Using Photographs in Social and Historical Research

Penny Tinkler

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780857020376, 9780857020369
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sophisticated, original and comprehensive, this book investigates photographic research practices and the conceptual and theoretical issues that underpin them.

Using international case studies and ?behind the scenes? interviews, Penny Tinkler sets out research practices and explores the possibilities, and challenges, of working with different methods and photographic sources.

The book guides the reader through all aspects of doing photographic research including practical issues and ethical considerations. Key topics include:

- Working with images

- Generating photos in research

- Managing large archives and digital databases

- Reviewing personal photos

- Photo-elicitation interviews

Written in a clear, accessible style, this dynamic book is essential reading for students and researchers working with photographs in history and the social sciences.

1

Getting Started: Using Photos in Research

Before you start using photos in research it is important to consider five questions:

• How do you conceptualise a photograph?
• Can photos constitute evidence of the social world?
• How do temporalities shape photo research?
• What can you do with photos?
• How do you combine methods?

These questions are at the heart of this chapter and I address each in turn. First, you need to consider how you conceptualise photos, as this is key to ascertaining how you can use them in research. Though photos are commonly thought of as images they are also objects, so you need to contemplate how the materiality of the image influences what and how you generate data using photos. There is debate about the properties of the photographic image and this also has implications for how you can use them: can an image provide evidence of what was in front of the camera? Should you treat photos as texts? Second, you need to consider how your conceptualisation of photos relates to your views on the nature of social phenomena and what counts as evidence or knowledge of it; in other words your ontological and epistemological positions. Do photos constitute evidence of what you regard as the constituents of the social world, and if so how? These deliberations provide the foundations for thinking about the methods and strategies you use to generate and analyse data. The third question concerns the temporalities of photo research. To use photos in social and historical research requires an appreciation of three temporal dimensions: the temporalities that are conjured by a photo; the life of a photo; the timings of research. Fourth, though researchers appreciate that photos can be looked at, it is helpful to think in more concrete and creative ways about what you can do with them. This includes: using photos to generate as well as answer questions and to stimulate memory; engaging with sensory and affective experiences of, and responses, to photos; and playing with images. Fifth, most research involves a combination of methods, so you need to think carefully at the design stage about how these fit together.

How do you conceptualise a photograph?

The prevailing tendency is to think of photographs as two-dimensional images. This stems from how we apprehend them; as Batchen (1997: 2) explains, ‘to see what the photo is “of” we … suppress our consciousness of what the photograph “is” in material terms’. Some scholars dispute this way of thinking about photos and argue that they need to be conceptualised as material objects. Concentrating on photographs made from film and photographic plates, I look at both ways of thinking about photos – as objects and images – and draw out the implications for research. I then consider the impact of digitalisation on how photos are conceptualised.

Thinking about photographs as objects

Photographs are three-dimensional objects. They are printed on paper, card, textiles and other material surfaces; in Japan in the 1990s there was a fashion for printing personal photos on stickers (Chalfen and Murui 2004). As Edwards and Hart (2004a) stress, understanding photos – what they mean, why they are or are not significant or valued, how and why they are used – involves engaging with their material properties. This is what Edwards (2002) describes as a material approach. The image is important, but its meaning and significance is inextricably connected to its materiality. This includes what the photo is printed on (e.g. the size, type and quality of paper), and how the photo is physically presented (in an album, in a frame etc.) as this shapes how people can engage with and use the photo and whether and how they can touch it. It also includes signs the photo bears of age and use which suggest the history of the photo. For example, a photo of a child placed in a locket suggests that the person in the picture is special to someone and cherished; the same photo printed on a mass-produced jigsaw puzzle has a different meaning.

Thus, a material approach is not limited to questions about the image, but directs attention to the place of the photographic image-object in personal and social life. In other words, it investigates the material contexts of production, such as: how and why photos are made in particular ways, including the implications of photographic technologies and choices at the point of taking a photo and processing it; the material form of the photograph, for example the choice of paper it is printed on and the finish used (glossy, matt, gold toning) and what these details mean to the people who make and use photos. A material approach also embraces personal and social uses of photographs, such as: how photos are circulated; where and how they are kept and presented; whether they are preserved and how; how they can be looked at and used; how photos are changed by use (damaged, worn) including deliberate acts of modification (cutting, painting over); and what people and organisations think about these practices.

Thinking about photographs as images

The most common way to conceptualise a photo is as an image, but there is debate about the properties of images and how you should use them. There are two main issues. First, can an image provide evidence of what was in front of the camera when the photo was taken? Second, should photos be considered to be texts and treated like paintings and letters?

Can an image provide evidence of what was in front of the camera when the photo was taken?

The answer to this question hinges on how the researcher perceives the relationship between the image and what it portrays. Approaches to the photographic image can best be understood as situated on a continuum; where they are positioned depends on how closely, if at all, the photographic image is considered to relate to the material and social world it seemingly depicts. This could be called the visual reality continuum, although I am referring to a particular understanding of reality that equates it with what is observable. Your position on the continuum will depend on how you answer the following questions, which I explore in detail. Is the photographic image a copy of the real world, or is there a more complex relationship? And if there is a more complex relationship, does the image provide some evidence of what was in front of the camera lens, or is it best conceptualised as independent of it?

At one end of the continuum are those who regard the photographic image as a transcription or copy of the real world; sometimes called a naive realist approach. The photograph is approached as transparent in the sense that it replicates the observable world. There is also an assumption that the photo tells you not only what was precisely in front of the camera lens, but that it is an accurate depiction of the ‘reality’ of the setting or event. The Victorians, for example, ‘invested considerable faith in the power of the camera to record, classify and witness’ (Wells 2000a: 55); photography was used to classify races, criminal types, ‘lunatics’, also to document place. This perspective still lingers; the phrase ‘the camera never lies’ has held, and continues to hold, considerable sway. The methodological implication of this approach is that researchers can use photos simply as a window for looking at the real world. For example, a photo of a young, slim woman with a flawless complexion would be considered evidence of what this woman looked like (Figure 1.1). Similarly, the photo in Figure 1.2 would be regarded as documenting accurately the appearance of a cottage and children in Evesham village in the 1890s.

Despite the ‘temptations of realism’ (Burke 2001: 21), contemporary scholars usually reject the idea that photos are mere copies of an observable reality (even if they sometimes slip into treating photos in this way). Instead, photos are approached as constructions that have a complex relationship to the world they depict; this is where a material approach to images (discussed earlier) is relevant, because a photo’s construction is shaped by the material qualities and possibilities of cameras and printing processes, how people work with these materials and the choices they make about them.

Figure 1.1 Young woman

One reason why images are necessarily constructions is that they are shaped by photographic technologies: ‘In the mere act of transcribing world into picture, three dimensions into two, photographs necessarily manufacture the image they make’ (Batchen 1997: 12). Moreover, photos never depict what the eye sees, or rather what the brain perceives (Goldstein 2007). Cameras do not register light in the same way as the human eye and they process colour differently. Additionally, a camera fixes a field of vision that is constantly changing in the human eye. Photographers can also set the depth of vision – the distance over which an image is in focus – to achieve results the naked eye cannot achieve and they can use different lenses to ‘see’ further or to include a wider view. For example, in his photographs of American landscapes Ansel Adams used camera settings that produce results the eye cannot replicate; the photos ‘show us the American landscape as we could never view it in “reality”’ (Sayer 2008: 59). Importantly, viewers often do not notice that a photo depicts the world differently from how they see it with the naked eye. This is because of historically and culturally specific ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1972) or ‘scopic regimes’ that are so well established within contemporary Western societies that we rarely consider them (Jenks 1995). Although some argue that in postmodern and digital societies this may be shifting (e.g. Mirzoeff 1998), these particular interpretative strategies remain commonplace. A photo’s ‘lure of realism’ is, therefore, partly a result of how we interpret the image’s visual techniques. Although a photo of a street is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality, we rely on our interpretation of the image’s visual techniques, namely use of perspective and shifts in tone, to ‘see’ two dimensions as three-dimensional. How people see colour is another instance of this. Before colour photography became commonplace, viewers of black and white photographs commonly interpreted shades of grey as colours (Yevonde 1940: 185–6).

Another reason why photos are always constructions is that the photographer inevitably makes choices about what to photograph and how, decisions that are often about materials or that have material affects. Although there are instances of deliberate manipulation of an image, as Brian Winston (1998: 64) insists, deliberate fraud is less common than ‘fine questions of intervention’ to achieve a particular effect or impression. These ‘fine questions of intervention’ include decisions about how to take the photo – lighting, angle and shutter speed – because these all convey meaning. Lighting, for instance, often conveys mood. As Goldstein (2007) describes, temporal and spatial editing also shapes the photographic account of a subject or scene. Temporal editing means deciding what moment to photograph and which, in a series of photos, to print. It is used to catch the moment a person smiles or the few seconds when no one is standing in front of a particular landscape. Whereas temporal editing is about which millisecond to record or print, spatial editing involves decisions about what aspect of a field of view to photograph and from what perspective. The selection process starts with taking the picture but there is often a second stage of cropping what has already been recorded, either manually or digitally. A host of other adjustments are also common once a photo has been taken, from refining colour, tone and focus to editing specific visual details. Not surprisingly, every photograph is shaped, literally, by the photographer’s point of view, although there is often more to a photograph than the photographer intended.

While the construction of photos is widely acknowledged, scholars differ in their views about the relationship of the image to what was in front of the camera lens; do images provide some visual evidence of the real world that is photographed or is the image independent of it?

Occupying the middle section of the continuum are approaches that acknowledge photos as constructions, but that also regard photos as offering some evidence of what was in front of the lens. For instance, in Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes (2000) argues that a distinctive feature of a photograph is its ‘evidential force’ (p. 89). The photograph provides evidence that what is in the frame was actually in front of the camera at some point in time. This is an indexical relationship, like a footprint in sand indicating that a foot has recently been there. Importantly, Barthes does ‘not take the photograph for a “copy” of reality’; instead, the photograph’s significance is that ‘From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me’ (pp. 80, 88).

Scholars in this section of the continuum evaluate rather than accept the photo as evidence of what was once in front of the camera. This can be described as a cautious realist position, sometimes called a ‘mild realist’ (Winston 1998) or ‘post-positivist’ (Margolis and Rowe 2011) approach. Like many social scientists, Winston (1998: 66) argues that photos ‘can only be considered as evidence of the real world in limited and complex ways’: ‘we are now too sophisticated to believe a photographic image is like a window on the world, a window unmarked by the photographer’s finger-prints’, but this ‘is not necessarily to deny totally that you can still see something of the world.’ This stance is evident also in Burke’s (2001, 2010) guidance to historians on the ‘pitfalls’ of using photographs and other visual sources as evidence. Images, he argues, can provide evidence of social reality but they ‘distort’ it (Burke 2001: 30). Returning to the earlier example of a photo of a young woman (Figure 1.1), researchers point out that while the photo provides evidence that the woman was there, the photo has to be used cautiously as evidence of what this young woman really looked like and what she was doing in front of the camera. Reasons for caution include the likelihood that the picture was posed, that special lighting was used, that this was an atypical pose, and that although hundreds of photos may have been taken only one was selected, touched up and cropped before being produced as a photo of this young woman. Similarly, given there was a convention in the 1890s to depict the British countryside as a rural idyll (Thomas 1978), researchers are cautious about accepting Figure 1.2 as evidence of everyday village life: the area around the cottage may have been tidied up for the photo, or the photographer may have taken this particular stretch because it excluded background that gave a less picturesque view of the village; the children may have been dressed up and posed specially for the picture; and small details may have been edited out at the printing stage.

At the far end of the continuum scholars eschew an approach that looks at an image for evidence of the material and social world it depicts. There are variations in how strongly this position is held. Some scholars, such as Alan Trachtenberg (1990: xiii), provide fleeting acknowledgement of the ‘depictive function’ of photos within very narrow limits, but they regard this as unimportant for how scholars should work with photos. For Trachtenberg, photos are not simple depictions of what happened in the past, but constructions that produce a particular, visual version of history; the historian’s job is to investigate how photos are used to construct particular stories about the past. Others adopt an uncompromising anti-realist position as exemplified by John Tagg (1988). Tagg takes issue with Barthes’ claim that photos have ‘evidential force’ because of their indexical properties for two reasons. First, as discussed earlier, photographic images have a problematic relation to the material and social world because of the technologies and practices involved in producing a photo. Second, photographs are only ever made sense of by social beings, and what viewers think they see in a picture is determined by the discourses and everyday knowledge within which the image is situated. Tagg argues that the status of a photo as evidence is not a product of the photo’s intrinsic – indexical – properties, but is a result of how powerful institutions at particular points in history have established some types of photographs as accurately reproducing the observable world. Tagg makes the point that not all photographs are treated as evidence in this way, and he asks us to consider: ‘under what conditions would a photograph of the Loch Ness Monster¹… be acceptable?’ (p. 5). Tagg has been very influential, but his uncompromis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• About this Book
• 1 Getting Started: Using Photos in Research
• 2 Image Work: Five Lines of Enquiry
• 3 Studying Found Photos
• 4 Autobiographical Methods
• 5 Researching Photographic Practices
• 6 Archives and Digital Resources
• 7 Generating Photos: Researchers
• 8 Generating Photos: Research Participants
• 9 Photo-interviews: Listening to Talk about Photos
• 10 Ethical Issues and Legalities
• References
• Index