El Guindi provides a comprehensive guide to the methods of visual anthropology and the use of film in cross-cultural research and ethnography. She shows how visual media — photographic, filmic, interactive — is now an accepted part of the anthropological process, a vital tool that reflects and produces knowledge about the range of cultures and about culture itself. It preserves the integrity of people, objects, and events in their cultural context, and expands our horizons beyond the reach of memory culture. El Guindi places visual anthropology within an empirically-based, analytic framework, built on systematic observation, identifying the research cycle that begins with data gathering and leads to visual ethnographic construction that is anthropological in method, process, and product. She explains how indigenous, professional, and amateur forms of pictorial/auditory materials are grounded in personal, social, cultural, and ideological contexts, and describes the non-Western critique of the Western traditions of visual anthropology. Her book is an excellent guide for ethnographic research, and for film and other media instruction concerned with cross-cultural representation.

"Fadwa El Guindi offers in this new study a sweeping analysis of the achievements of visual anthropology's century-old history. Grounded in a solid understanding of her subject, she explores numerous older approaches to visual anthropology as well as those that have come in the past decade with the worldwide web, DVD and CD-ROM data storage, light-weight digital cameras, the changed political environment since 2001, and the newly realized public need for public presentations about world Islam, women in traditional society, and modern power relations. This is a book which, because of its broad coverage and the many cogent questions raised, will certainly find wide use in film and anthropology classes as well as on the shelves of professional scholars." - Visual Anthropology

"It will be an important teaching text and its value to students should not be underestimated. The strengths of this book are that it makes doing visual anthropology comprehensible through real projects; offers first-hand accounts of the technologies the author has used; uses the issues and concerns that are embedded in her own work to demonstrate the role visual anthropology can play in public contexts." - Ethnos