Cameras at work: Dusty lenses and processed videos in the quarries of hyderabad

Ethnographic filmmakers have always looked for new ways to record lives. Drawing from Gilbert Simondon's ideas on technology, this article explores the technical conditions of filmmaking through the materiality of environments, digital and optical devices, recording formats, and human actions. It considers the work of cameras as participants in the stone quarries of Hyderabad (Telangana, India), and discusses how infrastructures of digital videos are hacked and acted upon. This article suggests that to contribute to theories in visual anthropology, and understand practices of ethnographic filmmaking, we need to reveal how cameras work with filmmakers, but also through them.