Visual Anthropology is built on the idea that there are physical manifestations of cultural knowledge that can be seen and therefore captured with visual media technologies. This division of cultural anthropology was born with the invention of cameras, found a fruitful adolescence with sync-sound 16mm film, and is coming of age in the digital world.

Digital connectivity means that ethnographers can record beautiful images with minimally invasive equipment and share these images with ease. Historically, visual communication has been relegated to the sidelines in the text-based academic world, but the unique communicative power of the image is increasingly difficult to ignore. While moving and still images do not and cannot say the same things as text, visual communication speaks its own language.

People in urban settings live in very sophisticated visual environments, where each building, article of clothing, car, bicycle, hair style and advertisement is wordlessly communicating to each passerby. People in non-urban settings read the sky, the plants, and the animals with similar scrutiny. The visual experience is the raw data of life, and our culture is the filter by which we make sense of it.