‘Organisational Space’ - Turner Sims Auditorium, 9.00am to 11.00am

Diane Taylor, Alan Radley

Telling Pictures: Snapshot Photography in the Hospital Environment

This paper is based upon a study in which patients took photographs during their time on a hospital ward, using them as the basis for two interviews, one in hospital and one later when the patient had returned home. It argues that by taking part in the project, identifying places and objects that had particular associations for them, and then photographing them, individual patients effectively turned on the hospital environment and re-presented their individuated experience of being a patient.

This study reflects recent interest in using personal photography in the social sciences primarily as an elicitation tool – another way of telling.  However a central issue raised by this collaborative and inter-disciplinary study is the disparity between the semantic richness of patients’ photographs in the discursive context and their banality in terms of photographic aesthetics, a cultural analysis that is largely ignored in other studies. However in this paper we are not making the case for a critical aesthetic appraisal but to examine a different rhetorical order associated with this very particular personal snapshot photography set in a hospital environment.

So this paper draws together and analyses the visual and discursive ‘evidence’ which, it argues takes us to the boundaries of personal snapshot photography in terms of its capacity to image. At those boundaries of discourse and photography (where things cannot be said and images cannot be made) seems to be a place where objects and subject exist in a state of equilibrium. It shows how that convergence might produce for social psychology a new object of knowledge that is given its shape as a transient memory through the agency of photography.

(Samples of photographs from the project can be viewed on the C-SAP funded website, 'Visualising Ethnography', edited by Sarah Pink, Chair of the Visual Anthropology Network. website at:

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/visualising_ethnography/

Stefan Guschker

Closer to Heaven: A Visual Approach to Soaring as a Secularised Religion

For most of the 100.000 glider pilots worldwide, soaring is more than a simple hobby: it is their way of life. Soaring is not only based on technical developments but also on myths around (the idea of) heaven.

Prophets, pioneers and passionate innovators have sacrificed their time, social integrity and very often also their lives in order to make a special human desire concrete and practicable. A few enthusiastic followers helped to spread the idea and created a set of modern myths: the superiority over natural and physical restrictions, the comradeship between pilots, heroism, the search for freedom.

Traces of this genesis can be observed every weekend when soaring is practised as a sport and leisure activity. The classical myths have been secularised and are now shared and lived in a popular way in the form of norms, values and rules of interaction and communication.  The acceptance of these rules is a prerequisite for the participation in this community.

However, a closer look also reveals religious and epistemological aspects of flying. Besides the technical education (learn how to fly), transcendental orientations are internalised. Flying therefore has two aspects: to get up into the sky as high as possible and to be closer to heaven. This orientation also serves as a form of social distinction in everyday life and can be regarded as a form of popular religion. Therefore, glider pilots represent an extraordinary community which shows similarities to religious groups.

The whole span of flying activities, on-ground rituals, shared values, distinctive symbols, myths and mental processes can be explored with the methods of visual sociology in combination with qualitative research methods. The presentation is based on more than 15 years of participant observation (the presenter holds a pilot licence and has been member of several flying clubs in Germany, Brazil, and Australia ), visual documentation on the ground and in the air, photo-elicitation interviews on the ground and interviews in the air while flying in a double seater gliding plane.

After a short explication of the genesis of flying, the presentation will focus on the recreation of myths, the contemporary confession of glider pilots, their forms of rationality, the social structure of flying clubs, the value of hierarchical positions in this social system, the forms of discipline and socialisation, the symbolisation of rites de passage, and the weekend-rituals of self-celebration.

It is demonstrated that the contemporary set of rules and normative frames level all personal characteristics and facilitate the creation of a homogeneous community. The obligation of pragmatic rules and communication patterns are similar to religious commandments. Individuality is suppressed by the idea of the community. Using the technique is not the most important motivation for flying. It is the longing for the unreachable, the longing for being closer to heaven.

Julie Charlesworth

Cinematic Representations of the Individual at Work

This paper focuses on representations of organisations and work in film and how film-makers portray the impact of wider social processes on individuals’ lives.  In particular, we focus on shifts in the psychological contract from a relational basis to a transactional one.  Discussions concentrates on three key areas; the relationship between the individual worker and the organisation, connection between work and community, and work and family life.  We draw on a range of British and American films (both historical and more recent) in order to illustrate how themes such as power relations, powerlessness, alienation, commitment, embeddedness and the psychological contract are portrayed cinematically.

Susan Halford

The Iraqi Refugee, Industrial Heritage and Modern Art: Spatial Meanings, Spacial Practices and Personal Identities in Contemporary Office Life

The relationship between workplace organization and space is well established. Existing studies emphasise the ways that space is ordered by employers as a means of imposing segregation, hierarchy and control. Whilst there is some evidence of workers resisting these spatial constraints, the significance of organizational space remains couched largely in terms of work-tasks, bureaucracy and production. This paper shows that organizational space is invested with far broader meanings than this, being commonly connected to articulations of individual and personal identities. The paper begins to unravel the complex meanings invoked through the spatiality of office life using material from a new empirical study of the spatial meanings and practices of staff working in a high-tech speciality for a large insurance company based in a converted carpet mill in the North of England. In describing these spatial meanings and practices the paper explores the links between the local, personal and micro spaces of office life and broader referents of identity in time and space: including history and memory, rooted-ness and mobility. The paper makes use of historical and contemporary visual representations to illustrate and elaborate these points.

Alan Latham

Researching and Writing Everyday Accounts of the City

‘Globalisation and Migration’ - Turner Sims Green Room, 9.00am to 11.00am

Camilla Elg

Female Migrants in Denmark

Interviewer: [...] What is it like to be a woman in Denmark from your own experience? Magda: ... Well, I don t know, it can be a little hard. I:Yeah? M: It s because Denmark is a very open country, of course, a lot of things are normal that aren't normal in our country, but now, now when we have grown up here, everything seems normal. You know everything that’s normal for the Danes is normal for us too, kind of ... I: What are you thinking of? M: For instance a man, a boy and a girl stand together and kiss in the street, we never see that in our country, it is not something you experience, but here in Denmark it is completely normal. (The name is fictional. Translated from the Danish)

This is an extract from my interview with a 17 year old female immigrant living in Denmark. I have conducted interviews with around 30 women aged 15 to 20 years, most of them with an immigrant background. These interviews form the main part of the empirical data for my Ph. D. project on young female immigrants and style; a project that researches the every day experiences of being a young female immigrant and focuses on the aesthetic aspects of identity formation and on differentiating processes in social space. The extract is just one of many examples showing how visual experiences play a crucial part in the encounter between the settled Danish society and the newcomer and poses the question: how do female immigrants see Danish society? Furthermore in Denmark we have experienced in recent years an intense debate about the way female immigrants dress, more specifically a debate primarily concerning headscarves worn by some female immigrants from various Muslim backgrounds. Thus, the public interest in this group has mainly been a visual interest and the understanding of who female immigrants are is closely linked to how they look. This poses the question: how are they actually seen? A third dimension of the visual experiences of being an immigrant is how they experience being seen? This is a question I seek answers to in my interviews. In general I regard personal style as part of a complex interplay between norms of bodily normality, physical and visual markers of identity and bodily feelings and experiences. Thus, it is, in rough, possible to conceptualise a  visual social space  (even though it can not be separated in any radical sense from other kinds of experienced space). This visual social space can be understood as a  pool of possible visual identification  and it works as a formative  interplay between experiences of seeing, experiences of being seen and normative images or screens one has to mirror in order to be identified and - maybe - ratified. I research how it is felt and experienced to be seen  in  and through these images. The project is inspired by Walther Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss and Pierre Bourdieu, as I have a strong interest in the mimetic faculty as a part of these social processes.

Lori Evans

Women Crossing Borders

I have developed a model of "The Urban Ecosystem", based upon my observations and research.  Parallels are of progressive structural form incorporating geography, ecology, and critical anthropology- to exemplify the environment and external forces/influences present, which thereby determine the level of adaptation necessary for the individual to survive (eg. (forces of) Nature = (forces of) Socioecopolitical Systems). (I will provide this model if seriously considered for presentation.)  I then developed a model to demonstrate the process of ecological (sociocultural) adaptation, based on resource availability within the model of the urban ecosystem, which also portrays a process of empowerment within conflict- either internal or external.  These models were developed following my Master's field study period working with seven key informants, and knowing many others.  As part of my initial research method, I used photo nouvella- resulting in three complete photoprojects (Canada, Sweden, and Portugal) where participating women used disposable cameras (I worked with minimal budget and minimal technology) to symbolically represent their own perceptions of "health risks associated with squatting".  (It is important to mention that cameras are not usually permitted within this squatting community.)  The women then wrote a brief narrative of each photo to share a piece of their stories- in the phenomenological sense.  I would like to present these photoprojects to give life to the two dimensional models of the urban ecosystem and process of adaptation. 

Eirini Papadaki

Personal Souvenirs of Social Moments: A Case Study of Greek Images on Postcards

Postcards are purchased both as souvenirs—objects that authenticate past experiences and speak through nostalgia—and as collection  items—objects that add to the narration of our personal past. They are sent to relatives and friends as charismatic views of the sociality and culture of the visited other.

For a moment, the postcard  moves art /history/geography/society into a single house, under the look of the owner’s eye. The postcard is purchased as a mass -produced view of a given society, produced within the given societal borders. The handwriting of the personal beneath the caption of the social transforms the public into private, the social image into an individual memento. “Then in a gesture, which recapitulates the social’s articulation of the self the postcard is surrendered to a significant other. The other’s reception of the postcard is the receipt, the ticket stub, that validates the experience of the site, which we now can name as the site of the subject himself or herself.”

Do the viewers of these postcards have the adequate knowledge and experience to fully interpret and comprehend the photographer’s intentions for the chosen images? Or do they intentionally buy the most celebrated image of the visited place—the one included in the Barthesian international language of travel—in order to gain the prestige of the intellectual traveller—the Grant-tourist that has visited a place, gazed at the sociality of a significant other and then bought the postcard as a personal souvenir and a trophy from the invaded country?

This paper examines the individual gaze at the social images of the “other”. Following Lacan’s notions of the “missed encounter” and the “trauma”, and through the analysis of a number of Greek postcards, I will attempt to define the restrictions and boundaries of this seemingly harmless quasi-mass medium—namely the postcard.

Elena Pollacchi

The Shaping of New Urban Heroes: Visual Representations of Workers in Contemporary China

Contemporary Chinese urban life is an intriguing field of research over which the impact of the global market, the resistance of Chinese cultural forms and the influence of Western culture are just the main factors of a rapid transformation, which is affecting all spheres of society.

Among the various changes, modes and institutions of Chinese cultural production have been radically modified over the last two decades, while a new industry of entertainment has been strongly developed in the cities since the mid-1990s.

My work focuses on the transformation occurred in the film industry from the end of the 1980s and investigates how the transformation contributed to the emergence of popular icons, specifically male icons, whose popularity can often be extended beyond Chinese film circles, thus shaping new social models.

The ideal setting of contemporary popular icons is undoubtedly the multifaceted urban environment; consequently my work would be more precisely indicated as a discussion on new urban heroes in Chinese film. The paper I wish to present will specifically look at visual representations of workers in the context of contemporary China, thus including not only recent feature films but also documentaries and video works.

My research stems from two different experiences, which are not commonly combined. Primarily, from my direct work experience within the organization of international film festivals, in particular the Venice Intl film festival and Turin Intl film festival, both taking place yearly in Italy, which allowed me to gain an insight into the changes occurred in the participation of Chinese films at international cultural events, but also from my research and academic background in both Chinese studies and film studies. On this basis, I am attempting to read the data that derive from my practice in the film industry and to relate them to the context of the booming of Chinese film industry in the last decade, which will emerge has the crucial element.

Filmmaking is getting closer and intertwined with different aspects of the social and commercial spheres: from TV production to literary activities, from advertisement to video art, and even poetry is involved. On top of this sparkling situation, the roles of key-figures are constantly subverted and can easily shift from one area of cultural activity to another, thus producing a network, specifically an urban network, which is constantly changing its patterns and which I will attempt to discuss by focusing on some crucial nodes, which I identify with the new heroes.

The interesting point is that the network is obviously connected to the global market, but because it leaves out and opens many interstices, it seems also to bear the potential to resist the commodification process, for example by generating new opportunities for filmmaking by the expansion of light technologies (digital video cameras, distribution through the Internet, etc). Thanks to these light technologies complex, multifarious and often contrasting depictions of Chinese urban life are emerging.

Giovanni Attili

Hypermedia for a Transient City: the Esquilino District in Rome

Nowadays cities are crossed by a multitude of irreducible migrants who don’t have sedentary projects. These migrants are just passing through some urban nodal places which can be interpreted as part of moving geographies, variously spread in time and space.

These complex presences call for different analysis tools to be used in order to destabilise the dangerousness of the abstraction “immigration”. In other words, it’s necessary to construct «representational devices» capable of accounting for differences, individual existences and collective memories, rooted and transient relationships, mental mapping, feelings and expectations, local spaces and global networks.

During the study of a significant urban context (Esquilino district in Rome), the use of life histories has been thought as the narrative filigree through which a complex representational hypermedia has been structured. This hypermedia keeps different expressive languages together (texts, films, graphic animation, voices, pictures, street noises, theatrical performances, moving cartographies, …). The co-presence of these languages succeeds in outlining the hybridism of our cities, where the collective practises, the emotional dimensions, the penetration of crossed spaces and lived time needs a plurality of different expressive codes.

This hypermedia can be thought as a tool capable of provoking interaction and sense making, focusing on a complex idea of “aesthetic rationality” in which all senses are involved. This dimension is central for every communication process. To create real communication spaces it’s not enough “to say something”; it’s necessary to transfer energies, awaking aspirations, knowledge and asleep creativity.

‘Education’ - Turner Sims Auditorium, 11.30am to 12.45pm

Stuart Connor

Connoisseurs of the Everyday

Emerging from a participatory ethnography addressing social exclusion, this paper examines the use of visual methods in the exploration and evocation of situated practices. Using a combination of text, still images and video, this paper will present what can be described as the tales of everyday connoisseurs. These stories seek to reveal the how young people who have been excluded from mainstream education make sense, engage and position themselves with respect to the situations they are in and the places where they live. Rather than put meaning upon processes described, these connoisseur’s tales are intended to allow the audience to place themselves in relation to specific features in such a way that their possibilities and significance may be revealed. In this respect, the storytellers are constructed as those who have developed the ability to experience the subtleties of form and thereby reveal fresh opportunities for practice. Within the life of the project at least, constructing those normally subject to study and policies as connoisseurs enables a new set of relationships to be developed and a shift in gaze from individuals, to the question of how practices are constituted. 

Jon Prosser, Andrew Loxley

Images from the Great Moral Steam Engine: Developing an Understanding of the Visual Culture of Primary Schools

This paper draws on visual (photographs, children’s drawing, video) and non-visual data (interviews, documents) from a long term project which since 2001 has been exploring the dynamics between proffered inclusive values and the visual culture of two primary schools in England and Ireland.  The notion of inclusion is densely rooted within the discourse and rhetoric of primary schooling within both countries and, as such, occupies a key policy position for central government and schools.  One of the key aims of the project has been to explore how the schools articulate and modulate such values via their embedded visual cultures; if at all.  Hence the purpose of this paper is to share at this stage, our findings in relation to the individual schools and a framework for comparing and contrasting schools in different contexts.  However, we had not come to the project with a neat and tidy useable definition of visual culture but rather used the study as a medium through which to develop a theory within the context of primary schooling.

Catherine Burke

The School I'd Like: Exploring Parallels between Children and Young People's Images of Ideal >School Environments 1967 – 2001

In 1969, Edward Blishen edited a collection of British secondary school children's writing about their ideal education or schooling, extracted from essays, models, plans and drawings submitted to the Observer Newspaper as part of a national competition held during the last month of 1967. In January 2001,the Education Supplement of The Guardian national newspaper was invited to repeat the original competition, this time inviting all children between the ages of 5 and 18 to submit their ideas.

Just as in 1967, this recent competition has produced not only ideas, dreams and practical projects explored in words on paper or in a variety of electronic formats, but also an array of drawings, paintings, models, architectural plans and designs. There is evidence of  a remarkable consistency across time in the use of certain imagery in expressing ideal school environments. In particular, circular or curved spaces, radial concentric schemes, spheres, domes and ellipses are a characteristic feature of many of the plans. This paper will present and explore this recently collected material in the light of Blishen's remarks about the visual contributions produced in response to the 1967 competition and in conjunction with aspects of the history of urban design.

‘Body, Fashion, Identities’ - Turner Sims Green Room, 11.30am to 12.45pm

Catherine Bates

How Might a Groom Design his Wedding?

Grooms in the West have traditionally been excluded from the wedding planning process, as the bride’s parents generally hosted the wedding.  With increasing numbers of couples today paying for their own wedding, however, there seems to be no reason why the groom should not be as involved as the bridge.  But in the representations of weddings in the media, and in the promotional literature associated with weddings, a feminised visual vocabulary predominates, ensuring that the wedding is constructed as a feminine concern.

So, how might a groom design his wedding, and what would be the ideological implications of this?  There are few singularly ‘masculine’ rituals in contemporary Western society, but there are a number of rituals in which both sexes participate equally, such as christenings, first communion, graduation and birthdays.  The visual imagery which surrounds these, and the artefacts related to them, including greeting cards, invitations, photographic records of the occasion, and dress, differ quite substantially depending on whether the ritual subject is male or female.  Based on analysis of this imagery, I intend to suggest how a male-designed wedding might be enacted and what it might look like.

Anna Bagnoli

Studying Identities with Autobiographical and Visual Methods

In order to investigate the identities of young people in contemporary Europe with a research that would involve participants as co-researchers, I designed an autobiographical approach that relied on the use of a variety of methods, including visual ones. Encouraging reflexivity, so to be able to read identities on a dialogical model, and providing a multiplicity of media for the young people to express themselves as they preferred, were the reasons for introducing visual methods. During a first interview the young participants were asked for a self-description, which included the visual technique of the self-portrait. They were later given a diary to be kept for a week, and asked for one photograph of themselves that they particularly liked. All these materials formed the basis for a second interview. Very successful with the young people involved, the combination of these methods could access data that might have been difficult to gather otherwise, thus significantly widening the area of research and tracing a holistic picture of identities. The use of visual methods made the process of reflection on one’s life easier, and provided insight in the contextual analysis of data coming from different sources.

‘Methodological Issues II’ - Turner Sims Auditorium, 2.00pm to 3.45pm

Jari Kupianen

Visual Ethnography and Aspects of Agency on Gatokae, Western Solomon Islands

This article analyses experiences in using photo prints as aid to ethnographic research of woodcarving traditions on the Gatokae Island in the western Solomon Islands in the 1990s. By applying Alfred Gell's theory of artistic agency to this fieldwork setting, attention is paid to varying forms of agency involved with working with photos among different sections of Gatokae people, and how these agencies frame and influence meanings associated with the photos and their viewing sessions in particular social situations.

Elizabeth Chaplin

Photography, Publication and the Problem of Informed Consent: A Personal Story

In 2000, I made a photographic survey of the residents of my road and asked each set of residents to provide a caption for their photograph. The project was eventually published on the web, where many of the photographs are reproduced and the residents are identified by name.  This paper presents the story of the project from a particular angle: that of gaining each resident's permission for their photograph and their name to be published. Involved in this story is an email discussion between IVSA members about informed consent, which took place while I was negotiating

with the residents.

Luc Pauwels

A Theoretical Framework for Assessing Visual Representational Practices in <Knowledge Building in Science Communications

This paper presents a theoretical framework for a more thorough and conscious investigation of visual representational practices within the different discourses of scientific data representation, conceptualisation and scholarly and public communication. Visual representations in science may differ with respect to what they purport to represent (their representational and 'ontological' status), the means and methods they are made by and the normative contexts involved, the purposes they serve and the ways they are used and combined, to name some of the more crucial aspects. Many generalizations about the use of visuals in scientific discourse are flawed to some extent due to inability to make a clear distinction between the diversity of appearances and applications and the broader contexts they should be placed in (scientific theory and traditions, culture, media and technology). While several scholars have pointed at the great diversity of representations and their uses, few systematic attempts have been made at devising a typology of uses or at producing a more synthetic framework for increasing insight in this complex domain. Such a taxonomic attempt however may form the basis or starting point of a more conscious practice and an essential part of a program aimed at heightening both social and natural scientists visual literacy skills.

Jon Wagner

‘Fish is Fish and That is That': Reconsidering Social Research and Documentary Studies

The boundary between social research and documentary studies -- including documentary photography and filmmaking --  is long, permeable and convoluted.  It's also problematic and contested.  Many researchers set themselves apart from documentary studies by criticizing the latter for a lack of rigor and depth.  For their part, many documentarians see the work of social scientists as insensitive, pedantic or irrelevant.  And yet, many social researchers and documentarians are also interested in communicating with audiences attracted primarily to the other's métier.

In this paper I argue that as ideal types, both research and documentary studies reflect an abiding interest in empirical social inquiry and that these two approaches can be distinguished, not so much by scientific intent, but by contrasting conventions for addressing three social scientific tasks: (a) ensuring that accounts of social reality are objective and authentic, (b) framing observations and understanding to highlight "new" knowledge, and (c) challenging existing "social theory." 

To illustrate these contrasting conventions, I examine three recent documentary projects, each of which integrates text and image into a provocative, empirical account of social reality:  The adaptation for HBO television of Moishe Kaufman's play, "The Laramie Project;" a photo and text study by Stephen Johnson, Gerald Haslam, and Robert Dawson that was published as The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland; and Lauren Greenfeld's project to document and problematize how young women experience their physical appearance -- one product of which is the book, Girl Culture.  None of these documentary projects has been embraced as bona fide "social research" by professional sociologists.  However, each reflects a systematic approach to empirical inquiry, and each was also designed to create new knowledge and to extend and refine social theory. 

A close look at the conventions by which the authors of these documentary projects approached the three tasks noted above reveals some taken-for-granted assumptions among social researchers that warrant additional inquiry.  These include: the pre-eminence of research designs over the craft of empirical observation, a reliance on elite communities in defining "new" knowledge, and an overweening attraction to explicit, rather than implicit, statements of social theory. 

Treating these assumptions as working conventions of professional social researchers, and not determinants of systematic, empirical inquiry per se, could blur the boundary between social research and documentary studies.  While this might be a good thing for public and civic culture, the occupational costs of moving in this direction may encourage continued resistance among social researchers and documentarians themselves

‘Conflict and Transition’ - Turner Sims Green Room, 2.00pm to 3.45pm

John Lyall, Claudia Bell

Unquiet Americans: Vietnam War Photographs

In this presentation the photographer will show a moment in time where the partially demolished displays and dioramas at Auckland Museum release their stuffed and skeletal inhabitants to roam amongst the builders' debris.   It is a lens through which to interrogate the multiple strands that previously coherently made up the official story of the bird life of New Zealand.

We see the Linnaen project in disarray; we see the skeleton of the building showing through again; we see the dioramic landscapes bereft of their props; we see the labels re-attached to the birds.  These birds/actors are about to go into permanent storage, or become newly staged in a process of Disneyfication in the new museum environment. For a brief period of time not only is the past coherent natural history stance gone; the new stories are not yet audio-visually in place. The reality of the builders' debris (the fire extinguisher, the ladder, the trolley, the filing cabinet) are the temporary structures with which to interpret these ad hoc terrains. It is a moment when the museum, which was a museum of museological styles of the last century, loses its 19th century wonder-house cases, its 1970s glitzy plastic displays. It is a moment of both loss, and of enormous possibilities, with potential to show the gritty and quotidian underpinning of the built form of the grand narrative.

This presentation will show photographic transparencies of the bird hall as it was, a body of documentation of the demolition process and the chance juxtapositions, some backroom storage of objects that have never sat together before now inhabiting adjacent shelving, and the new displays.  In particular many of these images show quite different stories than those intended:  the ones that emerge out of the reflections, the overlays, and the cross readings of two and three cases at a time.

This presentation descends from a body of work that was a key group of photographs in the first Auckland triennial, Bright Paradise, 2001; and comes out of an ongoing relationship with Auckland Museum.

Anny Brooksbank- Jones

Tacky Lifestyles and Revolutionary Decay: Re-framing a Modern Family Album

In July 2002, Mexico-City born Daniela Rossell exhibited in Madrid a series of photographs of friends and relatives in their home settings. In her exhibition notes, she self-consciously places this work in Mexico’s rich tradition of ethnographic photography. Unlike Manuel Alvarez Bravo, however, or Nacho López she does not document the lives of indigenous groups or the urban poor: her subjects are the wives, daughters and mistresses of the Mexican oligarchy, her concern ‘the habitat, customs and traditions of the smallest minority of all: Mexico’s ultra-rich’.

Neither Rossell nor her subjects anticipated the international vilification these images would inspire. In a comparatively temperate response ( El País June 2002) Mexican cultural critic Juan Villoro damns the women comprehensively, tracing the flashy vulgarity of their habitats to a certain sub-revolution in taste, an undermining of the Kantian ‘natural sense’ tradition (to which he subscribes) by a certain legitimation of popular cultural forms and practices. But his explicit focus is the corruption that he sees as sustaining the women’s lifestyles. For, in common with most of Rossell’s other critics, he reads them an index of the bankruptcy of Mexico’s version of institutionalised revolutionary politics. The paper examines some of these images, questions the interior view they seem to provide of, and speculates on their appropriation as markers of political and socio-cultural degeneracy.

Barbara Rosenstein, Rivanna Miller

Evaluation through Video of an Arab/Jewish Education Programme: for whom? When? How? And why?

This paper presents the successful use of video in the evaluation of an Arab/Jewish Project in Jerusalem (Traditional Creativity in School Communities). The program is based on using folklore as a vehicle for promoting cultural exchange. We used videotaped observations in feedback sessions to serve as a springboard for reflection. The focus of the evaluation is the concept of “reality”, how each person views and interprets it and how one learns from confronting these multiple views. The ensuing discussion highlights the complex interplay between expectations and reality. The videotapes reveal that working together does not "just happen", but needs to be carefully planned, facilitated and sustained and that interaction between cultural groups is facilitated by focusing on a common goal.

Kathleen Biddick

Pictures on the Wall: Nomadic Snapshots, Thumbnail Texts, Emergent Archives

This paper explores how design and cultural critique collide when working with a community to conceive and construct an emergent archive in which imagination, image and text also ‘kaleide’ to support the development of new kinds of intermodal literacies.

We situation our investigation as a collaboration between a media researcher and a historian working over a series of months in a low-income, inner-city Dublin flat complex facing imminent demolition and reconstruction to create a large-scale, projected interactive public art installation.  Using as starting points custom built software called TexTales and an expressed desire by the community to create contemporary archives, the installation is designed to support playful experimentation as participants combine a subset of over 700 images short and edited by residents with SMS text messages sent by residents and passers-by to create real-time, layered and dynamic image captions.  In this way, we take a longitudinal, participatory design approach in which conversation, co-constructed ethnographies, interaction design decisions, photo images and SMS text captions all serve as the bases for the development of layered, emergent community-driven intermodal archives and for the creation of new epistemological tools, materials and activities to support the development of intermodal literacies.

‘Methodological Issues III’ - Turner Sims Auditorium, 4.15pm to 5.30pm

Bella Dicks, Bambo Soyinka

Multi-Modal Ethnography

This paper discusses the implications for ethnography of the new 'multi-modal' forms of representation suggested by digital hypermedia technologies. There has been a recent explosion of interest in visual methods in qualitative research as a whole, which reflects the current predominance of visual modes of communication in society. This builds on earlier traditions established in visual ethnography. However, although qualitative researchers have only just started to come to terms with the visual dimensions of representation, digital technologies have issued a further challenge in the form of multi-media or 'multi-modal' discourse (as theorised in current work by Theo Van Leeuwen and Gunther Kress). This multi-modal dimension itself throws up important questions about how ethnographic 'meaning' is produced across different, yet interconnected, practices - including how the visual dimension is to be understood in relation to sound and 'voice', or how still images communicate in relation to moving images. These questions will be explored in the paper in relation to the possibilities implicit in new hypermedia modes of 'doing' ethnography.

Nina Wakeford, Kris Cohen

Photoblagging: Digital Photography and Sociology as Strange Chronicles

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the practice of 'photoblogging', using the data to think in parallel about digital photography as a subject of sociological inquiry and as an instrument of the inquiry itself. Photoblogs are web-based databases of personal photographs (‘snapshots’), often connected to textual, diary-like accounts of the blogger’s daily life ('blogs' comes from 'web logs').  We use an analysis of photoblogs and their makers to think through some of the ways that 'the digital' is made to modify photography.  Using sociological literature on everyday photography,  we examine the relationship of technological change to vernacular practices, the sociality of taking/making photographs, and new ways of chronicling the quotidian self.  We also address the question: ‘Is digital photography different than analogue?’, a question which has been often asked, but obliquely, as if photography were only an abstraction (see Slater, 1995; Kember, 1998, Ritchin, 1990; W.J. Mitchell, 1992; Manovich, 1995). This study looks at digital photography as the means and ends of a particular practice of photo-taking and employs digital photography as both means and ends of its own investigations. It asks ‘what does digital photography do’ as a way of answering the question of what digital photography is, and keeps both researcher and photoblogger in focus as conjoined agents of that doing.

David Smith

Communicating Tacit Knowledge: Case Studies of the Use of Multimedia Archiving in Modern and Traditional Craft Practices

The proposed paper will discuss the use of multimedia audiovisual technologies in the communication of ‘tacit’ knowledge in craft domains.  Using illustrative examples from case studies in India and Wales, the paper will discuss ways in which multimedia can function as a new tool of description to facilitate the explication of tacit aspects of craft knowledge.  This is will be related to Polanyi’s epistemology of the tacit dimension.

The paper will describe research carried out in the field of industrial craft domains (Smith and Hall, 2001) which suggests that that multimedia technologies make it possible to develop representations of skilled performance mediated by the craftsman him- or herself. This work has recently been extended into studies of craft workers in India, and the author is currently developing multimedia knowledge records of traditional dhokra brass founders in West Bengal (Smith and Kochhar, 2002) and patola sari weavers in Gujerat.  Some of the visual source materials for these will be demonstrated and discussed.

Multimedia technology now makes it possible to create “knowledge archives” by presenting very complex information in a variety of formats and contexts. Particularly valuable in this respect is the capacity of systems to use a full range of modalities of description, including moving and still images, sound and conventional text.

It would be both simplistic and epistemologically naïve to suggest that we are proposing to replicate the tacit knowledge per se of the craftsmen and women in our studies.  This would be contrary to all accepted definitions of this frequently misapplied concept, and would in any case lapse into existential incoherence, since, even if we could fully explicate a tacit knowledge base as formal propositional knowledge, it would, by definition, require another level of tacit knowledge in order to apply this in any meaningful way.

The fundamental difficulty is that we cannot disembody knowledge knowledge is embodied in the practice of people. Knowledge does not exist without practice, and practice does not exist without action. If we reject a formalist reductionist conception of knowledge, then we must seek other, and necessarily indirect, means of casting some kind of light on the matter. Multimedia technology appears to offer a way of circumventing at least some of the constraints (whether epistemological or societal) which render knowledge and know-how inaccessible, but do not necessarily render it any less ‘tacit’.  The use of a complex audiovisual technology allows us to approach the status of knowledge, tacit or otherwise, from its location within the practices of the specific communities within which it functions.  This implies a methodology which constructs representations of knowledge in action through appropriate social contexts.

It is argued that the work to be described here may be a contribution to the evolution of such a methodology.

‘Environment’ - Turner Sims Green Room, 4.15pm to 5.30pm

Juha Suonpaa

Authentic Manipulation of Nature Photography

During the past few years, the digital manipulation of nature and wildlife photographs has raised a great deal of questions at the international level. Not only in Finland, but also in Europe and the United States, the web pages of nature photography organizations show that non-manipulation of images is regarded as part of the professional ethic of nature and wildlife photographers. Discussion on genuiness focuses on the relationship of nature photography with social practice, raising the well-founded question of why such considerable interests are invested in the genuiness of nature photograph practice in particular.

The paper based on my doctoral thesis (The Rotteness of Nature Photography) takes closer look at the social constructing of authenticity of the Finnish Nature Photography. According to the study material nature photography and the genuine character it expresses have strong social connections with the construction of nature conservation practices, marketing nature photos and visual experiences based upon the use of nature images.  Nature photographs regarded as authentic are suitable for constructing national identity as well as an idea of man. An authentic nature photograph is like a dream of pure sport. Both are social games with national values and success at stake. Like genuine sportsmen Finnish nature photographers are reproducing sacred genuine image of Finnishness.

However according to the study there is paradox in nature photography and its authenticity: a genuine nature photograph needs not be authentic. For example celebrated and rewarded photographs of large predators are rarely taken without some staging.  Instead of preserving authenticity, nature photography means obeying and accepting the intrinsic unwritten agreements in the field of social practice of nature photography. Only authentic labelled photographs are valid capital in the social stock exchange of the field of nature photography, its social and economical markets.

Polemic conversation about public of digital manipulation of nature photographs brings up the question that manipulation is allowed to manipulate the nature but not the image which is taken from it. That is; social constructed practices are more sacred than the exploited object. Genuine nature photograph has replaced true nature.

Alexis Downs

Exploring Spaces at the Kentucky Horse Park

Our interest is the origin and characterization of social relations.  For many theorists, language is the origin of society.  However, physical space together with the subjects and objects within the space constitute a social structure.   Up until now, the importance of space and objects with respect to processes of social relations has largely been ignored. Recent developments, such as cybertechnology and concerns about wastes dumped into the environment, call for re-evaluation of the way in which social collectives, such as organizations, are influenced by objects and the physical environment.  Our work raises methodological issues concerning the study of objects and space.  Visual methodologies make it possible to study the relations between human subjects and their physical environment as well as the multiple influences that space and objects have upon human behavior.  In a series of photographs, we analyze the interactions between humans, horses, and physical space at Kentucky Horse Park.  We selected this site for investigation because it problematizes the separation between human and animal, subject and object, and private and public spaces.