File and images: heuristic and visual issues on the disclosure of Etienne Samain’s Kamayurá File

Abstract

This article presents some considerations on the methodological results, as well as the results from a visual experiment developed during an anthropological research, whose ontological challenge was to open a 500 photographs file that was asleep for almost four decades. The file with images portraying Kamayurá indigenous persons from Alto Xingu, belonging to the personal file of the anthropologist Etienne Samain, was inquired in light of its own condition of silence and the imperative of privileging, in the first place, the act of looking at and listening to the images. In this article, the reader will learn the methodological course traced, following part of its results from a double experience carried out with this photographic file – the researcher’s and the file producer’s. Thence, it is possible to examine the visual experimentation of the Images Poetic Charts, the construct of an experience of visual assemblage with the file photos.