PhotoVoice video and interview with Richard Woolrych

CONTEXT
Richard Woolrych qualified as a Psychiatric Social Worker. While doing neighbourhood work in Salford, he helped to set up a community darkroom and photography became an important part of his community development work.

Richard subsequently worked in services for people with learning difficulties and more recently has developed PhotoVoice in his work with ACT Advocacy. He has pioneered the use of PhotoVoice in helping people to have a greater say about their lives and services. Photographs are used to build communication and understanding about rights and choices. The Voices Newsletter enables Camphill residents to keep in touch and share their stories and concerns visually:

‘Speaking with pictures makes it easier for everyone to understand.’

You can see this newsletter at: http://www.savecamphill.org.uk/photo_voice.htm

Richard has worked with PhotoVoice.org in helping homeless people in London to take and exhibit their photographs.

Since 1998, as a consultant and independent practitioner, he has undertaken project work with a number of organisations and is interested in linking with others using audio visual approaches to empowerment.

In the following interview Richard discusses the PhotoVoice methodology and how he has used it in supporting people to 'have their say'. Each "segment" of the interview contains a link to a subtitled video of the discussion (RealPlayer is needed to view these).

A description of PhotoVoice - how Richard got involved, why he values it. [View video on a description of Photovoice]

IAN: Names, right ok. (laughing) My problem will be remembering anything, I think at this point. So we're with Richard Woolrych on July 5th 2005 and talking about "PhotoVoice" and some of Richard's work. I wanted to ask to start it off with a more general question about PhotoVoice: for you what's the essence of the PhotoVoice methodology?

RICHARD: It's helping people capture their lives and their dreams, aspirations in pictures and their own narrative and seeing the world as they see it. It's a way of influencing so it's particularly useful for people who are marginalized, socially marginalized in any way.and dealing with power differentials.

IAN: Great. Could you describe how you got into using PhotoVoice?

RICHARD: I was involved in Community Darkroom in the 1970's where we actually got a room in a house equipped as a darkroom and donated cameras and a photographer came along and taught us how to use all the equipment and we used that on a really run-down estate in Salford and then twenty years later I was sort of involved in different kinds of work with people with learning difficulties. I started using cameras again as a way of helping people to say what they've thought about services.

IAN: Hmmm.

RICHARD: I'd done some tape-recording and sort of worked out how to be involved as co-participants in research doing tape-recording and then I was amazed by how keen people were to actually portray themselves and their friends with pictures and how much more instructive the pictures were than the verbal interviews and the questionnaires. I didn't know it was called PhotoVoice at that stage, I just kind of followed up a few leads and found out about it through a colleague who was doing some work in Guatemala with survivors of torture and trauma and then through the webpage to how it was being used in community work and applied it to my work with people with learning difficulties.

A discussion of how PhotoVoice might be used in partnership research and some challenges involved in using the methodology. [View video on how Photovoice might be used]

IAN: How much is PhotoVoice about working in partnership for you? Or, I could ask, in your experiences what sort of partnerships have evolved from engaging in PhotoVoice projects?

RICHARD: The work I’ve been doing more recently with Camphill (find out more about the Camphill advocacy project at the following websites:

• http:// www.capinfo.org/
• http://www.savecamphill.org.uk/photo_voice.htm
• http://www.photovoice.org/html/projectgallery/worldmap/ukandireland/camphilladvoca/

or send an e-mail to: Camphill.advocacy@ntlworld.com)

people have used the photographs as a way of getting together in conferences and workshops where people from different parts of the country compare their lives and talk about what’s happening to them and where they want to go and what they want to see happen and the photographs have been a kind of vehicle for people to get together and start to have this dialogue and for breaking the ice and getting discussions going and latterly for this newsletter which is just about to be in it’s third issue coming out.

IAN: That’s right I’ve seen a few…

RICHARD: And the fourth issue is going to be one where, hopefully, they won’t need me as a go-between, hopefully there will be more people who will directly submit their stories.

IAN: Right. So it’s been working towards that has it?

RICHARD: Yes, yeah. So the danger at the moment is that people assume, they still assume that it is me that is the vehicle for PhotoVoice, what I’m trying to do is make it a more active partnership and say “right, here’s the toolkit, I want you to go away and do it, you don’t need me” but it’s taking longer than I thought to get to that stage (see Emancipatory/Participatory approaches).

Richard discusses how these projects get started. He focusses on his work with Camphill, and his role in this process. [View video on how projects started]

IAN: Initially when you begin to work with people the themes that you explore, are these decided together with you as being a sort of an instigator, an organizer or have you found these evolve and change as you go on with the project?

RICHARD: They evolve and they change. Some of the themes are… the most recent one for instance I was asked to do a bit of work which I will be doing in the Autumn, putting together with a group of people, a pictorial version of complaints, suggestions and compliments so we will meet together to find out how much they understand about the rules and principles that sort of govern their living and working together in this particular community and then try and put it into bare pictures and bare words. And also hopefully through that they can…I mean I’ve said this time I’m only going to do it if there’s someone there who is able to carry on the work so that they don’t then send for me for the next project.

IAN: Right.

RICHARD: So it needs someone from within that setting to take the work forward.

IAN: And is that in terms of both staff and the people who live in these communities, in this case with learning disabilities I guess, is it Camphill?

RICHARD: That’s right, yes, I mean so there will be staff who’ve got to agree to one person being there, the self-advocacy group that’s having its first meeting on Saturday. I will want to make sure that they are tied into this and that they have choice of who is represented so that the people who are learning the skills through doing project work taking photographs and putting it all together can then start to use this on other aspects of communal living. Because, I don’t think it matters in a sense where you start, I mean we’re starting with the complaints procedure because that’s where social services feels that there is a lack of understanding say, so I’m demonstrating that people do understand it if there’s a pictorial version available for people who can’t read and write. I’ll be very interested while we’re making this, picking up what other ideas people have for taking pictures because its only when people start having cameras and talking about the pictures that they take you suddenly start to think “well, why are we working on this particular theme?” and I expect, when there’s something else that’s much more vibrant and important for them in their lives.

IAN: Have you found some other projects or people that you’ve been involved with have sort of taken this and run with it without needing you to return necessarily to push them along?

RICHARD: There was one really exciting one. I’ve been doing a bit of work in Harrow and this is about helping people to look at housing options. What are the housing options? Do you want to move from your family or move from residential care into a place of your own and get in touch with housing? The council put together a day which was attended by about sixty people including service user groups, hostel residents and parents and staff and this group of people who are in a service provider organization PENTAHACT. Actually, I think they only took a week doing it. They put together the most brilliant presentation of tenants talking about their lives and presenting this to the conference. I was just gobsmacked, it was just wonderful so it just shows what’s possible. I gave the council the idea that I would just be there as a facilitator and that it would be the three people that I’ve been working with that would do the presentation and so got the computer setup and the projector and the idea. And that will change the way, I hope, that they have future conferences and work with people and set up a strong group that’s advocating for direct payments for housing and social, you know, this is the people there, the people with learning difficulties, that were saying we want social services and housing to work together. If I come in as a consultant which I have, you know, to sort of say in the sort of steering group “housing and social services need to work together” the message just wasn’t getting through, but because they were at a conference that was led by service users who were actually saying “I want a housing options plan” they’re not really interested whether it was filled-in by a social worker or housing worker or a support worker in the provider service, they just want to make sure that people work together to help them to get what they want.

Richard discusses the PhotoVoice technique and some of his developments of this technique. [View video on Photovoice technique]

IAN: All of this leads sort of into my next question because we’re talking about using people’s voice and I know that you’ve been innovating some of your work in the sense of trying to link in snippets of recorded voice to photographs and I was wondering if you could maybe discuss what led up to that innovation and/or have you been sort of working on other innovations of the kind of the PhotoVoice technique as it were.

RICHARD: The main thing that I’ve been doing is using digital cameras because you get instant feedback, you don’t get the same quality of inkjet that they’ve had on the major PhotoVoice exhibition work but you get a piece of work that can be built upon and you can work with quite rapidly. The voice bit is I think more than a gimmick because it enables the same presentation to be seen by different people and it can be shown without the person who’s made the pictures, you know, providing they’re in agreement with the editing that’s gone on and ideally have been part of the editing. I’m now sort of trying to say that, you know, there’s no point in getting me for two days you need to get me for at least four days because if the people who make the…take the pictures are going to be fully involved in doing the voices then that needs to be spread over quite a period of time because people get tired and they need to concentrate quite hard on interview and getting the words for the pictures right. So, I think the use of people’s actual voices gives a sense of immediacy and it communicates to a far bigger audience and I have seen this done at the ICT conference that Home Farm Trust and Keele University have organized and this last year someone was doing her family history as well as her life history and went right back to the 17th century.

IAN: Right.

RICHARD: Someone had helped her to trace a Dutch connection and there were pictures of Queens and all sorts of artefacts that visually linked her to the past, parts of her family. And this is a person with Down’s syndrome who is living in a supported housing service in the Wirral who was talking to a conference of 140 people.

IAN: Fantastic.

RICHARD: Yeah…There is so much excitement and thrill about people hearing their own voices while they see their own pictures. I think its much more than a gimmick and I think what we need to do is share ideas about the equipment and this is what I want to do when I’m doing the toolkit is do some research into what are the easiest forms of recording voices because you can do it directly into a laptop with a microphone and you can use a very tiny little digital recorder but both of those methods have got limitations. There is some stuff happening at the University of East London, they’ve got a big tree project in the Rix Centre. They are doing an online easy access website where people take stories and one of the people who came with me from Camphill, his story is in their first issue. So, that’s kind of in its infancy but they are starting from the premise “what do you want this website to do for you?” So, an easy access website, a portal and if people can be linked…I mean if self-advocacy groups can be linked in this way there will be so much more accessible information, material and people will be encouraged and start to have more confidence to share stories and that has so much more impact on the services.

Richard discusses the difference between PhotoVoice work and using video as well as some of the ethical issues of media representation. [View video on differences and ethical issues]

IAN: There are relationships maybe between PhotoVoice, participatory photography and other types of image-based participatory approaches like video diaries and things like that. Do you see these things as being very, y’know, similar, parts on the same sort of continuum or is PhotoVoice in itself with individual still images particularly appropriate in certain situations where video diaries aren’t?

RICHARD: I think the…I haven’t used video diaries. I think the discipline that goes with trying to reduce things into pages and combine the words and your text on the page and have a voice which will relate to maybe four images or whatever fits neatly into one page, is one that is much easier format than film and it’s a format that people can be in much more control of erm..I think there is an argument, certainly if you use film in a participatory way, for saying it is a continuum…My doubts about film are is the whole editing process is so, takes so much time and effort and it is much harder for people to be involved in a participatory way in the editing.

Richard discusses more about how PhotoVoice work is done and how the stories behind the images are ‘captured’. [View video on stories behind the images]

IAN: As this process of photography and storying is more than just photographs without text or just on their own, how do you negotiate or capture the stories in text that accompany the photographs? I remember that you spoke a bit about writing things down on a flipchart.

RICHARD: There’s writing things down on the flipchart, sometimes doing it in the group afterwards, trying to work out the captions in a group, that’s another way of doing it and the third way is trying to get someone else to do the caption work, y’know the work so that sending the photographs back to a group and saying “right here’s the photographs you took, 400 of them” or whatever, “I want you to tell a story” because the time that that involves and the travel can be huge as well. So, different ways of doing it, I’m not sure I’d say one way was best, I mean, I guess the peer model is that you would do it over a fairly long period of time using the same group of people, regular sessions, lots of storyboards, lots of space to sort the prints out. You can do it so much more quickly using the digital format rather than printing up the images and the storyboards. So I’m just interested to know what other ways people are doing and I think that potentially its going to be to do this over the web and once there are some accessible websites, that are easy enough for people like myself to use, uploading photographs onto the web and then viewing them takes out a whole extra dimension. Y’know you can start doing the work online in different places (I - yeah, sure) so you’re putting together a composite picture of what your experience or what my experience was as a facilitator and what participants experience without necessarily having to meet because the travel, the time is quite significant.

IAN: Sure, although I can imagine, I mean it’d be pretty amazing to be able to have that facility where you could do something like that online but there must be something about being, if its possible, being actually with people there in the same space working with photographs together as well that….

RICHARD: Yes, I think the being in the same space is important and that erm...I have worked with a group as large as 6 people and that is quite a strain – for them as well as me. So 2 groups of 3 work much better because people can then go off and take their own pictures. Organisations tend to try and think of the maximum number of people and y’know, the old sort of 1 instructor to 10 or 1:12 comes out and its not going to work y’know you can’t do that stuff, letting people focus on what’s important to them if you’re doing it as a group instruction exercise, so the smaller the number of people and the greater the number of facilitators the better really. But, risk taking can also affect how you work and I worked with an organisation recently where we had to be all together in one group because they weren’t insured for me to work alongside 2 people who might want to go one place and they could only spare one member of staff as a kind of facilitator so we all have to go to the different places so the amount of stuff we could was limited. It would have been much better if we’d been able to go to 2 or 3 different places at the same time and then come back together as a group.

IAN: But those kinds of things sometimes…the ideal situations are just not, just not there I guess when doing this kind of work and being adaptable….I mean it strikes me as being a very adaptable, a potentially adaptable approach really because you change things to fit the needs of people as you go in ways that maybe some other approaches might not be quite as flexible. I don’t know, have you found that to be the case?

RICHARD: I think the…I think its trusting people to have the equipment to… the problem is I’ve got my own cameras and unless I’m in that place – it’s not easy to post them to me y’know so. It’s easy with disposable cameras to do that, leave people with the cameras but your return rates not very good unless there is someone there who is actually prompting them personally to take pictures and supporting them. I’m not sure what the answer is and organisations once they buy cameras tend to make it quite difficult for people to borrow them so they don’t get used as much as they should. I’ve only ever had one camera stolen, there was nothing I could have done really to have stopped that happening, but that was kind of a risk I took working at a homeless Christmas event and there were lots and lots of people around. But cameras where y’know they have been bought by organisations, I know they don’t get used or people forget they’re there or forget how to use them unless they’re used a lot they don’t, people forget the skills. (I – mmm, definitely a problem) So visual language needs to be learned and then maintained because the cameras can be used in all sorts of ways, its not just on PhotoVoice, pictorial representation of what someone’s achieved for an annual review meeting - much more powerful statement for social services than the report that’s written by a member of staff.

Richard discusses the role of facilitation in doing PhotoVoice work. [View video on facilitation of Photovoice]

IAN: I will fill them all after ‘cause I don’t have any other tapes with me for anything else. (laughs) ‘cause I don’t want to misplace them, indeed.
Sometimes with PhotoVoice some of the rhetoric leaves out the kind of importance of even the existence of facilitation, almost as if PhotoVoice projects speak for themselves, which isn’t to say that PhotoVoice work or something like that, might not sort of speak for itself, in a way. Clearly there seems to be an importance and a role, this facilitation is quite important. I’m wondering if when you engage in this facilitation for a PhotoVoice project, how much do you focus on this that…?

RICHARD: I think PhotoVoice, actually you’ve made me think about something, a connection that’s there with the type of facilitation I do. The type of facilitation I do is actually when I’m with any group of people is to stick with what people directly observe and experience before they go into interpretation and discussion. So, the fact that you’re dealing with something tangible like an image or picture, although sometimes images can be quite indirect, to be looked at on different levels, is really important because that’s keeping the attention focussed onto what is directly observable. The danger with facilitation in group discussion and dialogue is that people go into interpretation and discussion without having listened to each other about what they have actually directly experienced and heard the accounts of what has happened, directly observable events. So, the fact that you start with the photographs and then go on to the account about the photographs or the story and then have the dialogue and the discussion really means that you’re working in a very disciplined way and in the sort of technology of participation which is a particular sort of type of facilitation that I learned with the Institute of Cultural Affairs. You start off, they have the acronym ORID, you start off with observation, you then move into reflection about how you felt about what has happened to you and what you are observing. You then, only when you’ve done that, then move onto the third stage which is interpretation and the final stage is discussion, what are you going to do about it? What’s your action plan going to be? So until you’ve done the first 3 stages you don’t actually move onto the 4th one. So, working with photographs and people’s own words actually imposes that discipline on you before you start trying to seek the solution. A lot of the times working with organisations, the discussion breaks up because people are seeking solutions without actually having checked out whether their experience ties in with other people’s experience. So it’s spending time with the experiential and the visual and the concrete then helps you to move into “well, what can we do about it?” “How can we move towards solutions?” That, I think is really important.

IAN: Have you done PhotoVoice work with people who don’t communicate traditionally, don’t speak or sign? If so, I was wondering if you could describe how you worked in these situations and this sort of leads onto a question that’s more…needs to be applied to many types of situations, not just with people who don’t speak or sign which is: How do you negotiate or facilitate in a situation where someone is at least seemingly unable or unwilling to articulate about their photographs? What happens to their photos if this situation arises and how much do your interpretations come into or influence this sort of production?

RICHARD: I’ve only touched on this and I’ve worked with people who for whom Spanish is their language and Spanish is a language I don’t know but where someone doesn’t have verbal communication skills, I will show them the camera and the picture on it and see what level of recognition I get y’know and move the camera and they see this little picture on the back of it changing. If they want to come closer to that then I will hold the camera and if they’re comfortable with me being close to them in their personal space, close to them and show them what happens when you press the button and the image freezes. The next stage would be to say, “do you want to put your finger where mine is and press the button yourself” and “what does it feel like having your hands maybe under my hands holding the camera?” Y’know so 2 people can hold the same camera. The question is, if I press the shutter button, for someone who’s got cerebral palsy and can’t do this without shaking the camera too much is it their picture or is it mine? And I don’t know the answer to that question. I mean there are all sorts of debates going on in terms of facilitated communication for people who are not able to have verbal y’know, manage verbal communication that other people understand the signs and cues of what they’re saying and there are lots of examples of this in institutions where staff cannot understand a particular person but a fellow patient or inmate or resident can do. So how much do you rely on what this other person is telling you about what the person who is unable to directly communicate in the way that you understand is saying, thinking and feeling? I think you can check it out by seeing how the person reacts to the images that have been produced and I have managed to group images in 2 different sets that have been taken by a person of 2 different settings, facilitated to take photographs by his father and he looked at these 2 different places, one was a residential care home in London, another was a place in Aberdeen and it was quite clear on a number of different levels that he preferred the place in Aberdeen even though social services wanted him to live in the place in London. Now, he couldn’t have said that, he can’t communicate in a way verbally that I understand but while he was looking at those photographs, his father took photographs of me and Erol looking at the photographs and you could see clearly from the photographs the father took that he was happy with the ones of Aberdeen, he was extremely unhappy with the ones of where social services wanted him to live with in London and that was good enough for social services. It might have been fairly crude but that was good enough and I think your level of understanding of other people is so flawed in many ways that what we have to aim at is not something that’s totally convincing but is good enough.

Richard discusses issues of ethics and consent, doing the work and what happens to the work when PhotoVoice projects are complete. [View video on ethics and consent]

IAN: Are there particular issues involving ethics and consent in PhotoVoice work and if so could you say a bit about what they are?

RICHARD: The biggest one about ethics is getting over to people the idea of respect. So, not taking photographs which show disrespect for another human being. So, I always start off having a group discussion with people. We play around with cameras and I then say "well, you've taken a picture of me" all right, or "I've taken a picture of the room or whatever but whose going to have a look at this? Who's going to decide whether this is a picture that you would want other people to see?" So we kind of have a discussion and then I say "do you want to go ahead and take some more pictures? If you do then before we keep them, you know, I'm going to plug them into the computer so that people can see them bigger but before I do that I need to know if its ok for me to do that?" So that's when we get out the consent forms and I get people to write on their names on the consent form or if they can't write their names someone else, not me, will write their name on the consent form to actually show that they are freely agreeing for their images to be shown for whatever the purpose of the PhotoVoice project is and that they will not. the other thing I ask them not to do is not to take photographs of people who do not want to have their photograph taken. The third thing I sort of try and instill in everyone is "don't be afraid to take pictures! Just take as many pictures as you feel like. That's the beauty of the digital camera because we will look at the pictures afterwards and will get rid of any that are embarrassing or that you don't want other people to see" and try and throw out of the window this notion that there is a right way to take a photograph because people always start off by being quite bossy, getting people to move so that they are front of the camera and they stand stiff and so on and that's not the way to do it. There's two rules - one is you don't put your hand in front of lens, unless you want a picture of your finger, the other one is that you try and get people to be as natural as possible while they're taking the pictures. So they just hold up a thing saying "consent" and take photographs of each other. I also sign a consent form myself so it's a kind of equal process, we're all doing it, we're all doing it together.

IAN: And then if. because I mean, one might consider issues of consent or the whole notion of consent as being perhaps something that evolves as well because I guess I'm aware that when I start certain projects I'm not always quite sure what might be the outcomes, who might see these things and how they might see these things. In the beginning of the project as much as you can try to sort of pre-figure what these things might be, you know, you run into things particularly with web use and stuff where projects and people's images might be available more widely and beyond the scope of their understanding, at least initially about how their photographs would be used. How do you approach these types of issues?

RICHARD: Well with the housing options project for instance I said that these photographs could be used in ways which would help the people involved in getting better housing options and explained to people they might be used by Housing Options as part of the Housing Options website as a sort of demonstration of what could be done. So I can't remember the exact wording of it. Giving housing options, saying that this organisation called Housing Options could use the pictures providing they would be used in a way which would facilitate them to get better housing in Harrow . Erm, it doesn't give other people the right to use those photographs without the permission of Housing Options. So, again with the Camphill photographs. I say to people they can be used for the copyrighted "Voices" newsletter they can't be used outside Camphill without that person's permission.

IAN: Are there cases where you think it is particularly important that there is an ownership attributed to particular photographs in that sense?

RICHARD: No. I think the important.if someone thinks they've taken a photograph and they've got a comment that goes with that picture. It doesn't matter whether they actually took that picture because you could have three different.I mean I have five cameras, I don't know which camera each persons having. At one stage I did try to number each camera, do all that sort of stuff but people are sharing cameras and then giving them to other people to take pictures. You can't control who takes a picture of what. You find at the end of the day that there are some pictures. and I take pictures during a photo shoot I forget which ones I've taken. I don't want this, you know, to be attributed to the photographer. Erm, its the organisation that's sponsoring it really that has, I guess, the copyright and I would only work with an organization that was going to work in an ethical way and not use the photographs.Because photographs could have a commercial value if they got into a library.

IAN: That's right, I see what you mean.

RICHARD: And I would not want to work with any organization that was not going to guarantee that they would just be kept for the purpose they were taken for. I mean OK the organisation may well decide its very useful to use some of the pictures in the Annual Review or a report, that's usually something that people would be very happy to have their picture shown there. I try to take as many pictures as I can of people taking the pictures so I've just got a record of the process.

Richard discusses the ethical issues such as respect and what the photographs depict. [View video on ethical issues such as respect]

RICHARD: That's right, yes. I mean photographs of incredible beauty! which without the script you would not know they were photographs taken by homeless young people of other homeless young people. Erm, so...the impact their photographs have on other people.I'm more worried by what professional journalists and film-makers take photographs of than I am about what people involved in PhotoVoice take photographs of. There are certain photographs which I will say to them, "I think that one should be deleted", I don't always wait for people to decide themselves if they are showing someone in a way that doesn't show proper respect. I mean I sometimes find that staff members are very vain, you know, and say "Oh, I don't want this one shown to anyone because it doesn't show me at my best". I say well, "sorry, that's not what the things about"

IAN: Right, yes. (laughter) How do you sort of distinguish that line between sort of where respect is and what crosses the line into being disrespectful?

RICHARD: Well, if someone's eyes are closed for instance I say "do you really want anyone to see that picture of you?" Or, y'know, "you've accidentally caught someone so they look like they're grimacing" or.so those ones I would try and get people to raise awareness. I mean there was one person who said she did not want to have her photograph taken and then we came to be looking at the results and someone had taken a photograph and she hadn't noticed it and partly that was because she didn't like having the flash and they had taken this when the flash wasn't activated on that camera but when she looked at the photographs she said "No, no, I don't want it, I don't want it!" but the other people in the group said "it's a really nice picture of you!" and she actually started to look at herself in a more positive way because she gave informed consent that that picture could be retained because she was listening, not to me but to the other people in the house she was living in saying "you look good, that is a nice representation of you, why do want to have this picture taken away?" That left me wondering about, what are all these issues of low self-esteem that she doesn't want to have a picture taken? Issues apart, stuff that we didn't actually address but it was kind of interesting that she did change her mind about having the photo retained. It did pick up some of the positive things that people were saying about her.

IAN: So, the importance of discussing these things?

RICHARD: Sure, yes.