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A Matter of Theft: Notes on the Art of Stealing a Soul

1. There is a well-known myth according to which indigenous people believe that when a camera takes a picture of them, it captures a part of them, if not stealing their soul. This has been repeated often enough, by the pioneers of ethnographic photography as well as in online forums by today’s amateur photographers; so-called natives have been credited with this belief in every part of the world and across time. Like many other popular assumptions from the field of ethnography, the idea of the theft of a soul by image has become a commonplace, free from critical reflection and questioning.

The Stealing of Souls Reader

Additional material, footnotes and texts related closely and loosely to the art of the stealing of souls. Contributions by Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar, Charles Baudelaire, Jane Gaines, Brion Gysin, Rosalind Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, Lawrence Lessig, Karl Marx, Felix Nadar, Jean Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Bruce Sterling et al.

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