Departing from an historical analysis of the relationship between anthropology and art, via their mutual connection to the photographic image, the author establishes the need to conceive cultural representation as a performative exercise of cultural inter-action. She conceives contemporary visual anthropology as a very wide field, open to aesthetic experimentation; a new form of approximating social research through an interdisciplinary perspective, that relates to the new theories of complexity by conceiving the embodiment of knowledge as a process, an exercise of creative experimentation in constant transformation.