“Images + Words > Words alone”
“Images + Words > Words alone”
Every pastor who gets ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) is required to take at least one unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). For me, this involved 120 hours in a hospital setting, with a small group of other students doing chaplaincy training together. CPE is a painful journey for many seminarians because the training involves deep internal group work: exposing old wounds among our colleagues for the sake of their transformation, and learning to discover how childhood experiences inform our pastoral responses to suffering. Personally, I was very grateful for this requirement because of the learning model in which we participated. CPE is based on an action—reflection model. On Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays we would do clinical work all day, visiting patients in their hospital rooms. Then on Tuesday and Thursday we would do group work and analyze the verbatims we had to write following each visit. So, we would go and do, and then reflect on our doing in order to gain clarity and make corrections. In the famous words of John Dewey (source unknown): “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” The action—reflection model of learning is an experiential way to learn and therefore is not just about transferring knowledge as it is transforming the person so that the ministry flows out of the personhood rather than simply the memory. Aspects of this model are clearly at work in our program at Portland Seminary, which is one reason why I signed up.
As I began to read Pink, I found myself eager to get going on doing the visual ethnography assignment of our advance (which isn’t for another several weeks), and to use this book as reference for that assignment and reflection as I go. As a novice qualitative researcher, I found myself mired down in the reading by the conceptual explanations of paradigmatic issues that surround this type of social science research. I wanted to get going on the assignment without having any real knowledge of what I’m doing, and then use the book to guide me along the way, and then to use this post partly as a reflection on that work.
Pink’s book, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, media and representation in research, serves as a textbook for to conducting ethnographic research. The book is helpful in the general philosophies of the qualitative research field, along with emerging understandings and implementation of visual methods. Unlike earlier texts, Pink brings an awareness of the “theoretical underpinnings” of visual ethnography in order to understand “how those images and the processes through which they are created are used to produce ethnographic knowledge.”[1]
We all know too well the old adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” which speaks to both the power of image to convey a message more fully than can words alone, as well as the real danger of misinterpretation of images. Pink begins by conveying the relevance of this type of qualitative research: “Images are ‘everywhere.’ They permeate our academic work, everyday lives. They inhabit and inspire our imaginations, technologies, texts and conversations.”[2]
The book consists in three parts. The first part of the book deals with the conceptual framework and ethics involved in this type of research. The most valuable aspect of part one for me was found in the first chapter with Pink’s brief treatment of the topic of reflexivity and subjectivity in the research process. According to one scholarly reviewer: “The reflexive approach to research is the acknowledgement that the researcher’s subjectivity is a central component to the conceptualization and production of the research process.”[3] It’s important to keep this subjectivity in mind.
Part Two of the book dealt with producing knowledge. This was important for me to become familiar with the relationship between textual and visual evidence. The idea being that visual research neither replaces textual research, nor does visual research merely translate to text, but there’s an integral relationship between the two that is meant to compliment and serve the other.
Part Three of the book is titled: Visual Images and Technology in Ethnographic Research, and these chapters deal with the common mistake in our highly-imaged but still written culture of placing a higher value judgment on the written word over the visual image. As an aside, I would turn to Michael Pasquarella’s book, Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Procalamation to hold in conversation on this topic as it relates to the theological implications of using multi-media in preaching.
With a decent grasp of the contents of the book and this method of research, I began constructing my visual ethnography of the Cape Town Advance. I want to tell the story in five brief chapters (or themes): The Land + Beauty, New Friends + Colleagues, Suffering + Hope, Unexpected Encounters, and the Dignity of Human Story. These are the themes that give the advance lasting meaning for me. I created files for each of these categories, then looked through all the pictures I had taken along with other visual representations, and chose the most meaningful images for each category.
Having studied the assignment description: Visual Ethnography Learning Synthesis ‘Story’ Post for Face-to-Face Advance, I still did not really knowing which tool is best to use for this assignment. By the samples and word count requirements, it looks like Microsoft Word is what is expected for this assignment to be considered academically acceptable. But through online research, I’ve seen these on youtube as video slide productions. This is a more delightful approach for me, so, at the moment I am using Keynote in order to make this into a video slide production to share with my friends and my church, though I realize I will need to do the assignment as expected, once we get a full briefing from Dr. Clark. At the moment, I’ve collected about twenty five images and a video, I’ve categorized them, and have begun to reflect and write alongside the images. What I am discovering is that the images themselves are brining richness to the writing that would otherwise not be there, and the writing gives deeper meaning to the images. I am looking forward to completing this project and experiencing those of my colleagues.
The author of Doing Visual Ethnography presented this book a resource tool for conducting visual ethnography and not as a manual to guide a researcher on how to realize a visual ethnographic study. For that the researcher must turn elsewhere. What must be remembered going forward in qualitative research is not only that a picture is worth a thousand words, but also that every picture has a story to tell.[4]
[1]Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography (London: SAGE Publications, 2013), loc: 236, Kindle edition.
[2] Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography (London: SAGE Publications, 2013), loc: 102, Kindle edition.
[3] Laurie Mullen, “Review: Sarah Pink (2001). Doing Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. London: Sage, 196 pages,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 3, no. 1 (2001): 1-3, accessed October 22, 2017, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs020197.
[4] Riviera, D. (2010). Picture this: A review of Doing visual ethnography: Images, media, and representation in research by Sarah Pink. The Qualitative Report, 15(4), 988- 991. Retrieved from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR15-4/pink.pdf
About the Author
Chris Pritchett
6 responses to ““Images + Words > Words alone””
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I loved this part of your blog: “In the famous words of John Dewey (source unknown): “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” The action—reflection model of learning is an experiential way to learn and therefore is not just about transferring knowledge as it is transforming the person so that the ministry flows out of the personhood rather than simply the memory.” What a powerful experience you must have had doing that in seminary, and I agree with you that this is an awesome part of the LGP program. Reading your post also made me excited to see your visual ethnography assignment, thanks to your tantalizing description of it. Also, I’m curious about your thoughts on the ethics of photographing people without their knowledge or consent and how that fits with the ethnography process? Great post as always Chris!
Chris,
You make a strong connection with your CPE experience. As a result of my own CPE I have remained on the chaplaincy roster of our local hospital and continue to be stretched and challenged through the Action/Reflection model. I had not seen the similarity of Pink’s work with the CPE experience until your post.
You also seem to be way ahead on the upcoming assignment. I made an attempt today to figure our what was expected but did not get a whole lot of clarity. However, your efforts to use keynote make sense to me. I am probably the least visual person I know. The pictures I took of riding my bike around Cape Town were the 1st pictures I have taken in decades. I tend to overlook images and am so thankful for the pictures that you and others shared with me as they capture so much of our shared experience.
Chris, first I wanted to say that in our online syllabus, it demonstrates five different techniques of visual ethnography for this assignment; you should look at those and see if they help you with the direction you are searching for.
Second, I have been seeking out from others with this reading the negative, or perhaps just ineffectual aspects of visual ethnography. I truly appreciate the work you participated in at the hospital, however, in regards to relaying that information to others, what do you believe would be the best methodology for transmitting what you learned and experienced to someone else? Could you see visual ethnography adding a reinforcing staple to your experience, or do you feel like a picture could possibly lesson it?
Chris,
What stood out to me in your post was that there is an interplay between word and image, image and word. Having both in conversation with each other is powerful. I think your plans for the VE project are well-conceived. Sorting your photos into the five categories allows you to craft a narrative around the groupings. Brilliant idea.
Chris,
You had me with your title, “Images + Words > Words alone” and I think you nailed this one right on the head. Especially for us Pastors!
You have answered my question from our most recent ZOOM on how do us Pastors speak to the many folks who are not auditory learners in our midst?
Use more than words alone! Well done Chris…
Chris, I am looking forward to your ethnographic piece from the trip to Cape Town. I am also planning to do a slide show for friends and church members as so many have asked about it and I feel like I have so many stories but I want the images to be carried into the narrative for them as well.
Thanks for your brief outline of the books structure as you utilize it for your projects as well. Did you find anything you did not particularly like or agree with in Pink’s text?
Also, your last paragraph sounded familiar to me and I caught it at the very last line. I really liked those phrases when I read Riviera’s review on Pink’s text. I think you may want to double check to see if you need a footnote there or if you both are the same amount of brilliant in your word choice.