Accessing experience through images of people's bodies at work: a coming Together of ethnography and film

In João Pedro Rodrigues' films, people are brought to mind by the unequivocal truthfulness of the images that depict their bodies. This cinematographic existence also became an ethnographic occurrence to me; from then on, my anthropological writing relied on the observation of forms those bodies attained in the moving images. The experience I have just described makes me think that the use of images created by non-anthropologists, as a means to the anthropological fieldwork, is always relevant, should those images provide access to dimensions the anthropologist wishes to perceive. The images (as any image) can be subjected to an anthropological interpretation, despite their ethnographic relevance not existing in the ethnographic purpose of their producers, but within a specific research relationship created by the anthropologist. The excerpts of these films, and the anthropological reflections on them, focus on work situations and the bodies of workers.