Photo-Ethnography Flashcards
What makes photo-ethnography?
- Photography x Ethnography
- Writing with light x Writing with people
What are the two forms and contents present in photo-ethnography?
- Photographs
- Texts
What is the goal of photo-ethnography?
- Combine photographs and texts to work in harmony
- Where sum is greater than the parts
What is the paradox of photography and text?
- Most photography in written text is superfluous to the textual narrative
- Yet, photographies are doing the work
-> powerful combination
What characterises photo-ethnography according to Christopher Wright?
- Combination photo x text
- Evocative powers
- Expressive possibilities
-> Ethnographic understanding, dissemination of knowledge to wider audience
How are photographs detractors to Ethnography according to Christopher Wright?
- Photographs are impoverished substitute to text
- Incapable of rendering complexity, information, arguments
- Open too much to interpretation
What is the evolution of photo-ethnography according to Christopher Wright?
- First about documentation
- Then marginalised to written ethnographic descriptions of complex social systems
What does John Collier’s (1967) photo elicitation consist of?
- Photo elicitation as research tool
- Way of interacting with people in the field, gathering wide range of information
What does Karl Heider’s (1989) experimental photo-ethnography consist of?
- Played with image size and sequences
- To illustrate arguments/text
What is the focus of Lutz and Collins (1991) regarding the photograph as an intersection of gazes?
- Intercultural relations
- Dynamic nature of interacting gazes
- Multiplicity of looks
What is the role of the dynamic nature of interacting gazes in photographs (Lutz & Collins, 1991)?
Breaks from the illusion that the photograph “masks or stuffs and mounts the world, freezes the life out of a scene, or violently slices into time.”
What does Jason de Leon argue regarding the ethnographic practice and the “Indecisive Moment”?
Ethics in photo-ethnography practice
- “ethnographic practice involves […] a constant gaze into the mirror wondering if I am doing the right thing.
Am I asking the right questions?” - “Should I be taking this photo?
What does my presence do to those around me?
Who is gazing at whom?
What kind of spectacle am I creating in the field […]?”
What does photo elicitation consist of as an ethnographic method?
- A photograph is a socio-cultural object
-> it’s dynamic - When interacting with your subjects, use photographs taken in the field or those you find in the field (e.g., subject’s home)
