Photographic sequences as a structured narrative

Chapter 2 described how I first observed and recorded interaction between members of the public and Ian in Glasgow’s Argyle Street. As I did so I could see that his experience as a street beggar could be told as a sequence of wordless photographic images which could be ‘read’ as a textual narrative could be read. What is suggested here is that the practice of visual ethnography should employ the universal notion and use of narrative as (to borrow a term from linguistics) a kind of frame grammar- a unit of meaning between a paragraph and a complete account.

One might call these ‘anecdotes’, but note that this typi­cally has pejorative connotations (it’s merely anecdotal evidence, etc.). Yet anecdotal narratives are how people understand themselves, how they construct themselves. The American psychologist Jerome Bruner, in an important paper entitled ‘Life as narrative’ (1987), gives to narrative the primary role in self-construction.

I believe that the ways of telling and the ways of conceptualizing that go with narrative forms become so habitual that they finally become recipes for structuring experience itself, for laying down routes into memory, for not only guiding the life narrative up to the present but directing it into the future. I have argued that a life as led is inseparable from a life as told – or more bluntly, a life is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold. (Bruner, 1987, p. 31.)

For researchers adhering to the scientific-realist tradition this can be difficult to take. What about objective validity?

The dilemma (for such adherents at least) is apparent when considering interview data. In the kind of interviews which are relatively unstructured: that is, where the structure and content are largely determined by the interviewee, then the ‘validity’ of the interview is a function of the freedom interviewees have to tell their story. A common objection to this is that people are ‘just telling stories’ and ‘how would you know they were true?’ To which the answer is: how else would they do it? And: what would a ‘true’ account be like?

Selecting elements for a narrative

Any photography or video used by an ethnographic researcher to present a narrative account of the culture being studied is the researcher’s own composition: some material is selected for inclusion and other material is left out.

In that sense it is a partial and also an optional account. It is not wrong to do so, provided that there is an explicit awareness that such a process is open to challenge, together with a justification for the selection process. This process of content analysis has a parallel in writing an account of an interview where substantive statements are selected and categorized and then interpreted, and where the researcher has to show the successive stages of data selection and reduction.

Source: Gillham Bill (2008), Observation Techniques: Structured to Unstructured, Continuum; Illustrated edition.