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Using photography in research
“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt,
seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.”
Susan Sontag (1977). On Photography.
One of the first photographs ever taken was in 1826 from the
upstairs window of a house in eastern France. You can just about make out the
online of some houses in the distance.
Figure 1: Original
1826 photograph 'View from the Window at Le Gras'
Since then, photographic techniques and technologies have developed enormously. The photo below was the result of around eight hours of exposure, to make an impression on a metal plate coated with a type of asphalt.
Figure 2: Manually
enhanced version of the same photograph
Today, most of us carry a camera around with us (together with a phone, Internet access and much more), which can take dozens of photographs or films every minute and can store literally tens of thousands of images. Even with a very basic non-smartphone (my trusted Nokia C2!), I was able to take three photos in very quick succession of oranges being distributed from a wholesaler to smaller fruit sellers at a market in Cochabamba, Bolivia:
Figure 3: Wholesale
distribution of oranges to re-seller in a market in Cochabamba, Bolivia (2017)
The ease of taking photographs and videos has led to an
explosion of image-making. The fact that it is so easy to take photos means
that people take many of them. But how often do we organise them, filter them,
group them, curate them? And, when it comes to fieldwork, what are we actually
taking photos for?
We know that fieldworkers and researchers will regularly
take photos while in the field. Usually we do this to remind ourselves of where
we travelled (many cameras today have an inbuilt GPS for geotagging), what we
saw and who we talked to. We collect photos to refresh our memories and share
them with our colleagues. But we rarely use photographs in a systematic and
considered way to improve the quality of our research process as a whole. For instance,
we don’t really use photographs as part of data management or analysis.
In the newly published resource Using
photography in research, I outline a list of some of the ways that
photography can be used to collect data (note that I use the term photography
to include both still images and video). The longer list is available in the
document itself, but here I want to give you an overview of them and show some
examples.
Photography can be used to record many kinds of information (data)
1 . Biophysical elements: land-use patterns, landscapes, crop conditions, etc.
Figure 4: View of
landscape (and land-use) around Naubug village, Chimborazo, Ecuador (2018).
Even a blurry photograph can be useful at giving a basic overview of how land
is used in an area, what crops are grown at different times of year, and what
the weather is like (foggy!).
2. Material objects: items in a room, houses, documents, posters, prices etc.
Figure 5: Banner for an agroecology market in Cochabamba, Bolivia (2017). Posters can contain a lot of information including names of places, dates, phone numbers, and how particular events are talked about and advertised.
3. Social interactions: how people interact in space, how a meeting is
arranged, body language, gender and power dynamics, etc.
Figure 6: A meeting with researchers/field technicians and
farmers in a community in Saquisali, Ecuador. Very noticeable how most of the
women are seated at the back and the men are standing, many of them close to
the information panels at the front, one person is even taking a photograph of
it. Photos like these can very quickly provide an insight into gender dynamics
and spatial arrangements that occur during meetings.
4. Values/perceptions (in the case of participatory photography): answers
to abstract questions about what people value, as well as memories triggered by
old photos.
Figure 7: Photograph produced by a participant in a
photo-elicitation research project when prompted to photograph 'significant
landscapes' [From Beilin, R. (2005) Photo-Elicitation and the Agricultural
Landscape: ‘Seeing’ and ‘Telling’ about Farming, Community and Place, Visual
Studies, 20(1), pp. 56–68.]
5. Sequences/time: different steps of a process, how something changes over
time, etc.
Figure 8: Stages of peanut production - field visit, examining the quality in the field, industrial quality control, and value-added peanut snack production, Bolivia (2015)
So that’s a snapshot of some of the ways that photographs
can be used in research. But what does it look like to actually use photographs
in a project in a deliberate way, to improve the quality of the research
process or data?
A research example: using photographs to explain data anomalies
One project in Tanzania used photographs to help explain
some data
anomalies.
The study – which examined below ground biodiversity in
Tanzania - took samples at several hundred points. At each point, researchers were
measuring soil fauna (earthworms, beetles, termites etc) and soil
characteristics (texture, N content, pH, etc). In addition, they took a photo
of every sampling point… that is; a photo of the site where soil was sampled.
When looking at the resulting quantitative data, there was
clearly huge variation (e.g. some plots had no earthworms while others had
hundreds) but, contrary to expectations, this was not associated with the soil
characteristics measured. This led to the research team brainstorming on some
possible explanatory factors. They suggested soil moisture, cultivation and the
presence of trees might be associated with different levels of soil fauna.
All these could be assessed from the photos they had taken.
Hence, they looked at the photo of each sample point and developed a scoring
system for it: (A) Whether the photo indicated a wet or moist plot; (B) Whether
it was under a tree or not; or (C) Whether the plot was cultivated. They then
added this data set to the quantitative data ready for statistical analysis.
This is an extreme example of using photographs in that a
nearly complete data set could be generated from photos and the data here proved
useful: those new indicators did indeed help explain some patterns.
Conclusion
There are so many ways that photography (both still and
moving image) can be used to enhance the research process. Not only can images
create a richer and more detailed understanding of the research site and provide context for
the data we collect, but they can also add layers of important data that helps us
answer our research questions more fully.
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For more information, have a look at
the guide on our resources
site.
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For information on the ethical
considerations of taking photographs, read ILRI’s excellent 13-page guide here.
Have you used photography in your research project? If so, was
this intentional and did it contribute to the data analysis? Do please share
your experiences ?
Author: Ian Fitzpatrick
Ian is an anthropologist and ethnobotanist with a background in food and farming research, policy and campaigning. He is interested in mixed research methods and working with smallholder farmers. He has worked for the Sustainable Food Trust, Global Justice Now, Sustain, the Food Ethics Council and the New Economics Foundation.
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Nicolas
Oct 28 2019