What is visual ethnography?
I’m a visual ethnographer, but what does that mean? Well, I like to think of ethnography as understanding how we make sense of our lives, and I use visual methods (photography mostly) to do so.
I’m there to learn, I’m the perennial apprentice.
There’s obviously a whole lot more to it. Earlier in my academic career, I reflected on my particular ethnographic approach, which culminated in an article called Longing to Belong. In that article, I trace the influences on why and how I research culture, work and how we organise our everyday lives. I go back to my formative years when my Dad would try to show me how to make and mend stuff in his workshop. As a visual thinker, like Temple Grandin, I wanted to pull everything apart and put it back together to figure out how it worked, including Dad’s tools —he wasn’t always impressed. The point being that by hanging out with my Dad I learned about work and organisation by getting involved and picking up his work ethic. Even if I wasn’t always listening, I soaked up his workshop culture, which stood me in good stead for my engineering apprenticeship after leaving school, as well as my later research career.
It’s possible to think of ethnography as a sort of apprenticeship. It is often defined as participant observation, which invokes the classical image of the ethnographer sitting on the periphery of a community, notebook and pen in hand, watching what goes on. A more contemporary approach can be thought of as ‘observer participation’, where the ethnographer gets involved in the everyday. That’s what I mean by longing to belong — I don’t just want to hang out, I like to roll up my sleeves and get involved like I did when I was a kid; and that’s ok by the way. As social researchers, we can’t and shouldn’t write ourselves out of real world research — we can’t control variables like they do in labs, so we should go with the flow. Personally, I embrace it. I’m there to learn, I’m the perennial apprentice.
I’ve found though that I can’t always be so involved. In the Wellbeing not Winning project, there were many things that I couldn’t be directly involved in, and asking too many questions wasn’t appropriate either. So, I turned for the first time in my research to photography — something I’d always done outside of academia. For this project, I used an approach I’d learned from reading Doug Harper’s Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop in which he photographed his protagonist, Willie, at work and later showed him the prints and they discussed. This was to understand how Willie made sense of things like an engine repair — something he just knew how to do, but not something he could necessarily talk Doug through while he worked. I did the same with my photographs of community sporting events. I asked community Elders over a coffee at the local shop what they saw in my images of young men playing football and their families barracking for them from the sidelines, and they in turn shared with me what those scenes meant to them and the community culturally. It was a powerful approach.
I’ve carefully considered my approach to conclude (at least so far) that holding ethnographic images and stories (visual ethnographies) requires custodianship.
So much so, that I saw the power in me making photographs and the Elders sharing their insights. So, I’ve carefully considered my approach to conclude (at least so far) that holding ethnographic images and stories (visual ethnographies) requires custodianship. The visual stories I hold are not mine to tell — I’m just lucky enough to have co-produced them in order to thread them together into an understanding of how lives are lived in a particular place, from which we might learn something new, interesting and important.
For one of the projects I discuss in my new book, I developed my visual ethnographic approach further to try to co-curate stories with individual participants. In Tales of Precarity, I made photographic portraits of participants as they shared why and how they work in the arts or creative industries. Combining words and images in our follow up discussions, we drew out how it feels to do such meaningful yet precarious work, which greatly informed key ideas in my book. Visual stories such as Helena’s don’t just tell you about artists’ experiences of precarity, they show us how it feels and why they/we persist. When I was a kid hanging out with my Dad, I didn’t just learn how to saw wood (and how not to) but why such practices were important to him — how making and mending stuff made him who he was.
So, as you read this blog, you can be sure that my words come from deep and meaningful encounters with a diversity of people over extended periods of time. My sense of custodianship means that I’m not going to share everything with you here — just key insights I’ve gained through my research. Hopefully, though, you’ll be intrigued enough to read on — my book offers much deeper insights.
As I take on more projects as a photographer, writer or as an academic researcher, I will continue to hone my approach. It requires curiosity , a certain sensibility and a way of seeing. Ultimately, what I aim to do is to make visual stories that draw out the meaning and value of everyday practices that otherwise go unnoticed or are taken for granted. By publishing and exhibiting those stories, my hope is that we all might take more notice of how our everyday lives and work are shaped and ask serious questions about them, like ‘why is work in the arts and creative industries so precarious?’
