photography

Where Were You During Covid-19? An Ethnographic Lens on Local Life in a Global Pandemic

hand washing station
by PATRICIA L. SUNDERLAND, CRAstudio.com 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. Gillian Tett, anthropologist and US editorial board chair at the Financial Times, for instance, wrote about the Covid-19 culture shock she experienced in London. The relative lack of mask wearing there was in stark contrast to the strict masking she had become accustomed to as an “embedded—and embodied—part of life” in her New York City neighborhood. In Paris, Dominique Desjeux, professional anthropologist, professor, and coordinator of the French applied anthropology network Antropik, created an auto-ethnographic video of what he and family members were doing and attending to in their apartment during the early confinement phase in March 2020. In my case, I spent most of 2020 in Addis Ababa,...

Tutorial: Participatory Visual Research—Getting the Most from Collaborative Methods

KRISTA HARPER University of Massachusetts Amherst 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 product, but also in process. As participant-researchers contribute to research design, ethical discussions, data collection, analysis, and presentation of results, they communicate users’ values and concerns that can inform better organizational practices and improve products and services. In the first part of this workshop, you will learn about participatory visual research methods, from their foundations as methodology developed in the global South to promote the public’s “right to research” (Appadurai) to their application in a variety of organizational settings and design projects. In the second segment, you will take part in a hands-on Photovoice workshop exercise designed to open up questions of visual representation, ethics, and participation. In the final...

Creative Photography through Ethnographic Research

GABRIELA OLIVEIRA INSITUM 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, much like ethnography, and they interlace in a deeper level than just registering of fieldwork. Visual registration of research can be as valuable as the content gathered from the conversation, and photography can enable both analysis and creativity in a researcher, by prompting him or her to train an observing eye to both content and surroundings. Thinking of photography as a tool as valuable as interviewing activates new ways for researchers to use their humanity to face ethnographic research. Gabriela Oliveira is a Brazilian research strategist based in São Paulo. gabriela.a.deoliveira@gmail.com 22019 EPIC Proceedings, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic...

Evidence Outside the Frame: Interpreting Participants’ “Framing” of Information when Using Participatory Photography

TABITHA STEAGER Pacific AIDS Network 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, British Columbia, I examine how we can interrogate photographs as data rather than factual evidence. Adages such as “the camera doesn’t lie” support the view of photography as a purveyor of truth. Photos accompanying journalistic dispatches from far-flung outposts around the world are seen as authentic evidence of real-world situations. Amateur videos of people’s life experiences are filmed on smart phones and then posted to YouTube to be taken as authentic representations of life events. Early ethnographic uses celebrated photography as the ultimate tool for showing that anthropologists had actually “been there,” displaying the exoticism of other cultures in factual black and white....

Emotional Landscapes: Observing and Capturing the Emotionality of Experience

BRIDGET MONAHAN Vellichor Design 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 behind these displays and the forcefulness of expressions captured in everyday lived situations. We, as researchers, pay attention to and interpret the words people say but often leave these emotional traces and visceral reactions undisturbed. An ongoing study of and immersion in these visible emotions formed a body of work around “emotional” landscape photography. Bridget Monahan, is a researcher and photographer. She has worked as a design researcher for a number of product design and innovation agencies, including MAYA Design, Razorfish, and Sapient. In 2017, she started Vellichor Design to concentrate more fully on her art and writing and to work as an independent consultant in the areas...

Instax as Objects of Record

DAVID PETER SIMON Atlasssian 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 the history of photography in research practice he introduces the concept of Spradley's“objects of record” (1979). How can we optimize the use of instant photography with participants, and make operable projects in corporate contexts. David Peter Simon is a senior design researcher at Atlassian, a software company. Before Atlassian, David was a design fellow at Medic Mobile, producer for World IA Day, experience designer with ThoughtWorks, and blogger on Indie Shuffle. David studied digital ethnography and information visualization at the University of Oxford (MSc). 2017 EPIC Proceedings, ISSN 1559-8918, epicpeople.org/intelligences...

How New Social Design Captures the Social with Photographs

ILPO KOSKINEN School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 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 sources, often artistic and journalistic rather than analytic. This paper explores how new social design captures the social with photographs. It shows that the main unit of social action in photography is the design act. Place on the other hand remains a non-analytic feature that conveys the sense of having been there, but does not go deeper into the social. The most analytic constructs in photographs are diagrams and other representations. Discussion links these observations into the professionalization of design and its aesthetic rather than analytic base....