Photographic Anthropology?

This is a quote from Laurent Haug's blog (LIFT lab), a post entitled "free to be a clone":

As diversity is diminishing, we end up with what Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have captured in their work Exactitudes (contraction of exact and attitude), “an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity“. These pictures are fascinating, disturbing, eye opening, familiar but strange. They show that we have reached a point where the more different you try to be, the more similar to others you become. What was true in niches a while ago (think punks, tektonik, black turtle-neck creative directors, etc) is now becoming mainstream.

I think that these pictures are the most powerful means of demonstrating this trend, and it is an interesting way to do ethnography.

(Anyway, I think this research is fascinating and I wish I knew about this when I wrote my undergraduate thesis on consumerism/identity-formation/mental health).