Doing Visual Research

Claudia Mitchell

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781446259900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Recherche dans l'éducation

Doing Visual Research offers an innovative introduction to the use of photography, collaborative video, drawing, objects, multi-media production and installation in research. Claudia Mitchell explains how visual methods can be used as modes of inquiry as well as modes of representation for social research.

The book looks at a range of conceptual and practical approaches to a range of tools and methods, whilst also highlighting the interpretive and ethical issues that arise when engaging in visual research. Claudia Mitchell draws on her own work in the field of visual research throughout to offer extensive examples from a variety of settings and with a variety of populations.

Topics covered include:

• Photographs and memory work studies

• Video and social change

• Participatory archiving with drawings and photos

• Working with images/Writing about images

• Can visual methods make a difference? From practice to policy

Doing Visual Research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of visual research, producing a practical introduction to the subject that will be of great use to students and researchers across the social sciences, and in particular in education, communication, sociology, gender, development, social work and public health.

PART I

Introduction

ONE

Introduction: Getting the picture

A few years ago Ardra Cole and Maura McIntyre, researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Canada, embarked upon a long-term study of adult caregivers caring for their elderly parents suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Living and Dying with Dignity: The Alzheimer’s Project (Cole and McIntyre, 2006) focuses specifically on the fact that relatively little is known about the experiences of caregivers, particularly taking on the role of ‘parent’, and, critically, what kind of support they need to sustain themselves in their care of their parents – a care that cuts across legal issues, health care, emotional care and public education. In their work, Cole and McIntyre conducted many single face-to-face interviews with the caregivers, along with interviews of support groups, social workers and physicians. They translated their findings into an exhibition first shown in the foyer of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Headquarters in Toronto. This exhibition was comprised of a number of installations, one of which was titled Life Lines (2008) and was made up of a gigantic clothesline spread from one wall to another with undergarments and adult-sized diapers hanging from it. The website of the Centre for Arts Informed Research describes Life Lines as follows:

Description: A free standing clothesline about 20 feet in length is held up by ropes and secured by concrete blocks at each end. Astro turf carpeting represents the grass below; a chair invites the viewer to sit and relax. The clothes on the line are blowing in the breeze. The undergarments are ordered from left to right according to the time in the life cycle at which they are worn. (Life Lines, 2008)

Another installation, Still Life 1, included a series of refrigerator doors, each with a different arrangement of fridge magnets holding a variety of artefacts: a school photo of a child (a grandchild), reminder notes about medication, and so on. In another of their exhibitions set up in Halifax there was a voice-activated tape recorder where viewers could sit and tell their own ‘caring for’ stories. Yet another installation, Alzheimer’s Still Life 2, contained a series of visual images taken from family photograph albums of the two artist-researchers, both of whom themselves are adult caregivers who looked after their mothers suffering from Alzheimer’s. As their curatorial statement expressed, the particular photos ‘were chosen because they so clearly signify the mother–daughter connection over a life span and poignantly elucidate the role reversal that inevitably occurs when Alzheimer’s interrupts, confuses, and redefines a relationship’ (Alzheimer’s Still Life 1, 2008).

Their work demonstrates some of the complexities related to what is actually meant by visual methodologies, showing, for example, the multiple forms of visual data: domestic photos taken from family albums and items taken from material culture (adult-sized diapers, fridge magnets). Their work also shows the multiple ways of working with the visual. Working with the visual is about both representation (transforming the interviews into visual representations through the use of material culture) and dissemination (creating a visual exhibition that drew the attention of the public as well as health care researchers and health care policy makers), but is also, as we see in the second level of interviews with the participants, a mode of inquiry (a type of data elicitation). But there are two other aspects of the visual that are also critical. One relates to epistemology and how it is that we come to know what we know (and how to account for subjectivity). Cole and McIntyre are inside their own experience as caregivers as much as they are studying the experiences of the hundreds of other caregivers who they have interviewed and met through their exhibitions. The other aspect relates to broader issues of engaging in social science inquiry in the first place and the question, ‘What difference does this make anyway?’ For Cole and McIntyre (2008), and for an increasing number of researchers engaged in social research, the idea of how data collection can in and of itself serve as an intervention and be potentially transformative is key. Given the impact of these installations, people with a personal connection to the topic are ‘provoked’ to tell their own stories (Knowles and Cole, 2008). And if visual data can mobilize individuals or communities to act, it may be possible to think of the idea of visual research and social action.

Participatory Visual Approaches

‘Draw a scientist’; ‘Take photographs of where you feel safe and not so safe’; ‘Produce a video documentary on an issue “in your life”’; ‘Find and work with seven or eight pictures from your family photographs that you can construct into a narrative about gender and identity’. Each of these prompts speaks to the range of tools that might be used to engage participants (children, teachers, out-of-school youth, women farmers, community health care workers) in visual research (drawings, simple point-and-shoot cameras, video cameras, family photographs) and suggests some of the types of emerging data: drawings, the photographic images and captions produced in the photovoice project, the video texts produced in a community video project, and the newly created album or visual text produced by the participants in an album project. In each case, there is the immediate visual text (or primary text as John Fiske, 1991, terms it) – the drawing, photo image, collage, photo-story, video documentary/video narrative, or album, and that can include captions and more extensive curatorial statements or interpretive writings that reflect what the participants have to say about the visual texts. In essence, participation does not have to be limited to ‘take a picture’ or ‘draw a picture’, though the level of participation will rest on time, the age and ability of the participants and even their willingness to be involved. A set of drawings or photos produced in isolation of their full participatory context (or follow-up) does not mean that they should therefore be discarded, particularly not in large-scale collections (Mitchell, 2005). Each of these examples can also include what Fiske (1991) terms ‘production texts’ – or how participants engaged in the process talk about their work, regardless of whether they are producing drawings, photo images, video narratives, or ‘reconstructing’ a set of photographs into new texts. Production texts are often elicited during follow-up interviews.

Each of the visual practices noted above and described in more detail throughout this book brings with it, of course, its own methods, traditions and procedures, ranging from approaches that are relatively ‘low tech’ and can be easily carried out without a lot of expensive equipment to those that require more expensive cameras; from those that are camera-based to those that provide for a focus on things and objects (including archival photographs); from those where participants are respondents to those that engage participants as producers; from work where researcher and participants collaborate to those where it is the researcher herself who is the producer and interpreter. The constant is some aspect of the visual as a mode of inquiry and representation, and as a mode of dissemination and engagement.

About Doing Visual Research

As the title suggests, this book focuses on the ‘doing’ of visual research. If the book had a subtitle, it would surely be something like ‘Taking it personally’. The approaches that I take and the examples that I draw on come out of close to two decades of visual research, working primarily with photography, drawings, community video, collage, and more recently digital storytelling, with the focus on participatory research. The ‘taking it personally’ seems to me to have an obvious link to the nature of participatory visual research, in relation to both the researcher and the participants, and in relation to reflexivity as a critical feature of visual research.

There are, of course, many visual approaches, only some of which are addressed in the book, and many cross-cutting themes, including ethical concerns in the doing of visual research, the management of visual data and the ways in which doing visual research can contribute to policy change. Here, I offer examples that are mostly drawn from my own work and the work of the various research teams and graduate students I have had the privilege of collaborating with in a variety of contexts and geographic locations. Much of the work comes out of studies in sub-Saharan Africa, an area that as a function of history and circumstance is home to some of the most challenging health and social issues in the world but also some of the most generative work when it comes to the optimism for what can be done through the visual.

This book is made up of ten chapters organized into three main sections. In the first section, there are two chapters. In Chapter 1, ‘Getting the picture’, I simply try to provide something of a map of what constitutes visual research. Chapter 2 deals with ethical considerations in working with the visual. It may seem odd to offer a chapter on ethics at the very beginning of the book. Isn’t that what one usually thinks of towards the end of a book, or something one includes after all else has been done in planning a project or research study? Ethical concerns, however, make up one of the three main sets of questions that I am repeatedly asked about in relation to doing visual research and, as such, seem like a good place to start. The other sets of concerns that underpin many of the subsequent chapters in this book relate to the questions, ‘How to do this?’ and ‘What do I do with the data?’

Part II, ‘Visual Methods for Social Change: Tools and Techniques’, is made up of three chapters, each focusing on a specific method but located within a particular research area. The first chapter in this section, ‘Not just an object’, examines the uses of material culture in visual research. The issues of objects and things in visual research is one that is sometimes debated. However, the fact that even the tools and products of visual research (cameras, photographs, digital images) are objects and things suggests to me that they belong in a book on doing visual research.

The next chapter focuses on community-based photography and draws on an analysis of a number of photovoice projects with young people and adults in a variety of research settings and geographic locations. The third chapter (Chapter 5) in this section is on community video-making.

Part III, ‘On Interpreting and Using Images’, is meant to provide theoretical and practical approaches to working with visual data. Far from offering hard and fast rules for analysis, the various chapters in this section suggest a broad framework for what can be done with visual images. The section starts with ‘Working with photo images: A textual reading on the presence of absence’. In this chapter, I offer what might be described as a situated reading of a set of photographs produced in one photovoice project in South Africa between 2004 and 2006. What I highlight here is the significance of developing a conceptual framework for analysis that complements method. The chapter uses the idea of loss – presence and absence – as an organizing framework for studying what’s there and what’s not there in the picture.

The next chapter, ‘Data collections and building a democratic archive: “No more pictures without a context”’, responds to the need for approaches to storing, managing and using visual data in ways that can be participatory. In so doing, it draws on recent work in the area of building digital archives and related studies on the use of technologies that make it possible to engage in participatory archiving with the actual ‘producers’ in community-based research. This makes it possible to add the dimension of participatory analysis to working with participatory visual studies.

The following chapter, ‘Look and see: Images of image-making’, is meant to draw attention to studying visually the producers themselves (and the process) in participatory and community-based research. What can we learn from ‘looking at looking’? How do participants take pictures or work with video cameras, and how can a study of looking help to deepen an understanding of visual research?

Chapter 9, ‘What can a visual researcher do with a camera?’, builds on the work of visual anthropologist Jay Ruby and his essay in Picturing Culture, ‘Researching with a camera: The anthropologist as picture taker’ (Ruby, 2000b). In this chapter, I describe and analyse the idea of the composite video as an analytical tool (in its production), a tool of dissemination (in working with communities) and as a tool of inquiry (in generating new research questions with communities).

The book ends with a chapter titled ‘Changing the picture: How can images influence policy-making?’ There is probably no area within visual research, at least in the context of participatory research, that is more compelling than the area around the question of ‘So what?’ or ‘What difference does this make?’ (Mitchell, 2009c). The chapter provides examples of how the visual has been used in policy-making frameworks and, as such, offers some strategic possibilities for this work. Inevitably there is overlap between and among the various chapters. Many of the examples cited in relation to visual ethics have their root in photovoice work and work with participatory video. Consequently, a similar point will be argued in more than one place. For the reader this overlap will, I hope, help to emphasize certain points.

Critical Issues in Doing Visual Research

Working across genres of visual methodologies

One of the challenges of writing a book that sets out to provide something of a comprehensive look at some of the key aspects of doing visual research and which is segmented into chapters is that it might suggest a set of discrete approaches: this is photovoice, here is video, or this is what one does with drawings. In actual fact, much of this work cuts across genres. Drawings might be used as an entry point to working with video or photography, and, indeed, in one project with several of my colleagues in Rwanda, storyboarding (or using drawing in planning out a video) was the main activity with the participants, followed by the various groups performing their stories (Mitchell et al., in press). Thus, although ‘video’ was in the imagination of the participants from the beginning (what would this issue look like as a video?), the ways of enacting the issue came through the mode of drawing and performance.

Participatory engagement itself also varies, as a case study from Swaziland demonstrates. The School Teacher is a play written by two secondary-school teachers in a rural school in Swaziland as a way to highlight the situation of teachers (mostly male) who sexually harass and abuse students (mostly young women). As studies such as the Human Rights Watch Scared at School (HRW, 2001) study attest, the issue of teachers as perpetrators of violence is one of the various challenges of making schools safe. The play focuses on a male secondary-school teacher who singles out one of his students, Emma. In the drama, we see the teacher calling on Emma all the time, touching her face, handing out special favours and candy – all in front of the other students who are quite aware of his intentions. He regularly keeps Emma after class, invites her to his house and notes that it is really Emma who he loves and not his wife. His wife finds out that Emma has visited the house and points out to her husband the absurdity of this situation because in addition to everything else, they (the husband and wife) are both HIV positive. Meanwhile, Emma is in trouble with her parents when they discover that she has been at the teacher’s house, and a visit from the teacher’s wife further complicates the situation. In the final scene, which also involves the Principal, the full implications of the situation are realized with the teacher being fired.

The School Teacher is a good example of what Goldstein and others would describe as performed ethnography in that it draws on an emerging body of data on sexual violence in and around schools in Swaziland: sexual harassment of female students by teachers, non-monogamous relationship...