Working with Pictures: Starting Points

There are lots of ways you can work with pictures in research.

• Instead of talking about something you could ask someone to draw something. You could ask the people you are working with to draw something and then talk about it (see Patricia's Art).

• You can take photographs. You can give 'throw-away' cameras to people to take photographs. If you use a digital camera you can see your pictures straight away.

• You can draw diagrams or 'mindmaps'. Or you could ask the people you are working with to do the same. Some people call this 'concept mapping'. You can then talk about the 'mindmap' which will remind you of all the different things you want to say.

Mind-map from: www.mind-mapping.co.uk

We want to talk in a bit more detail about photography now. Some of the things we say may be useful to other sorts of pictures as well.

When we look at photographs it is possible to think that we are seeing 'the truth'. 'The camera never lies' is a famous saying you might have heard. BUT it is also quite easy for a photograph to 'lie', for example, think about the following problems:

• What is missing from the photograph which is just outside the frame? If it was in the frame would the picture mean something different?

Two photographs of the same plant

• What happens just after the photograph has been taken? Is the person who is smiling in the photograph now looking very sad? Did the person smile for the camera and has this made us think she is happy? In fact she might be feeling quite sad.

• When we look at a photograph we cannot usually see the person who has taken that photograph. They might have said or done something that affected what we see in the photograph but we don't even know who they are.

These questions are about 'truth' in photography. This means we have to think carefully about the possible meanings of a photograph and we have to think about it in context . This means we have to take into account all sorts of other things that could help us understand what is going on.

Sometimes, of course, photographs do tell us a 'truth' in a way that words cannot. For example, we cannot be sure that someone is telling the truth when they say "I shook hands with the Queen yesterday". But if we had a photograph of them shaking hands with the Queen we would be more sure! Of course, nowadays, you can 'manipulate' or change photographs to make things look like they happened when they did not. In this case, however, we are not talking about changing a photograph in that way.

It may be helpful to consider some of the ways in which photographs are used in research. This is a short description of some of those methods.

• Photographs can be used for descriptive purposes in qualitative research. This type of 'ethnographic photography' is often linked up with words and other forms of qualitative data.
• Photographs can be used to encourage people to talk (a process sometimes called "photo elicitation"). You can ask people to bring photos with them to talk about. Or you can show them photographs of yours and ask them to talk about what they see. With this method, the photograph is much less important than the talking.
• Research participants can be invited to participate in 'PhotoVoice' work. This involves giving cameras to those groups and individuals whose views are sometimes left out of research (such as children, or adults with learning disabilities) as a way of expressing their views or 'voices'. The resulting photographs are often combined with the photographers' words to form a display of both pictures and words. See Photovoice video and transcript for some examples of this sort of work.