This course applies concepts and practices from anthropology and cultural studies to photography and the study of memory, place, and everyday life. The course aims at developing counter-intuitive and subversive approaches to practices of looking (observation) and techniques of representation. Whereas photographs are often taken to be simple documentary technologies, we will invert this idea and explore how images can be transient and ephemeral by focusing on sites of encounter and orders of engagement. This course is organized as a split theory/hands-on exploration of the photographic image and image-making. At all points in the course students are drawn into the use of image- making as an interpretive and critical engagement with course readings. We will begin with techniques of visual inquiry established by visual anthropologists and documentarians as well as artists working in the vein of documentary traditions. Students taking this course will work primarily with still photographic images. The goal of this course is to learn about the field of visual anthropology and to gain skills in using photographic methods in research. Students will be expected to have at their disposal a camera (digital or analogue).