Feeling, Imagining, Trusting: the Image as an Embodied Experience of Visual Assessment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56247/qua.560Keywords:
Visual anthropology, visual trust, embodied cognition, affect, imagination, documentary photographyAbstract
This article explores visual evaluation as an affective, imaginative, and situated practice through the case of documentary photography in contexts of creation and reception. Drawing on a multisited ethnography that includes fieldwork with documentary photographers, focus groups with adolescents, and audience observations at photography festivals, it argues that visual trust is not an objective response to an image but an embodied practice—a relational process in which body, emotion, and imagination actively shape the production of meaning. Inspired by the works of Elizabeth Edwards, Andrea Soto Calderón, W.J.T. Mitchell, Deborah Poole, and Georges Didi-Huberman, the article contends that images are not merely representations but active presences that affect and address the viewer. Photographs move us, generate doubt, and open interpretive spaces that go beyond visual evidence. In a context marked by disinformation and the proliferation of AI-generated images, this approach redefines visual trust as a sensitive and inventive practice that articulates connections between perception, affect, and critical thought. The study, conducted within the European research project Visual Trust, advocates for an embodied, ethical, and imaginative visual anthropology attentive to the relational and political dimensions of seeing.
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European Research Council
Grant numbers 101002897;European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program;ERC Visual Trust: Reliability, Accountability, and Forgery in Scientific, Religious, and Social Images
