Traditional dress – everyday wear or ceremonial – is an element of folk culture that cannot be fully studied without the use of visual anthropology. Photographs have a pre-eminent place in pictorial materials that the researchers of clothes work on. Moreover; they are both a source of scientific knowledge and one of the research tools. The effectiveness of employing various approaches to working on photographs has been revealed during fieldwork. The main task of an ethnologist is to collect maximum amount of available material that makes the local dress culture visible in different historical periods. As practice shows, family photo archives of respondents are a real treasury. Depicting people’s private life, lifestyle and leisure, home photographs also give visual information about everyday, holiday and ritual clothes of the local community, represent the spheres of use of the traditional costume and its elements in a certain period of time. Furthermore, they allow researchers to come to generalized conclusions about fashion trends and more. Narrativization is especially productive in the process of working on such photographs. The autobiographical micro-stories of the respondents viewing family albums detail the picture greatly. Visual information supplemented with verbal description helps a researcher to see what was behind the picture. Various museums, educational and cultural institutions, including their permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as photo archives are other potential locations for collecting the illustrative material in ethnographic expeditions. At the same time, the direct image capturing the phenomena of material and spiritual culture is one of the rational ways to accumulate the factual base for further research. If we talk exclusively about folk costume, finding and photographing traditional clothes directly in the environment of its use is becoming increasingly difficult. Today, museums, their ethnographic exhibitions and stock collections are the main centers, where one can make photo documentation of local costumes. Samples of modern ethnic clothing are usually caught on the ethnologist’s camera during fairs, festivals, and celebrations.