Harper Douglas_What's New Visually

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF

QUALHATWE ~KESEARCH

T H I R D E D I T I O N

EDITORS

NORMAN K. DENZINUniversity o f Illinois at U rbana-Cham paign

YVONNA S. LINCOLNTexas A & M University

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The SAGE handbook of qualitative research / edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln.— 3rd ed.

p. cm.Rev. ed. of: Handbook of qualitative research. 2nd ed. c2000.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-7619-2757-0 (cloth)

1. Social sciences— Research. I. Denzin, Norman K. II. Lincoln, Yvonna S. III. Handbook of qualitative research.H62.H2455 2005 001.4'2— dc22

2004026085

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Acquiring Editor: Lisa Cuevas ShawAssociate Editor: iMargo CrouppenProject Editor: Claudia A. HoffmanCopy Editors: D. J. Peck, Judy Selhorst, and A. J. SobczakTypesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd.Indexer: Kathleen PaparchontisCover Designer: Ravi Balasuriya

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CONTENTS

PrefaceNorman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln

1. Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln

PART I: LOCATING THE FIELD

2. Reform ot the Social Sciences, and of Universities Through Action Research Davydd ]. Greenwood and Morten Levin

3. Compositional Studies, in Two Parts:Critical Theorizing and Analysis on Social (In)Justice Michelle Fine and Lois Weis

4. On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty Linda Tuhiwai Smith

5. Freeing Ourselves from Neocolonial Domination in Research:A Kaupapa Maori Approach to Creating Knowledge Russell Bishop

6. Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research Clifford G. Christians

7. Institutional Review Boards and Methodological Conservatism:The Challenge to and from Phenomenological Paradigms Yvonna S. Lincoln

PART II: PARADIGMS AND PERSPECTIVES IN CONTENTION

8. Paradigmatic Controversies, Contradictions, and Emerging Confluences Egon G. Guba and Yvonna S. Lincoln

9. Critical Ethnography: The Politics of Collaboration Douglas Foley and Angela Valenzuela

10. Early Millennial Feminist Qualitative Research: Challenges and Contours Virginia Olesen

29

WHAT'S NEW VISUALLY?Douglas Harper

O ne faces the task of a chapter on the same subject for the third edition of this Handbook with a certain amount of trepi­

dation. After all, not that much changes in the social sciences, especially within such a few brief years. Yet there are new themes, technologies, and practices mixed into the gradual evolutions of established patterns in visual methods. With that in mind, my goal in this chapter is to minimize overlap with the chapters in the earlier editions, with the modest proposal of seeing what indeed is new in visually inspired qualitative research.

Thus, readers interested in the postmodern critique of visual ethnography; the relationship among visual sociology, visual anthropology, and documentary photography; and the devel­opment of a research typology of visual think­ing in visual research should consult the earlier chapters (Harper, 1993, 2000). I suggested that visual sociology offered the opportunity to add­ress the postmodern critiques of ethnography and documentary photography and, in so doing, to fashion a new method based on the under­standing of the social construction of the image and the need for collaboration between the subject and the photographer.

This chapter examines the status of visual thinking in the sociological community, the impact of new technologies on visual methods, the

continuing development of visual documentary and visual sociology, and problematical ethics questions in the visual research world.

In the background is a much discussed sepa­ration in the visual studies movement between the study of social life using images, which is often referred to as the empirical wing of visual sociology, and the study of the meanings of visual culture, which is usually called cultural studies. Some have argued that this clouds the fact that we share a fundamental interest in the meanings of visual imagery.

As an example of visually oriented cultural studies, Fuery and Fuery (2003) explore Foucault’s imaging of the body, Lacanian theories of abjec­tion and reflection, Kristeva’s ideas about body fragmentation and visual culture, Derridas notions about social reproduction and the semiotics of imagery, and Barthes’s semiotics of photography. Their book contains only one image— a repro­duction of a 1992 Calvin and Hobbes cartoon to illustrate Kristeva’s theory of the abjection of the self. However, the arguments are grounded in examples of visual imagery on websites that are listed at the ends of the chapters. Thus, the reader can refer to the images of Magritte, Dali, Warhol, Caravaggio, and Bernini, to the photographs of Newton, and to the films of Hitchcock without the expense and inconvenience of having the images

H 747

748 B HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH— CHAPTER 29

in the book itself. Of course, reading the book implies access to a computer and the Internet, and referencing websites in this way assumes that the images will still be available online for as long as the book is used. Because the images are not esoteric, this is probably a safe bet. So, the book presents itself as a postmodern argument against the hegemony of its own form.

But more to the point ot this chapter, Fuery and Fuery (2003) show how cultural studies use images to advance theories of the self, society, existence itself, and/or symbolism. 1 have sug­gested elsewhere (Finrper, n.d.) that cultural stud­ies generally use images (from fine arts to mass media, from architectural shapes to fashion, from body decoration and shapes to imagery of nightmares) as a referent for the development ot theory. One can argue that these cultural studies are ethnographic in an indirect manner; they are based on the analysis of the visual culture writ large.

This chapter has a different orientation because I believe that a handbook of qualitative research should focus on field research. From my perspec­tive, the emphasis should be on the practical, that is, using imagery to study specific questions and issues in sociology, anthropology, communica­tions, and the like. Much of what I discuss in the following draws on photography, although there are several other suitable ways in which to visually represent the world in social research. For example, in my own study of the work of a rural artisan (Harper, 1987), drawings complemented photo­graphs. The drawings allowed a more subjective take; elements could be left out, and interiors of objects could be invaded with cutaways. So, there is no reason why photography must dominate empirical visual sociology beyond the fact that it has proven to be enormously useful.

Most of the visual sociology discussed in this chapter depends on photographs— processed, juxtaposed, deconstructed, and captioned, but stili evidence of something seen. It is a reminder, once again, of photography as both empirical and constructed. It has become something of a ritual to repeat this idea in all articles or chapters on visual sociology, but it appears to be necessary.

0 I nnovations in J o urn al P ublication

Sociological research that relies on visual data is being published with increasing frequency. Journals such as Qualitative Inquiry and Symbolic Interaction include imagery— not exactly rou­tinely, but more and more frequently nonethe­less. Several new visually oriented journals have joined established visual social science journals, such as Visual Anthropology and Visual Sociology (renamed Visual Studies in 2001), as outlets for visual research.

A promising development within American sociology was the introduction of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) journal, Contexts, in 2001. Contexts, intended to popularize sociol­ogy for a mass audience, is the first American sociology journal to forefront visual information, albeit with not entirely consistent results.

Visual illustration in Contexts is used in three ways. 1 call the first the “ illustrated research arti­cle,” with an example being Rank’s (2003) study of the incidence of poverty in the United States. Rank uses photographs to portray a spectrum of the poor, including well-dressed job seekers, some using cell phones, in an unemployment line in New York; a group of perhaps 200 disheveled homeless people gathering for shelter in San Francisco; a young homeless family in Eugene, Oregon, sitting on a curb across the street from a grocery store; and an African American woman and an aged white immigrant in the daily routines of their poverty. The images put a face on statisti­cal data, but what do they add beyond that?

First, they contextualize poverty with other sociological variables such as family life, unem­ployment, and global migration. Visual documen­tation becomes a part of research triangulation, confirming theories using different forms of data. In these instances, the photographs argue that visual traces ot the world adequately describe the phenomenon under question.

The photographs also subjectively connect the viewer to the argument. The well-dressed job seekers in New York connect poverty directly to employment. The homeless couple and child in Oregon do not look like the stereotyped vision ol

Harper: What’s New Visually? gg 749

poverty; we would expect to see their attractive faces in a typical middle-class home. The immi­grant in poverty is an elderly man from the Netherlands, showing us that nonminority immigrants also struggle to make ends meet in the United States.

But although these photographs are impor­tant to the text, they remain secondary. The visual dimension is not integrated into the research; the images are added by an editor who has the challenging job of securing photos from a variety of sources. The result is that useful photos are often found and published, but so are images that fall short of their mandate to visually tell a sociological story.

Contexts also publishes photo essays, where sociological thinking emerges directly from images rather than reinforcing and elaborating on word-based thinking. Gold’s (2003) photo essay on the Israeli diaspora is a good example. The body of the article consists of 12 photographs and captions organized around the themes ot “ Individual and Community Business,’’“Designing and Finding Communities,” and “Transnational Networks and Identities.” The photographs locate people in various environments— from their homes, to businesses, to public settings— inter­acting in the routines of various social scenes. The images are organized conceptually and are the main way in which the ideas are presented. Gold’s photo essay (and others published in Contexts) shows the possibility of sociological thinking that derives nearly entirely from images. The intention is that sociologists will regard the photographs in these essays as visual data, that is, that sociologists will engage the photographs with active intellec­tual “ looking.” Because photographs saturate pop­ular culture and are generally treated superficially, this is a big leap.

As hinted at previously, asking sociologists to take photographs seriously raises the matter of their truth status— or their validity, in socio­logical terminology. Here, as has been stated many times previously and has already been mentioned in this chapter, rests a central irony of the photograph: It is both true and constructed. It is true in the sense that it reflects light falling

on a surface, but it is also constructed by the technical, formalistic, and other selections that go into making the image and by the contexts (from historical to presentational format) in which it is viewed. In this way, photos are similar to all forms ot data— both qualitative and quantitative.

It is hoped that the Contexts photo essays will elevate sociologists’ understanding of this essential similarity between photographic data and other forms o f data.

Contexts also publishes photo essays on social change, that is, images that show the same social scene at an earlier time and a more contempo­rary time. Photography is especially helpful in studies of social change because photographs can be matched with earlier images to reveal extra­ordinarily detailed renditions of changes in human habitation, landscape, and/or traces of human interaction. This approach draws on the work of a single sociologist, ]on Rieger, who has applied the tine arts and documentary “ rephotographv” move­ment to the study of social change in northern Michigan (Rieger, 1996,2003) and other settings.

Although Contexts has broken new ground in sociology, it remains to be seen whether the jour­nal will successfully make the case for visual data in research or whether it will be considered less rigorous precisely because the journal relies heavily on visual displays. For Contexts to redetine visual thinking in sociological publishing, it must initiate a discussion of the role of visual informa­tion in sociological thinking and presentation.

The journal must also improve its means ol attaining images; it is simply not feasible to assume that good-hearted photographers will donate the use of their photos. It is also not feasible to assume that volunteer staff members (despite their success so far) can do what professional photo editors do, that is, find and get access to the very best photos to develop visual arguments.

0 N ew T ech no lo g ies;N ew W ays of T h in k in g

What is genuinely new in visual sociology is the use of technology in recording, organizing,

750 a HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH— CHAPTER 29

presenting, and analyzing visual information. Emerging technologies have revolutionized the use of imagery in social science, and some intre­pid researchers have already provided convincing examples. The basis of the revolution is the com­puter, but more specifically it is software pro­grams such as Macromedia’s Director and, in some cases, the Web. All of these technologies are several generational offsprings of HyperCard, a program bundled with early Apple computers that allowed information to be organized in a nonlinear manner. In what follows, 1 briefly examine four projects that demonstrate the range of these new ways of thinking and doing field research visually.

Jay Ruby’s ethnographic study of Oak Park, Illinois, uses the Web to disseminate the ongoing results of a field study (Ruby, n.d.). The website (http://astro.ocis.temple.edu/~ruby/opp/) includes interviews, photographs, observations, historical commentary, and video segments in various forms of completion. Ruby also established a listserv of residents of Oak Park, inviting people who are the subject of the study to disagree, elaborate, or simply comment on the ongoing study. According to Ruby’s website,

Oak Park Stories is a series of experimental, reflex­ive, and digital ethnographies that attempt to explore a forty-year-old social experiment in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. It is experimental in that 1 have not followed the traditional method of producing a book or film but instead made an interactive and non­linear work that has both video and text. It is reflexive in that the subject of my research is my hometown. ... It is digital in its form of delivery—on a DVD using QuickTime movies and html documents. I have constructed these Stories in a nonlinear fashion; that is, unlike a book or a film, there is no defined begin­ning, middle, or end. Viewers/Readers are free to begin anywhere. They can ignore anything that does­n’t interest them. I have provided many links to mate­rials that will allow anyone interested to pursue a topic in more depth. I have found writing in a nonlin­ear fashion to be amazingly freeing.

The website is organized around “modules,” which are broad categories with scroll-down sub­categories. These include an extensive discussion

of ethnography, histories of families that represent the community, the black migration to Chicago and Oak Park itself, biographies of individuals who have played an important role in the commu­nity, and other modules that explore themes such as racial integration.

The module organization is similar to chapters in a book but also is distinctly different. The mod­ules include subcategories of photo essays (often from archival sources) that show, for example, images of race riots in 1919 and images of a single African American on an otherwise all-white championship football team. The module format establishes a logic for the overall project: The first-order categories are the modules themselves, the second-order categories are scrollable items beneath the module title, and the third-order information exists in the many linked articles, photo essays, newspapers, and other archival documents that are sprinkled liberally through­out. This is similar to the organization of a book with a chapter structure, text, and endnotes, but it is markedly different because of the freedom allowed to go into more depth than a particular subject in a book might allow or to add material that might be too tangential for a scholarly study. For example, Ruby’s study develops a cen­tral theme of racial and ethnic integration. Sub­categories of the integration module present the history of African Americans in Chicago in more detail than would likely be included in an acade­mic monograph. Ruby’s pages-long overview of housing policies, race politics, and shifting demographic information can, however, easily be included in the Web presentation. It is contex- tualizing information that some, but certainly not all, viewers/readers will use. Links to additional sites further these possibilities.

Ruby posts quarterly reports from the field and asks for feedback by way of Web discussions. His importance in visual anthropology and promi­nence in a visual communication listserv gener­ates a Web-based audience for his work.

The attractiveness of this mode of dissemina­tion is precisely that a variety of communication modes— text, still images, and moving images— can be integrated. However, the memory-hungry

nature of video makes it (so far) impractical to include more than a few seconds of video clips, with the moving images being bracketed into a small thumbnail on the screen. The final project is intended as a number of DVDs, where longer video segments can be included.

The sharing of the project-in-progress by way of an evolving website has not, to my knowledge, been done before. The project could be left in this form and updated 0 11 a continual basis through the near future. However, Ruby intends to finalize the project as one or more DVDs distributed in the same way as other emerging visual anthropology multimedia projects are distributed, that is, through commer­cial or academic publishers.

Other visually oriented sociologists have begun to develop the potential of advanced inter­activity with Macromedia’s Director. The first of these projects was Biella, Chagnon, and Seaman’s (1997) Yanamamo Interactive, which is an inter­action version of Chagnon and Asch’s classic ethnographic film, The Ax Fight.' The Ax Fight is a 10-minute film showing a hostile interaction between two groups of Yanamamo tribespeople in Venezuela. The film has become an important teaching tool as well as an important research tool. It is a commonly cited example of how min­imally edited ethnographic film can tell several layers of ethnographic stories. So, the Biella pro­ject is based on expanding the potential of a classic in visual anthropology, primarily (but not exclusively) for teaching.

The traditional means of teaching this mater­ial has been to show the film, assign readings on the Yanamamo, and integrate these materials in lectures and discussions. Researchers use a simi­lar strategy— close study of the film and consid­eration of visual material in the context of written sources.

By packaging the film with different kinds of information (still photographs, graphs, tables, and extensive texts) so that various parts can be connected in novel ways, Yanamamo Interactive opens up heretofore unexplored pedagogical and research possibilities.

The Yanamamo Interactive CD-ROM includes three versions of the film (unedited and edited in

two forms), 380 paragraphs that describe the events as they unfold in the film (these are viewed alongside the scrolling film), more than 100 cap­tioned photographs of the participants in the ax fight, genealogical charts that plot the partici­pants’ relationships, and maps of the village and the interaction of the fight. As noted, the soft­ware architecture allows viewers to move among filmed events, biographical sketches, maps of important places, and ethnographic explanations freely and creatively. The format invites theory testing, both formally and informally. The CD- ROM defines film as being integral to ethnogra­phy rather than as a form of ethnography itself. As a result, the film can be seen as ethnographic information that is deconstructed by reading the anthropology that gives background information.

My experience with the CD-ROM has been nothing short of inspiring. I am well aware of how difficult it is to teach ethnographic film; students see the film in one parcel of time and then read or discuss it in another parcel of time. Thus, the emotional and subjective experience of studying film is separated from the more analytical experi­ence of studying texts. This separation often leads to stereotyping precisely because emotions and analysis become ever more distant from each other.

The interactivity potential of the CD-ROM allows the viewer to, for example, stop the video, select a particular participant in the fight, and trace the participant’s genealogy in the village and his social position vis-â-vis his participation in village groups and activities. Thus, students and researchers can study the contexts of social action and begin to understand the layers of meaning that reside under the surface of the fight. In fact, the organization of the material invites students and researchers to ask new questions and to investigate new lines of reasoning.

The project has been distributed with an intro­ductory anthropology textbook and is widely used in university anthropology courses. The CD-ROM allows students from a wide range of backgrounds to actually encounter ethnographic information and, thus, to do visual research at a fairly sophisticated level.

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752 b HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH— CHAPTER 29

It is likely that the format introduced in Yamimamo Interactive will soon become common in visual anthropology, extending the usefulness of ethnographic film for both teaching and research. Several projects by the authors of this CD-ROM and others are under way.

Macromedia’s Director has also been used to produce a searchable archive of the work of docu­mentary photographer Jean Mohr. Mohr is best known for his collaborations with John Berger (Berger & Mohr, 1967, 1975, 1982) and for his work in the area of international human rights for several international organizations (Mohr’s first photographs, taken during the early 1950s, docu­mented the everyday lives of Palestinian refugees). He has also photographed less known projects involving the Chicago police on patrol and inter­national tours of a European symphony.

The CD-ROM titled jean Mohr: A Photo­grapher’s journey (Mohr, n.d.) collects more than 1,200 of Mohr’s black-and-white and color photo­graphs (from more than 1 million taken during his 50-year career) and includes brief interviews with Mohr and others about the meaning of his work as well as brief texts that explain and elaborate on the projects from which the images were drawn.

The core of the project is the photographs, which are organized in five categories, the most important of which are “ image type,” “subjects,” and “regions.” Each of these categories includes several subcategories accessible as drop-down menus. For example, the image category of “subjects” includes the subcategories of“migrants,” “music,” “ refugees,” and several others. Thus, the viewer is able to create a corpus of images by click­ing on one subcategory in each main category. Tor example, I direct the CD-ROM to gather Mohr’s black-and-white portraits of refugees who were photographed in Africa. Or, the viewer could direct the CD-ROM to select color images on the general subject of music that Mohr photographed in the Middle East. Combining a different subelement from each ot the main categories allows the viewer to construct hundreds of individualized archives.

These advanced searching capabilities allow the viewer to use Mohr’s work efficiently and creatively. I found that, after several hours of

working with the archive, the only limitation that suggested itself was the number ot photographs that it included. A total of 1,200 images might seem like a lot at first glance, but they are a tiny percentage of Mohr’s life work. Most searches cross-referenced across several categories yield 20 to 30 images, whereas Mohr’s full corpus would include several times that number. The most chal­lenging aspect of this project was clearly in pro­gramming the navigation; one senses that more images could have easily been scanned and added to the archive. Thus, if the project had included three to four times the number of images, the archive would be that much more useful.

Electronic and searchable photograph archives from newspapers or public collections are increas­ingly available. Mohr’s project, however, might be the first to present the life work of a sociologically oriented photographer with information that describes his career, publications, self-reflections, and commentary on his relationship with Berger. As an overview of the work of a single photogra­pher, it sketches the working methods of an artist. It also provides visual evidence on sociological themes such as refugees as well as visual area studies of the places where Mohr concentrated his efforts. Short video clips also humanize Mohr.

One would hope that the considerable effort represented in this CD-ROM project will lead others to synthesize their photographic work,espe­cially when the work so broadly addresses subject matters of interest to sociological researchers.

Two projects with a smaller scope show the potential of interactive media in visual research. Ricabeth Steiger photographed an aspect of daily life— a train commute she makes several times a week from Basel to Zurich, Switzerland, to con­struct a visual ethnography of a taken-for-granted aspect of daily life (Steiger, 2000) (Figure 29.1). The images are both impressionistic (showing blurred landscapes through the train windows— the world speeding by as viewed from inside the train) and ethnographic (showing the tacit social scripts— how people interact on a train— that underlie the public behavior in Switzerland).

Steiger’s project was published in Visual Sociology as a research article in two forms. The

Harper: What's New Visually? 0 753

Figure 29.1. Inside the Train Source: Photograph by Ricabeth Steiger.

article text and photo sequence were published as thumbnail-sized images in the print journal and on a CD-ROM that housed a Director-based movie version of the project. The CD-ROM format allowed Steiger to transform still photographs into a new mode of communication— a virtual movie consisting of an automatically advancing slide show. This was an ideal solution; the images were too numerous to work as an article but were too few to constitute a book, and they needed to be viewed in sequence to achieve the intended effect. Although the thumbnail images published in the journal are a catalog of the photos, the vir­tual movie clearly constitutes the actual article.

The publication of the project in Visual Sociob\;y was a breakthrough in the presentation of visual research. The development of the CD- ROM required the journal designer to have knowl­edge of relevant software and cross-platform development. The International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA), the sponsoring academic

organization of the journal, devoted considerable resources to fund the CD-ROM and to package and distribute it as a regular part of the journal. It did so with the hope that the project’s revolutionary character would help to encourage a new way in which to see and do visual research.

Finally, Dianne Hagaman recently published a photographic project using the same software, with considerably more elaborate development (Hagaman, 2002). As in the case of Steiger’s pro­ject, the subject is a visual ethnography of daily life, in this case her life with her husband, the sociologist Howard S. Becker.

The photographs are organized into 14 “son­nets,” with each sonnet named after a jazz stan­dard such as “Night and Day,’’“Slow Boat to China” (Figure 29.2), or “One Morning in May.” Jazz has been an important part of Becker’s life; he was (and remains) a practicing musician, and his studies of jazz are important contributions to cul­tural sociology. The photographs also have a jazzy

754 a HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH— CHAPTER 29

Figure 29.2. From “ Slow Boat to China” Sonnet of the CD-ROM Howie Feeds Me

Sciurce: Photographs by Dianne Hagaman.

quality; they are subtle and present reality from an oblique angle, transforming otherwise unre­markable subject matter, such as window frames and beds, into poetic visual statements. Likewise, jazz presents familiar melodies in unusual and provocative frames of musical reference.

The photographs are about place (the couple’s homes in Seattle and San Francisco and the cou­ple’s travels to Paris and other locations where Becker lectures), landscape (Hagaman is a master at rendering sky as a part of landscape, often inhabited by birds on the wing), social gatherings (often with well-known sociologists), and (most centrally) their own relationship. According to Hagaman’s introduction,

We weren’t kids when we met and decided to live together, and we didn’t have our whole lives ahead of us.. . .

He played the piano and knew hundreds of songs from his days when he played dubs in Chicago. And he could cook. And liked to do it. He told me that after his wife Nan died, he made himself three full meals a day, every day, in order to establish a routine and structure in his life in a time of changeand grief.

1, however, had never learned to cook. It wasn’t deliberate. 1 just somehow fell through the cracks. But, maybe as a consequence, I ’ve never taken the

preparation or the social aspects of food for granted: how central eating is and preparing the food that you eat (that magical skill) is, who we eat with and where.

Thus, the project is titled Howie Feeds Me, and the photographs allude to a relationship rooted in caring for and nourishing the body and spirit. In this way, the project is an ethnography of the daily life of a couple and their loving relationship, as told from the perspective of one partner. The only sim­ilar attempts to communicate this theme are Laura Letinsky s photo essay Venus Inferred (Letinsky, 2000), which focuses on the banalities of the sexual lives of several couples, and Pernette and Leeuwenberg’s (2001) photo essay on their inti­mate relationship. But whereas Letinsky (2000) focuses on the obvious (i.e., a series of couples looking embarrassed in the act of coupling) and Pernette and Leeuwenberg (2001), both photogra­phers in their early 30s, use the camera to record the energy and lovingness of sexual union, Hagaman (2002) communicates the mundane aspects of nonsexual intimacy with subtlety and humor that suggests the stuff of daily life.

Much of the message of Hagaman’s essay is in the medium. The project is rooted in

Harper: What’s New Visually? B 755

35-millimeter black-and-white photos, but from the beginning it was intended for the computer. Hagaman organized the CD-ROM-mounted photo sequences in what she calls sonnets:“ ! took the idea of the fourteen lines of a sonnet and used it to organize my photographs, a group of four­teen images making a kind of poem: rhyming, repeating, alluding, and suggesting, the way pho­tographs do when you put them into groups.”

The sonnets are of two forms. One is a series of individual images presented on the computer screen against a white background, like images on the wall of a gallery. These have short captions that usually identify the place or action depicted. The viewer studies these images individually and in sequence as well as in the context of the story hinted at by the title of the sonnet (a jazz standard).

Other sonnets are continuous visual loops of joined images that the viewer scrolls through. The images adjoin each other completely; the viewer creates new images composed of parts of the adjoining images by stopping the scroll bar in other than the borders of the photographs. Thus, when the viewer scrolls, images suddenly com­bine exteriors of a room from one image and exteriors of a street from another; other images contain both night and day, and so forth. The

continually joined images add a dimension that could not be achieved if the images stood alone either on a gallery wall or on a computer screen.

The photographs are also presented as thumb­nails with detailed descriptions of location, people, and events that are useful points of reference.

New developments such as those described heretofore have revolutionary potential in visual studies. There are, however, several issues that may affect their contributions.

The first issue concerns longevity. The software that runs the various programs is under constant development, and the systems that run the computers are as well. For example, Apple’s recent operating system, OS-X (already in its third iter­ation), has required full redesign of participating software. Similar developments in PC operating systems have led to the same challenges. With the rate of current development, it is nearly impossi­ble to predict the hardware, operating system, and/or software compatibility for today’s projects that will be in use 10 or even 5 years from now. Of course, the book that I just removed from the shelf will be there, in exactly the same form, 50 years from now.

The second issue is that, as noted previously, electronic delivery and organization of material

756 a IIAN'DliOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH— CH AFTER 29

oiten allows inlormation to be packaged in a way that could not be presented in print form. But the opposite is also true: Old-fashioned media, includ­ing books, articles, and handmade images, have been shown to have a remarkable resiliency precisely because of the very qualities that the electronic forms transcend. The illustrated book or journal article, for example, imposes limitations that the Web does not and that might lead to more judicious editing or organization. The linearity of old-fashioned presentations remains meaningful as a frame by which ideas and images can be organized.

There is also the matter by which various lorms oi information find their way to con­sumers. Books and articles are published and distributed through a system that draws on well-articulated institutional structures and a public that consumes in a certain way. This is a multilayered and conservative system. Nontextual media, such as CD-ROMs and DVDs, have only recently begun to get a foothold in this system.

This is not to say that the old forms are neces­sarily better or worse than newer competing forms of visual communication. It is simply to say that some aspects of change come slowly. This must be said in the context of the increasing success of the Web and multimedia platforms.

0 T he Continuation of the O ld

Certain themes and forms o f visual research, however, continue to produce useful visual research. One is the visual critical analysis, such as Margolis's (1998, 1999) studies of education and labor processes. This work traces its roots to studies such as Stein’s (1983) critical investigation of early social reform-oriented photography. Stein’s study focuses on how' the sponsorship, photographic technology, and forms of dissemi­nation influenced what the photos communi­cated. These arguments often suggest that the photographs have latent meanings that reinforce the very structures they seem to be criticizing.

A more informal use of images to ask critical questions of the past is Norfleet’s (2001) When We

Liked Ike. Norfleet, who may have been the first practicing visual sociologist (she worked in photography and sociology for several decades at Harvard University), here assembles photographs from archives from the 1950s that document everyday life— families, institutions,organizations, leisure life, and so forth. She captions these images with excerpts from popular sociological texts of the time (e.g., those ot David Reisman and Vance Packard), excerpts from novelists (e.g., J. D. Salinger), and quotes from the popular press (e.g., Ladies Home journal). The viewer is taken to the everyday world that became the basis ot sociological analysis.

Empirical visual sociology lives on as well. For example, Rich and Chalfen (1999) use visual methods in a study of disease phenomenology. In their research, chronic asthma sufferers in their teens or younger made and analyzed videos of their personal worlds under the influence of asthma. The films and discussions opened a window into the private world of a disease at a particular stage of the life cycle. The visual dimension served as a means of discovery by the disease victims (they filmed their worlds to tell the story of their disease experience), and it also served as the basis of dialogue among asthma sufferers, adults in their social worlds (e.g., parents, teachers), and the medical community. The videos described social isolation, parental irresponsibility, and other themes that led to a fuller understanding of how the teens and younger children manage a debilitating disease.

Rich and Chalfen’s use of native-produced imagery draws original!y from Worth, Adair, and Chalfen’s (1972/1997) Navajo project of the late 1960s, where anthropologists taught reservation Navajo to use 16-millimeter cameras to tell their cultural stories. Many other examples followed.

Native-produced still images, however, have also become important visual research tools in social science. An early example was Ewald’s work with Appalachian youth. Her approach was to teach young children to photograph their families and surroundings, develop the black-and-white film, and print the images. She asked the children

Harper: What’s New Visually? a 757

she taught what they imagined and dreamed about and how they interpreted their daily surroundings. Ewald’s initial success led to sev­eral similar projects in South America, Holland, and other settings (Ewald, 1985,1992, 1996).

Photo elicitation is another approach that belongs exclusively to the visual. In a recent description ot the method (Harper, 2002), I found photo elicitation to be the primary method in 40 studies, including doctoral theses, books, articles, and reports. Several studies have been finished during the period since the article was published, and certainly many were missed in the review. The disciplines represented ill these studies include anthropology, communication, education, sociology (especially urban, rural, and communities studies), photojournalism, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and industrial manage­ment. In these vastly dissimilar kinds of research, the common desire to understand the world as defined by the subject led to wide applications of the photo elicitation method.

In what follows, I explain one way in which photo elicitation operates in a brief review of a study of the meaning of change in dairy farming in northern New York (Harper, 2001). In this project, my goal was to understand how agricul­ture had changed and what these changes meant for those who lived through them. To this end,I showed elderly iarmers photographs from the 1940s, (a period when they had been teens or young adult farmers) and asked them to remem­ber events, stories, or commonplace activities that the photos brought to mind. The success of the project rested on the coincidence of the availabil­ity of an extraordinary archive of documentary photographs (the Standard Oil of New Jersey archive) from just the era that elderly farmers had experienced at the beginnings ot their careers and the fact that these photographs were of such a quality as to inspire detailed and often deep memories.

The fanners described the mundane aspects of farming, including the social life of shared work (Figure 29.3). But more important, they explained what it meant to have participated in agriculture that had been neighbor based, environmentally

friendly, and oriented toward animals more as partners than as exploitable resources.

In this and other photo elicitation studies, photographs proved to be able to stimulate mem­ories that word-based interviewing did not. The result was discussions that went beyond “what happened when and how’’ to themes such as “this was what this had meant to us as farmers.”

Visual methods have also been applied to approaches that have not previously been thought to be visual. A recent issue of Visual Studies (Volume 18, Issue 1) was devoted to eth- nomethodology. The visual worlds that eth- nomethodologists studied included the textual materials in various administrative jobs (Carlin, 2003) and the work objects of scientific endeavors (Kavvatoko & Ueno, 2003). These studies draw on Sudnovv’s (1993) pioneering ethnomethodologi- cal studies of jazz performance that were commu­nicated partly through photographic imagery.

Several texts on visual methods have been published during recent years. The most useful are Pink’s (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography, Banks’s (2001) Visual Methods in Social Research, and van Leeuwen and Jewitt’s (2001) edited Handbook o f Visual Analysis. Pink has studied visual research broadly, whereas Banks has concentrated on visual anthropology. Van Leeuwen and Jewitt's handbook is a useful collection of cultural studies and empir­ical research. Their contributors describe content analysis, visual anthropology, cultural studies, semiotics, ethnomethodologv, and film analysis. Although most contributors downplay approaches that favor “researchers making photos to analyze reality,” the collection is a useful starting place. Less useful is Emission and Smith’s (2000) Researching the Visual, which is largely a polemic against the photocentric orientation of visual sociology.

It is especially interesting that those who have synthesized the strains and traditions of visual social studies have come largely from outside the United States and, most significant during the past few years, from the United Kingdom. The “U.K. School” emphasizes cultural studies but is increasingly eclectic, with recent and forthcoming collections that center on visual ethnography (e.g., Knowles & Sweetman,2004).

758 ja HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RF.SEARCH— CHAPTER 29

Figure 29.3. A Farm Work Crew Eating DinnerSource: Photograph by Sol libsohn. Used by permission of (he Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville.

The other significant European movement in visual sociology is situated in Italy, primarily at the University of Bologna. Beginning in the early 1990s, Patrizia Faccioli and her colleagues have conducted visual research on a wide range of topics using photo elicitation, documentary pho­tography, content analysis, and semiotics (for an overview, see Faccioli & Losacco, 2003). Losaccos (2003) recent monograph uses family photogra­phy to understand the negotiation of cultural identities of Italian immigrants in Canada.

That the IVSA meets regularly in Europe helps to facilitate the growth of visual methods interna­tionally. The development of visual social science in the remaining areas of the world where social sciences are taught is a critical next development.

However, although there are many recent texts on visual methods, there are few new in-depth

studies based on visual data or visual analysis. Quinney has written and photographed a series of introspective ethnographies of place, with the most recent (Quinney, 2001) exploring the meaning of what he refers to the “borderland”— Hamlin Garland’s “middle border,” which he presents as a landscape, a state of mind, and a basis for philosophical orientation. Barndt (2002) uses photographs to both gather and present informa­tion in a study of the globalization of the food. Changing Works (Harper, 2001) is one of the few recent ethnographic studies based on photographs.

However, photo documentary studies continue to be published. Recent examples include Coles and Nixon's (1998) School, which explores the social realities of three schools in Boston; Goodmans (1999) A Kind o f History (1999), which documents 20 years in the life of an ordinary American town;

Harper: What’s New Visually? a 759

and Wilsons (2000) photo study of the Hutterites o f Montana. Yet the documentary tradition remains the scope or attention of most social scientists. Unfortunately, Beckers suggestion back in 1974 that documentary photographers and sociologists with an interest in photography should explore their overlap and get on with learning from each other is still largely underrealized (Becker, 1974).

U Unresolved Issues: E th ics of V isu a l Research— Special Issues and Specia l Considerations

The scientific world, of which sociology is a part, has become increasingly concerned with research ethics. This preoccupation is partly due to past misuses of scientific research. This has, in turn, led to the increased use of institutional review boards (IRBs) as legally mandated monitors of all research at U.S. universities. These issues are also the subjects of codes of ethics of professional societies such as the ASA.

Qualitative researchers, however, often have a difficult time in defining their work in terms that meet the expectations of IRBs. This is especially the case for photographic researchers. The primary issue concerns the matter of subject informed consent and subject anonymity. The problems for qualitative researchers, and the special case of sociological photographers, are detailed in what follows.

The first concerns the observation of public life and, in the case of visual sociology, the photo­graphy of public life. Observation of public life has been a part of sociology since Georg Simmels studies of generic forms of social interaction, based in part on his observations of public life from his Berlin apartment window, or since Irving Coffmans observations of the nuances of human interaction in social gatherings. Anderson (2003) refers to this style of sociological observa­tion as “folk ethnography.” Anderson’s method involves observing the public on bus trips and walks through a city as well as overhearing con­versations in restaurants and other instances of public life.

In large part, IRBs appear to be ready to accept that observation of public life may take place without informed consent. But the right to photo­graph the public without the subjects’ consent has, by and large, not been tested by passage of research proposals by members of the visual sociological community. Many visual sociologists model our photographic research on documen­tary photography and photojournalism, where the right to photograph in public has been guar­anteed by amendments to the U.S. Constitution dealing with freedom of expression. In these studies, it is precisely the clearly portrayed face of a stranger doing the things people normally do that leads to compelling documentary statements or sociologically meaningful insights.

Visual sociologists point to the precedent of photojournalism and documentary and argue that harm to subjects is unlikely to occur from showing normal people doing normal things. In a personal example, I was photographed unawares at a recent Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game by a photographer working for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and I was presented in a half-page photograph to support the message of an article that alleged low attendance at the Pirates games. In fact, I had chosen to sit by myself in an otherwise empty section becauseI like the vantage point of that section andI enjoy the solitude in a baseball stadium early in the season. Having the photo in the Post Gazette made me a celebrity for a day, but it also opened up other questions. Was I skipping work? WasI a social isolate? And so forth. However, the public accepts that being in a public space makes one susceptible to public photography. I was not harmed by my momentary celebrity status, and the ethics of photojournalism were not violated. I was portrayed accurately in the mun­dane performance of my life.

Those of us who want to use photography in sociology believe that it is logical to argue that we have the same rights as those who work in the closely related worlds of photojournalism and photodocumentary. Indeed.some of us have come to define ourselves as documentary photogra­phers, rather than as visual sociologists, to avoid

760 n HANDBOOK OF QUA UTA H VI-; RESEARCH— CHAPTER 29

IRB scrutiny, although this is surely not a solution to this issue.

The second matter concerns the loss of confi­dentiality in photos that portray people clearly. The language of the current ethics literature (in the ASA code of conduct or the IRB guidelines) is strongly aligned with protecting the anonymity of subjects. That is commendable if subjects wish to remain anonymous. But what about subjects who are pleased and willing to be subjects (and who sign releases to this effect)? The identifi- abilitv of subjects is critical to the sociological usefulness of the images; these include elements such as subjects’ expressions, gestures, hairstyles, clothing, and other personal attributes.

There has been little written about the ethics of photographic research. Several years ago, Gold (1989) argued that the biomedical model did not sufficiently address the ethical issues of visually based research, arguing instead for a “ research outlook— sensitivity— that is rooted in the covenantal ethical position . . . as a means of addressing the ethical problems of visual sociology” (p. 100). This sensitivity “ requires the researcher to develop an in-depth understanding at subjects so that he or she may determine which individuals and activities may be photographed, in what ways it is appropriate to do so, and how the resulting images should be used” (p. 103). This involves understanding the point of view of subjects, especially their thoughts on how and where the images will be used. According to Gold, “ Unlike a contract that simply specifies rights and duties, a covenant requires the researcher to consider his or her relationship with subjects on a much wider level, accepting the obligations that develop between involved, interdependent persons” (p. 104).

The practical implications are that one will sometimes find oneself in research situations where photography would violate the norms of the setting or the feelings of the subjects; in such cases, photography should not be done. Gold (1989) suggests that sociologists use their knowl­edge as well as their ethical sensitivities to guide their actions. Whether this can be the basis of an acceptable method remains to be seen.

For visual ethnography to come out of the closet, these issues need to be resolved. Visual researchers must have their work sanctioned by boards that eventually will accept research that varies radically from the formal experiment and that depends on the right to document life in glaring exactitude.

0 Summary

My hope is that visual methods will become ever more important in the various research traditions where it already has a foothold and that this growth will take place in a way that acknowledges the potential of new media, while preserving what is useful in the old media, and acknowledges the subjects’ rights but calls forth a larger ethical stance than the biomedical contractual model determines as appropriate. I hope that during the next decade, visual social studies will become a world movement and, thus, a means to long overdue internationalization of sociology.

For visual social science to develop, professional rules and norms concerning ethics must acknowl­edge the rights of photographers/researchers to photograph in public and to present identifiable subjects, but in the context of ethical considera­tions that consider photographers/researchers as connected by webs of obligation and moral regard.

0 N ote

1. Biella and colleagues’ (1997) project, as well as Steiger's (2000) article (which had just been released when the second iteration of this chapter was written), both were mentioned briefly in my chapter in the second edition of this Handbook.

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