This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of participatory photography as ethnographic evidence and how as researchers we can “read” the evidence our participants create. Drawing on examples from an ethnographic study examining concepts and constructions of community on Salt Spring Island,...
Tag: photography
Tutorial: Participatory Visual Research—Getting the Most from Collaborative Methods
Overview Participatory visual research methods like Photovoice open up opportunities for collaborative sense-making and advocacy. In these methodologies, data and knowledge are produced not only as an end...
Where Were You During Covid-19? An Ethnographic Lens on Local Life in a Global Pandemic
Where were you during Covid-19? The question seems destined to become a standard conversation piece at future get-togethers. For professional anthropologists and ethnographers, we can also add in questions about what was looked at, listened to, thought about, done and imagined for the future....
How New Social Design Captures the Social with Photographs
New social design defines “the social” rather than material things as its main design object, and builds usually on ethnographic research techniques in capturing the social. Designers use camera in their fieldwork but unlike social scientists, they build their camera practices on a variety of...
“Why Are You Taking My Picture?”: Navigating the Cultural Contexts of Visual Procurement
This paper explores how methods used to procure ethnographic visuals transition between different cultural histories and varying visual vocabularies. We use an instance during which we were detained (and the police summoned) after taking photos of an apartment building in Cairo to illustrate how...
Using Photographic Data to Build a Large-scale Global Comparative Visual Ethnography of Domestic Spaces: Can a Limited Data Set Capture the Complexities of ‘Sociality’?
This paper describes an innovative attempt to construct a large-scale, global comparative visual ethnography of domestic spaces, and uses the notion of ‘sociality’ to interrogate the ability of such a broad but relatively thin data set to do justice to ethnography’s potential to capture and...
Creative Photography through Ethnographic Research
PechaKucha Presentation This is a short story of when my sides of researcher and photographer met during a trip to the rural countryside of Brazil, where I went to research about internet connectivity, but ended up learning more about human relations. Photography creates connection between people,...
Emotional Landscapes: Observing and Capturing the Emotionality of Experience
PechaKucha Presentation This Pecha Kucha details how the imperative to employ visual thinking in doing ethnographic research work led to a fascination with capturing, through photography, the unguarded, natural emotions people express in their daily lives. It explores the differences in meaning...
Instax as Objects of Record
PechaKucha Presentation—Instant camera images can act as a physical-digital assistant and craft richer ethnographic records. The author particularly underlines the importance of photography for design field research, drawing upon his fieldwork work in Uganda. Starting by briefly contextualizing...