Visual Ethnography Method

It seems obvious: if you want to describe a culture, making your account vivid and ‘real’, what more direct method could there be than the use of visual media? And surely, if photographs and video are used you are dealing with a direct representation of reality rather than one conjured up by words?

The commonsense appeal of this assertion is so strong that it may seem absurd to question or qualify it. In fact, it raises issues both practical and philosophical, not least what is involved in something as apparently ‘real’ as observation.

1. How real is visual representation?

We inhabit a world of multimedia visual representation. The ubiquity of television, in particular, is such that for most people it is unthinkable to have a life without it. The con­stant bombardment of carefully contrived images is an almost inescapable experience. Popular magazines and newspapers are similarly image-dominated, text often having little more than a supplementary role. Being a ‘normal’ part of our lives they create a cultural unawareness of the fact that we are encountering a mediated reality. But in truth, all ‘reality’ is mediated by our understanding, however formed.

Of course, at one level we know that television is not ‘real’, but the distinction is not a sharp one and becomes increasingly blurred with familiarity, to the point that the distinction may no longer be made. But can we ever be unaware that we are dealing with representation? Every morning we see ourselves in the bathroom mirror – except that we don’t. What we see is a flat representation of the upper half of the front of our body. We don’t see a side or back view, or how we look when moving or in interaction. But, more importantly, because most often forgotten, we see a reverse image: and that is not how we actually are.

Are photographs realistic ?

If mirrors are a cultural convention so too are photographs. Wright (1990, p. 6) cited in Pink (2007, p. 33) argues that photographs ‘are only perceived as real by cultural conven­tion: they only appear realistic because we have been taught to see them as such’.

Even when we accept that in our kind of society photo­graphs reflect a shared convention, they still require to be interpreted; different people won’t necessarily put the same construction on the same photograph. This brings us to the heart of the dilemma about visual media: that all observation is an act of selection and reconstruction. And what guides that process? We are usually unaware of it.

The fact that we have to interpret a text is easier to appreciate. People get different things from the same book; see it differently, although this is often not intuitively obvious. At the age of 20 I read for the first time Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter and, in truth, found it a mystifying experience. Returning to it at the age of 45,1 read a different book.

A photograph, or a novel, represents something; but exactly what is to a greater or lesser degree a matter of subjective interpretation and that differs not only from person to person but in the same person over time.

Can photographs lie? We know that photographs of peo­ple can be retouched to improve their shape or remove lines and blemishes from the face; while a not infrequent occur­rence in political history was to remove discredited or undesirable figures entirely. But more familiar are those newspaper photographs (selected from many) which, in an unfortunate fraction of a second, show politicians looking bewildered or anxious or just plain evasive; trade union leaders with an arm apparently raised in a crypto-fascist salute; members of the royal family appearing bored at official functions. That malign ‘construction’ of reality has its more innocent counterpart. An ethnographer may take photographs (and select from them) according to barely formulated assumptions. In what sense is that selection ‘representative’? Whose ‘reality’ is it?

Constructing ‘reality ’

If we accept, as we surely must, that ‘realistic’ photographs are as much a selective subjective construction as text, that does not mean they are equivalent. They can do different though related things (true of different kinds of visual media: see below).

The sociologist, Sarah Pink, argues for ‘a reassessment of the aspects of human experience that images and writing best represent and a related analysis of the relationship between the visual and other senses … ’. (Pink, 2007, p. 3). Different media can do different things; provide different tools for the observer/ethnographer. But before consider­ing that we need to deal with the ubiquity of multimedia representation in relation to experienced reality: a book- length philosophical topic that we have to dispose of in a few paragraphs.

2. Reality and representation

We know the world only through our representations of it and these are constantly evolving; perhaps only babies have direct, unmediated sensory experience of the world – before they have developed representational abilities – and they will later have no conscious memory of it. These inner repre­sentations are mainly in the form of language and mental images, but other sensory representations play their part (movement, touch, taste, smell). Those who are born deaf or blind (or both) develop the latter representational abilities to a remarkable degree: they have no choice.

For most of us verbal language and visual images are the primary modes of representation: we employ developed symbol systems so that these representations can be elabo­rated. And these are the means by which we know anything, including ourselves. It is probable that we know nothing in a direct, unmediated fashion – even our own self. A pioneer in the development of what has come to be known as symbolic interactionism (although it was not a term he used) was G. H. Mead whose major work Mind, Self and Society was first pub­lished in 1934. His thesis was that in relating to (interacting with) other people we do so through our symbolic representation of ourselves and those others.

Observation, and perhaps ‘participant’ observation in particular, presents the challenge of being alert to the eth­nographer’s self-representation in relation to the self­construction of the people in the culture being studied. This is the notion of inter-subjectivity. So the issue is much more than considering what images and writing best represent, important though that is. These tools of external repre­sentation are part of the inter-subjective process.

Now these paragraphs smack of intellectual shadow-play but the issue reduces to the difficulty of knowing another person (the meaning and purpose of what they do; how they perceive themselves and their actions) even within the same culture; even more so when we are interpreting a different culture.

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