This article analyses the manner how Margaret Mead conceived and utilized the pictures taken by Gregory Bateson in Bali (1936-1939) to develop her study, almost ten years later, about the balinese children behavior. There are some limitations in this balinese photographic study caused by methodology adopted, and by the political ideological bias that crossed her research realized during the "cold war" period as well. I try to discuss these limitations and to synthesize the approach's possibilities of the images. Photographic plates are selected and reproduced here to show different perspectives of their use, in Mead's balinese works and in the Atlas of infant behavior produced by the doctor Arnold Gesell.
Bali; infancy; Margaret Mead; photographic observation
