Marcus Banks obituary

My academic mentor and friend Marcus Banks, who has died aged 60 of epilepsy, was a social anthropologist. He played a leading role in promoting the sub-discipline of visual anthropology, which is concerned with studying cultures through photography, film and other media.

Spending his entire career at Oxford University, from the late 1980s onwards Marcus showed how visual artefacts should be thought of as a central - perhaps the central - means through which all people, everywhere, forge their identities, and through which they order and transform the worlds around them.