploratory character of visual methodologies strikes me as a fundamental goal for good anthropological work, and one that aligns with my values as a researcher. This is undoubtedly reflected in this photo-essay.

Ultimately, I argue that these counter-practices can be powerful tools for imagining new entanglements between humans and their environments by harnessing photography’s potential for visualisation and imagination rather than representation. Borrowing the ghost as a motif and heuristic from The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), for how it relates to both water and photographs in terms of their materiality and temporality, I am able to uncover (techno) animistic narratives. Through collage, these ideas collide in the creation of a portrait that is more concerned with ‘[suggesting] internal dilemmas’ (Medeiros 2023: 164) than providing a clear image of what the Paiva is.

In The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), the authors theorise the ghost as the memory that haunts landscapes. The wind serves as a metaphor for this, sweeping over, present and absent, material and fleeting. Throughout the volume, different anthropologists present varied ethnographies, showcasing how searching for the ghost and learning to tell it apart in the landscape can be valuable to an anthropology that concerns itself with the environment. As a framing device, the ghost invites us to look beyond what is immediately materially visible, layering spatiality and temporality in ways more traditional approaches to ethnography may otherwise neglect.

Though I already knew the Paiva in an embodied way as a swimmer, thinking of it through the anthropological framing of the ghost taught me to look at it differently. Water, much like the wind in The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, has been shown to animate life by flowing through it (Wagner and Jacka, 2018: 3–4). I wondered, then, can the waters of a river also haunt a landscape, the centuries of their flowing shaping it, along with the ever-changing multispecies entanglements created, made, and unmade? Can water be read as an archive of a river’s memory, carrying its past in its flow? What can we learn from the traces these ghosts leave us? We are told that, ‘to track [these] histories … it is not enough to watch lively bodies. Instead, we must wander through landscapes’ (Tsing et al. 2017: G5). If we are to take the Paiva’s portrait, then to wander through it, we must go underwater.

Thinking about going underwater calls our attention to an implied ‘conceptual separation made between land and water’ (Strang 2005: 106). The riverscape’s material reality pushes us to question this notion; there is an amphibious aspect to placemaking in this context that is made evident by the way land and water converge (Gagné and Rasmussen 2016).

As I explored the Paiva during fieldwork, I was quickly reminded that the world of wild swimming is a textured one. Even when immersed in water, we are still engaging with the riverbed, our world framed by solid realities, just as much as liquid ones.

We should take the ethnographer into account here, not in terms of positionality as we have before, but by seeing them as a human agent. Contextualising the act of photographing within this textured immersion experience means acknowledging the corporeal sensibility of the researcher’s body, which also extends itself into the camera. If we can learn by wandering, can we also learn by photographing?

The images we are beginning to see are from the batch of film soaked in river water. Much like the blur did before (and continues to do throughout), the warmer yellow and pink undertones, alongside the new wave-shaped and scratchy textures we are now confronted with, also hint at the presence of a ghost; of the river’s voice as a counter-practice.

Through these photographs, ‘the very substance of water is being reexamined’ (Ballestero 2019: 406). Strang rightfully points out how ‘Cartesian [visions] of water as H2O’ (Strang 2005: 106) can constrict our understanding of it. By looking at these images alongside those that were not soaked, we are able to not only visualise but also imagine the previously unseen memories that constitute the flow of the Paiva. Indeed, there is something powerful about making a ghost visible.

My contrasting images of the Paiva reveal ‘how an animist sensibility is consequential for a variety of practices … [when it interacts with] technological imaginations’ (ibid. 96), highlighting how ‘too much is lost from analytical sight if, in John Tresch’s evocative phrase, we “deny technological things their own demented ontopoetics”’(ibid.).