The Place of the Photograph in Visual Narrative Research - Project Statement

For the past 10 years I have been working with girls who are between eight and 21 years old, inviting them to photograph their worlds inside and outside of school. Throughout these inquiries I have had a curiosity with the “evaded” curriculum–those lived experiences that are not seen, are dismissed and are institutionally ignored in both students’ and teachers’ lives. I have worked with girls who attend school and who actively connect their learning to subcultures of the performing and visual arts (1) and equestrian experiences. (2) Students as imagemakers, working with horses, has meant that the girls make images that matter to them. My work continues to explore the “evaded curriculum” in the lives of girls, those stories that are instantly dismissed, ignored or considered less than. As we listen to the girls we hear stories of strength, pleasure and entitlement. These girls write their lives through stories of learning with horses outside of the classroom. My hope is to provide spaces for them to show and tell their stories of learning with horses. One of the most pleasurable experiences the girls talk about is their enjoyment of the act of photographing. What matters, for me, is the girls’ excitement at being imagemakers. Hearing their voices and my desire to work visually presses me to find photography’s place within my narrative inquiry. I think about how my work with girls opens spaces of possibility to question the institutionalized place of photography and story in educational research.

As an educational researcher working visually with girls I still question who is making the picture. I trouble the existing constructions, re/presentations and documentaries that make knowledge claims about girl culture. Whose gaze de/constructs the image/sign? Who listens to the story told about girls’ photographs? Who is talking? What is written on the bodies of girls and who are those authors?

Making a photo narrative

Images created with photographs thicken ways of seeing. Participants in “visual narrative inquiry” are provided with one-time cameras in order to visually document their learning relationships that connect to their subcultures (the arts and equestrian). Pictured through their “cameraworks” the students document their coming to know their subcultures and how the arts or equestrian experiences affect them as learners, as knowers. Images suggest a space for visual representation similar to that of journal entries, field notes and artifacts, better thought of as “field texts.” The visual field texts constructed by the students and myself represent aspects of life as it unfolds.

Making visual narrative research draws upon the use of still photography to evoke memory in our lives, a memory around which we construct and reconstruct life stories. The girls have made photographs as a way to preserve the appearance of an event or a person, a metaphor of experience that has been closely associated with the idea of the historical. The idea of photography, aesthetics apart, is to seize a “historic” moment–photographs convey a unique sense of duration. (3) Visual narrative research makes “visible” different parts or narratives of girls’ stories–their subjectivities–as well as enables us to explore different positions within a dynamic and play with positions of authority.

Transformation of fixed or screen memories becomes possible in constructing the visual narrative. Yet, unlike memory, photographs do not themselves preserve meaning. They offer appearances, a sign–with all the credibility and gravity we normally lend to appearances–prised away from their meaning. Meaning is the result of understanding functions. Functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. Photographs in themselves do not narrate. Photographs preserve instant appearances. (4) Photographs can help us to acknowledge what has previously been resisted and repressed, so that we may let go, reflect and grow from our experiences. Photographs help to unfreeze memories.

Jo Spence believes photographs enable us to come to terms with negative experiences–photographs can be markers of triumph, a celebration of integration–and the successful exploration of recurring stories. I have seen this in the girls’ cameraworks where one girl explored negative stories of her estranged father in relation to her step-father, others show success in achieving a particular dance move while some girls integrate their experiences of learning patience with their horse to focusing on school work. I also feel something powerful behind the combination of image and text that forms the composition of my visual narrative research. I see the possibility for understanding photographs with multiple truths, “an understanding of this frees up the individual from the constant search for the fixity of an ‘ideal self’ and allows enjoyment of self as process and becoming.” (5)

By providing girls with one-time cameras I have had a space to see a part of their worlds–through their eyes. After the photographs are developed, I have a one-to-one conversation with the girls about the images they have created. Viewing the girls’ photographs evokes words, but the story is not bound by them. Stories change with time and retelling. Connections are always dynamic, dialogic in nature. My work with photography in visual narrative research is not about how to make re/presentation, but how to avoid re/presentation.Stories are powerful research sites. They provide us with a picture of real people in real situations struggling with real problems. They banish the indifference often generated by samples, treatments and faceless subjects. They invite us to speculate on what might be changed and with what effect. And, of course stories remind us of our persistent fallibility. Most important, they invite us to remember that we are in the business of teaching, learning and researching to improve the human condition and, of course, stories remind us of our persistent fallability.

Photography as a verb

In seeing the girls’ enjoyment in documenting their daily lives and talking about their photography, I am always struck by the power of our re-making of images, of our making photographs of photographs, and of the girls’ revisualizing and retelling their stories. The “act of photographing” guides our conversations. Each viewing allows for the possibility to see that we were different people, learning from difference and from other ways about how to live a life. We talk about the why–why they chose a particular frame, and why one particular moment of time was responded to rather than another.

There is always a story behind the story. The need to see through the story was helpful in understanding the girls’ photographs as they became sites to other stories that drifted into and through their daily lives. I found these sites difficult to explain with words or concepts, and this troubles my writing of my visual narrative research. I have tempered my questions by borrowing from Spence (6) and Weiser (7) by seeing “photography as a verb.” My visual narrative research is an ongoing learning experience about girls’ daily lives, expressed not just in the passive verb sense of evaluating product-print, but in the active verb sense of learning. I see the making of schoolgirl culture as a way to come to know girls in a different way. Photographs slow time into moments, moments that can be studied.

Photography that listens

Photographs act as a record. My hope is to see in the light, and see in the shadows, the culture that girls make. The girls tell me stories of strength, pleasure and entitlement as they re/look at their photographs. Each of the girls has created a “textbook” of their cameraworks. As Spence says, “The photographs act as a tangible marker of something which could otherwise go back into the unconscious and remain dormant for a long time.” (8) I see the photograph as an artifact that can be read and reread over time. Each reading evokes a different sound, something different is seen and heard. With that difference come reflections of memories.

There is an electrical charge, an energy released in the making of visual narratives. I feel the energy of the girls as they show me their photographs and tell their stories. Each time I look at their cameraworks, it is possible to order and reorder the photographs into a variety of mini narratives. There is never a fixed story being told, no narrative closure. In constructing a variety of re/presentations, stories are moved around, providing an infinity of possible tellings or montages. The photographs start further and more sustained conversations. Listening to the girls, I am aware of the cathartic release when they spoke about their cameraworks. I sense that the girls responded viscerally without the mediation of their intellect. I have come to understand the place photographs occupy, the different ways of telling stories that are controlled by the girls themselves. Listening is hard work.In studying girls’ cameraworks, I have found photographs offer us a site to “objectify and see a separate part of ourselves which can be integrated back into the overall subjectivity, or core self, as when we are ready for it.” (9) Although photography objectifies, because visual narrative involves the process of listening to the stories told about photographs, they can also act as “transitional objects” toward another reality. In this sense, they can be seen as stepping stones, perhaps a way of searching for narrative truth.

Through their narratives, the girls have given me ways of penetrating the cultural cliches, the view of the archetype characters in myths about girls. I see the possibility of visual narratives to disrupt and subvert already existing girl culture. I know that what I perceive is only part of the reality before me. Every girl creates her own world, and inviting them to be imagemakers has allowed me to un/learn girl culture through/with/against their I/eyes. I have learned that distortion in understanding girls’ cameraworks is inevitable, each girl must be seen in her own story. It is through the conversations with girls about their photographs that we share in the realism of their visual culture.

Our visual narratives show a social life as a process of lived experiences made up of relationships and shared understandings among the students, their worlds and myself. The research text reveals not only my “epistemological position” but also intertwining relations between the way I am in the world as a teacher, researcher and reader of theory. I am working against textual closure and unitary representations of subjectivity. I look and learn to see differently, and I emphasize the connections between the evaded and the curriculum and how they influence the ways in which we experience our worlds, the way we respond to what we see and how we construct knowledge of that experience.

HEDY BACH is currently a sessional lecturer in teacher education at the University of Alberta where she teaches visual studies. She is author of the book A visual narrative concerning girls, curriculum, photography etc. (1998).

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