Visual Ethnography in the Real World
My daughter, Grace, is an incredible visual ethnographer and she does not even know it. I imagine it is that way with many of her generation. As she goes through life, she documents the people and experiences in a way that offers a lens that not only invites others into the experience, but also allows for individual interpretations.
In her book, Doing Visual Ethnography, Sarah Pink defines ethnography as, “a methodology…an approach to experiencing, interpreting and representing experience, culture, society and material and sensory environments that informs and is informed by sets of different disciplinary agendas and theoretical principles” (34). If not for my daughter, I would likely have responded to this definition (and perhaps much of Pink’s book) with a simple, “Huh?” Instead, her words evoke the way in which Grace manages to weave her artistic viewpoint together with her love of science and passion for people into an ongoing documentary of everything she encounters.
When I started this book, I did not really understand the term “ethnography.” Dictionary.com defines it as “a branch of anthropology dealing with the scientific description of individual cultures.” Pink notes, “I understand ethnography as a process of creating and representing knowledge or ways of knowing that are based on ethnographers’ own experiences and the ways these intersect with the persons, places and things encountered during that process” (35). Grace provided me with a living example of this process during her recent hospitalization. Throughout this traumatic event, Grace visually documented not only her own angst and pain (mostly through Snapchat selfies), but also the development of her relationship with the different doctors, nurses, and even housekeeping staff as she caught them in candid moments and staged group pictures. In the visual documentation, one can see the way the doctors came to enjoy coming to see her each day, something many of them told her when she was finally released. She also showed, from a patient’s perspective, the progression from being trapped in a hospital bed, to being allowed to venture around the hospital, to finally being released. Interspersed with these representations of the personal aspect are the video and textual documentation of the progress of her diagnoses and treatment. Screenshots of the diagnoses and proposed medications from the web are chronicled along with pictures of the wounds and side effects of her medications. My particular favorites are the memes she either found on the web or created herself to describe treatments and/or personnel she encountered. Today, when she was once again telling the story to a new medical professional at a follow-up appointment, she used many of these images to show not only the progress of her disease and wounds, but also the progress of her own fear and frustration and the great care she received. When we were done, I told her she should write a book about the process and provide her visual ethnography as a way of explaining the things that words cannot express.
The entire time I was reading Pink’s book, the playground taunt, “Take a picture, it lasts longer!” played over and over in my head. Pink makes a compelling argument for the use of visual ethnography as a methodology for providing a necessary dimension to research to document and to evoke the intangible (197-8). Well-written words can, of course, evoke emotion and provide documentation, but there is something unique about images that takes it to another level. I was particularly struck by this as Pink discussed the collaboration required in such visual ethnographies as documentary filmmaking and other video research (198). Even a personal ethnography such as the one Grace inadvertently produced cannot be done without collaboration because most of us do not live an isolated existence.
Because of the nature of Grace’s medical issues, I am not going to post pictures from this particular journey (I don’t know you all well enough to know how squeamish you are), but I am posting a few pictures below to convey how she documents her deep love for, and interaction with dogs. Enjoy.
Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography, (London: SAGE Publications, 2013).
About the Author
Kristin Hamilton
8 responses to “Visual Ethnography in the Real World”
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Kristin I love your transparency in your post. The way you connected it to your personal life gave it a different sense of meaning and feel for me. I personally like how you attached images that came from a personal life context. It speaks beyond the text. Thank you for sharing your life with us 🙂
Very interesting, Kristin!
Everybody with a cell phone can be a video producer now. Sarah Pink’s book will help me to put more thought into my videos.
Thank you for sharing Grace’s story. It is very touching and shows how widespread ethnography is even if we can’t define it!
Kristin,
I too enjoyed your sharing your daughter passion. Pink as stretch my imagination in preparing for my paper.
Telling the story through visual method.
Great personal example of chronicling a story with Grace. Beautiful!
The collage/montage of the 4 puppies is wonderful. An excellent example of placement and context. Conveys deep meaning. Thank you Kristin!
Kristen,
Thanks so much for this. I really appreciated the post – I feel like I know you much better now 🙂 – & it was a great way to properly situate our young people as visual ethnographers (even if they don’t know it!)
Compelling connection between the text and your own life experience. (and Grace seems like an amazing, resilient young woman!). I’m curious how you might distinguish between visual ethnography and photojournalism. Is there a difference? Blurry distinction? It seems to me like Grace’s example would fall under visual ethnography if it was an accompaniment to a research text, whereas photojournalism allows the images to drive the story more. I can imagine that Grace’s upcoming book(!) will fall more in line with an ethnography. What do you think?
Yes Katy! I think that this kind of documentation would work for either photojournalism or ethnography depending on the context. Since Grace has a degree in science/human development, you can imagine the commentary that went along with her documentation. She has reams of statistical information about her disease and how often it shows up in young college students (as do many other autoimmune disorders) but those statistics don’t show the toll the disease takes or how many people are involved in treatment of just one flare-up. When I mentioned this to her, she said a photo-journalism piece would be more sensational to people but the real story is in the staggering statistics and massive amount of resources a patient/family/medical staff invests in treating these diseases while the number one thing many hear from their doctors and see in the research is, “We don’t really know what causes this, but we are getting better at treating it.” I wonder if good research done with visual ethnography would push toward finding out WHY these diseases are attacking.