David MacDougall is an ethnographic filmmaker and writer on cinema. He has filmed in East Africa, Australia, Sardinia, and India. With his wife, Judith, he produced the ‘Turkana Conversations’ trilogy in 1973-4, Photo Wallahs (1991) on Indian photography, and Awareness (2010). Other films include To Live with Herds (1972), Tempus de Baristas (1993), SchoolScapes (2007), Gandhi’s Children (2008), and Under the Palace Wall (2014). In 1997-2000 he conducted a study of the Doon School in northern India, followed by films about the Rishi Valley School in South India, and the Prayas shelter for homeless children in Delhi. He is the author of Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, 1998) and The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses (Princeton, 2006). His latest book, The Looking Machine (2019), is published by Manchester University Press. He is Honorary Professor at the Research School of Humanities & the Arts, Australian National University, Canberra. His most recent project, ‘Childhood and Modernity’, encouraged Indian children to conduct visual research in their own communities.
