Abstract
This chapter deploys photographs to critically anchor and provides visual evidence of an anthropology of the everyday. Brogden discusses the significance of non-place photographs in revealing the meanings attached to human agency. What people leave behind provides information about why they left it and what it meant to them. These anthropological encounters in non-place question beauty and belonging, as well as the punctum theory espoused by Barthes. Benjamin’s concept of the ‘optical unconscious’ is re-examined through the work of other scholars, and the author’s personal reflections. Brogden uses the representations of non-place to explore the notions of accelerated ‘super-modernity’, forms of consolation, the urban palimpsest, imbricated memory, and non-place as a repository for ‘structures of feeling’, providing a proposed counter-monument for those forgotten lived-experiences excluded by the archive.
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Brogden, J. (2019). Anthropological Encounters in Non-place. In: Photography and the Non-Place. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03919-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03919-6_4
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