photo-elicitation and the sensory experiencing of urban design

I’ve rather belatedly realised that a paper I have co-authored with Monica Degen is now available online.

The paper is called ‘The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design: The Role of Walking and Perceptual Memory’ and it’s online at Urban Studies here.

Its abstract says: “Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the design features of those environments. Drawing from empirical analysis based on surveys, ethnographic ‘walk-alongs’ and photo-elicitation interviews, we argue that distinct senses of place do depend on the sensory experiencing of built environments. However, that experiencing is significantly mediated in two ways. First, it is mediated by bodily mobility: in particular, the walking practices specific to a particular built environment. Secondly, sensory experiences are intimately intertwined with perceptual memories that mediate the present moment of experience in various ways: by multiplying, judging and dulling the sensory encounter. In conclusion, it is argued that work on sensory urban experiencing needs to address more fully the diversity and paradoxes produced by different forms of mobility through, and perceptual memories of, built environments.”

The paper uses a visual research method – photo-elicitation interviews – but in writing my bits of it, I was actually most interested in how people’s very ordinary, everyday memories of how familiar places used to look and be different – in the past, in their memories – work as a screen that mediates their perception of those places in the present.  I think that’s one reason that asking people to talk about the photographs they’ve taken of those places often seems to generate talk that has very little to do with the actual photograph.  In a way, it’s the differences between how people see things, and what photographs show, that generates the interesting talk in photo-elicitation interviews.

One of the case studies discussed in the paper is the town of Bedford, and here are some postcards from a series for that town, designed by Kristina Bullen, that perhaps evoke something of that screening effect of memories.

The Camera As Historian

I’ve just been leafing through a copy of Elizabeth Edwards‘s new book The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918, out now from Duke University Press.  It is a beautiful book, gorgeously designed and lushly printed; the photographs that are reproduced are so sensuous that I wanted every one to be at least three times larger than it is.

I should declare an interest at this point: Elizabeth very kindly asked me to write one of the blurbs on the book’s back jacket, which I was delighted to do.  I have long admired Elizabeth’s project to approach photographs as material objects which are created, stored, displayed and circulated by the convergent practices of people and technologies.  This book takes that approach to the widespread movement of amateur photographers who, around the turn of the last century, decided to photograph ‘old’ England as it was being destroyed by ‘modern’ England.  As my co-blurber Jennifer Tucker writes, the book thus explores the complex relationship between “visual practices and the historical imagination” (or at least, the historical imagination as it was practised at a certain moment in a particular place by a specific group of people).

One of the many things I like about the book – now I have the book in hand and not just its manuscript – is the way it reproduces many of the photographs it discusses.  They are shown not just as images, but as images published in the pages of books and magazines surrounded by text, or stuck onto neatly-filled-in archive record cards, or with handwritten captions scrawled around their edges.  The best example of just how crucial these different sorts of framings are to what the photographs mean and do, I think, is plate 50, which is in landscape format to respect the layout of the Somerset Archeological and Natural History Society’s Photographic Record cardboard frame; this means, though, that the actual photograph, which is in portrait format, appears as if it’s lying on its side.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen another book on photographs that’s dared to prioritise the archiving of the photograph – that is, what was done with it – over the image itself.  It’s just one of the many reasons to applaud this wonderful book.

a building, two photographs, some maps and a city. oh and some missiles.

I had a weird moment while I was browsing the Guardian website last week.  I followed the headline ‘London rooftops to carry missiles during Olympic Games’.   The Ministry of Defence has decided to site a launchpad for ‘high velocity missiles’ on the water tower of a building that is now called the Bow Quarter, near the Olympic Park, apparently.  According to the Guardian, the missiles ‘travel at more than three times the speed of sound, have a range of 5km and use a system of three dart-like projectiles to allow multiple hits on a target. Ten soldiers will be on duty at all times to guard and operate the missiles if needed to bring down a fast-moving jet or helicopter attack’.  Local residents are complaining about the lack of consultation, and have apparently looked the missiles up on Google (as you would) to find that they leave a lot of debris behind them and don’t therefore seem very suitable for use in cities…

Putting all that aside, the rooftops in question are ones I was very familiar with thirty years ago when I was researching my undergraduate dissertation.  The ‘Bow Quarter’ was originally a factory for making Bryant and May matches; it employed several hundred local women in very poor conditions, until the women went on strike in 1888.  That strike heralded the emergence of mass trade unionism in the UK.  About a hundred years later, I was studying the strike for my dissertation, and as I lived in London then I thought I’d go and take a look at the factory.  When I got there, I discovered it was in the process of being converted into flats; the entrance buildings had already been sandblasted, so there is pretty much the same photo as the one the Guardian in my dissertation too. Because of course I photographed the building when I was there.

Perhaps it was the pointlessness of taking a photograph as an illustration of a building that in the late 1980s was so radically changed from its use in the 1880s, via technology that had barely been invented when the building was designed, that spurred my later scepticism about using photographs in academic work without thinking quite carefully about what they’re supposed to be doing there.  (On further reflection, though, the photo did of course serve a purpose other than illustration – it proved to my dissertation supervisors that I was keen enough to investigate the actual site of the strike – so perhaps that snap also presages my interest in what photos do rather than necessarily what they show.)

What a place, though, that building.  From factory and birthplace of mass trade unionism, to gated community, to rocket launchpad… there must be some sort of symbolism there, of London’s trajectory as a world city.

Oh, and for anyone interested in maps as a visual research method (yes maps, an oddly neglected visual research method), for my dissertation I mapped where the strikers lived, and from the clustered residential pattern that emerged I argued that their collective strength rested as much on their experience of neighbourhood networks as it did on workplace solidarity.  A version later appeared in an atlas, even: see Rose G (1995) ‘The Strike at Bryant and May’s Match Factory, East London, July 1888′, in Charlesworth, A and Southall, H (es) The Atlas of Industrial Protest, Macmillan, pp.99-104.

the blog photo

I was planning to write a blog post on something else entirely and I found myself hesitating because I couldn’t figure out what image I could use to illustrate it.  Because each post needs an image, right?  This blog in particular, probably, as it’s meant to be about things visual, but I also find that other blogs I check regularly seem to have the cute/witty/obscure thumbnail down to a fine art.   Is there a new genre of photograph emerging, then, the blog-illustration-photo?

The Facebook profile picture seems to be an equally new and increasingly well-defined genre of photo too, with quite distinct types – mine is the standard cropped-from-a-family-snap, but I do have Facebook friends who’ve definitely worked at the from-an-odd-angle-and-in-black-and-white type; then there’s the metaphor/symbol-of-me type, and the me-with-my-kids type… it would be interesting trace the emergence of these different conventions as Facebook itself developed.  How did they emerge, and what relations do they bear to other small photos that represent individuals, like passport photos or police mugshots?  As self-portraits, perhaps rather little, since we can choose just how to picture ourselves; so maybe they’re closer to the photo-booth photo strip.  But as a more cultural and  historical shift towards a visual performance of the self, perhaps rather more.

Now I’m all self-conscious about it – this will be my first blog post without a photograph included.

230,000 photographs and counting

a page from Wallpaper's online review of John Pawson's book

There was an interview with architectural designer John Pawson on the Guardian website last week, about his new book A Visual Inventory.  “If something catches my eye, wherever, I’ll simply point and shoot,” says Pawson.  He uses a Canon compact camera, and apparently feels bereft if he forgets its spare batteries and extra memory cards when he’s out and about.

The 272 photographs in the book have been chosen from his collection of 230,000.  That selection process must have been quite something, although it looks as if some rather conventional modernist aesthetic criteria were applied, making this “a genuine library of forms, volumes, materials and patterns, as seen through the architect’s eye,” according to the review in Wallpaper.

But my main reaction is – wow.  230,000?  How are they stored, tagged and retrieved?  It’s an amazing number of photographs to have taken, and its scale demands as much attention as the few that were selected for publication, I think.  Because scale – just sheer numbers – does seem to be one of the qualities of the visual images created by digital technologies.  Once you’ve got a camera, you can store as many photos as your hard drive or web albums have the space to hold, and the numbers of images thus archived can be huge, as Pawson’s collection attests.

And these collections of vast numbers of images pose some challenges to conventional ways of understanding the significance of images, I think.  Can we interpret them by subjecting them to the kind of close reading that is dominant still in visual culture studies?  Or do we need a different approach?  Do they demand a return by content analysis, for example, for long shunned by cultural studies scholars but perhaps a necessity in the face of a photo collection in the thousands?  I certainly found my own attitude towards content analysis changing as I went from writing the first edition of Visual Methodologies to the third.  In the first edition, I wrote a chapter on content analysis out of duty, really, just to widen the coverage of the book; but by the third edition, with books like the one written by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green about YouTube using content analysis to get to grips with just under 4,500 videos, I was beginning to think quantitative methods might be of some help.

Burgess and Green talk about YouTube being ‘a mediated cultural system’ with a ‘shared and particular common culture’, which are best identified by examining the overall shape, if you like, of YouTube’s online presence rather than by close readings of the videos themselves.  They give YouTube some shape by working with its own counting of its tags: most favourited, most commented and so on.  This suggests that once something like YouTube congeals into a certain form, the form is sustained and has significance.

But how best to approach the form of a personal collection of 230,000 photographs?

the slide show as visual method

There was an interesting event in London last weekend, part of the Waste of the World research project, where I found out about a series of slideshows that are part of the project and can be found on YouTube here.  They’re all slightly different in format; the one below, for example, occasionally has a text slide inserted among all the photographs, while others have captions on each image.

 

 

Watching them reminded me of another slideshow, made by Trond Waage, a visual anthropologist at the University of Tromso, called Struggle for a Living – you can see it here.  This slideshow pushes more at what a slideshow can do.  It has a soundtrack – a voice-over and some ambient sound – as well as a few simple zooms into still images.  It also has a very powerful sense of rhythm, as the duration of the still images lengthens or shortens and the pace of the slideshow slows down or speeds up.  This is very effective in conveying a sense of urban everyday spaces – in this case, the town of Ngaoundéré in Cameroon – and Trond says that the process of working with images was also an effective way to negotiate understanding between himself and the protagonist of the slideshow, Bakary.

As well as its visual content, then, it seems that its rhythm, its ability to incorporate text that can be read, and its soundtrack, are the distinctive features of a slideshow – a medium that’s worth more attention than it’s so far received, particularly for those of us who don’t have the time to hone our filmmaking skills but still want something more than the photo-essay format.

remember: not all digital innovators are zuckerbergs or jobses

Today, Kodak finally gave up trying to catch up: the company filed for bankruptcy.  The Guardian newspaper reported it here.

I’ve been reading (on my Kindle, natch) John Naughton‘s lovely new book on the internet, called From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet.  It includes a very funny (in retrospect) account of how record companies did all they could to make money from cds without thinking at all about what the other consequences of digitised music might be.  A similar story might be told about Kodak, who invented the first digital camera but didn’t quite know what to do with it.

visual research methods: a thousand flowers…

I’ve just been browsing Paula Reavey’s new edited collection, Visual Methods in Psychology.  It’s a very interesting mix, very eclectic, and I enjoyed something about every chapter in it.

Eclecticism is in the nature of edited collections, I guess.  However, I am beginning to think that eclecticism is so entrenched in visual research methods that it might be worth thinking a bit more about its consequences.  It’s entrenched in terms of the extent of the variety of visual research methods, and also in terms of how unproblematic that variety seems to be to commentators on visual research methods.  There’s a sort of ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach to research methods using visual materials, which is great, of course, particularly as it seems to allow lots of experimentation with new sorts of methods (or at least with variations of old ones).

However, there are also some disadvantages, one of which is that there’s very little sense of established practice developing as researchers learn from each other; reinventing wheels of slightly different designs seems to be preferred to building (dare I say it) a better wheel by learning from other people’s handiwork.  Where are the paper reflecting on, say, photo-elicitation as a method, as opposed to reporting the results of a study using photo-elicitation?  (Please let me know by responding with a comment!)

And the experimentation is also rather less wild than it sometimes seems when luxuriating in field of a thousand flowers (or wheels – sorry, metaphors going a bit awry here): an awful lot of methods depend on talk with photographs, for example; video gets a look in, too, but quantitative visual methods are rarely acknowledged as part of visual research methods; and participatory and elicitatory methods are hegemonic.

The field is surely now big enough to engage in some critical self-reflection, and I’m looking forward to seeing it emerge.

visual methods and the nonrepresentational

I’ve just read the latest posting on my Open University colleague Clive Barnett’s blog.  The blog is called Pop Theory and it’s great, basically. Read it!

What caught my attention this evening was Clive’s neat dissection of a widespread assumption in a bit of influential human geography theory: that visual methods are somehow better at capturing/evoking/indicating the affective/nonrepresentational/ineffable.  This assumption has taken hold well beyond the small corner of human geography that Clive is focussing on, in fact.  A lot of discussion of visual methods are based on the claim that if people being researched are given a camera and told to photograph what matters to them, the photographs produced will somehow avoid the pitfalls of the ‘representational’ that dog talk.

I’ve always thought this was a very dodgy assumption.  It’s always seemed to me to be pretty obvious that photographs, of course, can be put to work to show the affective/ineffable; but they can also be put to work to make rigorous arguments, celebrate a birthday or describe cell structures.  They don’t inherently show anything in any particular way.  Conversely, talk and written text can be extraordinarily powerful in evoking the affective/ineffable, as well as making rigorous arguments, celebrating a birthday and describing cell structures.

Clive says, “the idea that visual methods somehow avoid the ‘representational’ – let’s call it the ‘interpretative’ for clarity’s sake – is based on a massively embarrassing philosophical error (and that’s leaving aside obvious points about technical mediation and framing): just looking at an event, an action, a scene, is not enough to tell you what that event, action, or scene actually is (i.e. what practice it belongs to).” Images still need interpretation if they are to communicate something.  This is true of all photos, for example: family photos have the family talk; art photos have their critical texts; pictures of the ineffable have affect theory, to make them show some things and not others.

I’d also like to elaborate on another of Clive’s points.  Specifically, why, in order to avoid the representational, are cameras so popular in visual research methods?  (Maps, for example, or scatter diagrams, never seem to feature in discussions of the affinity of ‘the’ visual with ‘the nonrepresentational’.)  I wonder if it’s because making photographs is seen as both easy and popular.  Indeed, I wonder if making photographs is seen as easy because it’s so popular.  Which leads me on to one of the most irritating things about current discussions of visual methods: which is that they pay very little attention to the skills and savvy that research participants might bring to the method.  Participants are asked to draw maps and take photographs and make films as if they had never opened an A to Z, seen a family snap or been to the movies.   This uninterest in the visual skills of research participants might be understood, then as another example of what Clive describes as “the disdain shown towards the viewpoints, opinions, perspectives – the words - of ordinary informants in cutting-edge cultural theory these days”.

Now, in fact a lot of visual research methods use photographs as ways of generating informants’ talk – talk about pretty much anything, in fact, which is rather different from the particular body of work that Clive is criticising.  Nonetheless, there is a sense in which visual research methods are being defended as being able to get more and better data for analysis by researchers, while too little attention is being given to the ways in which research participants themselves might use visual images for all sorts of effects, including creating articulate knowledge as well as inefffable emotion.  Perhaps a little more attention to the fact that social scientists are not the only ones creating diverse understandings of ‘the social’ might not go amiss.

photographic assemblages

I’ve just finished reading a new book by Risto Sarvas and David M. Frohlich called From Snapshots to Social Media: The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography.  It’s a fascinating read, not least because the authors are almost entirely unburdened by the literature in cultural studies on domestic photography: there’s barely a mention of Barthes, for example.  This is refreshing, and helpful, because what it allows them to do is focus on the contexts – both social and technological – in which domestic photography is embedded, rather than write oh-so-movingly about the images themselves (their own illustrations are largely of cameras and networks rather than photographs), or oh-so-theoretically about the affect of the digital.  And what they argue is that family snaps are increasingly part of social media networks, and that this changing context is altering the editing, storing, sharing, content and organisation of family snapshots.

I agree.  I think a lot of photographs now are taken and shared not as referential evidence of the there-then (to use Barthes), but rather as ways of connecting with family and friends.  Sending a snap is less an act of archive dispersal and more an act of keeping in touch.  What this means for the images themselves isn’t addressed by Sarvas and Frohlich at any length.  I wonder though if in part what it means is that the images themselves don’t mean so much any more, because they are taken to be sent, not taken to be kept.  Which raises some interesting questions about the legibility of photographs now…

a performer at a school show, photographed by Giorgio Ciaccio aged 11, on his mum's camera.

The most enthusiastic photographer in our household is 11-year old Lydia.  Sarvas and Frohlich mention several times that many more children now own a camera, most often the camera in their phone, and they wonder what new forms of photography might emerge when kids are sending pictures to each other.  It’s an interesting question and one which I think they might have pursued a little more fully.  Because it seems to me that there are a lot of different kinds of photographies that are emerging, now that photography itself is such an ubiquitous practice.  Sarvas and Frohlich kind of assume that domestic photography is morphing entirely into online social media.  While much of it is, that’s not true of all domestic photography, and I think even when it does, there are social media and social media; several people I know have more than one Facebook account, with different privacy settings and different Facebookfriends, and they upload different photos to each.  Then there are the teenagers explored by Frohlich’s colleague Abigail Durrant, who have one (or more) Facebook photo displays, another set in their bedroom, and are part of further displays in other parts of their family home.

And then there is the increasingly blurred line between ‘domestic’ and ‘professional’.  In the last week at work I’ve met two more people who work for The Open University as administrators but who also work as photographers (that makes four now, and counting); and I’ve also learnt a lot from Gary Penny about how popular wedding photography is among keen photographers who want a career change.  And then of course there is the increasingly blurred line between how art photography looks and the appearance of other kinds of photography, a point made very effectively by Julian Stallabrass at a recent event organised by the Photographers’ Gallery and the networking project Archiving Cultures, part of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, called ‘Vernacular Photographies‘ (though as Julian also noted, in many other ways the line between ‘art’ and ‘other’ sorts of photography is very clearly policed by the critical apparatus).

All this suggests to me that all photographies are vernacular, in the sense that they are all practiced in specific social worlds, through particular combinations of software, hardware, objects, images, discourses, and subjectivities.  And there’s huge scope – as Sarvas and Frohlich also conclude – for much more research exploring these specific assemblages as they emerge.