Chris Wright’s research interests centre around visual anthropology, including photography, visual culture, aesthetics, film, contemporary art, and the relation of visual images to ethno-history. He has been involved in various projects to return collections of anthropological photographs to local communities in New Mexico, Sikkim, and the Solomon Islands and curate exhibitions in those locations. These involved a wide range of strategies for 'returning' photographs to individuals and groups, from photographs hung on strings in people's houses, to major permanent exhibitions. He co-curated The Impossible Science of Being: dialogues between anthropology and photography at the Photographers Gallery, London in 1995, and Presence at Leighton House, London in 2003. The latter was an innovatory exhibition that featured interventions and installations (including a sound piece by the artist Mohini Chandra) by four contemporary artists and archival material from the Royal Anthropological Institute Photographic Collection. Both sets of material were inserted alongside the existing permanent exhibits at Leighton House.
Wright has carried out fieldwork in the Solomon Islands, South Pacific in 1998 and in 2000-2001, focusing on links between photography, material culture, and memory. He is currently working on this material as the basis of a book The Echo of Things: photography in the western Solomon Islands and a manuscript has been submitted to Duke University Press, awaiting readers comments.
Wright is also currently working on the practical and theoretical connections between anthropology and contemporary art, particularly in relation to the anthropology of the senses. In 2003 he was the co-initiator and co-organiser of Fieldworks: dialogues between art and anthropology, a major 3-day international conference held at Tate Modern, London. The conference archive can be accessed online via the Tate Modern website.
His publications include The Impossible Science of Being: dialogues between anthropology and photography, The Photographers' Gallery, London, 1995 and Contemporary Art and Anthropology, with Arnd Schneider, 2005.
Other participants
Liesbeth Bik, Bryony Bond, Mary Bouquet, David Chapman, Anna Grimshaw, Ade Hunter, Rosalind Nashashibi, Daniel Peltz, Amanda Ravetz, Paul Rooney, Erika Tan, Lucien Taylor, Jos van der Pol, Soumhya Venkatesan and Lesley Young
Go to Chris Wright’s object presented on Day One
