I presented this at International Visual Sociology (IVSA) 2011 on Friday July 8 at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. I was on a panel called Sensing Community: Toward an Ethics of Collaboration in Visual Research Practices with colleagues from Communication and Culture (Andrew Bieler, Paul Couillard, and Sara Martel). Comments, criticism, and so on all welcome. Some rights reserved: cc by-nc-sa 2011 Kris Erickson (panel abstract © 2011 Andrew Bieler, Paul Couillard, Kris Erickson, and Sara Martel).

A brief of the paper is immediately below, with the panel abstract below that; full text after the jump.

Paper brief:

Ethics and Community through Photo-voice

This paper will explore the ethical implications of photovoice research. It will challenge the assumptions of this compound term – namely, photographic realism and expressive communication – to envision how photovoice might enhance its collaborative and democratic dimensions. To this end, it will examine commonalities with and amongst related practices such as community cultural development or media democracy.

Panel abstract:

Sensing Community: Toward an Ethics of Collaboration in Visual Research Practices

This panel explores the ethics of locating, interacting and learning alongside communities in relation to a number of visual research practices: aerial photography, community arts, performance art, photo-voice, and photography within an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Although each report is substantively distinct, all challenge preconceptions of the ‘visual’ in academic research in order to move toward more collaborative paradigms of visual research. These experimental visual methods will be reflected upon as places of learning about ethics, where the meaning, practice and difficulties of ethical knowledge production are questioned. What are the stakes when research is understood not simply as impartial observation, but rather, as a potentially active force of production and transformation? To what extent can projects be structured to allow participants to share in shaping their direction and outcome, and what impact does this have on the very notion of research? What relationship can or should exist between ‘researcher’ and ‘participant’? Andrew Bieler will reflect on the socio-ecological dimensions of community arts and aerial photography practices aimed at mobilizing residents to challenge suburban sprawl and build support for local food security. Paul Couillard will report on a three-day performance project undertaken in Beijing, China in which he positioned his body as a public marker of personal wounds–whether physical, political or spiritual–identified by local citizens. Kris Erickson will explore the practical and political roots of the photo-voice method in an attempt to challenge certain implementations that minimize the emancipatory possibilities democratic photography offers its participants. Sara Martel will explore how a methodology like Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis invites participants to understand their own visual experiences, considering the Heideggerian “care” behind personal photography specifically. By bringing together these case studies, artist reports, methodological histories and theoretical interventions, we hope to find some significant, troubling and inspiring questions involved in collaborative research.

Ethics and Community through Photo-voice

In this paper, I want to consider the phenomenon known as photovoice from an ethical frame. I don’t mean “ethical” in the IRB or Tri-Council or institutional sense of mitigating harm to research subjects. Rather, I’d like to treat ethics more generally – inclusive of such specific concerns as these, but also of more broadly social and cultural ones. Indeed, the paired realist and emancipatory aims of the practice of photo–voice seem inherently to demand such a widened scope with respect to ethics. To my mind, photovoice as a particular instance of participant-generated research appears to be a challenge to research and inquiry conventionally done, and I want to think through a little what the implications of that challenge might be. Specifically, I want to propose that photovoice suggests a shift from participant-generated visual research to collaborative visual cultural production. More on this to follow.

For my understanding of ethics I draw on a small but useful little paper by Kenneth Keniston (1965) called, appropriately enough, Morals and Ethics. Writing in the upheaval of social change in the US during the mid-1960s, Keniston emphasizes the distinction between the two terms: morals, he asserts, are what we inherit simply by being in a given culture. Our morality is largely a product of socialization and, as such, is mainly tacit and below-the-surface. Ethics, on the other hand, are consciously and deliberately constructed. Rather than given in a culture, ethics must be reconstituted from an inherited morality, from appropriations and rejections of parts of that moral system. Keniston asserts that while some form of morality is practically inevitable, ethical development is not: instead, ethics constitute a response to rapid social change and increased “culture contact,” the interchange between previously homogeneous or geographically isolated cultural groups. As he argues, “The mid-twentieth century is a time of culture contact and social change more extensive and rapid than ever before in history; the prerequisites for a world in which morals suffice have long since disappeared.” This doesn’t imply a benign quality to these terms: the clash between moral and ethical worldviews has had disastrous consequences over the past few decades – even centuries – and a retrenched morality that refuses to acknowledge and address such heterogeneity or heterodoxy remains common to far too many contemporary systems of belief and regimes of power.

What I would like to draw from Keniston is the implication that ethical development is an active, empathic activity at its best – one which demands that the complexity of our new and emerging cultural interrelations be engaged with rather than shied away from. Although he doesn’t name it as such, ethics seems for him core to a radical democratic, socialist project. Further, such ethical development implies the cultivation and expression of a vision that exceeds what is immediately visible. Photovoice, as I will argue, might play a role in such a deliberate, ethos-forming process by connecting visual representation with political self-representation.

But before I continue, some words about photovoice as a method. Technically, the term refers to a practice of engaging a typically marginalized group or community in a process of individual or collective self-representation (or both) through camera-based technologies; primarily, of course, this happens through still photography. The argument goes that giving cameras to members of historically oppressed and socioeconomically underdeveloped communities – particularly youth – has been a way to not simply gather data about them, but to gather more accurate data, “through their eyes,” as insiders privy to a community’s complex, contingent relations with one another. The main point of gathering such participant-generated data through photovoice has largely been to better inform policy makers and social support systems as such agents and agencies address structural problems that affect these communities. A secondary purpose has been to gather qualitatively richer data via both the photographs themselves and through interviews centered on the images; interviews that capture greater detail about the objective, material conditions depicted in the photographs, as well as the affective and expressive intent inscribed into an image’s composition and construction by its author/photographer.

Caroline Wang appears to have coined the term in the mid-1990s and elaborated it in her work with Mary Ann Burris and others in rural China, Flint, Michigan and elsewhere (see Wang and Burris 1997; Wang, Burris and Ping 1996; Wang et al. 2004; Wang and Redwood-Jones 2001). The lineage could be traced much earlier, however: arguably to the roots of photographic practice itself, most particularly in the confluence and divergence of social reform photography and the workers or popular press beginning in the late 19^th century. This is a complex argument that I won’t pursue here; suffice it to say I would challenge any “pure” histories of the method, and argue that its roots lie far more in techniques for social change and social justice than they do in academic and scholarly research methods. Most recently, photovoice can be seen to emerge from postcolonial and feminist theories and practices developed from the late 1960s onward. Namely, community photography in the UK (see Braden 1983), popular education in the Americas (see Barndt 1991; Kane 2001), community cultural development or “community arts” in the US (see Goldbard 2006; Naidus 2009), and alternative media from around the globe (see Howley 2005; 2010). All are practices from which the methodology has drawn, and to which it has contributed in turn. From more academic practices, photovoice has emerged from the visual turns in anthropology and sociology, participatory research in education, health, psychology and social work and, to a lesser extent, interdisciplinary practices in arts-based research.

However, even if we tease out these various threads in greater detail, we’re still left with the qualitatively distinct shift implied by the term itself: photovoice. If we read it naively, we stumble upon a technology of the visual that is complexly implicated with aspects of speech and non-textual communication. Moreover, the variety of the visual to which photovoice alludes is not self-evident: the realist mode of photography that photovoice implies is but one way of conceiving of camera-based representation. Similarly, the political assertions of voice as ideals of expression or empowerment are significantly altered depending on who is doing the speaking, to whom such speech is being addressed, and in what context the voice is made to resonate. The matter of any visual image effectively “speaking” on behalf of a typically “voiceless” individual or group is an intriguing issue, but not a wholly unproblematic one. I want to address the implications of each half of the term in a little more detail before I critically return to the synthesis, photo-voice, with some ethical implications.

As I previously mentioned, the practice of photovoice typically assumes a realist approach. Its photographs are communicable because they imply that what is depicted is accurate to some degree in representing what was once actually in the world – whether person, thing, or event. In this sense, photovoice can be seen to be aligned with the traditions of photojournalism and social documentary, but also with vernacular – or “home-mode” photography as Richard Chalfen (1987) calls it. Photovoice relies on this status of its images being evidence: its participants were there; this is what they saw; this vision is authentic.

I can only enter into postmodern and postcolonial critiques partially here, but they are worth mentioning, since they have challenged the legitimacy of realist representation to which photovoice and other camera-based practices subscribe. For example, the presumed authenticity and authority of realist documentary tends to minimize the structural and institutional ways photographs get constructed: photographs by their very nature are duplicates, not originals, and as such are part of vast economies of representation, subject-formation, and material exchange. They are texts, in short, into and upon which the functioning of capitalism and modernity are inscribed. A realist mode tends to efface these inscriptions, so the critique goes, taking what is represented at face-value and even, in some cases, fetishizing or generalizing or stereotyping in ways that dangerously dismiss the broader, structural realities that contribute strongly to determining a photograph’s content and rhetorical impact.

As I said, these arguments are important, particularly for challenging any simple approach to photovoice or photographic practices in general. This does not mean, however, that a realist mode can or should be entirely dismissed. As John Roberts (1998) argues in The Art of Interruption, realism is too quickly and easily aligned with the tenets of positivism – an epistemology far more worthy of criticism. As he suggests, photographic positivism in the discourses of state administration or scientific empiricism exists alongside other subordinated or counterhegemonic photographic practices. These latter practices cannot be entirely ignored and, indeed, must be recuperated. In such practices, Roberts suggests, photographs are less important than photographies: processes and their relationality, in other words, come to supplant a fetishization of singular products and their presumed objectivity. In this sense photographs, he argues, are a form of practical knowledge: not simply inscriptions of, but reversible interventions in, the world and, specifically, a socially divided world.

What I’m trying to suggest, very briefly, is that photovoice images and practices are a subset of photography, and thus are inseparable from the concerns about photographic realism I’ve raised here. Like any photography, photovoice’s practices and images may veer alternately between an essential positivism or a critical – even radical – realism. That said, to veer towards the positivist side takes a concerted effort with photovoice. Presumably, the method is taken up because it is an inherently political media practice. After all, researchers or community animators are well aware that photovoice images are constructed and organized by research participants themselves, and that the processes seek to explicitly depict and give voice to non-dominant concerns. Taken as interventions in Roberts’ sense, photovoice photographs are not simply visuals but visions: not simply objects for analysis, but catalysts for change. This status of “intervention” is important, and something I’ll return to shortly when I consider ways to strengthen the ethics underlying photovoice practices.

So far, the challenge I’m presenting to understandings of photography are similar to those I’ll raise regarding voice theory. The challenge, to be clear, is to move beyond normalized assumptions with respect to either term in the compounded word; specifically, both suggest a kind of transparency of intent and representation. On the one hand, photovoice images are not merely objective images, not simply documents that research participants make to depict their world from their perspective. On the other hand, neither does the concept of voice suggest these images are fully conscious and explicit articulations of that vision. This dual ideal of photovoice is simply not a reality.

Like photography, voice is bound by power relations: between researchers and community members; between and amongst distinct community members, and the groups of which they are a part; between those authorized to speak and those spoken on behalf of. As such, the voice of photovoice is not merely transmitted through photos, or indirectly via any other means like captions or subsequent dialogue about product or process. Voice is far more complex; indeed, as Madeleine Arnot and Diane Reay (2007) suggest in another but related context, voice is composed of a number of distinct elements. Although Arnot and Reay, following upon the work of Basil Bernstein in the sociology of education, are talking specifically about pedagogic voice, what they say about the use of different registers or codes in communication within particular settings is important. Arnot and Reay’s research into the involvement of students in school and educational reform suggests that student voice as conceived and deployed by reformers or school administration it is quite different from the fuller range of student voice that actually exists. If we draw a comparison between their assertions and our present concerns, voice evoked by participant-generated camera practices is never equivalent with a researcher’s understanding of that voice. Indeed, if researchers assume photovoice images to achieve such equivocality – to be, in other words, transparent documents of life and experience – there are several risks. Two notable ones: first, an inadequate interpretation of what photovoice texts and performances signify; and second, a dangerous alignment of project goals with participant aims, and all the problems inherent in outsiders claiming they are adequately representing insiders.

To bring this discussion down to earth, we might ask what photovoice participants’ interests are in participating in these kinds of projects. Are they interested in asserting their individual and collective vision of a community in order to strengthen and change it; or do they just want to make pretty pictures? How do we know? Are participants committed to actualizing political and socioeconomic autonomy in their communities; or do they simply aspire to a career in media? Again, what steps have we taken to assess such concerns? Do photovoice projects – and their lead researchers, by extension – adequately consider these concerns; or minimize them in order to underscore concrete change in the context of projects of limited duration supported by short-term funding? These and other questions are meant to highlight the range of voices – both researchers and participants – involved in any participatory project.

Perhaps it may seem I am making the really rich and successful history of actual photovoice practices seem poorly conceived and broadly ineffectual; this is not my intent. I am simply trying to bring a critical light to the idea of voice that is explicitly included in the technique. Invocations of the term photovoice purposely raise the contradiction in its very name. As such, photovoice paradoxically demands visual representation of a politicized verbal action, photo–voice, and it implicitly demands a grappling with this contradiction at every stage of every photovoice process. This is a challenging but rewarding struggle.

To return to the ethical focus with which I began this paper, this paradox also signals a pedagogical intent implicit in the method. For if photovoice is to be differentiated from other visual practices – visual ethnography, social documentary, photojournalism, home-mode image-making, and so on – it is in the desire to show someone how to know for oneself what one is seeing. Photovoice is founded upon this desire to intervene; to not merely to stand by. A researcher’s aims with photovoice are, at their root, a cultivation of a distinct sensibility with regard to the ways in which her participant/collaborators communicate. Recalling Keniston’s claim that morals are tacitly acquired while ethics must be consciously articulated from a prevailing moral order, the pedagogy contained in photovoice is meant to lead participants toward their own ethical self-development. Whatever else it might contain, contributions from photovoice to this self-development might include the realization that one’s actions upon their world are interventions into that world; that one’s voice has depth one might have never otherwise had the chance to explicitly realize; and that while one’s visions are unique, there are elements common to others that can be shared and collectively acted upon.

Of course, whether photovoice projects are put to such ethically idealized ends is another matter. Further, I have no doubt that what I am putting forth here entails unresolved and even unacknowledged contradictions. Photovoice is, at root, utopian: to avoid the pejorative, unachievable sense of the term and turn to a more materially grounded and actualizable vision for social change, I have tried to argue that photovoice must continually embrace the contradications inscribed in its very name. Doing this is not simply a matter of researchers acting ethically, but of participants engaging in such a process – including the process of thinking and acting ethically. Turning to photovoice’s various predecessors and contemporaries is crucial: community photography, community cultural development, alternative media, popular education, and so on, all feature key strategies for moving beyond a participant-generated approach to research planning, data generation, and analysis and towards more truly collaborative methods. While this shift might complicate research, and while power differentials may remain, I don’t see how such complexity would in any way diminish the experience of the research process for those involved, nor weaken the political impact of the collaborative research intervention; indeed, just the opposite.

Thank you.

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Works Cited

Arnot, Madeleine, and Diane Reay. 2007. “A Sociology of Pedagogic Voice: Power, inequality and pupil consultation.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28, no. 3 (September): 311-325.

Barndt, Deborah. 1991. To Change This House: Popular Education Under the Sandinistas. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Braden, Su. 1983. Committing Photography. London: Pluto Press.

Chalfen, Richard. 1987. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Goldbard, Arlene. 2006. New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development. Oakland: New Village Press.

Howley, Kevin. 2005. Community Media: People, Places, and Communication Technologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Howley, Kevin, ed. 2010. Understanding Community Media. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Kane, Liam. 2001. Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America. London: Latin America Bureau.

Keniston, Kenneth. 1965. “Morals and Ethics.” The American Scholar 34, no. 4: 628-632.

Naidus, Beverly. 2009. Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame. Oakland: New Village Press.

Roberts, John. 1998. The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Wang, Caroline, and Mary Ann Burris. 1997. “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment.” Health Education & Behavior 24, no. 3 (June): 369-387.

Wang, Caroline, Mary Ann Burris, and Xiang Yue Ping. 1996. “Chinese Village Women as Visual Anthropologists: A Participatory Approach to Reaching Policymakers.” Social Science & Medicine 42, no. 10: 1391-1400.

Wang, Caroline, Susan Morrel-Samuels, Peter M. Hutchison, Lee Bell, and Robert M. Pestronk. 2004. “Flint Photovoice: Community Building Among Youths, Adults, and Policymakers.” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 6: 911-913.

Wang, Caroline, and Yanique A Redwood-Jones. 2001. “Photovoice Ethics: Perspectives From Flint Photovoice.” Health Education & Behavior 28, no. 5: 560-572.