Children Photographing Well‐being: Facilitating Participation in Research

Children aged 8–12 years took 723 photographs representing well‐being. Another group of children categorised the photographs, identified what was missing and discussed their inter‐relationships. The largest categories were ‘people I love the most (friends)’ (23.2%), ‘activities’ (18%), ‘food and drink’ (17.2%) and ‘animals/pets’ (12.8%). Children reported that the categories were all related and could be subsumed into the general category ‘the way I live’, reflecting their holistic integrationist perspective on well‐being which in turn mirrors the whole child perspective of the Irish National Children's Strategy. The usefulness and limitations of this approach to working with children are discussed. Copyright © 2005 National Children's Bureau.     

‘Such fine families’: photography and race in the work of Caroline Bond Day1

This article examines a collection of family photographs published in an unusual 1932 anthropological study of ‘Negro‐White families’. In the 1920s Caroline Bond Day, a woman of mixed ancestry herself, gathered family histories and photographs of over 300 ‘Negro‐White families’ for her graduate work at Harvard University under eugenicist Ernest Hooton. Day's subjects, recruited from her circles of friends and acquaintances, shared her goals of African American equality and uplift but were often suspicious of her chosen field. Anthropology has often been referred to as the handmaiden of colonialism and racism, and physical anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not generally supportive of African American civil rights movements prior to World War II. Nevertheless, about 350 families submitted family histories and photographs and filled out surveys. Some also allowed themselves to be measured with calipers. The published study included over four hundred photographs, which collectively provide a visual mediation between Day's political goals, her exclusive focus on mixed‐race families and her use of physical anthropology and blood‐quantum language. Day's work remains controversial, but continues to be used by scholars, activists and artists in part because of its unique focus and methods.     

Breasted experiences in pregnancy: an examination through photographs

Drawing on qualitative data from a sample of pregnant women in Hobart, Australia this article uses ‘feminist’ ‘memory work’ and the ‘photovoice’ method as frames for discussing the ways in which interviews and participant-produced photographs may be used to trace and understand pregnant embodiment. I argue that digital photographs taken by women during pregnancy can reveal important information about how they negotiate their own experiences of breastedness and wearing maternity underwear over time. Here, the concept of ‘breastedness’ itself is expanded as women’s individual embodied experiences of pregnancy are reflected in the production and viewing of their own photographic images.     

Going out of business in Highland Park

The practice of collecting photographs of refugees in ‘coffee‐table books’ is a practice of framing and thus inflecting the meanings of those images. The ‘refugee coffee‐table books’ discussed here each approach their topic with a particular style and emphasis. Nonetheless, while some individual images offer productive readings which challenge stereotypes of refugees, the format of the collections and the accompanying written text work to produce spectacle rather than empathy in that they implicitly propagate a world view divided along imperialist lines, in which the audience is expected to occupy the position of privileged viewing agent while refugees are positioned as viewed objects.     

The desire for space: stains in Zoltan Kluger’s institutional photography

The article studies the construction of Zionist space in Kluger’s institutional photographs in an attempt to understand the ideological desire for space in Zionist imagistic propaganda. The analysis employs Lacanian ‘stains’ as well as strategies of art interpretation to suggest that behind the image of Sisyphean work of men toiling the land stands the Zionist ‘law’ (in contrast to the female jouissance) which comes to signify the Jewish return to history after the fall from divine grace. This paper demonstrates by what means Kluger’s photographs echoed and propagated the Zionist unconscious based on western and Christian desire for eternity and redemption of the land, even if it meant sacrificing the sons in exchange for eternal life and the return to grace.     

Bringing their worlds back: using photographs to spur conversations on everyday place

This article poses a methodological argument for the use of expressive photographs in fostering more mindful discussions of the experience of everyday places. The article builds on the author’s ‘guided tours’ methodology of walk/make/talk, which involves asking inhabitants to take the researcher on tours of their everyday places, the researcher making creative visual representations of those places and then, bringing those images back to residents to talk about how the photographs are similar, or in contrast, to lived experience. The article uses examples from research in Brooklyn, NY, and Oakland, CA, to specifically explore the ‘making’ and ‘talking’ part of the process, and to argue for the critical distance gained when a participant has the opportunity to see their most commonplace and often unremarked worlds brought back to them through another pair of eyes. The paper considers distinctions with other photo-elicitation methods and discusses how this model of bringing people’s worlds back to them often allowed the jolt of a new perspective to suspend the taken-for-grantedness of the world, creating a time and opportunity to consider the everyday in more depth. It further discusses how the method enabled people to clarify three aspects of everydayness that are hard to pin down: the feel of place, emotional responses, and seeing past time. The paper challenges conceptions of photographs as ‘data’, champions expressive work in research, and proposes that photographs made by a range of authors can enable new ways of seeing, challenging and discussing the everyday urban environment.     

Recycling the orphan photograph: the new life of Jewish objects

The aim of this article is to explore the new lives of prewar photographs of European Jewry. In particular, I employ the concept of ‘orphan photograph’ which describes any work whose owners, producers, and the subjects featured in them are no longer available. Working from the premise that a photograph is not only a two-dimensional representation but also a three-dimensional object, I show how family images are consumed, distributed, discarded, salvaged and brought back to life. As I argue in this article, with the annihilation of their owners the once-important personal meanings of the pictures become obscured and obliterated. Subsequently, in post-Holocaust culture orphan photographs become invested with collective values. In the process of being recycled, these private family photographs are transformed into public spaces through which new visions of the past are projected and group interests promoted. Drawing on two case studies from Poland, I look at the ways in which these orphaned images are used by writers and NGOs, and examine how the various agents affect the subsequent readings of these artefacts. The article shows that once allowed to ‘speak for themselves’ these images reveal an immense capacity to challenge our pre-set notions of the past and escape the ‘backshadowing’ narrative of the Shoah.     

New soldiers and empty boys: imaging traumatic memory

This essay reconstructs one important context for images published by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW): the testimonial practices of anti-war veterans. First in small rap sessions, and then in unofficial public hearings, anti-war veterans recollected their war experiences in an effort to inform civilians about the US war in Vietnam, and mobilise them to oppose it. Photographs of introspective veterans – lost in memory – provide a visual idiom for the experience of ‘flashing back’ that was the basis for veterans’ testimony. If these photographs signify the central role of self-reflection in veterans’ anti-war organising, they also imply a distrust of graphic war photography – both images disseminated by the mainstream media and atrocity photographs taken by soldiers themselves. Anti-war veterans worried that war photographs catered to a consumerist appetite for intense, vicarious experience and provoked only a fleeting sense of revulsion. Compounding this distrust of graphic imagery was the circulation of war souvenirs, atrocity photographs taken by soldiers of their dead and wounded victims. Exploring portraiture as an alternative to photojournalism, this essay situates images of introspective veterans in relation to the pioneering activism of the VVAW and allies them with images produced by other activists working in the visual field, focusing on Martha Rosler’s ‘Empty Boys’.     

Collecting loss

ABSTRACT

‘Collecting Loss’ develops themes from Pleasures Taken (Mavor, Duke University Press, 1995) with an emphasis on the fetishization of photographs and old clothes (exemplified, on the one hand, in Elin O'Hara Slavick's own girlhood dresses that she has stitched with haunting memories of her childhood, and on the other hand in the lush photographs taken by Sally Mann and the Victorian photographer Clementina Hawarden). As Christian Boltanski has written: ‘What they [clothing and photographs] have in common is that they are simultaneously presence and absence. They are both an object and a souvenir of a subject, exactly as a cadaver is both an object and a souvenir of a subject.’ Reading an old photographic album made by her own grandmother against other maternal collections of plenitude (whether they be old clothes or photographs or domestic bric-a-brac), Mavor reveals how such accumulated goods are made to fill in for the pangs of loss: lost childhoods, lost family histories, lost memories, lost friends. Mixing corporeality and critical theory, Mavor engages with Emily Apter's notion of ‘maternal collectomania’ as a site of provocative meanings worthy of placement alongside more conventional discourses on visual representation and collecting.     

Are all communities communities in the mind?

Studies of community undertaken over a period of some forty‐five years by the author and his colleagues are re‐considered to show how the significance of ‘communities‐in‐the‐mind’ has been inadequately appreciated. The distinction made by Clifford Geertz between ‘experience‐near’ and ‘experience‐distant’ is used to sharpen up certain assumptions and approaches of community sociologists, including Frankenberg. Some possible explanations for the decline in the perceived importance of comminity studies from the late 1960s are discussed in the context of the growing centrality of social class in sociological analysis in the 1970s and 1980s. Reference is made to recent research on personal communities by Liz Spencer and the author to illustrate how an ellision between ‘experience‐near’ and ‘experience‐distant’ approaches may be achieved. It is concluded that the imputed community‐on‐the‐ground, often based on materialistic assumptions, should not be conceptually privileged over the real community‐in‐the‐mind.     

The ruins of Managua vieja: the use of expressive photography in urban ethnography

This article proposes a method of conducting urban visual work – a practice-led visual study in which researcher-generated expressive photography explores the ‘city-as-archive’ (Hetherington 2013) and contributes to the urban visual archive. The photographs used in this article focus upon the social world of material remnants in the setting of the old downtown of Managua, Nicaragua. The aim of the article is four-fold: to suggest the epistemological gains of expressive photography, to discuss the methodology and style, to present the use of these images in an urban visual ethnography of Managua and to address related ethical concerns. Although expressive photographs are used to some extent by scholars, there is a noticeable lack of discussion of the method and empirical examples in urban visual studies. In this article, I propose intentionally using expressive photography to convey the subjective and affective knowledge that is generally not communicated by more conventional, ‘realist’ documentary visual techniques. Moving into a more explicit conversation of the work process, I point out three arenas for inquiry, for which this method can be useful. I detail my own visual ethnographic practice, and present my primary visual aims in three image clusters: expressive photography in conjunction with historical images, theorising the oscillation between absence and presence and visually interpreting the vernacular design of the ruinscape. The article concludes with a consideration of ‘ruin romance’ as an ethical concern, as well as some reflections over perceived difficulties in using this method as a means of doing academic research.     

Anthropology, class and the 'big heads': an ethnography of distinctions between 'rough' and 'posh' amongst women workers in the UK pottery industry

In the context of the take‐over by a global corporation (Royal Doulton) of a family‐owned and run pottery factory in Longton Stoke‐on‐Trent, known as ‘Beswick’, and the subsequent re‐structuring of production, this paper explores the way in which women pottery workers make social distinctions between the ‘rough’ and ‘posh’, ‘proper paintresses’ and ‘big heads’ which cut into and across abstract sociological notions of class. Drawing on ethnographic data I show that for these working class women, class as lived is inherently ambiguous and contradictory and reveal the ways in which class is gendered. I build on historical and sociological studies of the pottery industry, and anthropological and related debates on class, as well as Frankenberg's study of a Welsh village, to develop my argument and draw analogies between factory and village at a number of levels. My findings support the view that class is best understood not as an abstract generalising category, but in the local and specific contexts of women's working lives.     

The Delicate Scientist Practitioner

This article offers an alternative understanding of the ‘scientist‐practitioner’ in clinical practice. The ‘dodo bird’ hypothesis or ‘common factors’ findings suggest that the specific technique of a particular treatment protocol, whether supported or not by empirical validation, are not as important as feedback to the clinician as to whether this particular treatment is working or not. A new philosophy of science and cognition suggests that ‘know‐how’ and ‘withness‐knowledge’ is of more importance than any ‘know‐that’ or ‘aboutness’ knowledge. Two hundred years ago Goethe suggested a method of science that was more focused on performativity than representationalism, which is being discovered again by postmodern science and philosophy. This model of science, combined with Levinas' call for an ethics first approach, can provide an alternative to the move towards treatment manuals.     

Negotiating the dichotomy of Boffin and Triad: British-Chinese pupils' constructions of 'laddism'

Little research has examined constructions of gender among young British‐Chinese. This paper seeks to further understanding in this area, particularly in relation to notions of ‘laddism’ currently deployed in educational policy discourse around gender and achievement. As a group British‐Chinese boys tend to very high achievement in the British Education system. The notion of ‘laddish behaviour’ as an explanation for boys’ apparent underachievement in comparison to girls at GCSE level was discussed with British‐Chinese pupils. An overwhelming majority of British‐Chinese pupils supported this explanation, and a majority of these pupils applied notions of ‘laddish behaviour’ to British‐Chinese boys, to some extent contesting stereotypes of the Chinese as uniformly ‘good pupils’. However, the discourses of ‘the good Chinese pupil’ and ‘Chinese value of education’ were frequently drawn on by pupil respondents, with the result that the pupils often presented British‐Chinese manifestations of ‘laddism’ as mild versions in comparison with pernicious ‘others’. The paper discusses different presentations of laddism among some of the male respondents. It concludes by analysing the impact of ‘raced’ and gendered discourses on British‐Chinese constructions of masculinity. British‐Chinese boys may be able to adopt versions of masculinity which do not impede their learning, but this tended to result in their masculinity being problematised in teacher discourse.     

Synchronic and diachronic variation in the use of spatial frames of reference: An analysis of Japanese route instruction

By focusing on everyday use of spatial ‘frames of reference’ (FOR) in route instruction, we propose some possible explanations for the seemingly contradictory trends observed in FOR‐based and deixis‐based spatial expressions in Japanese. We examined the data obtained in a series of longitudinal surveys conducted in Japan over 50 years (1953, 1972 and 2008). Our GoldVarb analysis confirmed what is called a ‘retrograde’ lifespan change. This indicates that, first, synchronically, the preference for External FOR (that is, based on North‐South‐East‐West) increases as community members grow older. This means they shift toward the local norm through ‘age‐grading’. Secondly, diachronically, the preference for Internal FOR (based on Right‐Left‐Front‐Back) has gradually increased over the past century. There is, therefore, a ‘generational change’ motivated by the linguistic marketplace. In contrast, as a community‐wide preference for Internal FOR expressions prevails, there is an accompanying gradual decrease in the use of deictic expressions such as ‘here/there/over there’. This indicates a partially complementary relationship between deixis and Internal FOR.     

Writing birthing bodies: exploring the entanglements between flesh and materiality in childbirth

ABSTRACT

This article enquires into the lived experiences of childbirth as a site of ‘fleshy becomings’ that disrupts the dominantly cleaned-up approaches to organising. Theoretically, we approach childbirth as a primitively humane experience in which birthing bodies become entangled with the materiality by which they are surrounded. The empirical material of the article consists of 12 in-depth interviews with first-time mothers in Finland as well as of photographs and autoethnographic research notes taken by the two authors of this article. By empirically highlighting the interplay between flesh and materiality in the ‘making’ of birthing bodies, this article offers novel viewpoints on the discussion of embodied experiences as well as on the entangled relations between flesh and materiality in the field of organisation studies. It also makes an empirical contribution using a unique contextual example of ‘birthing’ to illustrate how vulnerable topics can be researched, offering critical viewpoints on this subject.     

The photo‐survey research method: capturing life in the city

Recent promotion of city centre living within UK policy has led to a commensurate interest in city centre conditions and the opinions and experiences of the people who live there. An apposite, straightforward method to capture city centre residents' experiences and views is described in this article. We successfully combined a novel, under‐utilized visual technique (self‐directed photography) with qualitative methods (log‐sheets and interviews) in the form of a ‘photo‐survey’. A background to visual methodologies is presented in this article, alongside a critique of using the photo‐survey with 84 city centre residents to investigate environmental conditions and perceptions within three of the UK's major cities. The method provided a rich, detailed set of data, but also brought a number of noticeable benefits to the data collection process. The photo‐survey not only effectively captured and documented life in the city but also acted as an ‘agent for change’, evoking thoughts and feelings which ultimately encouraged participants to reflect on their existing perceptions and urban experiences. The study also raises some important considerations for future work undertaken with this method and with using photographs as a set of data, and proposes techniques for minimising potential problems.     

Caring children: exploring care in post-divorce families

This article draws on information from in‐depth interviews in addition to a survey from a Norwegian ‘Families after divorce’ study, in which the perspective of children and younger people are emphasized. We describe the complex relations between care‐giving and care‐receiving among children and adults in post‐divorce families and challenge and nuance the traditional western picture that emphasizes children as the receivers of care and adults as care‐givers. Inspired by the notion of ‘caringscapes’, the article seeks to incorporate the spatial and the temporal into the analysis of care and caring, and three ‘caring routes’ are identified: i) the ‘money squeeze route’, ii) the ‘emotional considerations route’ and iii) the ‘time squeeze’ route. The three routes are verified by the interview data as having both direct and indirect effects on the phenomenon of caring. We argue that children's care‐giving should be further investigated both empirically and theoretically and that a caringscapes approach might provide insight and departure for further research.     

Editor's introduction: ethics in visual research

This essay addresses a group of contemporary artworks which qualify as photography and painting at the same time. Because these works lack medium-specificity, several theorists refer to them as ‘pictures’. Analysis of this concept's etymological origin and of the art-historical context in which it appeared indeed reveals the concept's usefulness for discussing this particular group of artworks. However, merely defining them as ‘pictures’ would imply that important and interesting effects of the combination of photography and painting in these works are ignored, if not negated. This is why the authors coin the term ‘multi-mediating picture’ as a preferable concept in this context. As such it not only refers to the clearly discernible multiplication of media in these works, but it also indicates the layered and delayed perception that results from this multiplication. The authors demonstrate the suitability of their concept through a case-study of two photographs by Louise Lawler. Their analysis is geared to processes of appropriation involving both other media and images made by other artists.