research article about photography

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Hunters and gatherers of pictures: why photography has become a human universal.

• 1 Independent Researcher, Leonding, Austria
• 2 Department of Behavioral Biology and Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
• 3 Domestication Lab at the Konrad-Lorenz Institute of Ethology, Wolf Science Center, University of Veterinary Medicine, Ernstbrunn, Austria

Photography is ubiquitous worldwide. We analyzed why people take, share, and use personal photographs, independent of their specific cultural background. These behaviors are still poorly understood. Experimental research on them is scarce. Smartphone technology and social media have pushed the success of photography, but cannot explain it, as not all smartphone features are widely used just because they are available. We analyzed properties of human nature that have made taking and using photographs functional behaviors. We did this based on the four levels, which Nikolaas Tinbergen suggested for analyzing why animals behave in a particular way. Including findings from multiple disciplines, we developed a novel conceptual framework—the “Mental Utilization Hypothesis of Photography.” It suggests that people adopt photography because it matches with core human mental mechanisms mainly from the social domain, and people use photography as a cognitive, primarily social coping strategy. Our framework comprises a range of testable predictions, provides a new theoretical basis for future empirical investigations into photography, and has practical implications. We conclude that photography has become a human universal, which is based on context-sensitive mental predispositions and differentiates itself in the social and societal environment.

Introduction

Photography is ubiquitous around the world, with the number of people taking and using personal photographs steadily increasing ( Lee and Stewart, 2016 ; Canon, 2018 ). More than 90 percent of all photographs (henceforth photos ) are taken with smartphones ( Carrington, 2020 ), and more than half of the world's population uses smartphones or mobile phones to take, view, and share photos ( Statista, 2019 ; Kemp, 2021 ). Smartphones integrate photography with many other functions, notably with access to the internet and social media ( Smith, 2011 ; GSMA and NTT DOCOMO, 2014 ). This has rapidly shifted photography from an exclusive activity of socio-economically capable minorities toward engaging a majority of the world's 7.8 billion people.

We examined the question why people take, view, own, share, and use personal photos, and why photos are important to them. We consider the distribution of smartphone technology and social media a precondition for the sweeping success of photography, but insufficient to explain it, as not all smartphone features or technologies are widely used just because they are available. The technology to make audio-recordings, for example, has not been adopted by many people ( Milgram, 1976 ). Although smartphones are capable of easily recording the voices of loved ones, conversations, the sounds of a birthday party, or of a strange city, people rarely use this function ( GSMA and NTT DOCOMO, 2014 ; Lutter et al., 2017 ).

There is extensive research on the psychological bases of pictorial representation and art (e.g., Deacon, 2006 ; Donald, 2006 ; Dutton, 2009 ). No theory, however, has suggested an integrated psychological basis of the wide range of photography-related behaviors. Photography differs significantly from other visual representation techniques. The invention and further technical developments in photography have conveyed images with characteristics that drawings, paintings, maps, or plans do not have: (a) photos are realistic in a special way; (b) photos are produced by technical devices; (c) part of the information in photos is there by chance; (d) people tend to believe that what they see in photos really happened that way; and (e) photos can be created easily, quickly and effortlessly. We will describe these properties in more detail at the beginning of the following section.

Milgram (1976) assumed that taking and using photos conveys specific abilities, which can be best understood if cameras and photos are regarded as “evolutionary developments” (p. 7). We followed this approach and hypothesized that the urge to take, view, share, and use photos is based on human nature ( Wilson, 2012 ; Kotrschal, 2019 ), i.e., on evolved context-sensitive predispositions and mechanisms, mainly rooted in the social domain. We examined this hypothesis on the basis of the four levels of Tinbergen (1963) to analyze and explain “natural” traits, i.e., those which evolved via the Darwinian processes. These levels relate to (1) the physiological mechanisms underlying a certain behavior, (2) it's ontogeny, (3) evolutionary history, and (4) adaptative value. This frame guided half a century of behavioral research and may be considered the research program of organismic biology in general ( Bateson and Laland, 2013 ; Nesse, 2013 ).

We place photography in the context of the coherent theory of the evolution of life ( Darwin, 1859 , 1879/2004 ; Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ) and human nature as an outcome of this evolution. The four levels proposed by Tinbergen are the theoretical and practical formulation of this context. Since there is only a single Darwinian theory of evolution, and culture is part of human nature ( Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ), the biological context should allow us to develop a unified explanation, coherent with contemporary knowledge particularly on the proximate mechanisms (i.e., current physiological mechanisms and their ontogeny). According to the four levels of Tinbergen, our central research questions are: What are the cognitive and physiological mechanisms underlying taking and using photos? How does taking and using photos develop ontogenetically?—which is important for understanding the development of inter-individual variation. What is the phylogenetic basis for photographic behavior? What may the functions and adaptative value of taking and using photos be? In this respect, a contribution of taking or using photos for survival and individual reproductive success may not be obvious in modern humans, but to qualify as an evolutionary function, the proof of a direct effect would not be needed. Rather, it would be sufficient to find a plausible positive effect on a person's social and mental well-being, which, in turn, on a population level, would entail a positive, supportive effect on societal and biological fitness.

Our aim was to create a theoretical framework, which describes why and in what way taking, viewing, sharing, and using personal photos are functional behaviors in terms of what is presently known about human nature. The development of this framework was based on the integration of available empirical findings on photography from multiple research areas with findings from biology, psychology, and neuroscience. We consider cultural and biological traits as closely interconnected and interacting in driving evolution and individual behavior (e.g., Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ; Kotrschal, 2019 ). To the best of our knowledge, a similarly comprehensive integration of findings into a coherent theoretical framework has not been attempted before. Our framework generates a number of predictions about the specific characteristics of personal photos and photography-related behaviors, which can be tested through empirical investigations.

Based on our framework and data on the global availability of smartphones and social media, we intended to show that photography qualifies as a human universal ( Murdock, 1945 ; Brown, 1991 ; Antweiler, 2016 ; Christakis, 2019 ; Kotrschal, 2019 ). The concept human universal is traditionally associated with traits, activities, characteristics, or institutions, which are observed in all cultures and societies worldwide, like social organization, cooking, language, music, or weapons ( Brown, 1991 ). According to this view, photography would not be a human universal. Historically, photography is a new development and did not exist in the traditional societies described by ethnology. For traits or behaviors, which have only recently become universal, Brown (1991) introduced the term “‘new’ universals” (p. 50). He cited dogs, tobacco, metal tools, and plastic containers as likely examples. Hence, according to Brown's classification, photography is a “new universal.” We describe photography as a human universal, which is based on context-sensitive predispositions, which differentiates itself over ontogeny in the societal environment. Our evolutionary approach does not suggest categorizing photography as a stereotypic behavior based on “innate” dispositions. In line with the present concepts of human social behavior and human universals, we emphasize context-sensitivity, inter-individual variability and individual uniqueness of photography-related behaviors within the frame of the human reaction norm ( Woltereck, 1909 ), as comparable, for example, with language or music.

Materials and Methods

Specific characteristics of photographs and photography.

Our focus is on personal photography , that is, on photography-related behaviors, including taking, viewing, sharing, and using photos, which are performed for personal reasons and without commercial intent ( Chalfen, 1987 ; Kindberg et al., 2005 ). In particular, we refer to photography-related behaviors, which people perform immediately and voluntarily (spontaneously), without intentional preparation or planning beforehand. We specifically referred to characteristics of photos and behaviors related to photos, which other representational pictures and behaviors associated with them do not have:

Photos Are Realistic Images

An object depicted in a photo can share a large number of visual features with the object that was seen in the environment at a specific point in time from a specific location ( Bradley and Lang, 2007 ). Because of this characteristic, photos are called realistic images ( DeLoache et al., 1998 ). When individuals see a photo, a retinal image can be formed, which is similar to the image that would be formed if they saw the represented event or object in the environment in real life ( Perrett et al., 1991 ). When investigating the neural bases of recognizing or categorizing objects (e.g., faces, bodies, sites, or objects), neuroscientists and cognition researchers often assumed that there is an equivalence between the photographic representation and the perceptible object in the environment and presented photos of objects as stimuli instead of the real objects in question. Important psychophysiological mechanisms underlying photography-related behaviors are related to the fact that photos of objects elicit reactions in certain areas of the brain similar to events, which are effectively seen in the environmeint.

Photos Are Produced by Technical Devices

Drawings and paintings can also be realistic images. In contrast to photos, the creation of drawings and paintings involves the hands of the artists who created them, and important visual characteristics resulted from the dispositions, ideas and decisions of these artists. Photos are created by technical devices, and viewers know this fact.

Part of the Information Came Into the Photo by Chance

The people who use cameras choose a certain perspective, a certain frame and a certain moment when they press the shutter button. Photographers use this selection to control the characteristics and meanings of photos. In complex natural scenes, photographers cannot control all of the information that gets into the photos. Some information comes into the pictures by chance ( Talbot, 1844/2011 ). This is hardly the case with representative drawings or paintings.

People Assume They See Reality in Photos

People tend to believe that what they see in photos really happened that way—even if photos are posed, manipulated or forged ( Wade et al., 2002 ; Nightingale et al., 2017 ). This phenomenon is still poorly understood. It is possibly related to the knowledge of the viewers that they see a picture that was produced by a technical apparatus. This knowledge could be linked to the assumption that the picture is little affected by the personal attitudes and intentions of the person who made it ( Miller, 1973 ; Gu and Han, 2007 ).

Photos Can Be Created and Understood Easily, Quickly, and Effortlessly

Unlike drawings, paintings, maps, or plans, photos can be created easily, quickly and effortlessly. Three-year-old children can take informative and expressive photos ( Magnusson, 2018 ). Without complex knowledge or skills, people can take photos that they and other people find excellent ( De Looper, 2016 ). Complex events represented by photos are quickly and easily understood. A single quick glance is enough for viewers to understand, for example, an interaction between two individuals ( Hafri et al., 2013 ).

Taking, sharing, and using photos are not behaviors, which have all of a sudden appeared as something completely new and an emergent property of culture. We hypothesized that they are deeply rooted in organismic and cultural evolution. The basic cognitive and physiological factors underlying photography-related behaviors are common to all people. Some of these factors may vary relatively little between individuals, but others, for example, related to individual personality structure may show great inter-individual variability. But even such a pronounced inter-individual variability is far from random, as much of ontogeny seems to depend on context-sensitive human dispositions (e.g., Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ; Kotrschal, 2019 ). Such dispositions are the result of non-random interactions between genes, epigenetics, and the social and societal environments during ontogeny. They frame the way people tend to take, view, share, and use photos.

Empirical Data and Findings on Photography-Related Behaviors

Empirical data and findings on taking, viewing, recognizing, sharing, and using photos come from a variety of disciplines, such as psychology, neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and anthropology. In analyzing the questions on the level of the cognitive and physiological mechanisms underlying photography-related behaviors, we referred to studies that examined the following questions: Which cognitive processes in the brain play a special role in photographing ( Barasch et al., 2017 ; Blitch, 2017 )? How do people's brain responses to photos they have taken themselves differ from their responses to photos taken by others ( Sellen et al., 2007 ; St. Jacques et al., 2011 ; Diefenbach and Christoforakos, 2017 )? Which brain responses do photos elicit in which viewers see a person with whom they are connected through a close emotional relationship ( Bartels and Zeki, 2004 ; Gobbini et al., 2004 ; Leibenluft et al., 2004 ; Master et al., 2009 ; Eisenberger et al., 2011 )? Which brain responses do photos evoke in which viewers see themselves ( Devue et al., 2007 ; Butler et al., 2012 )? Which neural processes form the basis for viewers to find a picture beautiful or ugly ( Kawabata and Zeki, 2004 ; Jacobs et al., 2012 )?

To describe the ontogenesis of photography-related behaviors, we refer to studies that examined the development of the ability to recognize the representational properties of photos ( DeLoache et al., 1998 ; for review, see Bovet and Vauclair, 2000 ), as well as to studies, which examined the age at which children start taking photos and for what purposes they use cameras ( Mäkelä et al., 2000 ; Sharples et al., 2003 ; GSMA and NTT DOCOMO, 2014 ).

In analyzing the evolutionary roots of photography-related behaviors, we refer to studies of the ability of non-human primates and other animals to recognize objects depicted in photos ( Bovet and Vauclair, 2000 ; Kano and Tomonaga, 2009 ; Aust and Huber, 2010 ). Information was also provided by investigations into the question how people develop the ability to recognize objects pictured in photographs ( Deregowski et al., 1972 ; Miller, 1973 ; Bovet and Vauclair, 2000 ).

Table 1 briefly summarizes some of the research that will be used to analyze the level related to the adaptative value of photography-related behaviors. Every single referenced study provides a number of answers that are not always consistent with the answers from the other studies. The answers given are therefore rather examples of content to which we refer in the article than representative information.

Table 1 . Questions and studies used to analyze the adaptative value of photography-related behaviors.

Results: the Four Levels of Tinbergen (1963) As a Theory Frame

Psychophysiological mechanisms underlying photography-related behaviors.

Researchers have used photos as stimuli. Thus, quite some knowledge on the psychophysiological mechanisms involved in recognizing and viewing photos has accumulated, but experimental research on the mechanisms involved in taking photos is essentially lacking (except for Blitch, 2017 ). The success of photography, however, is primarily related to features of taking photos ( Krämer and Winter, 2008 ; Hu et al., 2014 ; Lee et al., 2015 ; De Looper, 2016 ; Malik et al., 2016 ; Carrington, 2020 ). These include various activities and outcomes. These activities are, for example, associated with relating to individuals or objects as well as creating and appropriating images of them and their desirable properties. Outcomes may be associated with a sense of control and efficacy. The rapid global spread of photography was not driven by new opportunities to get, acquire, or exchange photos taken by other people, but mainly by the increased availability of inexpensive cameras, particularly smartphones, and opportunities to share one's own photos electronically. For this reason, we address in this section the specific mechanisms that form the neural basis of taking personal photos. The following description of the processing steps in taking pictures corresponds to hypothetical predictions. We mainly employ findings on processes in primates including humans from various contexts, which can be related to the psychophysiological mechanisms involved in taking photos. Figure 1 shows a hypothetical model including the major steps of taking a photo.

Figure 1 . Hypothetical process model including the major processes and activities that occur in an individual who engages in taking a personal photo. The place within the sequence where the processes and activities are located indicates either when they occur or when they first occur. In order to keep the presentation clear, possible feedback effects of activities on the antecedent steps are not shown. Downward arrows mean “then occurs”; a horizontal arrow means “interacts with”.

Initial Steps in Taking Photos

The first steps in taking a photo do not involve conscious awareness ( Custers and Aarts, 2010 ). A mother, for example, responds spontaneously to the happy expression on the face of her 6-year-old son at his birthday party, or a hiker responds to the overwhelming panorama at a mountain top. In these examples, the perceptual input activates a fast, low-level system of subcortical structures related to affective processing ( Baxter and Murray, 2002 ; Pourtois et al., 2013 ), including neurons responding to the visual information and others responding to relevance and information related to primary (evolutionarily developed) or individually acquired reward value. Some of these structures project to the midbrain dopaminergic system ( Dommett et al., 2005 ; Schultz, 2006 ). In turn, dopaminergic projections from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the midbrain reach the ventral striatum, including the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), amygdala, hippocampus and other areas of the mesolimbic system ( Berridge and Robinson, 1998 ; Alcaro et al., 2007 ), which functions as the central neural basis for approach and motivation. This mesolimbic system overlaps with the social behavior network in the brain, responsible for the control of social behavior ( Goodson, 2005 ; O'Connell and Hofmann, 2011 ).

The activity of the dopaminergic neurons in the brain of the mother who sees her happy son corresponds to a “wanting” reaction ( Berridge and Robinson, 1998 ). It makes her son's excited face salient and attractive. The fact that the mother likes what she perceives may be related to the release and processing of endogenous opioids ( Panksepp, 1998 ; Kringelbach and Berridge, 2009 ; Hsu et al., 2013 ). Whereas dopamine conveys motivational incentives, endogenous opioids convey “liking,” but also have a calming effect and reduce neural responses to pain, stress and anxiety ( Carter, 1998 ; De Kloet et al., 2005 ).

In everyday life, people usually take photos of pleasant events ( Chalfen, 1987 ; Sharples et al., 2003 ; Hu et al., 2014 ). We assume, however, that the motivation to take a picture is often also related to the activation of a mental representation of a negative context, which is processed non-consciously. In our example, this negative context would be that the mother knows that her son celebrates his last birthday party before entering school. As her own mental representations of school are ambivalent, she develops an anticipatory concern regarding the situation of her son, which is threatening and creates mental stress ( Ulrich-Lai and Herman, 2009 ). Representations of such threats correlate particularly with activities in the amygdala ( Baxter and Murray, 2002 ; Pourtois et al., 2013 ), triggering a cascade of adaptive neural and neuroendocrine reactions ( De Kloet et al., 2005 ; Schiller et al., 2008 ; Ulrich-Lai and Herman, 2009 ; Hostinar et al., 2014 ). They include the activation of the stress systems leading to an increase in excitement and alertness.

Hence, we suggest that two conflicting representations are activated in the mother's brain, each associated with a different behavioral response than the other. The mother needs to mobilize cognitive and behavioral resources to be able to balance the two possible meanings and reactions, which in essence employ different parts of her brain. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays an important role in this. The ACC lies inside the frontal cortex, where it extends around the dorsal side of the corpus callosum, the nerve tract that connects the two cerebral hemispheres. It integrates and organizes emotional and cognitive information related to coping with pain, fear, anxiety, and stress, and potential motor responses, and is a major neural basis of cognitive control ( Bush et al., 2000 ; Shenhav et al., 2013 ). Cognitive control is defined as regulating reactions to pieces of information that are in conflict with one another and in which automated processing may lead to errors ( Miller and Cohen, 2001 ). The goal of cognitive control is to integrate conflicting information into representations that support appropriate behavioral decisions.

The mother's medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) signals that there is something out there that offers the opportunity to collect or appropriate something valuable—mPFC is a central part of the neural basis of appropriating or collecting something ( Anderson et al., 2005 ; Turk et al., 2011 ). Based on the dopaminergic processes involved, the motivation for appropriating something can be very strong: mPF and ACC have the greatest densities of dopaminergic projections from the midbrain of all areas in the cortex ( Williams and Goldman-Rakic, 1993 ; Cohen et al., 2002 ).

Based on her photography-related knowledge, the mother categorizes what she perceives as “something that is photographed.” What is going on out there, could enable her to create a valuable picture. According to the assumptions of Event Cognition ( Newtson, 1973 ; Zacks et al., 2001 ), “a children's birthday party” is not represented in the mother as a continuous, uniform event, but in the form of a few interconnected discrete units or steps, such as welcoming the guests, eating the birthday cake, blowing out the candles, and so on. The mother has detected that such a discrete step of the party has occurred. A photo of it could represent much of her son's birthday party. Activation patterns in prefrontal and hippocampal areas switch on photography-related memory contents that are connected to one another and retained in various locations widely spread over the cerebral cortex ( Tonegawa et al., 2015 ). Context and scene are associated with possible outcomes of taking a photo with a smartphone camera, including a coarse anticipatory representation of the possible photo and its use.

Still without the involvement of conscious processes, the representation of the goal to take a photo is activated in structures of the mother's anterior prefrontal Cortex (PFC) ( Soon et al., 2008 ; Custers and Aarts, 2010 ). Processes in OFC, mPFC, ACC, and ventral striatum analyze whether the goal to take a photo can be achieved in the given situation, and whether it is worth the effort. The result is the decision that the photo is worth the effort.

Steps Accompanied by Conscious Awareness

For taking the photo, representations from different explicit and implicit memory and processing systems must be integrated. Our mother is now consciously recognizing ( Dehaene and Naccache, 2001 ; Damasio, 2010 ) that she is perceiving something that might be worth photographing. She takes her smartphone and points the camera at her son, who is surrounded by friends. She controls what will be seen in the picture. OFC, ACC, amygdala, and the anterior insula build the neural bases of various valuation, filtering, ordering and decision processes ( Hsu et al., 2005 ). The mother's working memory ( Baddeley and Hitch, 1974 ; Miller and Cohen, 2001 ) processes, maintains and integrates different pieces of information of internal and external origin.

The mother takes a photo of her son, a person with whom she is connected through a close positive emotional relationship. Seeing him activates areas in the mother's brain that have a high density of the peptide hormones oxytocin and vasopressin ( Bartels and Zeki, 2004 ). Oxytocin and vasopressin are produced in the hypothalamic Nucleus preopticus (NPO), stored in pituitary, and are involved in the development and maintenance of close selective social relationships ( Carter, 1998 ; Panksepp, 1998 ; Scheele et al., 2013 ; Hostinar et al., 2014 ). They also support the control and suppression of threat-related information ( Nelson and Panksepp, 1998 ; Donaldson and Young, 2008 ; Scheele et al., 2013 ). Particularly oxytocin is involved in the development and maintenance of close selective social relationships or attachment and conveys the feeling of social connectedness ( Carter, 1998 ; Panksepp, 1998 ; Scheele et al., 2013 ; Hostinar et al., 2014 ). Both hormones are associated with activating the mesolimbic reward system ( Donaldson and Young, 2008 ). Oxytocin release correlates with opioid activities, reduces stress and thereby causes a calming effect ( Nelson and Panksepp, 1998 ). In fact, there is a strong antagonism between oxytocin release and glucocorticoids synthesis, i.e., metabolic hormones that are produced and released in response to stressors ( Carter, 1998 ; Hostinar et al., 2014 ; Preckel et al., 2015 ).

The mother's vmPFC assigns a positive value to the neural representations of the situation, photographing in general, and the intended photo in particular. On a non-conscious processing level, however, the anticipatory representation of the threat of her son's potentially negative experiences at school is still effective. This threat is primarily processed in the amygdala, but the mother's vmPFC projects into the amygdala and, thereby, inhibits its activity, which reduces fear and anxiety ( Andolina et al., 2013 ; Hostinar et al., 2014 ). In addition, vmPFC, OFC and ACC project to the hypothalamus and reduce the activity of the mother's stress systems ( Ulrich-Lai and Herman, 2009 ; Hostinar et al., 2014 ). Her implicit processing mechanisms suggest that she can now safely ignore the threat ( Schiller et al., 2008 ).

When she recognizes a sufficient correspondence between the characteristics of the picture on the smartphone display and the mental representation of the desired photo, she presses the shutter button. She creates a permanent external picture of her son in a particular context, a representational digital object, which she possesses and can share with others. An important part of the value the picture has for her is related to the fact that she has created it herself. Actually, people can reliably distinguish between photos that they have taken themselves and photos taken by others ( Sellen et al., 2007 ; St. Jacques et al., 2011 ).

A mountain hiker who discovers something she wants to photograph may have a different experience than a mother at her son's birthday party. She likes to hike alone and enjoys nature and silence. When looking at the mountain landscape, the anticipation of a longer period of non-self-chosen solitude has been activated. The hiker can take a picture, which will allow her to share her experience with her friends. Unlike our example mother, the hiker has more time for taking the picture, because the landscape does not change as quickly as social situations at a party. The hiker can use this time for creatively composing a photo, which will be different from ordinary photos depicting similar landscapes and which the viewers will find beautiful, useful, or important ( Thagard and Stewart, 2011 ; Ellamil et al., 2012 ). She associates and integrates the incoming visual information with certain conceptual and emotional categories as well as with internal representations of existing extraordinary landscape pictures. The neural bases of these operations include structures of two cortical networks that are usually not active at the same time. One of these networks is activated when people focus their attention on external stimuli, the other network when attention is focused on thoughts, memories or imagery ( De Pisapia et al., 2016 ).

Ontogeny of Recognizing, Taking, and Using Photos

Human babies recognize certain photos at an age of 3 months or even earlier (for review, see Bovet and Vauclair, 2000 ). In a cross-cultural study, DeLoache et al. (1998) showed that 9 months old babies treated pictured objects as if they were real objects, explored them with their hands, tried to touch them, or to take them out of the picture. At the age of 19 months, human children understood that pictures are both concrete real objects, but also representations of other objects. From about 1-year of age, children begin to create traces on two-dimensional surfaces with suitable materials ( Thomas and Silk, 1990 ; Wright, 2010 ). At the age of two, children begin to name the meanings of their drawings or paintings. They also know that pictures are made with specific intentions to represent objects or events ( Preissler and Bloom, 2008 ). Children aged 3- to 4-years know what properties of pictures are helpful if they are used to convey ideas of objects to other people, and that there are better and worse pictures for this purpose ( Allen et al., 2010 ). They know that pictures containing a lot of visual details are best used to tell others what objects look like.

Many children like to draw. As much as they develop joy and zeal in drawing, they usually have little interest in owning the pictures as soon as they are done ( Thomas and Silk, 1990 ; Cox, 2005 ; Cherney et al., 2006 ; Wright, 2010 ). If they have mastered a special pictorial challenge, they proudly show their picture and look at it together with others, but they do not go for drawings they made the week or the month before to look at them again. The fascination lies in the activity of drawing itself, in experiencing the ability to create a picture with a certain meaning—and to use this to relate to others ( Cox, 2005 ; Wright, 2010 ). The early ontogenetic development of competences related to producing and using representational pictures happens in the social environment, usually the family. The family is also one of the most productive places of personal photography ( Chalfen, 1987 ; Petrelli and Whittaker, 2010 ). The most successful photography exhibition of all time even had “family” in its title: The Family of Man (1955) .

Children see the photos their parents keep in photo albums, photo books, boxes or computer folders. The photos of the ancestors—and their actions, experiences, relationships, occupations, and possessions—that a family owns can give children a sense of social belonging, societal significance, and security ( Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981 ; Chalfen, 1987 ; Petrelli and Whittaker, 2010 ). These photos are heritable assets of knowledge. They are usually linked to oral or written information, which shows and tells to whom the children belong and whom they can trust. Through mechanisms of social learning, family traditions of photography emerge ( Mäkelä et al., 2000 ; Sharples et al., 2003 ; Petrelli and Whittaker, 2010 ). Children get to know certain ways of using cameras and photos early on ( Mäkelä et al., 2000 ; Sharples et al., 2003 ). They experience how their mother or father reacts to certain events by taking photos—usually positive, which supports this behavior via positive reinforcement learning. Children also realize that taking, viewing, and sharing photos is repeatedly done in certain social contexts, for example at a birthday party, graduation, or wedding. They learn that photographers keep some pictures and discard others and may shape their own taste along this.

Many children start taking photos themselves at preschool age ( Sharples et al., 2003 ; Magnusson, 2018 ). Seven- to 15-year-olds take and use photos in connection with the playful and explorative use of electronic devices ( Mäkelä et al., 2000 ; Sharples et al., 2003 ). They use cameras and photos for joking, like making faces or adopting funny poses, for expressing feelings, or telling stories. According to an international survey, 81% of the 8- to 18-year-olds in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia used a mobile phone in 2013 ( GSMA and NTT DOCOMO, 2014 ). Most of the children got their own mobile phone between 10- and 12-years of age and 55% had access to the internet. The features most used by children and adolescents were cameras (91%), followed by music players and video players. Many young people in their teens and early twenties take and use photos to create a sense of self and an identity ( Schiano et al., 2002 ; RSPH and YHM, 2017 ). Social media provides them with a platform where they can use photos to express different characteristics of themselves and to experience other people's reactions ( Krämer and Winter, 2008 ; Hu et al., 2014 ; Lee et al., 2015 ). Photos of family members and pals are especially important for people ( Mäkelä et al., 2000 ; Sharples et al., 2003 ), and the value of these photos increases with the age of their owners ( Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981 ).

Evolutionary Roots of Taking and Using Photos

Why do photos have the characteristics they have? Why are they important for people all over the world? Which meanings can almost only be represented and communicated through photos Kislinger, 2021 ), and which cannot? In this section, we will refer to cognitive and social building blocks, which are part of the evolved nature of modern humans and suggest answers to these questions. Figure 2 presents an overview of the evolutionary building blocks that underlie the success of photography to which we refer.

Figure 2 . Schematic illustration of the building blocks that are part of the evolved nature of modern humans and form the basis of the importance of photos for people. The arrows show the order in which we describe the building blocks in our model.

Vision as a Central Element of Human Cognition

People take and use photos to represent important events in the environment. Representing features of the environment with survival value is one of the core functions of central nervous systems (CNSs) since they exist. Organisms developed sensory organs, which react to relevant physical and chemical events in the environment, as well as neurons, that is, cells capable of receiving, generating, and transducing signals for internal communication and for relating to the environment ( Butler and Hodos, 2005 ; Gregory, 2008 ). By means of neural activation patterns, organisms have used “images” for hundreds of millions of years ( Damasio, 2010 )—as representations of the environment enhancing predictability in interaction with this environment and, thus, survival. Although it is hard to imagine how a jellyfish with its dispersed nervous system should be able to form an image-like mental representation, the fact that its body responds to stimuli in a coordinated and adaptive way at least hints at such a possibility.

Mammals evolved out of mainly visually oriented reptiles ( Northcutt, 2011 ; Striedter, 2020 ). During their first 100 million years of evolution, however, the reign of dinosaurs forced them underground or into a nocturnal lifestyle. This led to a reduction in visual orientation, while olfaction and hearing were optimized. Within the modern mammals we see a full reinstatement of trichromatic vision only in the primates, while most other mammals remain bi-chromatic as an adaptation to being active at dusk and dawn and at night. Due to specific properties of their central nervous systems, including retinae, primates can extract a broad range of information from the properties of light and its reflections in the physical world ( Felleman and Van Essen, 1991 ; Gollisch and Meister, 2010 ). Vision is a central component of human cognition. Visual content dominates, for example, perception, memory, imagining, and dreaming ( Posner et al., 1976 ; Zimmermann, 1989 ).

Living Together in Groups and Social Attachment

People primarily take photos of other people, especially people to whom they are emotionally connected ( Chalfen, 1987 ; Hu et al., 2014 ; Lee et al., 2015 ). Processing stimuli with social significance has a long evolutionary history ( Wilson, 1984 , 2012 ). The tegmental and diencephalic parts of the brains of birds, bony fish, and mammals feature an evolutionary extremely conservative—hence homologous—social behavior network ( Goodson, 2005 ). This regulates social recognizing, mating, parental behavior, persistent bonding, expressive behavior, aggression, and responses to social stressors. Primates inherited this network virtually unchanged in structure and function from their ancestors. The primate ancestors of humans established close relationships with other individuals in their groups who were not reproductive partners or relatives ( De Waal and Brosnan, 2006 ; Wilson, 2012 ). Social cohesion improved the ability of individuals and groups to adapt to variable environments, to survive and to reproduce. Living together in groups affected both behavior and cognition. In primates, the social domain hosts a substantial part of the motivation to orient to and perceive stimuli, and to carry out certain behaviors and actions. Important and mutually linked social behavior systems are attachment and care , that is, a close selective emotional connection with another individual—the caregiving attachment figure, or the other way round, the attached dependent ( Bowlby, 1974 ; Carter, 1998 ; Panksepp, 1998 ). There is a strong antagonistic interaction between the feelings of safe attachment and distress ( Panksepp, 1998 ). Threatening or stressful situations elicit the desire for social closeness, and societal cohesion increases in times of crisis. Support by an attachment figure provides a sense of security and calmness. Conversely, being isolated from attachment figures or other socially supportive individuals is perceived as a potential threat. This antagonistic interaction is relevant in terms of photography-related behaviors. Photos of attachment figures or of the attached dependents convey important potentials. In experiments, for example, merely seeing the photo of an attachment figure reduced physical pain as effectively as the actual closeness to that person ( Master et al., 2009 ; Eisenberger et al., 2011 ).

Social Learning, Cultural Evolution, and Symbol Systems

An important ability of animals living in groups is profiting from experiences or interactions with other individuals, called social learning ( Richerson et al., 2010 ; Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ). A system of characteristic behavior patterns and preferences, which are socially passed on through generations, is referred to as culture and its gradual change as cultural evolution ( Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ). Cultural phenomena have probably played a greater role in human evolution than in any of the other animals showing cultural diversification (for example wolves or orcas) ever since the common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees ( Richerson et al., 2010 ; Whiten, 2011 ).

Social learning is the base for tradition forming and transferring information via culture. The ancestors of humans used gestures, vocalizations, and found objects as signs for something that was not currently present in the environment to communicate with others ( Seyfarth et al., 2005 ; Deacon, 2006 ; Arbib et al., 2008 ). Over many generations, groups gradually developed a complex system of gestural and vocal signs, as well as rules specifying how these signs were to be combined into larger units of meaning ( Seyfarth et al., 2005 ; Arbib et al., 2008 ). As a crucial step in human evolution, humans began to use symbols , this is, signs that represent meanings based on rules and conventions. Symbols are part of an evolved cultural system, which regulates the relationships between individual signs and indicates how they are combined to represent units of meaning ( Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ). The use of symbols for organizing and conveying information was a crucial step in human evolution. Human symbols are considered as discrete dimensions of inheritance and evolution which interact with genetic evolution. People developed systems of symbols to represent and communicate knowledge, rules and ideas ( Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ; Tomasello, 2014 ). Language became the most important symbol system, likely also pushing brain development. Cultural evolution and genetic evolution interacted and led to a positive feedback selection between cognitive mechanisms, language, and social skills ( Deacon, 1997 ; Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ).

Cooperation, Property, Status, Reputation, Courtship, and Mating

Among the evolutionary mechanisms, which favored cooperation in groups, direct and indirect reciprocity appear to be particularly relevant ( Nowak, 2006 ). These mechanisms are also relevant in terms of taking and using photos. Direct reciprocity is effective when two individuals encounter each other repeatedly: one cooperates assuming that the other one will reciprocate later. Cooperation, hence, benefits both. The mechanism of indirect reciprocity explains cooperation in situations where one individual helps another individual whom the individual may not meet again or from whom no help is expected. This can still pay off, if the helpful behavior is observed by other group members. Indirect reciprocity describes the benefit of an altruistic act for the helping individual, which spreads via gossip or other information. In this detour, the helping individual acquires the reputation of being “generous,” i.e., able and willing to cooperate. This reputation supports access to resources and reproductive success ( Nowak and Sigmund, 2005 ; Nowak, 2006 ). With the evolution of complex language—and later with the distribution of photos—the subset of a population that could receive information about the cooperative potential of an individual tremendously increases as compared to the number of people able to directly observe an individual's behavior. Photography and social networking services on the internet have increased the potential audience enormously.

In human societies, it is generally advantageous to regulate resource use and ownership through rules or conventions in order to avoid costly redundant conflicts ( Stake, 2004 ). Depending on socio-economic background, people have developed specific rules about the appropriation of things as well as about the retention and distribution of property ( Stake, 2004 ). Many animals appropriate things and retain them ( Stake, 2004 ). Property-related experiences and behaviors are based on specific neural substrates, especially in the frontal cortex ( Anderson et al., 2005 ; Turk et al., 2011 ). The brain structures involved are particularly rich in dopamine receptors. The acquisition of property is accordingly associated with strong motivation. When individuals acquire and possess valuable resources, it may also be beneficial to their status within their groups, or may even be to the benefit and status of these groups ( Brown, 1991 ; Van Vugt and Tybur, 2016 ). Much of human social complexity is about status and prestige. This modulates, in turn, individual access to resources in a social dynamic between cooperation and competition ( Nowak and Sigmund, 2005 ; Van Vugt and Tybur, 2016 ). Individuals can display their property and signal that they have a certain status within the social and cultural hierarchies of their group or society. To communicate this status, individuals may use symbols of their possessions. Individuals can also share their resources with others, be generous or even wasteful with their possessions to increase their prestige and, ultimately, their reproductive success ( Buss and Schmitt, 1993 ). In women and men, the acquisition, retention, and use of resources or possession have specific characteristics ( Brown, 1991 ; Buss and Schmitt, 1993 ).

Photography has provided people with effective means to signal their social status to a large audience ( Krämer and Winter, 2008 ; Piazza and Bering, 2009 ). Distributing selfies with famous people or in front of famous sights, for example, is motivated by telling others about one's own potential to meet these famous people or to travel, and to communicate one's own interests and attitudes ( Krämer and Winter, 2008 ; Diefenbach and Christoforakos, 2017 ). Many people also take and share status-relevant photos of themselves with their “belongings,” such as house, car, boat, their beautiful partner, or children ( De Looper, 2016 ; Jain and Mavani, 2017 ). Empirical data suggest that people also use photos for enhancing their mate value in the minds of potential romantic or sexual partners ( Piazza and Bering, 2009 ; Smith, 2016 ; Hobbs et al., 2017 ; Sedgewick et al., 2017 ; Gale and Lewis, 2020 ; Kemp, 2021 ; Morris, 2021 ). We will discuss this in more detail in the section on the functions of photography.

Memory and the Urge to Create Coherent Explanations for Events and Conditions

Humans improved their ability to use language to categorize behaviors, events, objects and states. They developed a special system of comprehensive memory for experiences, including social, called episodic memory ( Tulving, 2005 ). Thereby, experiences of “what,” “with whom,” “when,” and “how it felt” are integrated in a way that individuals can consciously access their stored representations and have a comprehensive awareness of their own life as related to others. With the ability to represent, process, and communicate past and future, as well as possible or imagined events through language, came the urge to explain what happens in the world, to interpret the past and to predict the future ( Pettitt, 2011 ). Humans developed an awareness of mortality, thinking about death, and the desire to overcome mortality. The earliest burial sites found with material traces of ritual practices are around 100,000-years old ( Pettitt, 2011 ; Wilson, 2012 ). The desire for extending one's effectiveness beyond lifespan could also play a role in taking pictures ( Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981 ; Chalfen, 1987 ). Many people retain photos of ancestors in a respectful way, in the implicit understanding that their descendants will do the same. This is reminiscent of animistic cultures, where identity and existence of people are deeply rooted in cults around ancestors ( Frazer, 1911 ; Bird-David, 1999 ).

When taking a photo of another person, the photographer not just appropriates a picture of the light reflections from this person, but also of the visual, behaviorally relevant signals that this person emits at that particular moment. This may be part of the reason why many people consider appropriating a picture of a person to have “magical” ( Frazer, 1911 ; Kittredge, 1929 ) or “animistic” ( Bird-David, 1999 ; Harvey, 2005 ) properties. The term “animistic” refers to the belief that not only humans, but also animals, plants, lakes, mountains, etc. have souls and are animated ( Harvey, 2005 ). With taking a picture of a certain person her or his personality and even “soul” may be captured, and the owner of this picture can change the condition of the pictured person—with potentially negative consequences ( Hetherwick, 1902 ; Frazer, 1911 ; Hocart, 1922 ). Image magic has a long tradition going back far into human prehistory ( Kittredge, 1929 ). Today, there is an ongoing struggle for legal regulation of the protection of one's image as part of personal rights and property rights, indicating that personal images still retain their special private status. Even on a rational base, the power that is conveyed by taking, owning, and using photos [e.g., Regulation (EU), 2016 ], is still a delicate topic in modern Western societies.

Language enables humans to integrate a huge amount of information into meaningful contexts and to create explanations of events in which these events appear ordered and understandable toward a goal, rather than meaningless, accidental and pointless ( Kahneman, 2011 ). In addition to language, an evolutionarily older cognitive system remained ( Evans, 2008 ; Kahneman, 2011 ), providing quick reactions to relevant events in the environment on the basis of minimal sensory information, for example, via faces with emotional expressions or expressive body poses ( Kislinger, 2021 ). Certain events depicted in photos cause activations of evolutionarily old brain structures, like superior colliculus, pulvinar, and amygdala ( Morris et al., 1999 ; Van Le et al., 2013 ; Almeida et al., 2015 ). Objects and events pictured in photos are not only recognized by humans, but by many other species ( Bovet and Vauclair, 2000 ; Kano and Tomonaga, 2009 ). In some cases, the last common ancestor of humans and a species in question lived long ago, e.g., 220 million years in the case of pigeons ( Aust and Huber, 2010 ). This either hints at an ancient ability shared via phylogenetic inheritance (homology) or at parallel evolution (analogy).

Functions and Adaptative Value of Photography

A “function” of a behavior describes a specific contribution of the individual expression of this behavior to survival and reproductive success ( Jablonka and Lamb, 2014 ). Photography-related behaviors touch the evolutionary functional domains of well-being and social connectedness, which are at the core of human nature. These behaviors will therefore, directly or indirectly, relate to potential individual societal and—ultimately—reproductive success. We suggest that taking, owning, viewing, sharing, and using photos provide a specific and effective strategy for coping with complex environments fraught with uncertainty. Photography as a coping-strategy comprises four core domains: (1) making sense, (2) appropriating an image, (3) establishing and supporting social connectedness, and (4) courtship and mating. These four domains can be involved in different photography-related behaviors to different degrees.

Making Sense

“Making sense” plays a role in many photography-related behaviors ( Harrison, 2002 ; Frohlich et al., 2013 ); it is particularly evident in the taking of photos ( Chalfen, 1987 ; Gillet et al., 2016 ). Thereby, people assign a certain cause to an event—that is, they create an explanation for why this event occurs—or a certain meaningful order, which is consistent with a goal. The 6-year-old birthday boy from our example above laughs because he gets along well with other children, and other people want him to be happy. The photo of the hiker shows that being alone on a mountain top is great, because it gives one a deep personal feeling for nature, which still can be shared with friends via a picture. According to our framework, people build mental representations, which make an event understandable. As a consequence, the future course of the event appears predictable and controllable. Taking photos allows making sense immediately and intuitively, without the involvement of complex reasoning.

Sharing and viewing photos can also be used for making sense of events. The photo of a family reunion can show a group of laughing people who relate to each other in a friendly and nice way, even if a heated argument broke out at this meeting, which may have led to long-term insults and resentments. Particularly, people who were at this meeting can look at this photo to reassure themselves that, despite certain controversy, things are fine and people like each other. This is supported by the propensity of viewers to assume that what they see in photos reflects reality. Understanding photos does not require the mastery of a particular language, complex cultural knowledge, or elaborate thinking. A single photo can give a fairly comprehensive idea of an event—possibly better than any verbal description: “a picture is worth a thousand words” ( The Post-Standard, 1911 ).

Appropriating an Image

The domain “appropriating an image” is related to the fact that people gain permanent access to valuable information by taking, sharing, or getting a photo—most frequently related to social relationships. Photographers relate to an event or object through the camera, select certain properties of this object and the scene in which it is contained, and create a focus. From the flow of the object's appearances, which they perceive over a certain period of time, they extract a single picture and fix it. It represents only a small fraction of the sensory information that is available in that situation. By selecting and organizing the information, which they include in the picture, they interpret the object or event. If they have managed to create the picture with the intended meaning, this success conveys the experience of effectiveness and competence ( Krämer and Winter, 2008 ). This experience reduces emotional arousal and physiological stress responses to potential threats and supports coping with them ( Bandura, 1997 ). A man looking out the window of the plane that is taking off, for example, may take a number of photos, thereby potentially also coping with his fear of flying. Taking photos may help to maintain control in a potentially stressful situation.

Establishing and Supporting Social Connectedness

Seeing an important person in a photo allows the viewer to relate emotionally to this person, although she or he is absent or may have passed away. Photos of their own children, parents, or romantic partners are particularly important to people ( Bartels and Zeki, 2004 ; Gobbini et al., 2004 ; Leibenluft et al., 2004 ; Petrelli and Whittaker, 2010 ; Hu et al., 2014 ). Photos of loved ones enable people to feel close to them, provide a sense of security and calmness and reduce the sensation of pain ( Master et al., 2009 ; Eisenberger et al., 2011 ). Photos, to some extent, can substitute for physical closeness. Viewing, owning, or sharing photos of family members or ancestors support developing cultural and genealogical roots ( Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981 ; Petrelli and Whittaker, 2010 ). Hence, taking and using photos relates to establishing, maintaining and strengthening social connections ( Kindberg et al., 2005 ; Barasch et al., 2014 ; Lee et al., 2015 ; Pittman and Reich, 2016 ).

Many people share their photos, and if a photo is liked and appreciated by others, the photographer experiences self-efficacy ( Krämer and Winter, 2008 ) and self-esteem ( Burrow and Rainone, 2017 ). This is exploited by the “like buttons,” an enormously popular feature of social media platforms ( Kemp, 2021 ). Sharing photos contributes to a common understanding of the world. Sharing photos also enables people to convey others views that they enjoy, e.g., photos of hilarious events or natural sceneries. Photos of natural scenes (as opposed to human artifacts or urban environments) have a positive influence on the well-being of viewers ( Berto, 2005 ; Valtchanov and Ellard, 2015 ) as “Biophilia” is a human universal ( Appleton, 1975 ; Ulrich, 1983 ; Wilson, 1984 ; Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989 ). Viewing such photos relaxes, reduces emotional stress, and thereby regenerates depleted cognitive resources.

People often use photos to show others who they are and what role they play in society. Issues of identity, reputation, prestige, or status often play a role in personal photography ( Chalfen, 1987 ; Barasch et al., 2014 ; RSPH and YHM, 2017 ). If one person photographs another person, this can be of value only for the photographer, or for both ( Milgram, 1976 ). People can use photos to influence how other people perceive the pictured individuals, objects, or events and thus exert social control ( Sharples et al., 2003 ; Diefenbach and Christoforakos, 2017 ). People being photographed, however, may also use this circumstance for their own goals, like for influencing how others perceive them ( Harrison, 2002 ; Krämer and Winter, 2008 ; Jain and Mavani, 2017 ). Being photographed can immensely increase the size of the “audience.”

As humans are radically social in their nature, observing or monitoring the behavior of other people plays a central role in the motivation to use social media on the internet and to post photos ( Joinson, 2008 ; Lee et al., 2015 ; Malik et al., 2016 ). People are usually aware of the presence of cameras. This may produce “audience effects,” i.e., the feeling of being watched influences behavior and makes people behave in a socially agreeable way ( Bateson et al., 2006 ; Oda et al., 2015 ), by showing, for example, “photo faces.” Through this tendency, photography supports cooperative coexistence in complex societies and has an adaptative value both, on the individual and on the societal level.

We are well aware that people also distribute photos of atrocities. The impact of such photos can be used to boost the importance of the photographer or distributor, or even to hurt other people, to violate the rights of others, or to deceive ( Smith et al., 2008 ; Kowalski et al., 2014 ). Manipulative to harmful photo use is facilitated by the fact that photographic forgeries are becoming increasingly difficult to detect, both in social and in journalistic media ( Campbell, 2014 ; Nightingale et al., 2017 ). Various detrimental outcomes of taking and using photos have required legal regulation of photography-related behaviors [e.g., Regulation (EU), 2016 ]. The ubiquity of taking photos has massively reduced possibilities of intimacy and privacy. A vast dark side of photography exists outside of personal experience. The large social media providers use the shared personal photos as a data source. The acquisition of these data, their possession, the algorithms of their management and the extraction of information from them give the companies enormous power, which has not been put under democratic control until now ( Zuboff, 2015 ).

Courtship and Mating

Courtship and mating are certainly part of the domain of establishing and strengthening social connections and attachment ( Hazan and Shaver, 1987 ; Fisher et al., 2002 ). But they are directly relevant in terms of evolutionary function and as such encompass a range of distinct strategies and conflicts ( Fisher et al., 2002 ; Buss and Duntley, 2011 ). The global prevalence of intimate partner homicide reflects the high value of the activities and resources that are at stake, as well as the severity of the conflicts in question ( Stöckl et al., 2013 ). Sexual or reproductive behaviors shaped all living beings and played a central role in the evolution of human cognition ( Miller, 2001 ; Nowak, 2006 ). Sexual themes and symbols are featured in some of the oldest preserved artifacts ( Conard, 2009 ). With photos, a new type of visual cueing was developed that fulfills special functions in attracting potential partners, mate selection, and sexual behavior. The potentials of photography range from tender romantics to hardcore pornography.

“Beauty” plays a special role in this context. Many people want to take and use beautiful photos ( Bakhshi et al., 2015 ; De Looper, 2016 ). Darwin (1879/2004) associated the “sense of beauty” (p. 114) with the context of sexual selection: the function of beauty is that the choosing female or male individuals are “excited” by it. Individuals considered to be beautiful manage to “excite attention” (p. 467). In this sense, beauty is a sensory signal that it could be advantageous to pay attention to, and approach, the sender of this signal. Among the hashtags (terms assigned to posted photos) that were most frequently used on Instagram in 2020, “Love” came first, “Art” fifth, and “Beautiful” sixth ( Kemp, 2021 ). Instagram is the most photography-related social platform and was the fifth most visited website worldwide in 2020 ( Kemp, 2021 ).

The invention of photography and its further technological developments, including digital communication, allowed people to create a new type of sensory cues relevant to courtship activities, mate selection, sexual intercourse, and (ultimately) reproduction. Photography has been used almost from the start to satisfy cravings for pictures of naked people and for erotic images. Retinal images of naked potential partners expressing interest in sexual activity has meant observers had access to reproduction for hundreds of thousands of years. Photos of sexual acts are among those images that are most emotionally arousing ( Bradley and Lang, 2007 ; Wehrum et al., 2013 ) and pornography is one of the most prominent domains of internet use.

People also use photos to influence choices of potential romantic or sexual partners. The success of dating applications on the Internet has greatly increased the importance of photos in connection with courtship and mating ( Piazza and Bering, 2009 ; Smith, 2016 ; Hobbs et al., 2017 ). Social media platforms and dating apps enable users to form relationships with people they have never seen before. Mobile dating applications are used by more and more people ( Smith, 2016 ; Morris, 2021 ). People looking for partners create profiles on these apps that they use to present themselves. Photos of oneself play a central role in this. People show photos of themselves—often also taken by themselves—in which they are represented as they would like to be seen by potential romantic partners ( Sedgewick et al., 2017 ; Gale and Lewis, 2020 ). The use of such photos enables people to reveal actual traits of themselves, but also to make themselves appear more attractive than they potentially are ( Sedgewick et al., 2017 ; Gale and Lewis, 2020 ). People can also use symbolic self-made photos to create a desirable impression of themselves in potential romantic partners, for example photos of groups of nice, laughing people, pets, flowers, a beautiful garden, an elegant apartment, tourist attractions, dangerous environments, sporting events, or full bookshelves ( Krämer and Winter, 2008 ; Piazza and Bering, 2009 ). Online dating is not only increasing rapidly among young adults, but also among the older population ( Smith, 2016 ; Morris, 2021 ). Through dating apps, photos play an increasingly important role in mate selection, which played a central role in the evolution of human cognition ( Miller, 2001 ). When photos are used in dating and courtship, there is also the characteristic connection between emotionally positive information and the processing of uncertainty ( Berger and Calabrese, 1975 ; Knobloch and Solomon, 1999 ), addressed above. In this context, the positive information concerns one's own attractive properties. Uncertainty is associated with one's search, and potential negative outcomes of establishing relationships with people one does not know from face-to-face encounters.

The Mental Utilization Hypothesis of Photography

We propose that the success of smartphones as well as photography is based on core human mental mechanisms which are primarily related to the social domain. Photography exploits evolved cognitive and social predispositions. In this sense, our framework is a mental exploitation hypothesis, analogous to the Sensory Exploitation Hypothesis in evolutionary biology (e.g., Ryan, 1990 ). This hypothesis states that new preferences evolve along established pre-existing sensory biases and response tendencies, such as primates owing their social and/or sexual preference for red to their old predilection for this color, which usually indicates ripe fruits ( Ghazanfar and Santos, 2004 ).

Sensory biases and preferences also play an important role in photography-related behaviors. The visual channel provides information, which is converted into, or affects, mental representations. In our framework, however, the focus is on a higher, more integrated level of processing, on which those mechanisms and functions are organized that control the mental representation of the world and flexibly adapt social behavior. In connection with photography, the term exploitation may have a negative connotation, such as photographers exploiting the people in front of the camera (e.g., Sontag, 1978 ). For this reason, we refer to our framework as the mental utilization hypothesis of photography. It suggests that photography fits the nature of human perception and mental processing like a key fits its lock.

Photography as a Coping Strategy

Along to the four levels of Tinbergen, our analysis of photography-related behaviors suggests that people take and use photos to cope with certain stressful and threatening events in specific ways. The conceptualization of photography as a coping strategy is counterintuitive against the background that people usually like to take photos and generally take, share and own photos of events associated with happiness, pleasure, love, or success ( Chalfen, 1987 ; Sharples et al., 2003 ; Hu et al., 2014 ). Individuals who take or use such photos, we propose, experience a pleasant situation, but are also—non-consciously—exposed to threatening information or uncertainty. As examples, we mentioned the mother who photographs her 6-year-old son, the lonely hiker, and the man who is afraid of flying. Taking and using photos allows people to search for, and engage, in emotionally positive information. Successful coping through photography-related behaviors reduces complexity, uncertainty, and anxiety. Coping, or the exercise of cognitive control, does not have to be exclusively reactive, but can also be carried out proactively ( Bandura, 1997 ). Coping through taking and using photos has features that can be described on a continuous scale, with reactive coping at one end and proactive coping at the other.

People use photography not only to cope with events with generally positive emotional value, but also in coping with negative events. For example, traffic accidents, high-rise fires or other disasters tend to lure in bystanders and onlookers taking smartphone photos of the scene or of the victims ( Vollmuth, 2017 ; Newton, 2019 ). There is no research on the motives which drive such photography-related behaviors. They may be similar to the motives which make people watch horror or crime films ( Bartsch and Mares, 2014 ). What people see confronts them with something extremely meaningful—threats that exist in the world, their own mortality and vulnerability ( Arndt et al., 1997 ). Most of these bystanding photographers immediately share their products. Taking and sharing the photos, we suggest, enable people to make sense of threatening events to get along with them, but also use them to push their own importance and prestige within their networks.

Has Photography Become a Human Universal?

Several researchers discussed the creation and use of representational pictures as human universal ( Deacon, 2006 ; Donald, 2006 ; Dutton, 2009 ). The creation of realistic visual pictures appeared more than 30,000-years ago and some of them have been preserved on cave walls ( Guthrie, 2005 ; White et al., 2018 ). Photography, in connection with digital technology and smartphones, has made it possible for everyone to create, own, and share realistic pictures easily and effortlessly and to integrate such pictures in everyday life. Based on our analysis and statistical data ( Statista, 2019 ; Carrington, 2020 ; Kemp, 2021 ), we conclude that taking, viewing, and sharing photos through the use of smartphones has become a human universal—a “new” universal, according to Brown's (1991) classification—that is based on context-sensitive predispositions, particularly connected with the radically social human nature, and differentiates itself in the societal domain ( Kotrschal, 2019 ). Photography not only classifies as a human universal, but also as a unique human feature not shared with any other animal species—not only because other species lack the technical means of photography, but before all, they seem to lack the motivation and mental mechanisms behind the typical human urge to capture the world in images. We conclude that photography is closely matching the unique construction of the human mind and qualifies as a feature of human nature, i.e., the Conditio humana ( Arendt, 1958 ; Kotrschal, 2019 ).

Figure 3 summarizes the conditions, components, and abilities that have made photography a human universal as proposed by the mental utilization hypothesis of photography. One element of Figure 3 relates to the specific social contexts and environmental features that generate photography-related behaviors, as suggested by the evolutionary building blocks of photography. They are (1) coexistence in large, complexly structured societies; (2) frequent encounters with strangers, the outcome of which is often difficult to predict; (3) strong mutual observation of behavior; (4) individuals' well-being and prosperity depend on judgments by strangers; (5) requirement to display one's own status symbolically in public; (6) continuous confrontation with the news of success or profit, as well as disaster, illness, or death; (7) large number of potential sexual or reproductive partners among strangers; (8) individuals have to make far-reaching decisions about their future lives; (9) requirement of communication with absent or distant people; and (10) requirement of quick communication with strangers across cultural or linguistic boundaries.

Figure 3 . The Mental Utilization Hypothesis of Photography. The schematic illustration shows the proposed conditions, components, and abilities that made photography a human universal. An arrow means “provides the basis for” or “leads to”.

Limitations

The analysis of a particular behavior on the basis of the four levels of Tinbergen requires the integration of findings from a range of disciplines. Despite the referenced mechanisms and functions of taking photos, which represent the present state of knowledge, our conclusions remain necessarily speculative—because of the preliminary nature of all scientific results, because of the inherent pitfalls of attempting to integrate such diverse results into a comprehensive synthesis, and due to the space constraints of a journal article. In addition, there are very few empirical findings on taking photos, and they come only from the Western world. Thus, we may underestimate the cultural diversity in photography, although we are quite confident that the behavioral core is based on human nature, and therefore, should in principle, apply to all people. Within our conceptual frame we describe taking and using photos as functional outcomes of cognitive and social adaptations. It could certainly be argued that the success of photography is ultimately a byproduct of the accessibility, affordability and success of smartphones and social media, which results from marketing activities of powerful companies. But this is a different level argument not contradicting our utilization hypothesis. Our analysis of photography-related behaviors as coping strategies creates a picture of photography in which the benefits are generally greater than the cognitive and social costs, which also explains why photography became such a sweeping worldwide success once the smartphone technology became available.

The goal of producing an image that supports memory only plays a subordinate role in our description of photography-related behaviors. In this respect, our framework differs from explanations that describe the production of memory pictures as a central function of photography ( Milgram, 1976 ; Kahneman, 2011 ; Frohlich et al., 2013 ; Henkel, 2014 ). These explanations are consistent with the fact that many people stated the retention of memories, when asked about the purpose of photographing ( Chalfen, 1987 ; Kindberg et al., 2005 ; Broekhuijsen et al., 2017 ; Lee, 2018 ). Empirical findings, however, show that people lose many photos they have taken or never look at them again ( Kirk et al., 2006 ; Whittaker et al., 2010 ). Furthermore, the experimental studies on the question of whether taking or seeing photos improves people's ability to remember past events produced a multitude of different and sometimes contradicting results (for review, see Foley, 2020 ). This was one of the incentives for us to attempt a new synthesis within an evolutionary theory frame.

Testable Predictions for Future Research

As shown in Table 2 , the mental utilization theory of photography allows generating a number of testable predictions. Ideally, these would be tackled by experimental and behavioral field studies in natural environments, in both everyday and lab situations. Rapidly developing mobile techniques (such as EEG headsets, eye-tracking devices, etc.) open up new possibilities for the investigation of the attention structures and specific cognitive mechanisms involved in taking and using photos.

Table 2 . A sample of testable predictions along the 4 levels of Tinbergen based on the mental utilization hypothesis of photography.

We position viewing, sharing, and using personal photos within the coherent theory of the evolution of life and human nature. On the basis of the four levels of Tinbergen (1963) , we developed a theoretical framework that describes the characteristics of photos and photography-related behaviors, including potential adaptative values related to the evolutionary functional domains of coping, well-being, social connectedness, courtship, and mating. We hypothesized that people take or use photos in contexts in which a pleasant event is coupled with uncertainty or with the processing of threatening information, and that people generally use photography as a coping strategy. Based on our analysis, we propose the Mental Utilization Hypothesis that explains the success of photography by its match with core human mental mechanisms, which characterize human nature.

The proposed hypothesis provides a novel conceptual framework, potentially useful in devising future experimental studies of photography. Despite the global ubiquity of photos, there is still almost no research into the cognitive mechanisms underlying photo taking. Investigations into the courtship or mating functions of photography are still limited to the explicit use of photos in online dating, but these functions are more fundamental and embracing. Studies regarding evolutionary functions of photography are particularly desirable. Important findings could be gained through comparisons between cultures, subcultures and sociological strata, gender and age classes. Important questions in such comparisons could be whether social prestige and social, occupational, or reproductive success can be linked with photography. Is photography an addition to existing social and sexual behavior or is it part of a socio-sexual change which compensates for or replaces previous behaviors or customs? Does it have “emergent properties” not found in its constituent elements? Last but not least, our description of taking and using photos as a coping strategy provides a comprehensive theoretical basis for new experimental research into the application of photography in psychotherapeutic contexts. With photography, people developed a new means of representing experiences and ideas through pictures with special characteristics, the understanding of which requires a minimum of effort and cultural knowledge. We are creatures in an increasingly complex social world for whom and in which these pictures open up powerful possibilities for action, but also for feeling at home and safe.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the analysis are included in the article, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

This project was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): W1262-B29.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. They also thank Jenna Hicken for personal assistance in translating the manuscript.

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Keywords: photography, psychology, biology, evolution, coping, wellbeing, human universals, social cognition and interaction

Citation: Kislinger L and Kotrschal K (2021) Hunters and Gatherers of Pictures: Why Photography Has Become a Human Universal. Front. Psychol. 12:654474. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.654474

Received: 16 January 2021; Accepted: 11 May 2021; Published: 08 June 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Kislinger and Kotrschal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Leopold Kislinger, leopold.kislinger@ufg.at ; orcid.org/0000-0003-4383-5852

† These authors have contributed equally to this work

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Article contents

Photography and the ethnographic method.

• Sasanka Perera Sasanka Perera South Asian University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.379
• Published online: 28 August 2019

Photography has had a close association with anthropology from the beginning of the discipline. However, this proximity has not been as evident since the 1960s. Despite this seeming discomfort with photographs in contemporary social anthropology in particular, they can play a useful role in social research in general and social anthropology in particular as both sources of information and objects of research. This is not to about using photographs as a decorative element in a written text as is often done. What is useful is to see how photographs can become audible taking into account when and where they were taken and by whom. To do this however, methodological considerations of photography needs to travel from the sub-disciplinary domains of visual sociology and visual anthropology into the mainstreams of these disciplines as well as into the midst of the social science enterprise more generally.

• photography
• anthropology

Introduction

Aaron Siskind has noted, “photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving” and “what you have caught on film is captured forever” because “it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” 1 These words capture much of the commonsensical, popular, and emotional assumptions about photography and photographs. That is, photographs (and by this I mean undoctored still photographs of people, events, and places) are by and large good repositories of memory and social history narrated pictorially. But obviously, for this information to be of any significant use for research in social sciences and humanities in general, there must be a way in which this information might be reliably decoded and presented in written form. Alternatively, they need to add a nuanced research sensibility to a given research project. In other words, photographs have to be centrally implicated in the process of research and not merely be decorative accompaniments to the final written project. But by and large, this has not happened beyond the restricted parameters of visual anthropology (and visual sociology) on one hand, and disciplinary domains such as art history, photography and film studies, cultural studies, and to some extent archaeology on the other. In the case of the former’s contemporary mainstream practices, there almost seems to be an anxiety over the visual except in the genre of ethnographic films.

This article poses two interrelated questions to address why this situation has come to dominate mainstream social sciences with a focus on social anthropology. These two broad questions can be formulated as follows:

What is the axiomatic relationship between photography and anthropology historically, and what kind of anxieties are embedded in this relationship, which might explain contemporary social anthropology’s seeming fear of photography? This question does not extend itself to film, as in the case of ethnographic films.

In the context of the understanding that presents itself through the answers to the queries in question 1 above, how could photography be seen as a productive component of social research, including in ethnography? Toward this end, this article presents three case studies based on my own recent work, which heavily depended on photography.

My interest is not merely with photographs taken by professionals like anthropologists in situations clearly spelled out as “research” or “field” contexts. Barbara Wolbert ( 2000 ) has observed that an “‘anthropologist as photographer’ is both an amateur and professional” (p. 321). In this context, anthropologists are generally not formally trained photographers. However, when they use cameras in their professional contexts despite the absence of training in photography, “they do make photos in a professional context” (Wolbert, 2000 , p. 321). But many photographs anthropologists take in such professional contexts do not become a core part of their reading of social situations or their narratives available in the public domain. Beyond such contexts however, I am also interested in photographs taken by individuals who are not necessarily researchers. Instead, they can be individuals such as travelers in the colonial period or contemporary professionals such as news photographers or ordinary people who simply happen to have access to cameras as they engage in routine activities or are confronted with extraordinary events. We need to keep in mind that in 21st-century global circumstances, the visual more than the written text has come to dominate our quotidian lives given the democratization of the act of photographing consequent to the introduction of cameras to mobile phones. This means that cameras are now owned by almost everyone and photographs are widely taken, stored, and often publicly circulated as never before. This has made photographs and photography widely accessible across class, cultural, and ethnic divides as well as across the world. While much of what is available in this sense involves photos taken in situations of leisure, there is no doubt that there are multiple and easily accessible repositories of photographs that have not been utilized for research in social anthropology, despite their availability.

Photography’s Historical Presence in Anthropology

Photography has had a long-term relationship with anthropology. But, as MacDougal ( 1997 ) has correctly pointed out, anthropology as a discipline has never been able to work out how to clearly implicate photography in the practice of the discipline (pp. 276, 283). Viewed differently however, this difficultly can also be seen as a contradiction that defies explanation. For instance, as argued by Pinney ( 2011 ), cross-cultural concerns over causation, evidence, personhood, and matters of monumentality are issues that anthropology deals with and are also of interest to photography, making that engagement “anthropological” (p. 11). And yet, that seeming symbiosis cannot be seen convincingly in the recently published anthropological record. Hence the contradiction, to which not too many explanations have been offered within the discipline itself. Utilization of photographs in the early ethnographic practice emanated from following the prolific use of images in 18th- and 19th-century travel literature. However, this earlier practice consisted of using engravings, drawings, and paintings, whose place was taken over by photography once the practice was invented and made widely available. The early ethnographic practice followed this tradition of travel literature, which described what a person had actually seen. It was merely a matter of an anthropologist taking the place once occupied by a “traveler.”

With the expansion of colonialism, the curiosity to “know” more about the colonized people and their material culture also simultaneously expanded in imperial centers. The evolution of this taste for exotic visual objects coincided to a certain extent with the early development of anthropology itself. It is in this overall scheme of things that Sir Walter Baldwin Spence once noted with regard to film in early 20th century , that his intention was to show the world “the real native” (quoted in MacDougal, 1997 , p. 276). Both film and photography offered what seemed to be an irrefutable corpus of “facts” whose authority and authenticity were established within the realms of knowledge available at the time. After all, it was an individual who was “on the spot” to capture these images—in real time. This cluster of assumptions was captured by E. H. Man in his essay “A Brief Account of the Nicobar Islands” ( 1886 ), when he suggested that “more correct information [can] be obtained from photography than from any verbal description” (quoted in Pinney, 2011 , pp. 14–15). In this way, photography was understood as a crucial and “clinically accurate” method for recording “facts.” However, the word “method” itself was never used in the debates at the time. The alleged accuracy of photography was based on the following closely related assumptions and conditions:

The historical record shows that early anthropologists had no faith in “native” people’s ability to offer what they considered factual information pertaining to their social systems and cultural domains. This was considered to be the result of these peoples’ civilizational backwardness. As such, only something tangibly “scientific” could overcome this situation, which stood in the way of advancing “science.” Science in this case was anthropology. This is what Pinney means when he suggests that the “anthropological potentiality of photography was defined” when early anthropologists were concerned about validity of what the “natives” actually said (Pinney, 2011 , p. 14). But in reality, the circumstances were quite different. Many of the roots of these difficulties in communication can be traced to early anthropologists’ inadequate language training and the resultant challenges in understanding specific local situations and nuanced conversations (Pinney, 2011 , p. 14). In this context, photography, with its direct lineage to “science,” addressed this lacuna.

As early anthropology evolved in its preliminary phases, there was no confidence in observation-related research methods. This anxiety resulted partly from a reductionist understanding of “science,” which was influential in formal academic and scientific discourses of the time. During these pioneering times of the discipline, carefully formulated fieldwork, as it has been understood since the second half of the 20th century (consisting of case studies, interviews, and so on), was yet to become an established research tool. It is in such an intellectual climate that Andrew Lang posed the following question in his book The Making of Religion ( 1896 ): “how can you pretend to raise a science on such foundations, especially as the savage informants wish to please or mystify the inquirers, or they answer at random, or deliberately conceal their most sacred institutions?” (quoted in Pinney, 2011 , pp. 25, 156). Lang’s target of ridicule was “observation.” Faced with these kinds of situations, photography was considered the most viable scientific option. In the construction of this favorable disposition, photography’s ability to freeze time and space was considered a major asset. Moreover, the belief was that such freezing of time and space occurred while natives were situated in perceivably natural states of habitation surrounded by their cultural implements and social practices. The postindustrialization intellectual climate, within which the emergence of anthropology also needs to be located, took the chemical processes involved in making photography work very seriously. This further reinforced its identity as a scientific tool. It is in this context that C. H. Read noted that “there is no question” about information captured in photography (quoted in Pinney, 2011 , p. 15).

The implication of 19th-century photography in anthropology can be at least partly traced to its role in documenting the human body. Nineteenth-century anthropology was often seen as an extension of “comparative anatomy” (Pinney, 2011 , p. 15). Given this association, photography played a crucial role in organizing societies according to types by creating human models (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 280). The assumption was that these models offered possibilities for comparative analysis across the world (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 280). In this context, photography was seen as a reliable tool that would make it possible to record the complexities in human body types.

As social anthropology evolved—particularly in the first decades of the 20th century —transforming itself from the informal nonprofessional armchair practice of its early pioneers, photography as a tool of reliable data collection, recording, and dissemination was already well accepted within the three conditions and assumptions referred to earlier. It is in this context that E. B. Tylor, a prominent anthropologist of his generation, noted that “the science of anthropology owes not a little to the art of photography” (quoted in Pinney, 2011 , p. 29). As he elaborated, “most engravings of race-types to be found in books [are] worthless—now-a-days little ethnographical value is attached to any but photographic portraits” (quoted in Pinney, 2011 , p. 30).

The seeming methodological reliability of photography in anthropology during this period however was more than a matter of the “accuracy” of the “facts” it supposedly presented. At one level, photography’s presence in social anthropology in the late 19th century and early 20th century offered the discipline a sense of being reliably anchored to stable foundations of “science.” In addition, photography played an equally important role in authenticating the ethnographic authority of professional anthropologists. Photographs that accompanied published accounts squarely situated these scholars in the midst of the “strange” and “exotic” places and people they were describing. In other words, this was no longer a matter of hearsay based on other people’s reports. This trend was clearly visible well into the mid 20th century as professional social anthropology was institutionally established. MacDougal ( 1997 ) has described photography’s prominent presence in ethnographies until the 1930s, after which it tended to occupy a much less obvious position. This generalization is made by taking into account the work undertaken by both amateur and professional anthropologists. But in both circumstances, an emphasis was placed on the “anthropological” content or focus of these works. C. W. Hatterseley’s The Baganda at Home ( 1908 ) marketed itself with the claim, “With One Hundred Pictures of Life and Work in Uganda.” Similarly, Henry A. Junod’s The Life of a South African Tribe ( 1913 ) offered its readers 112 black-and-white photographs. Charles and Brenda Seligmann’s book The Veddas ( 1911 ), based on fieldwork in Ceylon, presents about 112 photographs. R. S. Rattray’s Ashanti ( 1923 ) contained 143 black-and-white photos (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 281). The most obvious feature in the books by Hatterseley, Junod, the Seligmanns, and Rattray is the saturation of photographs. But these photos were not closely or self-consciously interlinked with the written text. In other words, the stories these books presented could be told without the photos. Along with their captions, these photos helped provide a secondary narrative in pictorial form, which simply coexisted with what was written without making an inherent or symbiotic link. But in almost all cases, these writers were narrating their stories from the “field,” and the images helped establish beyond any doubt their proximity to the circumstances they were describing. Even by 1940 , when E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s celebrated ethnography The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People was published, it presented 41 photographs (Wolbert, 2000 , p. 325). As in the texts referred to earlier, Evans-Pritchard’s photos took his readers on a visual tour aided by his written text to the parts of Sudan where he had conducted his fieldwork.

As anthropology evolved in Europe and the United States in the first half of the 20th century , Margaret Mead emerged as one of the most vocal supporters of photography in anthropology. Mead’s interest emerged within her overall attempt to promote the visual in social science research by resorting to film as well as photography. Her intention was to use imagery as an integral discursive practice in anthropology, which she perceived as a “discipline of words” (quoted in Pink, 2003 , p. 182). For Mead, anthropology’s over-dependence on the written word created a methodological reductionism. She developed her approach in association with Gregory Bateson on the basis of their work in Bali, which played a crucial role over time in the development of visual anthropology later in the 20th century (Pink, 2003 , p. 182). Mead was a supporter of what came to be known as the “observational method” in social research, which itself was influenced by the “ways of seeing” debate in anthropology (Pink, 2003 , p. 182). The problem, however, was that the observational method quite simplistically assumed a photograph to be an “objective fact” emerging as a direct result of scientific research. But in contemporary circumstances, most scholars would agree that ethnographic research is the outcome of a “relationship and negotiations between the researcher and informants rather than of the former’s objective observation of the latter” (Pink, 2003 , p. 182). In this transformed intellectual equation, photographs—like all other social facts—cannot be thought of as objective scientific facts. Instead, it is necessary for them to be located in the larger and changing contexts of discourse and be interpreted both ethnographically and theoretically in these contexts.

Anxieties of Photography in Anthropology

Although photography was considered a marker of scientific validity in late 19th- and early 20th-century anthropology, almost from the very beginning of anthropology’s association with photography this relationship also posed a number of anxieties, which in the longer term led to photography’s diminishing presence as a research tool in mainstream social anthropology. Many of the early photographs supposedly captured in the “natural” habitats of the subjects, which typified anthropological knowledge production of the time, were in fact carefully posed and choreographed. The people in them were “dressed” and “ordered” in a way that captured and emphasized the European imagination of “difference” at the time. But the dominant argument was that these photographs presented a sense of ethnocultural authenticity. Focusing on the way photography was understood and practiced among the French peasantry in the 1960s, Pierre and Marie-Claire Bourdieu argued that the “posed photograph, which only grasps and fixes figures who are settled, motionless, in the immutability of the plane, loses its power of corrosion” (Bourdieu & Bourdieu, 2004 , p. 612). “Corrosion” here refers to the ability of the photographs to narrate a convincing story and to be creative. The argument they make in general also makes sense with regard to many anthropological photographs of the late 19th and early to mid- 20th century as well. But “posed” photography was considered a valid practice as anthropology came into its own in the early 20th century . Much of the argument for this was based on the assumption that dying cultural formations needed to be recorded as completely as possible before their final demise due to colonialism, and later as the result of the rapid spread of modernism. It is in such a situation that Edward Curtis’s photography came to be known for his efforts to “stage manage” a romantic representation of “dying native American culture” (Pinney, 2011 , pp. 90–92).

This genre of photography in social anthropology, as well as in commercial photography more generally, has presented countless unsmiling photos of hunters, farmers, warriors, chieftains, and others whose ability to narrate a historically contingent story is limited. But this limitation does not mean their narrative abilities have been completely negated due to the constructed nature of these photos. Beyond the issue of posing and its resultant construction of a fictional reality, photography’s strength also comes from its ability to freeze time, space, and people. However, that freezing creates photography’s often referred to sense of immobility and silence. At times, these circumstances marked by emotions of immobility have linked photography with death (Metz, 1985 , p. 81). As a result, for many critics visual imagery becomes “disquieting” because “they appeared to show everything and yet, like the physical body, remained annoyingly mute” (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 276).

Claude Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist with an interest in photography who presented a substantial critique of the possibilities for its use in social sciences. Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques ( 1962 ) resulted from his travels in Brazil in the 1930s. His thoughts are presented along with a series of 48 black-and-white photographs, which he himself had captured. At one point he observes that “travel-books, expeditionary records, and photograph-albums abound” and “they are written or compiled with an eye mainly for effect” and “the reader has no means of estimating their value” (Lévi-Strauss, 1961 , pp. 17–18). His concern is that texts with photographs may be more interested in titillating readers than in advancing substantial knowledge. He is more explicit when he says,

mere mileage is the thing; and anyone who has been far enough, and collected the right number of pictures (still or moving, but for preference in colour), will be able to lecture to packed houses for several days running. Platitudes take shape as revelations once the audience is assured that the speaker has sanctified them by travelling to the other side of the globe. (Lévi-Strauss, 1961 , p. 18)

Lévi-Strauss’s concern with photographs also comes from his fear that photos might be used to camouflage the disruptions colonial expansion brought to the landscapes he saw in his travels. He notes, “today the savages of the Amazonian forests are caught, like game birds, in the trap of our mechanistic civilization” (Lévi-Strauss, 1961 , p. 18). But he says that he “will not be deceived by . . . the black magic” in the form of “an album in full colour” presented to eager audiences (Lévi-Strauss, 1961 , p. 18). In 1994 , 60 years after Lévi-Strauss initially took his photographs, his antipathy toward photographs had become more pronounced. In Saudades do Brazil: A Photographic Memoir , Lévi-Strauss completely discarded his own photographs as useless and considered them “a void, a lack of something that the lens is inherently unable to capture” (Pinney, 2011 , pp. 104–105). He referred to these photos as “silent images” devoid of “perfume” of the place where they were captured (Pinney, 2011 , p. 104). He argued his field notes still contained a more nuanced sense of the places where he undertook research even though time had allowed some sense of liminality to creep into these notes as well (Pinney, 2011 , p. 104).

Critics have also argued that photographs are often captured after an event has actually taken place, which makes them similar to crime scene photos recording the “residual” by professionals who come to the scene “too late” (Bond, 2009 , p. 1). Similarly, photographs taken by anthropologists or other field researchers who come to a ceremony or any other cultural or political event after it has taken place can be seen in a similar sense. But is this residuality such a methodological dead end? Photographs taken of an event need to be “read” and situated in a broader social and political context to be given meaning. After all, like all social facts, photographs are not autonomous texts. Instead, they are linked to the situations in which they must ultimately be located. To put it more simply, reading a photograph in this manner does not differ very much from having a conversation with a person about an event that may have already happened, making notes of that conversation, and revisiting such material later to compile a case study of the event. However, unlike such an interview, a photograph may record more contextually relevant background information, such as the aftermath of war and destruction evident in the series of photographs I took in the northern districts of Sri Lanka in December 2012 . By this time, Sri Lanka’s destructive civil war that had lasted for 30 years had already ended in 2009 . But the photographs were taken in the midst of what used to be an active war zone, and the government had self-consciously adopted a policy of erasing all signs of war except for selected symbols, which helped narrate its own story. But even at that time, the pictures I took of military monuments, half dismantled monuments of the defeated guerrilla group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), houses that had been destroyed by war with clear signs of battle embedded on their walls, burned trees and masses of destroyed vehicles, juxtaposed with images of billboards of numerous commercial products and services that had begun to penetrate the former war zone along with incoming capital helped place much of my research in a broader socioeconomic and political context. So the lapses of time from an event when a photograph is taken should not be an issue as long as that time lapse is taken into account in the overall reading of that image.

Talking about film, Kirsten Hastrup has argued that film is merely “thin description” when compared with written anthropological texts (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 282). In a similar vein, Maurice Bloch says that anthropologists who spend time dealing with film have “lost confidence in their own ideas” (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 282). Given the visual correlations between film and photography, there is very little difference between these two mediums. In this sense, Bloch’s and Hastrup’s criticism of film in the context of anthropology can also be made against photography. Again, this indicates anthropology’s obsession with the written word and its reluctance to see photographs as “data” or “information” with a sense of value.

Taken together, what becomes evident as a general trend in these criticisms is that they assume photographs had to narrate a “complete” story by themselves. Further, in so doing, they could not distract or deviate from the core narrative under any circumstances. In other words, photographs had to present the ultimate truth by themselves. But in the post-1980s’ “writing culture” and “partial truths” debates in anthropology, such a seemingly limitless burden of representation is not the prerogative of even the written text in ethnography. Even the “perfume” of place that Lévi-Straus sees in his field notes cannot be merely seen as references to simple undisputed “facts.” Instead, these are compilations of “partial truths” that need to be interpreted and “written” as ethnography. It is in this context that we should be quite clear that “photographs should be the object of a reading that one may call sociological and that they are never considered in themselves and for themselves, in terms of their technical or aesthetic qualities” (Bourdieu & Bourdieu, 2004 , p. 605).

Given these criticisms of photographs in anthropology by groups of influential people within the discipline itself, anthropology’s association with photography considerably diminished as the 20th century progressed. By the advent of the 21st century , there was little discussion about the place of photographs in mainstream social anthropological work, either as sources of information or as objects of research.

Toward Photographs as Records of “Social Facts”

The criticism summarized here places an unreasonable and rigid burden of representation on photographs, without space for contradictions or interpretation. Interestingly, well-known ethnographies such as M. N. Srinivas’s Remembered Village ( 1980 ) and Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma ( 1954 ) were based on memory and recollection because research notes maintained in the field were destroyed in accidents. In these situations, the Lévi-Straussian “fragrance” of field notes was not available to these two scholars. And yet, the works they produced continue to be generally perceived as examples of good ethnographic work. This seeming sympathy accorded to memory, notwithstanding its countless fallibilities, has not been granted to photography in mainstream social anthropology. Stated differently, these criticisms suggest that memory and recollection are methodologically more acceptable and stable than the apparent silence and stasis of photography. However, in reality, if carefully situated in their broader context of production, photographs contain data and information similar to that of field notes and recollections. Referring specifically to photos taken by anthropologists in the context of their fieldwork, Wolbert ( 2000 ) notes that these photos are “delicate documents of the anthropologist’s transgression of intimate boundaries and temporary participation in the lives of others” (pp. 321–322). In such situations, precisely because the authors of such photographs are able to partake in the lives of people they are with, photographs become crucial elements in the bodies of “facts” compiled by researchers. As we know well, these compilations vary from field notes to audio recordings and encompass videos, photographs, case studies, and so on.

An additional lingering concern with photography has to do with its beleaguered position with regard to “objectivity.” But the debates in the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s have shown us that issues of objectivity embedded in social research have not been completely resolved. That is, certain margins of “subjectivity” in any process of social research would always remain. But this itself does not delegitimize the overall process of research or the information collected. These issues can be managed by clearly accounting for the sociocultural and ethical contexts of research as well as the theoretical conditions of interpretation. The same general principles should apply to photographs as well. As Harper ( 2002 ) has noted, photographs “represent subjectivities embedded in framing, exposure and other technical considerations” (p. 13). According to him, such issues are often seen in photographs taken in anthropological field situations (Harper, 2002 ). Beyond such obvious technical limitations, which are easy enough to identify, the stories narrated by photographs are also impacted by the angles from which they have been framed and are also dictated by the nature of access to people, places, and events a researcher might have had in his research site. Similarly, photographs can also be silent about crucial events that are known to have taken place immediately beyond the frames of the photos. It is in this context that one needs to reemphasize that photos can never narrate an autonomous story by themselves, completely delinked from the historical, social, political, temporal, and spatial conditions within which their stories would make more nuanced contextual sense. That is, such additional and necessary contexts offer essential information to make photographs speak more reliably and audibly.

Seen in this sense, more than any dire difficulty in photographs as potential tools or sources of information, the issue is more a rigid frame of mind emanating from mainstream social anthropology’s limitless embrace of the written text. In this context, Pink ( 2003 ) suggests that any research project that incorporates images should not focus only on the internal “meanings” of the photos, but also on why a specific image might have been produced and how it makes itself meaningful to those who see it (Pink, 2003 , p. 186). This has to do with the broader contexts of a photograph’s production and its consumption. For instance, there is a vast difference between photos taken in contemporary anthropological field situations by anthropologists and photos taken by tourists and travelers. In the same vein, the way they become meaningful to those who see them and “read” these images can be very different. That difference needs to be taken into account when a set of photographs is considered for research.

Unlike the preoccupation with anthropological field photographs by Wolbert and Harper referred to earlier, photographs for ethnographic or social research more generally do not have to come from fieldwork conditions. In fact, most photographs available for analysis in the 21st century would likely come from other less controlled contexts. Nevertheless, any photograph taken in a given social situation is a likely source of information. But often, supposedly “aesthetically satisfying” and casual photographs taken by tourists, professional photographers, and others would not be considered “reliable facts” or “sound” sources of information in formal anthropology or many general academic contexts, even by scholars who have methodological sympathies for photographs (Collier & Collier, 1986 , p. 165). For instance, Collier and Collier ( 1986 ) note, “we can responsibly analyse only visual evidence that is contextually complete and sequentially organized” (p. 163). From their perspective, this is because “no matter how rich our photographic material is, quantitative use of evidence is limited to that which is countable, measurable, comparable or in some other ways scalable in quantitative forms” (Collier & Collier, 1986 , p. 163). In other words, according to the Colliers, for photographs to be of any methodical value they have to be quantifiable. But in the 21st century in particular, photographs have become widely available from countless sources, many of which also circulate via the Internet. Most of these will hardly be quantifiable except under specific circumstances when using specifically designed algorithms to ascertain the prevalence of certain kinds of photos. Under these general circumstances specifically linked to the lifestyles of contemporary times, the Colliers’ position is too restrictive. Photographs’ methodological usefulness cannot be fully realized if they are perceived clinically only within the ambit quantification (Perera, 2016b , pp. 160–161).

Banks points to the following important general factors with regard to making sense of photographs as research tools:

(i) what is the image of, what is its content? (ii) who took it or made it, when and why? and (iii) how do other people come to have it, how do they read it, what do they do with it? (quoted in Pink, 2003 , p. 186)

Banks made these observations generally referring to “research about pictures” (quoted in Pink, 2003 , p. 186). But these considerations would make sense in the context of any project that uses photographs as one of its main approaches, and not merely in projects that exclusively focus on photographs.

In the following elaboration, I present three case studies in the general context outlined so far. The examples are drawn from recent work in which I attempted to make reasonable use of photographs in constructing the core arguments and the overall narrative of the projects described, while at the same time depending on photographs as a significant source of raw information.

Case Study 1: Photographs as Representations and Silences of Social Life

Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture launched a project in August 2008 to produce a number of documentary films focused on the youth in rural Sri Lanka. One of the places selected for filming was Dambana, an area that has been historically associated with the local aboriginal group known as the Veddas (Perera, 2017 , p. 310). The expectation was to encourage the youth of this group to write a collaborative script for the film that aimed, among other things, to place in context their own “understandings of ‘multi-culturalism’ in the community through an exploration of the world around them” (Perera, 2017 , pp. 310–311). To get a sense of this understanding, photography was adopted as the main approach. It was assumed that visuality would be an easier, more proximate, more personal, and more nuanced way for these youngsters to comment on their social and cultural circumstances. To facilitate this, approximately 20 cameras and unexposed film rolls were distributed among the young people who volunteered for the program. They were asked to take photographs of anything or anyone they wished, “which in their perception, described the social and cultural world around them” (Perera, 2017 , pp. 310–311). Toward this end, they were given basic instructions on how to use the camera, how to frame, and how to control light. They were also introduced to ethical considerations in photography. After about one month, the Colombo Institute printed more than 400 color photographs the youth had captured that focused on different events, scenes, and people they had encountered during that time (Perera, 2017 , pp. 310–311).

These photographs were publicly displayed in the front yard of a local temple, which captured the attention of many people in the community, including some of whom appeared in some of the photos. After the public interest in the photos waned, an effort was made by Colombo Institute staffers and the youth to “put selected images together in preparation for writing the script” (Perera, 2017 , p. 311). It was hoped that the “relationships between the images that the youth might see would become the basis of the script” (Perera, 2017 , p. 311).

In the context of this article, it is not important that the film was subsequently made, but what the photographs meant to the people who took them. For me, it was important to see how the young people in the area understood the world around them and what they considered important enough to photograph. It was also important to work out “the themes that are absent in their photographs” despite the consistent reference to those themes when the overall sociopolitical context of the site was taken into account (Perera, 2017 , p. 311). The following were the dominant themes that emerged from the photos:

smiling children in schools; Buddhist religious ceremonies; sunset over the nearby irrigation reservoirs and scenes from the surrounding forests; old Vedda men carrying bows, arrows with a short axe slung over the left shoulder; young people bathing in the reservoir, smiling long-haired young Vedda men in the forest; the community leader providing herbal medicines to people with ailments, and so on. (Perera, 2017 , pp. 311–312)

What these photos collectively presented was an idealized image of a “‘happy’ and ‘self-contended’ group of ‘tribal’ people living an uncomplicated life in beautiful natural surroundings” (Perera, 2017 , p. 312). This was also very close to the image of the community generally circulating among the larger Sinhala society both adjacent to this community and beyond. In this sense, the popular and almost uncomplicated “orientalist” visual consumption of the Veddas that circulated beyond them also seemed to have been adopted unquestioningly by the community members. In this fictionalized and narrativized visual context, “the routine difficulties, poverty, drunkenness, despair, global cultural influences seeping into the community transforming it, which are also part of the essential circumstances of the community, were not simply absent from these images, but were very consciously expelled” (Perera, 2017 , p. 312). But these seemingly “negative” trends routinely came up in private conversations with the youth despite their absence from the photos.

What does this state of affairs mean in research and epistemological terms? In generating meanings from photographs, what is present within the frame is as important as what is self-consciously not present, which ideally one would expect to see (Perera, 2017 , p. 313). Though not taken in a typical anthropological field research situation, given my own involvement, the introduction of photographs as a means of generating possible meanings of the surrounding social world was inspired by anthropological research and my own interests in photography as source of information. Nevertheless, these photos were not taken by a trained field researcher but by young people within the community who came from very different educational and social backgrounds compared to the film crew as well as myself. As a result of this “insider” status, the photographers had far more access to the community than any average field researcher ordinarily would. Notwithstanding the contexts in which the photos were taken and by whom, and when these images are situated in the larger body of work that has historically been produced on the Veddas, these photos shed considerable contemporary light “on identity politics and cultural representation among contemporary Veddas” (Perera, 2017 , p. 313). For instance, they clearly present the ways in which “Veddas themselves readily consume the idealized image of them constructed by the dominant society and how, in that process, their routine predicaments and realities are expelled into oblivion” (Perera, 2017 , p. 313). Through the photos, the young community photographers “were also keener to present the “Buddhist” scheme of things in their lives . . . rather than the numerous non-Buddhist local practices that were still known, but increasingly under-emphasized” (Perera, 2017 , p. 313). This was a clear sign of the almost complete Buddhistization of the community, particularly among the youth. There were also numerous other cultural trends that were not visible in the photos even though they were evident all around, which varied from the young people’s embrace of both Sinhala cultural practices and global influences and trends. More specifically, these included following popular trends in Sinhala music, constant watching of Bollywood movies, popular dance forms that had nothing to do with the community’s own dance traditions, fashion, and so on. 2 The silence on the part of these trends in the photos and their open existence beyond the frames suggest what the community preferred to underemphasize in their own public self-representation.

In the overall context of this case study, it is not my intention to suggest that these kinds of photographs would narrate an independent story on their own. Instead, “they would enhance the narrative that is being constructed in the overall scheme of research and writing, which naturally includes other sources of information” (Perera, 2017 , p. 313). They would help situate what is present as well as what is absent; what is given voice and what is silenced. And a thoughtful reading of the absences and what is present, when situated in the broader domains of knowledge on the community that has been historically produced, would offer a more complete story of their situation.

Case Study 2: Photographs and the Politics of Visual Culture

The second case study describes a project that lasted from 2002 to 2012 . Its primary focus was Sri Lankan visual culture as it manifested in painting, sculpture, and installations. More specifically, the artworks I paid attention to were collectively identified as the “The Art of the 90s,” and could generally be seen as “political art” (Perera, 2012 , 2017 ). What was crucial was that in this project, not only “the process but the object of research itself was in the realm of the visual” (Perera, 2017 , p. 313). My basic intention was to see how these artworks might be considered repositories of memory that could narrate stories of political violence that had become endemic in Sri Lanka’s recent past, while also addressing issues such as ethnicity, nationalism, and religion, which had become core political issues that had preoccupied local politics since the 1950s (Perera, 2017 , p. 313).

As an anthropologist—and not as an art historian—my specific methodological approach was to explore whether such preoccupations might be embedded in these visual artworks, in their materiality, and in the way they were produced at a time when creative prose, poetry, and academic deliberations were not particularly dynamic arenas of discourse with regard to such crucial national issues. In this specific research context, my understanding was that photography would be a crucial source of recording and interpreting information in addition to more conventional anthropological means of information collection such as interviews, case studies of persons and events, press clippings, content analysis of exhibitions and exhibition catalogues, and so on (Perera, 2017 , pp. 214–215).

Clearly, it was imperative that extensive field notes and detailed interview material had to supplement the photographs of artworks as well as the broader and varying contexts of their exposition in the longer term process of thinking about, analyzing, and writing (Perera, 2012 , 2016a ). That is, photographs of artworks were crucial in working out what had been said by artists as well as by viewers during conversations, and what was seen, heard, and read in other contexts. The main focus of attention in this project was a particular genre of visual objects by a group of radical artists interested in experimental work, many of whom were unfamiliar to potential viewers. As such, I assumed the artists would be even more unfamiliar to the readers of my text, many of whom may never have seen these works before. Beyond the needs of my own analysis and conceptualizing, photographs of these artworks had to be seen by readers as well. That is, they had to diligently accompany the written text. There were no alternatives. In this overall context, “photography was not merely a method of recording ‘field’ situations, contexts and objects, but a crucial co-narrative that had to accompany the written words if the overall narrative was to make better sense and to be more nuanced” (Perera, 2017 , p. 315). In other words, without the photographs, I simply could not “‘show’ a particular reader what I had ‘seen’” and the overall narrative would have been incomplete (Perera, 2017 , p. 315).

Case Study 3: Photographs and the Politics of Memory and Violence

In this discussion, I refer to two interrelated research and writing projects, one of which ran from about 2002 to 2014 and the other from 2002 to 2013 . Both were published in 2016 and took photography as one of their main methodological preoccupations.

In the first project, Violence and the Burden of Memory (Perera, 2016a ), photography was mostly a methodological concern in terms of recording field information that was crucial for my reading as well as in subsequently making what was seen by me manifest in the eyes of readers as in the case described previously. The core of the project was to see how memory works among the Sinhalas in the context of Sri Lanka’s civil war. But more specifically, in addition to getting a sense of how the memories of people who perished in war and extensive political violence were embedded in the recollections of people who survived, I was more interested to know how these memories were recreated or performed in public monuments, tombs scattered around the country, and the artworks formulated by a number of well-known artists. 3 So a major concern was objects directly linked to war and violence. For analytical purposes, descriptions of them would be incomplete without any pictorial reference.

War- and violence-related public structures of memory are a relatively new phenomenon in Sri Lanka although public monuments constructed for other reasons have a much longer local history. But in both cases, no serious studies on the phenomenon existed in the academic domain. In the context of this relative absence of knowledge and popular reference, what was researched and what was presented were unfamiliar and had to be presented visually as well as in considerable detail for the analysis to make sense. Besides, prior to that the physical embodiments of public memory—monuments, tombs, or other structures, such as specially constructed bus stands—had to be carefully recorded and read like all other field information. In this process, it was essential that these structures were photographed carefully to understand not only the visual icons and symbols embedded in them but also their overall conception, design, locations, and use of space, all of which had their own dynamics of politics. At the time of research as well as in the process of writing and making a case, photography was methodologically crucial in making “sense” of what was being argued.

In the second project, Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise , the use of photographs was conceived in two ways. First, it was a field and writing/presentation prerogative in the same sense as the first project. Second, photography was an analytical category as a recurrent practice undertaken by a specific group of travelers (see Perera, 2016b ). But unlike the earlier study, where the focus was on tombs and monuments built by the state as well as by individuals, in the second study the focus was on what constituted sites of “interest” for those who traveled across Sri Lanka’s war zone during the ceasefire between 2002 and 2005 and after the war ended in 2009 . Some of the sites that attracted the attention of tourists, such as the public monuments, cemeteries, and military infrastructure of the guerrilla group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, no longer exist. In this context, when I traced the trajectories of travelers to place in context where they went, where they stopped, what they saw, and what they photographed, it was essential that these trajectories were visually mapped. And this was done with commonly accessible photography. My reading of these circumstances could not be undertaken in any degree of seriousness given my specific emphasis without recourse to photography. What the tourists saw, what I saw as a researcher, had to be seen—albeit pictorially—by those who read my text in order to comprehend my argument. This was the methodological preoccupation in this project.

The second preoccupation was not about collection of information, its recording and final presentation. It had to do with what the war zone travelers were doing with their cameras as they traveled. Many of the photographs they took were “trophy photographs” (Perera, 2016b , p. 165). What happened in these travels was not merely a cartographic mapping of terrain but also a pictorial mapping of war, violence, and celebration of victory. In this context, these photographs were devices of authentication through which travelers strived to document that they had been to the war zone and “seen” the “realities” of war (Perera, 2016b ). Collectively, these photographs were signs of adventure. They were also symbols relating to a celebration of victory without stressing the human cost and pain that victory had caused (Perera, 2016b ). This identification with victory in war, which was the same narrative presented by the state, was often achieved not simply by photographing remnants of war, but more specifically by embedding oneself in the foreground of objects and places that were photographed. This was not very different from the way in which photographs were used by early travelers and early field anthropologists referred to earlier in this article. In this context, the only way I could discuss the “logic of photography in contemporary warzone travel” in Sri Lanka (Perera, 2016b , pp. 160–171) and place it in a specific theoretical and ethnographic context was by presenting a visual record of what was seen by travelers and argue why they preferred to photograph some objects and not others.

When taken as a whole, in all the three case studies, photographs played a key role in research as well as in the final narrative of presentation, which helped make better sense of the arguments and the broader ethnographic contexts in which the narratives were woven. This does not mean that none of the studies could have been done without recourse to photography. But it does mean that without the use of photographs, those narratives would have been seriously incomplete and therefore only partially narrated. That is, I considered photographs in all the three case studies to be an important “methodological prerogative in at least partially creating a parallel narrative that would accompany the written text as a necessary subtext of what it [the written text] was attempting to outline” (Perera, 2016b , p. xiii). But to reiterate, my attempt was not to place these photographs on an intellectual stage and ask them to narrate their own story. Instead, these images were meant to enhance and offer a more nuanced reading of the overall narrative that was being presented.

There is one issue that needs further discussion if the use of photography is to be radically expanded in social anthropology: ethics. All the photographs produced in the three case studies presented here were produced in the context of planned research programs to which ethical considerations had been attached as a matter of routine practice. What to photograph and what not to photograph in these cases was decided by expanding established anthropological field research ethics. But the situation becomes more complicated when one has to use photographs taken by others that may be freely circulating on the Internet or in other less restricted repositories. Ethics applicable to these circumstances are not satisfactorily evolved.

What does all this mean in real terms? With special reference to research areas in emotion, the body, time senses, gender, and individual identity, MacDougal ( 1997 ) has referred to the difficulties of communicating sense in anthropology (p. 287). According to him, the challenge “has been in finding a language metaphorically and experientially close” to what these broad areas deal with (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 287). In this context and with particular reference to the visual’s ability to communicate, he notes, “the historical primacy of the visual has been its capacity for metaphor and synaesthesia” and “much that can be ‘said’ about these matters may be best said in the visual media” (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 287). Naturally, MacDougal’s list of research areas in which the visual might be better suited to communicate sense should not be seen as limited. This can be expanded creatively and, depending on the need, to many other areas in anthropology in particular and social sciences in general as has been done in the three case studies presented here, which included visual arts, violence, memory, and travel. The “visual” in the sense articulated by MacDougal also includes photography. But unlike MacDougal, I am not making a comparative argument in favor of photography to make the claim that photography is “better” or “more suitable” than other means of expression. However, photography allows for certain arguments to be made more completely and in a more nuanced manner than is possible without it. If this is the case, why not use photography, which is so readily available, particularly in today’s social and technological circumstances? To use photography or other kinds of visual media in presenting a narrative, the creation of a “specialized visual media” is not necessary (MacDougal, 1997 , p. 287).

Instead, what is needed is a clear understanding of social anthropology’s varying relationship to photography and its research and narrative potential, and to evolve a more open frame of mind and scheme of reference that would facilitate this methodological transition (Perera, 2017 ). To consider the usefulness and utility of photography in social anthropology, we would first have to overcome the discipline’s seeming fear of the visual.

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1. Aaron Siskind. BrainyQuote.com .

2. Bollywood (Bombay + Hollywood) movies are produced in India’s film capital, Bombay, or Mumbai. Hindi, the language in the films, is not spoken in this community or in Sri Lanka more generally, but the music, dance forms, and fashion presented in these movies are significant forces of cultural influence.

3. The focus on artworks and artists was the same as what was described in Case Study 2. As such, I will not focus on this aspect in the present discussion.

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The visual vernacular: embracing photographs in research

• A Qualitative Space
• Open access
• Published: 02 June 2021
• Volume 10 , pages 230–237, ( 2021 )

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• Jennifer Cleland   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1433-9323 1 &
• Anna MacLeod   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0939-7767 2  

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The increasing use of digital images for communication and interaction in everyday life can give a new lease of life to photographs in research. In contexts where smartphones are ubiquitous and many people are “digital natives”, asking participants to share and engage with photographs aligns with their everyday activities and norms more than textual or analogue approaches to data collection. Thus, it is time to consider fully the opportunities afforded by digital images and photographs for research purposes. This paper joins a long-standing conversation in the social science literature to move beyond the “linguistic imperialism” of text and embrace visual methodologies. Our aim is to explain the photograph as qualitative data and introduce different ways of using still images/photographs for qualitative research purposes in health professions education (HPE) research: photo-documentation, photo-elicitation and photovoice, as well as use of existing images. We discuss the strengths of photographs in research, particularly in participatory research inquiry. We consider ethical and philosophical challenges associated with photography research, specifically issues of power, informed consent, confidentiality, dignity, ambiguity and censorship. We outline approaches to analysing photographs. We propose some applications and opportunities for photographs in HPE, before concluding that using photographs opens up new vistas of research possibilities.

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Introduction

Smartphones, tablets, and other devices are increasingly embedded in everyday life, influencing how many people interact, think, behave and connect with other people [ 1 , 2 ]. Many people Whatsapp, tweet and text, and/or use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for professional, social, educational and entertainment purposes. Images are increasingly accessed and used where words would have been used in the past. Indeed, more than 10 years ago, van Dijck [ 3 ] suggested that “digital cameras, camera phones, photoblogs and other multipurpose devices are used to promote the use of images as the preferred idiom of a new generation of users.”

The increasing use of digital images for communication and interaction in everyday life has given a new lease of life to a source of research data long embraced by sociology and anthropology [ 4 , 5 ]. In contexts where smartphones are ubiquitous and with groups of “digital natives” asking participants to share and engage with photographs, this aligns with their everyday activities and norms more than textual or analogue approaches to data collection. Thus, it is time to consider fully the opportunities afforded by digital images and photographs for research purposes [ 6 , 7 ].

This paper joins a long-standing conversation in the social science literature which advocates moving beyond the “linguistic imperialism” of text [ 8 ] to embrace visual methodologies. This conversation has relatively recently made its way into health professions education (HPE): for example, various authors have proposed video [ 9 ], video-reflexivity [ 10 ] and drawings [ 11 ] for research purposes. However, the use of still images or photographs in research remains niche to some areas of inquiry (e.g., exploring patient experiences, particularly mental health and experiences of serious illness (e.g., [ 12 , 13 , 14 ]) and some healthcare professions disciplines (e.g., nursing: [ 15 ])), and is an under-exploited approach in HPE research (see below for notable exceptions). Yet it is a method which offers many possibilities, particularly in respect to giving research participants more agency and power in the research process than is the case in traditional qualitative data collection approaches such as interviews.

In this paper, we discuss ways of using photographs in research, focusing on the use of photography within participatory research inquiry. We consider ethical and philosophical challenges associated with photography research, as well as its unique strengths. We outline some popular approaches to analysing photographic data. We finish with a brief consideration of how photographs could be used more in HPE research.

The photograph as data

Photography has been described as a silent voice, another language to communicate with and understand others, and a way of accessing complexities which may not be captured by text or oral language [ 16 ]. As instances of Latour’s “immutable, combinable mobiles” [ 17 ]—literally things which do not change but which carry action and meaning across time and place, as objects of memory and of relationship—photographs allow us to see what was “happening” at a particular point in time.

Photographs can be a source of data (photo-documentation and existing images) and a tool for eliciting data (photo-elicitation and photovoice). Each of these approaches are explained below.

Photo-documentation

Photo-documentation has been used in clinical medicine for nearly two centuries [ 18 ] Clinical photographs and images are vital for training purposes, to illustrate a clinical finding, steps in a process or procedure, or for comparative (“before” and “after”) purposes. They are an integral part of patient’s clinical notes in numerous specialties and are also used to offer the patient insight into realized or expected treatment results [ 19 ].

This way of using photographs—as objective records documenting an objective something—is quite different from how photographs are used in social science research. In fields such as sociology and social anthropology, photography has been used as a tool for the exploration of society [ 4 , 5 ]. Photographs help others understand how societies are culturally and socially constructed, to critically uncover the meaning people place on certain activities, places, things and rituals and to record and analyse important social events and problems. It is on this second use of photographs in research that we focus from this point onwards.

Existing images

A second way of using photographs in research is analysis of publicly available images: in other words, analysis of secondary (photographic) data. There are examples of this approach in medical education in relation to the messages given by images on public-facing documents and webpages, and how these might influence student choice of medical school [ 20 , 21 ]. Visual data is also used in research examining the relationships between architecture/space and learning [ 22 , 23 ]. Photographs can show us how people and things relate to each other. For example, what can we learn from a photo illustrating how staff are distributed around a coffee room, or around the table during a morbidity and mortality (M&M) meeting? Documenting the materials of a research space in a photograph serves as a mechanism for tracing the complexity of the field (see Fig.  1 and its accompanying explanation).

A photograph as an elicitation tool. Collected as part of a sociomaterial study to document the material complexity of simulation led by MacLeod. This photograph of a manikin in a typical simulation suite could serve as a useful elicitation tool in a study of simulation. Rather than asking research participants to use their memories to imagine a simulation suite, the photograph provides concrete detail, helping to reorient participants to the space. Rather than using a phrase like “simulation is complex”, the photograph serves as “evidence” of the complexity, documenting multiple non-human elements involved in a simulation at a particular time and place. This clarity can provide a jumping-off point for more detailed and specific conversations about the topic being studied

Photo-elicitation

In photo-elicitation (sometimes called photo production [ 24 ] or auto-photography), the specific area of focus is typically decided by the researcher. The photos are either taken by the researcher or participants.

In researcher-driven photo-elicitation the researcher decides on what people, objects, settings and/or scenes they find interesting or potentially important enough for a picture. These photographs are then used as prompts for discussion within an interview with the researcher. The photo(s) is a prompt to elicit data, akin to an open question in a semi-structured interview. Unlike interview or focus group questions however, participants not only respond to photographs with extended narratives but also supply interpretations of the images, drawing from and reflecting their experiences.

In participant-driven photo-elicitation, control of data collection is handed over to participants who have the freedom to pick and choose the representation(s) which is most salient to them in relation to the question under study. For example, to explore children’s experiences of hospital, Adams and colleagues [ 25 ] asked children to photograph architectural or design features that most interested them in a vast hospital atrium (the hospital’s primary non-medical space, full of shops, restaurants and so on). The children’s photographs were then used as the anchor to dialogue [ 26 ].

Participant-driven photo-elicitation empowers the participant to both choose the image and drive the dialogue about the image. Consider a picture of an alarm clock set to an early hour. This becomes meaningful only when the photographer explains that this image signifies their transition from student to first trained job. While the participant’s perspective on the transition to practice could potentially be accessed using traditional words-alone methodologies, photographs are different because they present what the participant felt was worthy to record, help capture the immediacy of the experience and stimulate memories and feelings. In other words, one of photo-elicitation’s strengths, and how it differs from interviews and focus groups, is its potential to collect data that not only taps into the perspective of the participant but does so at the time of the experience.

Images seem to prompt a different kind of reflection on lived experiences. Harper [ 26 ] suggests that images prompt emotions and thoughts in ways that narrative alone cannot. By seeing what they did, informants may help the researcher to better understand their behaviour. Moreover, by viewing and discussing photos together, the researcher and participant actively co-construct meaning. In this way photo-elicitation offers a way to potentially enrich and extend existing interview methodologies and give a combination of visual and verbal data for analysis purposes [ 27 ]. Furthermore, the act of interpreting an image creates a critically reflective space within the research process which is lacking in interview methods. Leibenberg suggests that “collectively then, images introduced into narrative research create important links that participants can use to more critically reflect on their lived experiences and to more accurately discuss and share these experiences with others” [ 28 , p. 4].

Arguably however, if the main source of data is not the photographs themselves but the transcripts from photo-elicited discussions, this may still privilege participants who are more skilled verbally—maintaining the “linguistic imperialism” of text, or, more accurately, of transcribed responses [ 8 ]. While this criticism cannot be wholly dismissed, the many empirical studies referred to in this paper suggest that photographs help make abstract ideas accessible and encourage reflection in groups which are less literate and who do not routinely engage in reflection. Moreover, there are approaches to data analysis which privilege the image, not the accompanying text (see below).

A specific research method within the bracket of photo-elicitation is photovoice. Developed by Wang and Buriss in 1997, photovoice involves asking community members to identify and represent their community through specific photographs and tell the stories of what these pictures mean, promoting critical dialogue and potentially catalysing social action and change [ 29 ]. Photovoice allows people to see the viewpoint of the people who live the lives, and as such is considered an example of participatory research [ 30 ]. For example, MacLeod et al. [ 31 ] asked adolescent youth to take photographs pertaining to the health of their community. The adolescents created a platform for discussion, and helped the researchers, who were medical students, learn about the community they were serving. Photovoice is often used to access and explore patient experiences, particularly mental health and experiences of serious and/or life-threatening illness [ 12 , 13 , 14 ].

The ease of taking photographs with a mobile phone has opened up new ways to utilise the photovoice methodology, particularly the method of “time-space diaries” [ 32 ] or digital journals. Participants record what is meaningful to them across time and activities, such as what and where they ate over a full day, or salient events in the first few weeks of medical school. Just like non-research social media activity, a series of images can provide insight into real, lived experiences and give participants a voice to reflect on their everyday lives on issues relevant to the research topic. Consider a resident taking pictures of things and people who were significant to their first experience of a full weekend shift. The nature of the images may change over time, reflecting exposure to different patients, working with different colleagues, task demands and fatigue.

In summary, the nature of photographs as data varies according to who produces them, whether they are independent of the research or created specifically for the research, how they are used in the research process and whether they are used in conjunction with narrative (verbal) data. These key decisions can be synthesised, according to Epstein et al. [ 33 ], into three basic questions:

Who is going to make or select the images to be used in the interviews?

What is the content of the images going to be?

Where are the images going to be used, and how?

How photographs and accompanying narratives can be analysed is discussed next.

Data analysis

There are two main ways of approaching photographic data analysis. The first, the dialogic approach, focuses on analysing the verbal or written reflection on the content of photographs and what they symbolise. This approach is fundamentally constructivist, “locating visual meaning as foundational in the social construction of reality” [ 34 , p. 492]. Traditional ways of analysing verbal/transcribed data such as thematic analysis [ 35 ], content analysis [ 36 ], grounded theory [ 37 ] and various forms of discourse analyses [ 38 ] are appropriate for analysis of photograph-prompted dialogue. In this approach, the photographs themselves are usually used merely for illustration purposes, if at all [ 38 ].

Alternatively, the data can be within the photograph itself, separate from its capacity to generate dialogue and independent of any explanation. Photographs can provide new ways of seeing the phenomena under study from their visual features. For example, in their analysis of existing images on medical school websites and prospectuses in 2019, MacArthur, Eaton and Marrick [ 21 ] recorded information including gender, ethnicity, assumed role and setting, of each person on each image. They found a predominance of hospital-themed images, compared to few community-themed images. They concluded that these images signalled to students a strong preference for hospital-based settings, despite a strong national drive to recruit more general practitioners.

This approach to analysis is referred to as “archaeological” because images inherently reflect the social norms of a point in time. Consider your graduating class photograph. Clothes and hairstyles which were chic at the time may look old-fashioned and incongruous when viewed many years later. In this way, photographs contain “sedimented social knowledge” [ 34 , p. 502], manifest through the photographer’s choices of scenes, subjects, styles, compositions and so on. An educational example of this is presented in Photograph S1, found in the Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM).

Grounded, visual pattern analysis (GVPA) combines both approaches [ 39 ]. Via a structured, multi-step process of analysis, GVPA investigates the meanings individual photographs have for their photographers and also attends to the broader field (sample) level meanings interpreted from analysis of collections of photographs. Paying attention to absence (what is not photographed) is also important [ 40 ]. The analysis process ends by building conceptual contributions rather than purely empirical ones from the photographic data (see Photograph S2 in ESM).

Whichever analysis approach is taken, as with any qualitative research, it is important to consider quality and rigour in respect to the credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability of the data [ 41 ]. Providing details of the sampling strategy, the depth and volume of data, and the analytical steps taken helps ensure credibility and transferability. Photo-elicitation allows participants to work with and direct the researcher to generate data that is salient to them, thereby increasing the confirmability of research outcomes. Allowing participants to clarify what they meant to convey in their photographs is inherently a form of member checking. As for all research, ethical considerations should be considered and addressed, as well as a clear statement made on formal research ethics committee approval or waiver. Thought must be given to the power relationship between researcher and participants and how this might affect recruitment, the nature of the data and so on. Reflexivity, reflecting on the extent to which similarities or differences between researcher and researched may have influenced the process of research, is particularly critical in photo-elicitation studies [ 42 ]. Keeping written field and methodological notes as well as a reflexive diary is important for dependability and confirmability.

Finally, in terms of data presentation, in our discipline most journals have a limit on the number of tables, figures and/or images allowed per paper, and most do not publish colour photographs. This limits the visual data which can be presented in an article. However, journals also offer the option of supplementary e‑files. We suggest that one or two pictures in an article can support key evidential points, with additional data made available electronically.

Ethical considerations associated with photographs in research

As with any method, care must be taken to ensure the proper use of photographs for research purposes. Here we briefly consider the main ethical issues of power, informed consent, anonymity, dignity and image manipulation. We direct readers to Langmann and Pick [ 43 ] for more in-depth discussion.

In any researcher/participant situation, there is a power dynamic that privileges the “expert” researcher over the object of study, the participant. Certain ways of using photographs in research, specifically photo-elicitation, can change this dynamic and empower participants by giving them an active role in the research process, making them the experts, and allowing the researcher greater insight into participant perspectives [ 29 , 30 ]. Photo-elicitation also gives those who are not verbally fluent another way to express themselves effectively, avoids the use of survey questionnaires and other research instruments that might be culturally biased, and places participants as equals—able to reflect and decide how they want to represent themselves visually [ 43 ]. Photo-elicitation is thus firmly rooted in an approach to inquiry that draws on Paulo Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy [ 44 ] and fits within the broader participatory action research method [ 29 , 30 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 45 ].

The use of mobile phones for data collection is considered a way of connecting younger groups with research [ 46 ], connecting with populations in more remote and rural communities across the globe [ 47 ] and with “difficult to reach” populations (e.g., [ 14 ]). However, it is important to again acknowledge the “digital divide” and the associated power differential: marginalised populations and certain societal groups may not have access to equipment to take and share photographs. Where this is the case, the researcher must consider whether to supply the necessary equipment or whether an alternative method of data collection is more feasible.

Informed consent

Informed consent is particularly challenging with photographs. It is difficult to ensure that every person in an image has given their consent to the photo being taken and used for research purposes. Where images are participant-generated, clear instructions about the purpose of the research and the photographs, and the processes of ethical consent, are essential [ 48 ].

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is an issue, particularly if a photograph includes a person’s face. Faces can be pixelated or blurred to protect participants’ identities, but these approaches may objectify the people in the photo and make the photographs less powerful [ 48 ].

Our third point relates to dignity. Langmann and Pick [ 43 ] suggest three ways of considering dignity in research photography: being sensitive to the social and cultural norms of the communities being researched, being aware that those who are the focus of the research will benefit by the presentation of an authentic view of the situation and considering the impression the photograph will give if and when it is published. In all cases, it is the researcher’s responsibility to exclude photographs which are not covered by ethical approvals, as well as any potentially harmful or compromising photographs.

Photographs can mean different things to different people [ 24 , 49 ] and meanings may change over time, depending on context and how they are associated in terms of text and other images (for example, one’s interpretation of a photograph taken as a teenager is likely to differ when viewing it as an adult). This ambiguity makes some researchers uncomfortable. However, if one takes a social constructivist stance, that we live in a multi-reality world, then this possibility of multiple meanings from a photograph adds to the data.

Conscious and unconscious “self-censorship”, including when, where or what to photograph, or editing a photo to convey an intended message, is inherent in photo-elicitation [ 45 ]. However, self-censorship is not an issue if one accepts that the purpose of photo-elicitation is to access the social reality of another individual.

Strengths of using photographs in research

Participation and co-construction.

As mentioned earlier, photo-elicitation and photovoice maximise opportunities for participant agency and engagement in the research process, allowing participants to work with and direct the researcher. Furthermore, in dialogic approaches, research involves a joint process of knowledge-production where narratives are co-constructed between participant and researcher through discussion. By using participant-driven photographs, the researcher gains an understanding of what the content of the photos means to the participants without imposing their own framework or perception of a topic on the process.

Participatory research requires trust, a safe space between participant and researcher, so people can express their thoughts and views. Wicks and Reason [ 50 ] suggest that establishing this safe space must be considered throughout the research process: empowering participants in the earlier stage of the research process can also build the connection and trust between researcher and participant—and reduce participant inhibition later on. This may be particularly useful where the topic is sensitive or taboo. For example, Meo [ 51 ] reported photo-elicitation was useful in tapping “class and gendered practices” (p. 152) in greater depth than with interviews alone.

Giving power to participants within the research process can be challenging for researchers. Adjusting to participants as co-researchers may be new and unfamiliar. Continuous flexibility and reflexivity on a personal (e.g., personal assumptions, values, experiences, etc. that shape the research) and epistemological (e.g., the limits of the research that are determined by the research question, methodology and method of analysis) considerations are critical [ 52 ].

Photographs provide structure to an interview, giving the researcher something to return to, to elicit more detailed discussions and/or trigger memories and reflection [ 53 ]. In addition, participants often give information about people or things outside of the photo (the invisible) as well as on who and what are visible [ 52 ]. Similarly, the researcher may be able to access parts of participants’ lives that would be difficult to see into otherwise. For example, Bourdieu argues that visual methods of research may be particularly helpful in investigating habitus, ways of being, acting and operating in the social environment that are “beyond the grasp of consciousness” [ 54 , 55 ].

Snapshots in time and of space

As mentioned earlier, photographs are inherently snapshots in time. They also provide snapshots of space, a means of examining the material assemblages of space, of how things are ordered and used [ 56 ]. For example, a photo of students in a learning space would illustrate who sits with whom, the spatial relationships between humans (e.g., student and student, students and teachers) and the non-human (e.g., bags, laptops, phones, snacks) (see Fig.  2 as an example).

An example of a photograph representing the assemblage of time and space: Students distributed in the space of a contemporary learning suite. Photograph from a publicly facing webpage on a medical school website. This photograph provides an example of how a photograph captures space and time. It provides a glimpse at a contemporary medical school. The photograph serves to document the complexity of modern medical schools, making clear the digitized learning environment. Such a photograph might evoke emotion and a sense of progress, in particular, when contrasted with more traditional images of students learning in a stadium-style lecture theatre

Applications and opportunities

Looking forward, we encourage researchers to consider the use of photographs as a source of data, as a way of accessing data that might otherwise have been obscured or overlooked if we had relied solely on language-based data. We encourage readers to consider what might be learned were we to augment current understanding by incorporating photographic data sources into healthcare professions research. In Table S1, found in ESM, we suggest some outstanding research questions and topics that could be explored. The list found there is by no means exhaustive. Rather it reflects our own interests and observations and should be regarded as a springboard to help readers consider diverse ways in which photographs may add richness in research endeavours.

There are many ways of conducting qualitative research in health professions education research (HPER). All have their affordances and limitations. In this article, we have offered a critical examination of how photographs can be used to generate rich and potentially different data to that generated through talk-only data collection. Using photographs in HPER research opens up new vistas of research possibilities, whether as a means of accessing snapshots of people and situations in time and space and/or as a means of engaging participants collaboratively, to explore taken-for-granted lived experiences which may not otherwise be accessible. This is a fertile area for future research and the empirical potential is vast, ranging from reflective practice to widening participation to questions which are as yet unknown.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was inspired by JC’s move to Singapore, a society which uses photographs rather than text in all spheres of life—as proof of payment or parcel delivery, to illustrate a point, to share information, to advertise an event, etc.

The authors neither sought nor received any funding for this project.

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Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Jennifer Cleland

Division of Medical Education, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Anna MacLeod

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JC suggested and coordinated this collaborative effort, initiated the writing outlines and drafts. AM helped create and revise outlines and drafts. Both authors contributed significantly to the intellectual contents, gave approval of the version to be published and agree to be accountable for the work.

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Correspondence to Jennifer Cleland .

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J. Cleland and A. MacLeod declarethat they have no competing interests.

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This is not applicable as no human or animal subjects were involved in the creation of this paper.

Supplementary Information

40037_2021_672_moesm1_esm.jpg.

Table S1 Potential applications and opportunities for using photographs in qualitative HPE research. This is arranged by area of Interest (e.g., simulation), potential research question, philosophical underpinnings, methodology, method and analysis for ease

40037_2021_672_MOESM2_ESM.jpg

An archeological example of the complexity of distributed medical education. Taken in the audio-visual control room of a video-conferenced medical education program (from MacLeod’s photograph research cannon)

40037_2021_672_MOESM3_ESM.docx

This example features a photograph from a publicly facing webpage on a medical school website. The combination of the photograph and its accompanying text would lend itself well to a Grounded Visual Pattern Analysis (GVPA)

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Cleland, J., MacLeod, A. The visual vernacular: embracing photographs in research. Perspect Med Educ 10 , 230–237 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-021-00672-x

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Received : 28 October 2020

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Accepted : 21 April 2021

Published : 02 June 2021

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-021-00672-x

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Photography as a Research Method with Learners in Compulsory Education: A Research Review

This article offers a review of thirty-one research articles from 2001–2019 on the use of photography as a research method with learners in compulsory education. Understood within the scope of ‘visual’, ‘participatory’ and ‘arts-based’ research methods, many scholars have linked the increased use of the photographic method to greater awareness of the rights of the child and changing understandings of children as full ‘human beings’ with agency rather than simply vulnerable ‘human becomings’. Nevertheless, photography is still a relatively under-utilised approach in research with learners in school-based compulsory education and its use is not widespread globally. Against the background of the history of visual and photographic methods in general and in education in particular, this article highlights two key themes in the empirical research literature: why the photographic method is used (dealing with representation, participation and emancipation); and how the photographic method and the photos themselves are used (pre-generated and participant-generated photographs). It closes with a reflection on what may be holding back its expansion, including key ethical concerns, and a proposal for encouraging its use in education.

• 1 Introduction

It has been argued that the research methods that social researchers use should be applied creatively so that they can be made ‘fit for purpose’ ( Kara, 2015 ). With this responsibility in mind, a plethora of visual ( Banks, 2001 ; Pink, 2001 ; Rose, 2001 ), arts-based ( Leavy, 2008 ; Knowles & Cole, 2008 ) and participatory ( Reason & Bradbury, 2008 ; Chevalier & Buckles, 2013 ) methods have been evolving, particularly over the last four decades. Scholars have linked this development to a number of shifts, two of which can be related to children and young people and school-based research. The first shift is in understandings of children and young people that came around the time of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, and particularly the legal obligation for the ‘best interests’ of children to be taken into consideration, and the views of children to be taken into account on anything that affects them ( Lundy, 2007 ; Lansdowne, 2011 ; Hanna, 2019 ). The second shift relates to the movement within the sociology of childhood that began to more vocally advocate the appreciation of different childhoods where children were increasingly seen not as a vulnerable collective who needed protection, but as individuals holding agency to act on their world and the capacity for independent thought: as fully-fledged ‘human beings’ rather than simply ‘human becomings’ ( James & James, 2004 ). These two shifts, it may be argued, lead to the conclusion that children and young people should be allowed to ‘represent’ themselves to the world ( Prout, 2001 ). Therefore, it is sometimes argued that these, more creative methods hold the potential to offer a more holistic, inclusive and flexible approach to exploring social realities – and a more enjoyable and engaging research experience – particularly with children and young people as research participants ( Thomson, 2008 ; Stirling & Yamada-Rice, 2015).

One method that may be included within this shifting methodological landscape is photography. Used widely within anthropology from the late 19th century, it now holds a firm place in 21st century research methods literature ( Banks, 2001 ). However, while photography has been used fairly frequently as a method in some other fields, as will become clear from the limited number of research articles that were available for this review, it is still a relatively under-utilised approach in school-based compulsory education. This is despite the enduring and perhaps growing salience of visual culture due to the widespread use of social media among younger people in particular ( Woodfield, 2014 ), a conundrum that this Special Issue seeks to take some steps towards addressing.

Against such a background, this article offers a review of thirty-one empirical research articles from the past eighteen years (2001–2019) on the use of photography as a research method with learners in compulsory education. It considers the development of visual and photographic methods in research in general and within educational research in particular. Then it presents the scope of this research review and the search strategy employed to find the articles included within it. Following this, it moves on to the two main themes that emerged from reviewing the research papers, namely: why the photographic method is used (dealing with the key motivations of representation, participation and emancipation); and how the photographic method and the photographs themselves are used (distinguishing between pre-generated and participant-generated photographs). It closes with a reflection on what may be holding back its expansion, including key ethical concerns, and a proposal for encouraging its use in education.

• 2 Visual and Photographic Methods in Social Research

Photography has variously been described as a ‘visual’, ‘visual ethnographic’, ‘participatory’ and ‘arts-based’ method, depending on how and with whom it is used. Photography first began to be used as a research method within anthropology and ethnography in the early 20th century, when photographic equipment became accessible to researchers ( Banks, 2001 ). In this sense the camera was usually used by the researcher-photographer as a way of capturing an aspect of a community: as ‘photo-documentation’ ( Rose, 2001 ). Since then, the method has seen various evolutions, and particularly a significant movement towards being used as a way of involving participants in the research process itself, either through using ‘found’, researcher-produced or pre-existing photographs, or through participants producing photographs themselves.

Key scholars who have been active in the field of visual ethnography over the past two decades include Sarah Pink (2001) , Gillian Rose (2001) , and Marcus Banks (2001) , who have explored the various debates and dilemmas that have arisen as the method has evolved. For example, in her monograph, Pink (2001) proposes that images are everywhere, ‘inextricably interwoven with our personal identities, narratives, lifestyle, cultures and societies, as well as with definitions of history, space and truth.’ (p. 17) She therefore concludes that visual ethnographic researchers must appreciate the interlinkage between the oral/aural and the visual, for ‘[j]ust as images inspire conversations, conversations may invoke images…images are as inevitable as sounds, words or any other aspect of culture or society.’ (p. 17) Rose (2001) highlights issues of representation in terms of the extent to which an image can represent an object, person, place, time or concept; related to this is the issue of ‘audiencing’ which can influence how a particular image is understood and interpreted, a huge challenge for researchers in any qualitative research but perhaps particularly in visual research. Banks (2001) proposes that visual research is a ‘collaborative project between image maker and image subjects’ and so, social researchers ‘[can]not pretend that they can somehow transcend their humanity and stand outside, merely observing’. (p. 112) There have also been notable contributions from Claudia Mitchell (2011) in her monograph Doing Visual Research and Pat Thomson’s (2008) edited collection Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People . Many of the key debates explored in these monographs and volumes emerge also from the articles selected for this research review and will be returned to later.

In terms of photography in particular, it may be said that its use as a research method has expanded significantly, being used in very different ways to cover different topics and work with different groups of people, to serve different ends and to address or challenge some ethical issues. There have been notable edited collections published from the 1960s onward, such as John Collier’s collaboration with Malcolm Collier in their book Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method . ( Collier & Collier, 1967 ) One of the best-known pioneers in this area has been Caroline Wang (along with Burris in the early days) who from 1997 began to publish on ‘photo-voice’ or ‘participatory photography’ in health and community contexts (see, for example, Wang, 1999 ). ‘Photo-voice’ is a method that involves participants documenting their experiences through photography and then discussing them, with a view to bringing about criticality, empowerment and change, all within a participant-led environment. ( Wang, 1999 ) It is an approach that has been used quite extensively within community settings, where a research participant will often have the use of a disposable camera and will therefore be able to take photographs within their daily lives. In this way, Wang has inspired a whole generation of researchers who wish to use a participatory approach to research, where participant-researchers are fully informed and leading and moulding the research in some way. It is also strongly associated with ‘photo-elicitation’ (Collier & Collier, 1986; Harper, 2002 ) whereby participants describe the photographs and sometimes write short inscriptions for them, that may or may not be shared publicly. However, ‘found’ or researcher-generated photographs have also been used as a way of sparking discussion or debate or tapping into a memory. Both of these approaches will feature in the themes of this research review below.

What may be apparent so far is that the best-known scholars in photography as a research method appear to be located outside of the field of education. While its use within social science research in general may be traced to the 1960s, as Kaplan, Lewis and Mumba (2007) noted, it is very difficult to trace the origin of the photographic method within compulsory education; in 1998 Wetton and McWhirter wrote on health education, in the same year, Prosser (1998) discussed the fact that text is normally more highly valued than images in educational research, and the earliest research paper that could be found for inclusion in this review was from 2001, which investigated sociability and cooperation among 4–5 year olds in England, using researcher-generated photographs ( Broadhead, 2001 ). There are some notable, more recent contributions specific to education that will interest the reader. There is extensive treatment of photographic methods in Miles and Howes’ (2015) edited collection Photography in Educational Research: Critical Reflections from Diverse Contexts . There is also the Wylie Handbook of Ethnography in Education from 2018 which includes a chapter on visual ethnography in education that refers to photography and covers such aspects as ‘participatory photography’ and ‘photo-elicitation’ interviews as well as the challenges of getting access to research sites due to institutional review boards ( Holm, 2018 ). However, while compiling this research review, what became clear was that, although photography as a research method is quite common within the early years of education, as well as in community (non-school) settings and other anthropological or sociological research ( Barker and Smith, 2012 ), it appears to be used less often with learners within compulsory education. Returning to Kaplan et al., they noted this in their work over a decade ago (2007) but it could be argued that the field has not expanded significantly since then. This is despite the fact that the method is clearly and continually being developed in other fields, while appreciation and understanding of visual culture grows. This is a curious point that will be explored more fully in the concluding section of this article, where ethical concerns and understandings of children will feature.

• 3 Scope of this Review and Search Strategy

This research review is a qualitative, narrative review (Efrat et al., 2019) focused solely on the use of photography as a research method with learners in compulsory education. This type of review aims to ‘survey the state of knowledge in a particular subject area and offers a comprehensive background for understanding that topic.’ (p. 21) It is based on articles in English language journals that report empirical research as this is the only language in which I am fluent. Therefore, it is unsurprising that many of the articles have been written by English native speakers in English-speaking countries.

In terms of search strategy, I followed Reed’s stages (2017). I did an initial general search based on Google and Google Scholar, looking for ‘photography as research method’ to check on terminology. After reading generally about visual and photographic methods, I then turned to academic databases, beginning with Scopus. I did a Boolean search of titles, key words and abstracts, with my search terms refined to ‘photography’, ‘education’/’school’/’learning’ and ‘research’ and ‘method’. I limited the disciplines to ‘arts and humanities’ and ‘social sciences.’ I also limited the search to research articles and excluded books and book chapters. I did not limit the time period at this stage, although I was aware from my initial reading that very little was available from before the early 2000s. I also did not limit the country focus. This brought up 135 research articles. I also used the references in the selected relevant papers that were more broadly on ‘children’ and ‘photography’ to plug gaps, particularly of papers that did not appear on Scopus. Some of these used the term ‘participant photography’ or ‘photovoice’ or ‘visual’ or ‘arts-based’. Finally, I searched the Taylor and Francis journal website to fill in any remaining gaps. After a brief review of titles and abstracts, I excluded papers that did not relate to compulsory education (a significant number). Once I had briefly scanned these articles, I also excluded those that did not focus on the use of the method with learners specifically.

In total the review is based on 31 articles that report empirical research studies. The findings focus on key themes that emerge from this research review. The list of papers included in this review can be found in Table 1 and in list form at the end of this article.

• 4.1 Why Photography is Used: Representation, Participation and Emancipation
• 4.2 How Photography and Photographs are Used: Pre-generated, Researcher-generated and Participant-generated Photographs
• 5 Summary and Reflecting on the Prospects for Photography as a Research Method in Education
• Review Articles

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19 Photography as a Research Method

Gunilla Holm, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki

• Published: 04 August 2014
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This chapter discusses the development of photography as a research method in social sciences. It describes the different types of photographs used, such as archival photographs and photographs taken by the researcher, and it focuses especially on photographs taken by participants. The uses of different approaches to obtain photographs and issues of interest concerning each approach are presented. The most common approaches to analyze photographs, such as content analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnographic analysis are described. Interesting and challenging questions about the interpretation and presentation of photographs are raised, such as the impact of the researcher’s and participants’ habitus on the interpretation of photographs. Finally, ethical issues in research using photographs are considered, especially the meaning of informed consent and confidentiality in photographic research is emphasized.

We encounter numerous photographs or visual pictures many times every day. They might range from photos on billboards to mug shots in a newspaper or photos of family members on a person’s work desk. We notice and process most of them on a superficial level, but some have more of an impact on us. They affect us more profoundly, emotionally or intellectually. Overall, our culture is becoming more and more visual, with images saturating our environment not only through the more traditional modes like TV, newspapers, and magazines, but also through smartphones with cameras and social media like Facebook. Despite living in a visual age ( Gombrich, 1996 ) and the visual saturation of our culture, photographs are underutilized in social science research.

This chapter explores how photography has been used in social science research and what the current developments are. Commonly, we refer to visual methods and visual research, but here we can distinguish between two major kinds, namely, film/video research and research using photography. Within both fields are many different ways of using videos and still photos. For example, with regard to video, the researcher can do the videotaping, but in recent research family members also act as co-researchers, videotaping another family member at home in the absence of the researcher ( Sahlström, Pörn, & Slotte-Lüttge, 2008 ). Likewise, for photography, photos can be taken by the researcher or the research participants or existing photographs can be used. Videos and photographs require different kinds of analyses and are reported in different ways. Although there is a considerable variety and complexity of work arising from the two methods, in this chapter I give an in-depth discussion only of the use of photographs in social science research.

Even though some thought that digital photography might be the end of photography, it simply changed photography and made it even more popular. Mirzoeff (2009 , pp. 2–3) estimates that there are “more than 3 billion photos on the file-sharing site Flickr, and over 4 billion on the social networking site Facebook... Media estimates of the number of advertisements seen per day range from hundreds to the now widely used figure of 3,000”; furthermore, Mirzoeff estimates that in 2008, people took 478 billion photos using their mobile phones (p. 250).

The emphasis on visual images and on visual culture is also evident in the numerous textbooks on visual culture produced in the last fifteen years. A classic text in social sciences first published in 1999 is Evans and Hall’s Visual Culture: The Reader ( Evans & Hall, 2010 ). The book theorizes photography and provides theoretical perspectives on it, as well as providing a gender and race perspective on photographs. The difference between a visual and a textual research culture is well expressed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006 , p. 2) in their statement “(b)ut even when we can express what seem to be the same meanings in either image—form or writing or speech, they will be realized differently. For instance, what is expressed in language through the choice between different word classes and clause structures, may, in visual communication, be expressed through the choice between different uses of colour or different compositional structures. And this will affect meaning. Expressing something verbally or visually makes a difference.” This difference is important in visual research. Different data and different results are obtained through different ways of doing the research. The search for a better understanding has led to a rapid increase in the use of photography in social science research. The visual culture research includes many different kinds of visuals, such as art pictures, graphs, and maps (for a comprehensive overview of different kinds of visuals, see Margolis & Pauwels, 2011 ; Reavey, 2011 ).

There has been a proliferation of books on general visual research methods including those by Emmison and Smith (2007) , Margolis and Pauwels (2011) , Mitchell (2011) , Reavey (2011) , Spencer (2011) , and Stanczak (2007) , as well as methodology books such those by as Pink (2007) and Rose (2012) . Likewise, much has been published on specific aspects of visual research, such as visual ethnography ( Pink, 2012 ) and the analysis of visual data ( Ball & Smith, 1992 ; Banks, 2007 ). We also see the increasing popularity of visual research methods in social sciences; in addition to journals like Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, Visual communication, and Visual Studies , many other journals now also publish photographs. In addition, the Society for Visual Anthropology and the International Visual Sociology Association provide avenues and conferences for presenting visual research.

Across the social sciences, photography as a research method has a long history in fields such as anthropology and sociology, but it is fairly new to psychology and education. However, in sociology, photography continues to hold a marginal position, mainly because it is considered too subjective. In anthropology, film has been more important. Harper (2004) describes gathering information as a function for photography in social sciences. Here he uses Bateson and Mead’s book Balinese Character, A Photographic Essay (1942) as an example; these researchers “used 759 photographs (selected from more than 25 000 taken during their fieldwork) to support and develop their ethnographic analysis” ( Harper, 2004 , p. 232). In his discussion of photography in sociology, Harper describes photography as being used mostly with the researcher as the photographer. A similar tendency can be seen in anthropology. Although earlier anthropologists and sociologists like Collier and Collier (1986) , Prosser (1996) , and Grady (1996) wanted to make photography fit into a “scientific” framework by providing exact methods for how to use photographs in research, contemporary ethnographers like Pink (2007) reject this approach. Pink argues for developing the way photography is used in research based on the questions and context of the study. The method can develop in the field, and she does not see the text as superior to the photographs, but as complementary and working together.

The field of psychology has engaged with photographs throughout its history, starting with Darwin’s use of photographs in his work. “A historical analysis of the role of the visual within psychology can reveal its instrumental effects in providing the context for ‘the psychological’ to become observable and therefore, measurable and more ‘scientific’” ( Reavey, 2011 , p. 2). As Reavey (2011) points out in her book Visual Methods in Psychology , qualitative research in psychology is a marginal field. The use of visual methods is thus at the margins of a marginal field of study. Contributing to this marginality, according to Reavey (p. xxvii), is the notion that photography as a method has been considered more appropriate for “use with children and those deemed less ‘able’ to communicate thoughts and feelings... In this sense, the ‘visual’ has traditionally been given the status of a naïve or more simplistic form of communication.” Overall, qualitative research in psychology has focused on language- and text-based materials. In experimental psychology, photos are sometimes used as material for memorization or evaluation tasks ( Mavica & Barenholtz, 2012 ; Mandal, Bryden, & Bulman-Fleming, 1996 ). In psychology related to health, education, and similar fields, there is some research using photography as a method (e.g., Brazg, Bekemeier, Spigner, & Huebner, 2011 ; Clements, 2012 ), but a search of psychology databases gives very few studies using photography.

In education, photos have been used in archival research related to, for example, school and space ( Grosvenor, Lawn, Nóvoa, Rousmaniere, & Smaller, 2004 ) and schooling and the marginalized ( Devlieger, Grosvenor, Simon, Van Hove, & Vanobbergen, 2008 ; Grosvenor, 2007 a ; 2007b ). Photography has also been used with preschool children to obtain an understanding of the children’s perceptions of their own surroundings and communities ( Clark & Moss, 2001 ; Einarsdottir, 2005 ; Serriere, 2010 ). The photographs are helpful especially if the children’s language is not yet well developed ( Clark, 2004 ; Prosser & Burke, 2008 ). Other examples of research in education using photography as a research method are studies focusing on elementary school students’ views on school and gender issues ( Newman, Woodcock, & Dunham, 2006 ) and on high school students’ views on quality teachers ( Marquez-Zenkov, Harmon, van Lier, & Marquez-Zenkov, 2007 ) as well as on themselves as high school students ( Holm, 1995 ; 1997 ). Lodge (2009) argues that children and youth are often not heard in research on schools, but that photography offers possibilities for engaging young people in the research. She sees photography as especially useful for engaging those usually silenced or marginalized in the school community (See also Wilson et al., 2007 , on the empowerment of students). Joanou (2009) points out that there are increased ethical considerations when working with marginalized groups of children, using as an example her study on children living and working on the streets in Lima.

Using photography in research with children is the fastest growing application of its kind. Most of this research is done in relation to the school setting, but research is also done on children’s perspectives on, for example, their outdoor environment ( Clark, 2007 ) and their city ( Ho, Rochelle, & Yuen, 2011 ). Others discuss more generally the topic of using photography with children ranging from two years old to teenagers and children’s photographic behavior ( Sharples, Davison, Thomas, & Rudman, 2003 ; Stephenson, 2009 ; Warming, 2011 ).

In this chapter, I discuss photography as a research method, review the different types of photographs used in research (e.g., archival photographs, photographs taken by the researcher), and focus especially on photographs taken by participants. The uses of different approaches to obtain photographs and issues of interest concerning each approach will be presented. The most common approaches used to analyze photographs are briefly described, and interesting and challenging questions about the interpretation and presentation of photographs are raised. Finally, ethical issues in research using photographs are considered.

Photography as a Research Method in Qualitative Research

In this chapter, a distinction is made between images and photographs. As stated earlier with regard to visual culture, images can also include such things as artwork, cartoons, drawings, and maps. In research studies, children are often asked to draw pictures on which interviews are then based ( Ganesh, 2011 ). Drawings in combination with texts focused on schooling were also the focus of Holm’s (1994) analysis of the teen magazine Seventeen (1966–89). In this study, the text and drawings placing an emphasis on how girls should behave and look made a strong counternarrative with regard to the importance of education for girls. The emphasis was on conforming to norms, on being stylish and pleasing, and on not challenging or upsetting male students. Skorapa (1994) analyzes how cartoons about schooling can either challenge or perpetuate stereotypes and the dominant ideology of schooling. Cartoons are not only amusing, but also often deal with cultural tensions, changes, and conflicts ( Provenzo & Beonde, 1994 ).

In 1997, Jipson and Paley (1997 a ) published an unusual book called Daredevil Research: Re-creating Analytic Practice in which several of the chapters on postmodern research challenge our notions of how research should be reported. Many of the chapters incorporate or build on visual images. In Paley’s (1997) chapter “Neither Literal nor Conceptual,” the text blends with abstract black-and-white images. In another chapter by Jipson and Paley (1994 b ), text blocks are imposed in the middle of the pages, which in turn are a map of the space. In yet another chapter, the text itself constitutes an image by being written in one to four interweaving curving columns ( Jipson & Wilson, 1997 ). Although we rarely see this kind of experimenting with the use of visual images, these examples and other more arts-based visual research (see e.g., Knowles & Cole, 2008 ; Jipson & Paley, 1997 c ) provide a sense of the endless possibilities of using images. Furthermore, photography itself provides a lot of options; the kinds and uses of photographs are numerous. Due to the myriad of possibilities and the increasingly common use of photography, this chapter is limited to the use of photography in social science research.

One of the difficulties in using photography as a research method is the ambiguity that exists in photographs. Although photographs traditionally were thought of as portraying reality—the simple truth—this is no longer the case among researchers, even though many viewers still consider photographs as showing the truth. We acknowledge that photographs are constructed; they are made. Harper (2004) argues that this construction and subjectivity can be seen very clearly in photographs by early British anthropologists because they are all taken from the colonizers’ perspective. Interestingly, Chaplin (1996) argues that photographs are both taken and made as opposed to just made or constructed. They are taken in the sense that they give researchers the information and details they need, more like a record or a document, but the researcher also makes decisions on what to photograph and how to set it up and process it.

The photographer always has a reason for taking the photograph. There is an intention behind the photograph. The photographer wants to see something in particular or wants to send us a “message.” If the photographer is also a participant in the research, then the intended communication is connected to the researcher’s intentions as well. The researcher also influences the process by having selected a particular photo to be viewed by others. Consequently, there is also the intended audience; for whom is the photo taken? And, finally, there are the individual viewers. Photographers and researchers have their aims and intentions, but they cannot influence or control how the viewer interprets the photo. Sometimes the intended audience is only the researcher, and most of the photos will be seen and analyzed only by the researcher. These photographs are taken exclusively for the research and the researcher.

Whatever the case, without an accompanying text, many photographs can carry multiple meanings for the viewer ( Evans & Hall, 2010 ; see also Grosvenor & Hall, 2012 ). The possibility for multiple meanings and the ambiguity attached to photographs has made many, especially positivist, researchers uncomfortable with using or accepting photographs in books and articles. A good example of this is the disappearance of photos from the American Journal of Sociology under the direction of positivist editor Albion Small, even though the journal earlier had published numerous articles with photographs ( Stasz, 1979 ).

Photographs as Illustrations or for Documentary Purposes

Photography can be considered a data collection method, but not all photographs are used as data to be analyzed. The most common uses for photographs in social science research have been as illustrations and documentation. Documentary photography has a long history in fields like anthropology and sociology, as discussed earlier, but also in fields like history, where archival photographs are often used. In cultural studies, a good example of historical analysis of documentary photographs is Steet’s (2000) study of the construction of the Arab world in the magazine National Geographic . She analyzes one hundred years of photographs in the magazine, visually (and textually) constructing men and women as well as patriarchy and Orientalism in the Arab world. In contrast to Steet’s extensive material, Magno and Kirk (2008) analyzed only three photographs when examining how development agencies use photos of girls to promote their agencies’ work concerning the education of girls. However, they used an elaborate analysis template with seven categories: surface meaning, narrative, intended meaning, ideological meaning, oppositional reading, and coherency (coherency meaning in this case whether the photographs and the text argued for the same thing). Banks (2007 , p. 11) explains the difference between using photographs as illustrations and as anthropological visual research in that photographs as illustrations “are not subject to any particular analysis in the written text, nor does the author claim to have gained any particular insights as a result of taking or viewing the images.”

Wang (1999) describes a nontraditional approach to documentary photography as underpinning the photo-voice method. She sees photo-voice as theoretically grounded in critical consciousness and feminist theory and as an effort by “community photographers and participatory educators to challenge assumptions about representation and documentary authorship” (p. 185). Photo-voice is an approach to using photography as a method for collecting data that is merged with social activism and political change, and particularly with community involvement. The main goals of photo-voice are, according to Wang, Cash and Powers (2000 , p. 82) “(a) to enable people to record and reflect their community’s strengths and concerns, (b) to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important community issues through large and small group discussion of photographs, and (c) to reach policy makers and people who can be mobilized for change.” Wang has used this approach mostly for health-related research. Other researchers, like Duits (2010) , claim to use photo-voice but without the community improvement goal; these kind of studies more closely resemble participatory photography research.

Archival Photos

Many archival photos were originally taken for documentary or illustrative purposes. The most frequent use of archival photos is in some form of historical research. Today, digital archives are becoming common, making it easier to search for particular kinds of photos. However, it is also very demanding to work with thousands of photos on a particular topic ( Park, Mitchell, & de Lange, 2007 ). Photos are commonly of interest in newspaper or magazine research because they often are perceived as documenting or illustrating “objective” reality or providing evidence of historical events. For example, Martins (2009) includes a couple of photographs in her study of deaf pupils in a boarding school, illustrating and providing “proof” of the kinds of exercises the pupils had to do. A similar use of photos can be seen in Amsing and de Beer’s (2009) article on the intelligence testing of children with mental disabilities. Photos of the test and a testing situation show the reader “how things were done” in the testing of these children. However, in contemporary historical research, photos are critically examined with regard to how they construct an argument in interaction with the text in a particular context. Grosvenor and Hall (2012 , p. 26) emphasize the importance of examining archival photos in relation to the text when creating meaning because “(w)ords when used with images can anchor meanings; change the words and the original meaning can be displaced, even though the image that it captures remain the same.” A common problem with archival photos is that they are anonymous, in the sense that nothing is known about them; neither the photographer’s intentions nor the context in which they are taken ( Martin & Martin, 2004 ). Hence, the use of these kinds of photos for research is limited.

Photo albums are also a form of private or family archives. Because family albums and photos are very familiar to us as researchers, it is important to be aware of one’s own notions and constructions of families, of what one sees as a “normal family.” A reflexive approach is necessary so that the researcher does not impose his or her own views of families on the interpretation of albums. These kind of albums also bring forth an ethical issue, since photos often contain images of family members and other people who have not given permission for their photos to be part of a research project ( Allnutt, Mitchell, & Stuart, 2007 ).

Collier and Collier (1986) describe documentary photographs as “precise records of material reality.” Photographs document the world for further analysis at a later stage. However, Collier and Collier argue that many anthropologists have used photographs as illustrations but not as documentary data for research. Most anthropology and sociology researchers have themselves been photographers and often these photographs have been taken as illustrations or for documentary purposes.

Photographs Taken by Researchers

Traditionally, photographic surveys (see Collier & Collier, 1986 ) of, for example, visual aspects of workplaces or institutions were used as a way to systematically document and produce material to analyze so that the researcher could draw conclusions about working conditions, types of work, and the like. As Pink (2007) points out, the photos taken in these kinds of surveys do not say anything about whether the objects or physical surroundings are meaningful to participants or what meaning they hold for participants. In this case, the researchers decide on what they find interesting or potentially important enough to photograph. Photographs taken by researchers can also be used in photo-elicitation interviews, but, even so, it is still the researcher who sets the tone for what is important to discuss. It becomes the researcher’s interpretation of “reality” that is considered important and analyzed. In a well-known context, the researcher can provide both descriptive meaning as well as stories about each object (see Riggins, 1994 ), and this can make researcher-produced photographs very valuable for understanding processes. For example, Mitchell and Allnutt (2008 , p. 267) describe how it is possible in photo documentary research to follow “social transitions or change by identifying shifts in material objects, dress, and so on.” Rieger (2011) calls the study of social change “rephotography” and suggests it for studying social change with regard to places, participants, processes, or activities. Hence, in this way, detailed photographic surveys produce data to be analyzed rather than photographs for documentary and illustrative purposes.

There is no agreement on what the best approach is for researchers to take photos in the research setting. Some argue that by taking photographs immediately, at the beginning of the study when entering the scene, the camera can function as an opening device to create contact with the participants. Others argue that it is necessary for participants to get to know the researcher first, in order for them to feel comfortable with the camera and with being photographed.

Photographs Taken by Participants

Having participants take photographs, also called participatory photography , is the most frequently used photography method in social sciences today. Photographs taken by the participants for the purpose of, for example, photo-elicitation interviews encourage the participants to take a more active role in the research by indicating what is meaningful for them to discuss in the interview. It also gives participants more control over the interview ( Clark-Ibáñez, 2004 ; Majumdar, 2011 ). Some researchers prefer to call this type of photography, in which participants construct and take the photos, photo production ( Majumdar, 2011 ; Reavey, 2011 ). Radley (2011) points out that photos produced by participants also allow for interviewing about the circumstances of the production, which will give a more comprehensive insight into the participants’ intentions. However, even if the participants produce the photographs, the researcher’s presence is evident because the participants take the photos for the purpose of the research. In this chapter, I am not making a distinction between photographic interviews and photo-elicitation interviews. Most researchers less familiar with participatory photography tend to use the term photo-elicitation interviews as covering all kinds of participatory photography. The focus here is instead on the issues surfacing in participatory photography.

Clear instructions about the purpose of the research and the photographs need to be given to participating photographers. Even so, participants often deviate from the instructions. In a study in England on young people’s constructions of self and the connection to consumer goods, they were supposed to photograph goods they considered important. Instead, they all photographed mostly their friends. Hence, the participants redefined their task ( Croghan, Griffin, Hunter, & Phoenix, 2008 ). Commonly, participants are asked to take photos during the study, but frequently they contribute photos that were taken previously, but which they think exemplify the topic. For example, in a study of language minority ninth graders’ perceptions of their identifications and belonging to the Swedish language minority group in Finland, we ( Holm, Londen, & Mansikka, 2014 ) found this to be common. Because the study was done in the fall, they found it difficult to photograph some things they thought were important for their identification. Therefore, they brought in many photos of, for example, flowers and parties taken in the summer that they believed exemplified being part of the language minority group (Figures 19.1 and 19.2 ).

The flowers portray the beautiful Swedish language.

Crayfish is something we eat with our friends. We always do it with Swedish-speaking Finns.

Likewise, participants most often are asked to be the photographers themselves, but it is quite common for participants to ask others to take photos of them as well. In a study with doctoral students about what it means to be a doctoral student, several students asked others to photograph them instead, or they used previously taken photos in which they themselves were included ( Holm, 2008 a ). The photo in Figure 19.3 is taken by a friend of a student who is a participating doctoral student.

The time of the year influences the study in other ways as well. Especially in countries with dark, gloomy winter weather, wintertime photo projects will produce more indoor photos and dark, gray outdoor photos. In a study on elementary students’ perceptions of what community means to them and what their community consists of, the children took many outdoor photos of friends, their homes, and family cars, but the days when they happened to have a camera were overcast winter days. The indoor photos of their classrooms, schoolmates, and teachers are also quite gloomy despite the smiling faces. Hence, looked on out of context, there is a somewhat downcast mood over the photos even though their neighborhood is a very lush, green one with a vibrant street and porch life in the summer. Consequently, photos taken in summertime would have looked much more upbeat and cheery (Figures 19.4 and 19.5 ).

Photo of a doctoral student taken by a friend.

The time of year affects how photographs may look; this classroom photo was taken during the wintertime, which gives it a gloomy look.

The importance of clearly communicating to the participants in multiple ways the purpose of the research and the participants’ task cannot be overemphasized. The study of students’ perceptions of the meaning of community and their own community was originally a comparative study between a school in the United States and a school in Finland. The students in Finland were Finnish speakers attending an English-language school, and the researcher was American. The students understood that their task was to photograph their school community instead of their community in general, which resulted in photographs mostly of their friends at school.

Outdoor wintertime scenes may hide the true nature of an environment.

A weak common verbal language can also be overcome if participants express themselves through photographs. Veintie and Holm (2010) did a study of how Indigenous teacher education students from three different tribes thought of knowledge and learning in an intercultural bilingual teacher education institute in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Spanish was the common language, but it was also the second or third language for everybody. To ease the limitations for the students to express Indigenous thinking about these concepts in Spanish, the students took photographs that were then used as the basis for interviews. As researchers, we assumed that many photos about learning and knowledge would be related to schools and the teacher education institute because they were very prominent in the small community. Instead, the photographs portraying learning always involved people and actions and were mostly taken in the community (see Figure 19.6 ). In interviews, students also explained that learning is not given, but that learners are given the opportunities to observe and practice what is to be learned. Students also expressed knowledge as lived knowledge. Therefore, many students could not participate in the study because their families and homes were too far away to be photographed. Knowledge was grounded in their communities and their ancestors. The school-based photographs were only a small part of the pictures showing learning and knowledge. Instead, learning and knowledge were based on social interaction. Images like books, newspapers, internet, and television were completely absent because they held no meaning and were not present in the students’ lives. These aspects of knowing and learning would have most likely not emerged if the students would have only been interviewed.

Ethical Issues in Participatory Photography

Access to research sites for qualitative and especially ethnographic research can be difficult. Many institutional review boards (IRBs) and sites like workplaces, schools, and organizations are cautious about providing access, particularly to vulnerable populations like children and the ill. The very openness of the qualitative, ethnographic design may raise concerns. It is impossible to know in advance exactly what questions will be asked or what situations will be observed. Likewise, the analysis may be perceived as being too open and imprecise. These issues are often amplified with regard to including photography as a research method. The cautiousness is justified because the risks are higher when participants can be identified. There is no confidentiality if a photograph includes a person’s face. If the researcher is also the photographer, there is of course more control over what will be photographed, and the researcher can use his or her ethical judgment in each situation and refrain from taking photographs that could potentially harm or compromise participants or the research site. Conversely, if the participants are the photographers very clear instructions can be given about what should be photographed, but there is no guarantee that participant photographers will keep to the topic or particular settings. It then becomes the responsibility of the researcher to exclude potentially harmful or compromising photographs from being published or publically presented.

An Ecuadorian student’s photo of an object that represents community knowledge and learning.

Getting official permission and access is a first step, but securing informed consent from participants or the people who participants include in their photographs can be complicated. It is difficult to know if participants fully understand how their own photographs or the photographs of others might be used later. Publishing photographs in a book is easier to grasp, but the lack of control over photos on websites or explaining that they might be shown and discussed in conferences across the world is more complicated. Institutional review boards seem to perceive the risks for taking advantage of children as lower if the children themselves take the pictures ( Holm, 2008b ), which means that it is somewhat easier to get IRB approval for these kinds of studies. However, children taking photographs requires informed consent from guardians, beyond the informed assent of the children themselves. Involving children means more difficulties in gathering guardians’ consent and children’s assent forms. In most studies, some guardians will not give their consent despite their children wanting to participate; conversely, some guardians will give their consent but their children will not want to participate. One way to avoid having to exclude children who want to participate is to make the photography assignment part of a school or organization project in which all children participate, but only those with their guardian’s permission participate in the actual research.

Guardians are a form of gatekeepers, but more unpredictable gatekeepers are institutions such as schools, day care facilities, hospitals, and businesses or organizations. For example, in an ethnographic study of a school for pregnant and parenting teenage girls, the girls were going to photograph their lives as pregnant and/or parenting teenagers. However, after the study was set up, the school principal suddenly decided that the girls could not take photos of any males or of their children in diapers or taking baths. This restricted the girls so much that, in the end, they mostly took photos of each other posing at school. The restrictions were understandable, because there were several fights in school about the fathers of the babies (e.g., one man had fathered three children with three different girls) or the girls’ boyfriends who sometimes switched from one girl to another. Likewise, the restriction about not taking nude pictures of babies was understandable because the principal wanted to protect the babies from potential abuse, especially in light of the fact that several girls had themselves been abused in different ways. However, the restrictions were imposed on the girls without an explanation of why the rules had suddenly changed. These kinds of rules imposed from above reinforced the general management and control attitude of the school with regard to the girls’ schooling ( Holm, 1995 ).

Certain studies are difficult to do without the participants acting as co-researchers/photographers. Janhonen-Abruquah (2010) studied the daily transnational lives of immigrant women. The women kept photographic diaries of their everyday mundane activities, revealing the importance of cross-border communication between women in extended families living in different parts of the world. The women decided on what and who they photographed. Due to the often fairly private family situations portrayed, Janhonen-Abruquah decided to blur the faces in the photographs to protect the participants’ identities (Figure 19.7 ). This allowed photos of people to be used without obtaining permissions from everybody included, which would have been difficult for the women to do. However, if someone familiar with the women reads the study, it might be possible for him or her to recognize people in the photos based on surroundings or other features. Although this is a feasible way to deal with a difficult situation, it also objectifies the people in the photographs ( Wiles, Prosser, Bagnoli, Clark, Davies, Holland & Renold 2008 ) and makes them more remote and less interesting. Conversely, the alternative is not to use any photos, but merely describe them. In Newman, Woodcock, and Dunham’s (2006) study on bullying it was also essential to blur or box out faces to protect the children, but the photographs still give a sense of the bullying that gives additional information and understanding compared to a mere written description.

A similar situation emerged in the study of elementary school students’ sense of community. They had to take their own photos because much of their community was located at home, centered around their families, pets, toys, and bedrooms—places not accessible to the researcher.

Researcher (right) discussing with a research participant (left).

Preparations for Participatory Ethnography

Even though many people have some experience with cameras and photography, it is useful to have a session before the project to talk about the basics of photography. Even taking photographs for a research purpose requires some planning. For example, it might be useful to talk about how light and colors influence how a photograph is perceived (see Holm, 2008a ). Likewise, it is useful to talk about literal and metaphorical photos. How does one take photographs of abstract or missing things? Can the photographers manipulate their photos, now that it is fairly easily done if they have access to computers? Can the photographers bring an unlimited number of photographs, or do they have to pick a certain number of the most important ones? How will the participants deliver their photos to the researcher?

The issue of manipulation is no more important when using photography as a data collection method than in using other methods in qualitative research. Unethical researchers can always manipulate data. Interview and observation sections can be left out as easily as photographs are left unanalyzed. However, all manipulation is not the same. If it is the participants who manipulate/edit their own photographs, it could also be considered part of the data. Unedited and edited photographs could, for example, be compared to study differences between the current and desired situations. The difference between posing for a photo where clothing, pose, expression, and surroundings are arranged and editing a photograph can be marginal. They are both ways of arranging the photo to convey an intended message. The researcher manipulating photos for the purpose of misrepresentation is a very different issue. With digital photography, the total number of photos can become unmanageable. In a study in four countries on consumer behaviors of poor people, the group of researchers took 10,400 photos but analyzed only 612. In these kinds of cases, the question arises of why exactly these 612 were selected for analysis ( Lindeman et al., 2010 ). A detailed description of the elimination process would help dispel thoughts of manipulation due to the selection of certain photos.

If a group of people are to take photographs, a brainstorming session is useful at the beginning of the project in which participants generate ideas about what kinds of things might be possible to photograph. This is not about telling participants what to photograph but rather to encourage them to explore as a group possibilities for constructing and producing photos related to the research theme ( Holm et al., 2014 ). In the study on doctoral students’ perceptions of their studies mentioned earlier, we did not have a brainstorming session. When students as a group viewed everybody’s photos, there was real disappointment that they had not thought about photographing certain themes they considered very important. They also discovered that, as a group, they had forgotten certain themes altogether, such as the importance of fellow doctoral students, seminars, and professors. In other words, they were so overwhelmed by the life outside the university that, in most cases, they forgot to photograph the actual university scene ( Holm, 2008 a ).

Photography works well as a method for research and advocacy using the kind of concrete portrayal/documentation of problems used in photo-voice. Many researchers argue that young people are especially comfortable with and knowledgeable about photography. Many also argue that it is easier for young people and children to photograph and then discuss difficult and complicated issues. Especially when dealing with less verbal students or students with another first language, photography might be a good method ( Cremin, Mason, & Busher, 2011 ; Lodge, 2009 ; Sensoy, 2011 ; Wilson et al., 2007 ).

Habitus and Metaphorical Photographs

Bourdieu (1990 a ; 1990b ) and Sweetman (2009) also argue that photography can be used for exploring abstract and difficult-to-grasp concepts like habitus. Following their claims that photography is a possible way to explore habitus, we ( Holm et al., 2014 ) set out to study the habitus of Swedish-language minority speaking teenagers in Finland. How do these teenagers see themselves as being a member of a language minority group, and how do they perceive the entire group? The photos they took can be divided into two kinds. One kind was of literal depictions of Swedish-speaking theaters, newspapers, street signs, and the like (Figure 19.8 ).

The other kind was metaphorical photos showing, for example, being a minority group member, community, togetherness, feeling threatened, and being worried about the future of the language group (Figures 19.9–11 ).

Interestingly, in interviews, students had difficulty explaining what it means to belong to a language minority group. They had focused mostly on the language, whereas with the photos, they brought forth a variety of different aspects. In the photos, the language was just one aspect among many. The students also tended to use photographs of nature for their metaphorical visual statements. They often said in interviews that language minority members stick together and that they have a sense of belonging. In the photos, this was expressed through nature, as in Figures 19.12 and 19.13 .

The students photographed more deep-seated thoughts about the group’s future and stereotypes about the group, as well as their attachment to nature and the archipelago where many of their families originated. Likewise, Croghan, Griffin, Hunter, and Phoenix (2008) found that young people took photographs of sensitive issues related to their identity positions such as religion and race, issues that were not brought forth in interviews.

A literal photograph. One can understand both languages; street signs are in both Finnish and Swedish.

A metaphorical photograph showing the proportion of Swedes to Finns in Finland.

This kind of literal and metaphorical division can also be seen in photos taken by Palestinian children and youth living in refugee camps in Lebanon ( Mikander, 2010 ). They took photos to show what their lives are like. In this case, too, the children and the researcher had no common language. Here, too, there were many photos portraying their thinking, habits, and ways of being. An example of a literal photo isone of a living room wall. Interestingly, in this case, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the picture of Yasser Arafat, but the child who took the photo took it to show the hole in the wall. She wanted to show how they continue to live without permanent wiring, as if their housing was temporary (Figure 19.14 ).

A metaphorical photograph; Finland-Swedes are melting away slowly in Finland.

Finland-Swedes are like trees in a storm. Often we just bend, but if it is storming too hard we will break.

I think this little path is like the Finland-Swedes, all the rest around are the others in Finland.

A lone swan in the big sea like a Finland-Swede.

In Palestine, young people’s ways of thinking about their future can best be told through a series of photographs of a burning cigarette (Figure 19.15 ). They start out with full lives, with seemingly a lot of possibilities and hope. Their lives shrink with age and in a metaphorical way stop when they finish school because they do not have opportunities for further education. Dreams about future families are also hampered by the severe housing shortage. Hence, their life prospects are very limited.

Other abstract aspects of life, like absence, seem to be more difficult to photograph. In a study in which doctoral students photographed their lives as doctoral students, four photos of four different students’ families were very similar, but depicted different things. One was a Chinese wedding picture; another of a Korean mother, father, and child; a third one of a Ugandan mother with four children; and the fourth one of an American father with two children. In all photos, the people looked happy. Without an accompanying text, it was impossible to know how different their intended messages were. The American photo indicated that, for this doctoral student, her husband and children were her first priority even if the doctoral studies require much of her time. However, all the other photos indicated that the international students were studying alone in the United States and were missing their families, which had remained in their home countries. Hence, the question for them had been “How do you photograph the absence of someone?”Many of the issues, like ethical questions and habitus, brought up here in relation to participatory photography are also important for other kinds of photography in social sciences. However, they are often brought to the forefront in participatory photography because the participants are in charge of taking the photographs.

Analysis and Interpretation

No one “best” specific method exists for analyzing or interpreting photographs. In social science studies, most researchers use the same methods for photographs as for text. Early books on visual research methods (see, e.g., Collier & Collier, 1986 ) tended to give fairly precise instructions on how to organize, categorize, and compare photos in order to be able to conduct a good analysis. All researchers have to organize and group their photographs in some way, especially when we talk about hundreds and thousands of digital photos. However, researchers develop their own styles, often in connection with how they analyze their textual data. Many researchers use various software programs to organize photos; others group them by hand. However, categorizing or grouping photos is just a beginning, as with textual data. According to Harper (2003 , p. 195), taking and analyzing photographs is aided by theory, just as when collecting and analyzing any other kind of material. He also sees photographs as helping to build theory by forcing us to look at specific things in the field or to confirm theory. “Indeed, the power of the photo lies in its ability to unlock the subjectivity of those who see the image differently from the researcher.” Theory, the researcher’s own and the participants’ previous knowledge and experiences, previous research, and the participants’ descriptions of the photographs all contribute to an understanding of the photographs.

A Palestinian child’s photograph of a wall in her home; although the eye is drawn to the picture of Yasser Arafat, the child’s focus is on the hole in the wall.

How the analysis of photographs is done is not discussed much, if at all, in most research reports and visual research books, even though Ball and Smith wrote about analyzing visual data already in 1992. However, there is literature on various kinds of content analysis, iconography, semiotic analyses, and interpretive and other methods (see, e.g., Margolis & Pawels, 2011 ; Rose, 2012) . As Spencer (2011) points out, how a research study is designed, data collected, and results understood depends on the underlying paradigm. Therefore some researchers simply state that a study was analyzed based on a particular paradigm.

Content Analysis

A mostly quantitative content analysis is used for large numbers of photographs because it gives basic information about the frequencies of certain types of photos, on the basis of which various comparisons can be made. Rose (2012) gives fairly detailed steps to be followed to conduct a reliable content analysis. She emphasizes a careful selection of images and rigorous coding. However, Rose cautions that a high frequency count does not mean that the occurrence is necessarily important. In addition, frequencies neither indicate how strongly a photo exemplifies a category nor anything about the mood of photos. The intentions of the photographer are also excluded from a content analysis. Even though the analysis is quantitative, there is also a qualitative element in the interpretation of the frequencies and the presentation of the results.

Margolis and Rowe (2011) describe their use of a grounded theory approach to content analysis, which differs substantially from the one discussed by Rose. In their approach, the coding is theoretically based, which also allows them to pay attention to absent categories. Their categories overlapped, as opposed to the usual requirement of mutually exclusivity, and they also expanded the number of categories, as well as merged categories during the analysis.

The life opportunities of a youth in Palestine are metaphorically depicted as a burning cigarette.

Discourse Analysis

In popular culture studies, as well as in other social science research, various forms of discourse analyses are used in the analysis of photographs in relation to text. There is no specific visual discourse analysis, but Spencer analyzes specific images as examples of the use of discourse analysis. Rose (2012 , p. 195) makes a distinction between discourse analysis (DA) I and (DA) II, describing DA I as paying “rather more attention to the notion of discourse as articulated through various kinds of visual images and verbal texts than it does to the practices entailed by specific discourses.” Discourse analysis II she describes as working “with similar sorts of material, but is much more concerned with their production by, and their reiteration of, particular institutions and their practices, and their production of particular human subjects” (p. 227). Rose gives highly detailed and in-depth descriptions, with examples of how to conduct these kinds of discourse analyses. However, here it can be useful to remember that there are many different ways of doing discourse analysis (e.g., see Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 ).

Ethnographic Analysis

Many researchers use some kind of interpretivist analysis without being specific about it. Pink (2007 , p. 117) summarizes the ethnographic approach very well:

The academic meanings that ethnographers give to visual images are also arbitrary and are constructed in relation to particular methodological and theoretical agendas. Individual researchers classify and give meanings to ethnographic images in relation to the academic culture or discipline with which they identify their work. Moreover, ethnographers are themselves subjective readers of ethnographic images and their personal experiences and aspirations also inform the meanings they invest in photographs and videos. A reflexive approach to classifying, analyzing and interpreting visual research materials recognizes both the constructedness of social science categories and the politics of researchers’ personal and academic agendas.

Hence, an ethnographic approach entails using one’s already established or newly developed ways of organizing data. This organization and categorizing or beginning analysis might be quite intuitive and begin in the field. In many cases, the field and academic work intersect on a weekly basis, which influences how the researcher sees the data. In the academic setting, photographs are interpreted more closely from particular paradigms and theoretical frameworks and thus receive different meanings than in the field. In this kind of ethnographic approach, text and photographs are equally important and interact and inform the understanding of each other, as well as the relations between the two. The categorization in this approach differs from earlier approaches (see Collier & Collier, 1986 ) in that photos might be grouped in several different ways. They can, for example, be grouped according to the content, symbolic meaning, or origins of the photographers. Neither is the sequential order in which the photographs are taken necessarily important for the analysis because the photographers’ or participants’ thinking might not be linear. Rather, the way participants think about the way the photographs connect to themselves and their worlds might be more important.

At times, text and photographs might produce different but connected stories. Harper (2004 , p. 232) describes, with regard to Agee and Evan’s work on sharecroppers during the Depression, how the text and photos are juxtaposed and where “neither form repeats or replaces each other. Rather they develop in tandem.” In my research on the schooling of teenage mothers, the photos told the story of happy, playful girls posing alone or with other girls, but always without children. This was the story they wanted to show to outsiders. The text, on the other hand, told the story of the girls’ more private thoughts about their unhappy childhoods of abuse and abandonment, as well as their worries about being young mothers, often without any support network. Together, the two stories give a much fuller view of the girls than either one separately ( Holm, 1995 ).

Issues in Interpretation

The context of the production of the photos can be important. In our study of minority language teenagers’ perceptions of their own identifications, the geographical region in which they lived and produced their photos was closely tied to their identifications. Likewise, the larger societal context with regard to the general standing of the language minority group turned out to influence how worried the teenagers were about the future of the entire group. The academic context in which the photos are interpreted produces interpretations different from the ones in the field.

The interpretation of the photos will always vary somewhat from person to person depending on previous experiences. An interesting question arising here is how much the researcher needs to know and understand of the context in which the photo is taken. How much of the historical context do we need to understand in order to interpret archival photos? On one level, we can of course make some sense of photos of people living in difficult circumstances (as, for instance, during the Depression), but without the knowledge of this historical context our interpretation will be very superficial. Likewise, how much of the context do we need to know and understand of the participants who have taken photographs?

As researchers, we found in our study of the Swedish-speaking students’ photographs (see earlier description of the study; Holm et al., 2014 ) that having a habitus similar to the participating photographers facilitated the understanding of their photographs. Metaphorical photographs were especially easier to interpret. For example, photographs of the feeling of being harassed or that the future is somewhat insecure for the minority group immediately rang a bell in us. We had all had that feeling or experience at one point, although in different settings. Figure 19.16 shows the sun disappearing like the Swedish language is doing according to the student, and this feeling of doom is familiar to all Finland-Swedes, like the participants and the researchers in this case, who live in areas where the Finnish language is dominant. Without the text (or without an interview about the photos), this photo would simply be a photo of a beautiful sunset. Outsiders would get some sense of the situation from the text, but for the researchers living in the same societal context, the photo immediately brings to mind the larger debates about abolishing compulsory Swedish-language instruction from schools, hostile comments by members of an anti-Swedish (and anti-immigration) party, personal comments that Swedish speakers should emigrate to Sweden, and the like. Hence, knowing the societal context helps the researchers to more fully understand the deep thinking of the student taking the photo.

Swedish is disappearing from Finland (photo taken by Eva, a student participant).

In analyzing and interpreting photographs taken by participants, it is important to pay attention to photographs not taken as well, since they can be important. They can be missing because it is too difficult or painful to find ways of showing one’s thoughts, as Frith (2011) found in her study of women in chemotherapy who did not have enough energy to take photographs when they were feeling most ill. Other issues might be too intimate or sensitive. Missing photos can also be due to restrictions placed on the participating photographers by gatekeepers ( Holm, 1997 ).

There are numerous books about different kinds of analyses of photographs and visual data in general. However, most researchers do not recount in their articles what kind of analysis has been used. In the methods section of articles, researchers discuss what kind of data was collected and how it was collected, but few proceed to discuss what was done with the data after it was collected. Mostly, the data were “analyzed.” Some use phrases like photographs “can be read,” “in line with the social constructionist paradigm,” “we looked for salient patterns/images/issues,” and the like. The reason for this lack of discussion about the actual analysis might be that there is not one specific approach and that the field is relatively new for many researchers. Many researchers treat photos in the same way as verbal texts, but often not even basic information is provided about how this was done. Some researchers mention that photographs were categorized, but usually there is nothing more explicitly said about the analysis or interpretation.

Presentation of Research Using Photography as a Research Method

In social science studies, the most common way to present research using photography is still to translate most of the photographs into text, although more journals are willing to publish a few photographs as part of an article. However, only journals like Visual Studies, Critique of Anthropology , and Visual Communication will publish photo-essays in which most of the article consists of photos accompanied by short texts or captions and with the participants’ story ( Banks, 2007 ). There also tend to be more photos in books and book chapters than in journals. Pink (2007) discusses the possibilities of hypermedia presentations both in the form of CD ROM, DVD, and internet-based formats. Hypermedia holds a lot of potential for presenting multimodal data, but, as Pink also points out, has increased risk for manipulation of data that might change the importance and meaning of photographs, even though CD ROM and DVD provide limited access. E-journals are ideal venues because some of them, like Forum: Qualitative Social Research , are open-access journals and publish photography-based articles. Hypermedia online journal articles, like a special issue of Sociological Research Online , edited by Halford and Knowles, go a step further than regular online publishing by including, for example, live video clips. Although some researchers publish their work using photographs on websites, this is not a realistic option—at least not as the only venue—because most researchers today work in institutions requiring publishing in refereed journals.

Ethical Issues in Photography as a Method

Ethical issues have emerged throughout the chapter with regard to gaining access, securing informed consent, and promising confidentiality. Of foremost concern in photographic research is whether participants understand what informed consent means and for what purposes the photographs can be used. Institutional review boards are especially strict with regard to protecting participants from harmful or compromising photographs. However, many argue that it is not possible to foresee all possible situations in advance but that giving consent should be ongoing during the entire study ( Pauwels, 2008 ; Wiles et al., 2012 ). It is possible to produce consent forms in which participants specify what kind of uses they give consent to. For example, some participants may allow their photographs to be used for analysis but not for publication. Other participants might not want anonymity but instead want the viewers to know who they are and/or that they have taken a particular photograph ( Grinyer, 2002 ; Wiles et al., 2008 ), although this is not always possible if others are involved in the study. Conversely, there can be difficulties with photo release forms if someone is suspicious of signing forms ( Banks, 2007 ) or cannot understand the language or meaning of the form.

Ultimately, the researcher must make judgments about ethical issues surfacing during the course of the study. Respecting participants’ rights to refuse to be photographed or to photograph certain things has to be respected at all times. Likewise, it has to be possible to withdraw from the study at any time. In describing the difficulties of taking photos of very poor consumers in four different countries, Lindeman et al. (2010 , p. 9) describe how the fieldworkers were torn about doing what the study required in just a couple of weeks fieldwork or respecting people’s right not to want to be photographed or have their poor homes photographed. “The issue of interfering in peoples’ lives was also present when we wanted to take photos and videos. In principle we always asked for permission before filming or taking pictures, but in some instances we also had to take sneak picture of things of high importance to the research.” In the pressure to collect data quickly, they made poor ethical decisions.

Researchers using previously taken photos as well researchers working with new photos face questions of ownership and copyright ( Pink, 2007 ; Rose, 2012 ). With regard to new photos, some researchers try to prevent potential problems by stating the ownership on the forms for permission to conduct research. This might be a good idea, especially if the participants take the photos and think of them as their own.

Overall, collaborative research in which the photographs are more of a co-production might be a more ethical approach to visual research. Giving copies to and discussing them with the participants whenever possible is also a way to give the participants a better sense of which photos will be used and how they will be used. In using photography as a research method, the one aspect present in all studies and throughout the studies from the beginning to the end is the responsibility of the researcher to make good ethical judgments to produce research that does not harm participants in any way.

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Breaking ice, and helicopter drops: winning photos of working scientists

Nature ’s annual photography competition attracted stunning images from around the world, including two very different shots featuring the polarstern research vessel..

By Jack Leeming

23 April 2024

This article is also available as a pdf version .

Scientists often take images from their work – whether they produce medical scans, microscopic captures, or computer screenshots of tricky pieces of code during the course of their work. By continuing our Working Scientist photography competition, we aim to celebrate and highlight the very best images created by our audience in the pursuit of research.

We received more than 200 entries this year from researchers working around the world. The winner and the four runners-up were selected by a jury of Nature staff, including three of the journal’s picture editors. All will receive a prize of £500 (US$620), in the form of Amazon vouchers or a donation to charity, as well as a year’s subscription to Nature .

This image, taken on top of the icebreaker research vessel Polarstern , shows the delicate process of retrieving an instrument called a CTD (short for conductivity, temperature, depth) that had become trapped under sea ice off the coast of northeastern Greenland.

CTDs, which are anchored to the sea floor, measure how ocean properties such as salinity and temperature vary with depth. At some point, the sea ice had closed over the top of this one, forcing the Polarstern to skirt carefully around the equipment, breaking the ice to rescue it from the freezing ocean.

Credit: Richard Jones

“You’re crashing into ice and breaking through it. So it wasn’t particularly calm sailing for the majority of the trip,” remembers Richard Jones, who took the image in September 2017 and is the winner of Nature ’s 2024 Working Scientist photography competition. His research aims to improve estimates of the rate at which ice is being lost from the world’s glacial ice sheets.

Jones, a glaciologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, highlights the photographic contrast between icebreaker and ice that he’d become used to in his five weeks aboard the Polarstern . “All you really see is blue and white. And sometimes that might feel pretty monotonous, but the colours from the CTD instrument and the orange of the crane contrast the scene and also complement it quite nicely.”

Here are the rest of the winning images from the competition.

Credit: Ryan Wagner

Reaching the beak

Conservation biologist Ryan Wagner snapped this photo of field biologist Sonia Vallocchia feeding a recently caught kiwikiu ( Pseudonestor xanthophrys ), in January this year. It was taken on Haleakalā volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Wagner, a PhD student at Washington State University Vancouver, was on an expedition to the island as a science communicator, hoping to raise awareness of the plight of the endangered birds.

“Only 130 of these birds remain on Earth,” explains Wagner. “Their numbers have crashed due to avian malaria, which is spread by invasive mosquitoes. As climate change warms the island, mosquitoes have advanced upslope into the high-elevation refuges where native birds survive. A single mosquito bite can kill a kiwikiu.”

He hopes that ornithologists such as Vallocchia, who works for the Maui Forest Birds Recovery Project in Makawao, will help to save these birds by bringing some of them (by helicopter) to the Maui Bird Conservation Center, also in Makawao. There, they will be treated for malaria and join a captive breeding programme, he says.

Credit: Luiz L. Saldanha/Kimberly P. Castro

Library of leaves

PhD student Kim Castro took this photo of her colleague, postdoctoral researcher Luiz Leonardo Saldanha, in a herbarium that they both work in regularly. It’s shared between the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Both Castro and Saldanha investigate the medicinal plants of the Amazon at the Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany at the University of Zurich, although the two have very different approaches: whereas Saldanha investigates their chemical diversity, Castro looks at how the plants are perceived by Indigenous communities in the Amazon, specializing in how the plants smell.

A herbarium, Saldanha says, is “like a library — but instead of books, there are plants here”. Saldanha posed with this particular sample ( Palicourea corymbifera , collected in 1977) because it comes from his home country, Brazil, but is used by the Indigenous Desano people in Colombia as a medicinal herb. “So it creates a commonality between South American countries,” he says.

Credit: Herton Escobar/University of São Paulo Images

Mountain drop-off

In this dramatic image, taken from below the still-spinning, deafening blades of a military helicopter, scientists shelter with their equipment after being dropped off at the top of a remote mountain in northern Amazonia. They are taking part in a biodiversity-research expedition to Serra Imeri, an isolated mountain range that rises through the forest canopy near the border of Brazil and Venezuela, in November 2022.

“A total of 14 scientists and dozens of military support personnel took part in the expedition, which lasted for 11 days and resulted in the discovery of several new species of amphibians, reptiles, birds and plants,” says photographer Herton Escobar, a science journalist who works with the scientists pictured, at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Credit: Emiliano Cimoli

Go with the floe

Emiliano Cimoli, a remote-sensing scientist at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, Australia, took the second photograph featuring the research vessel Polarstern in this year’s collection of winning images. Here, Carolin Mehlmann and Thomas Richter, mathematicians at the University of Magdeburg, Germany, are measuring the depth of snow across a giant ice floe drifting in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.

The image was taken during a two-month voyage organized by the Alfred Wegener Institute, based in Bremerhaven, Germany, in August 2023. The goal of the expedition was to evaluate interactions between the ice physics, biology, hydrography, biogeochemistry and biodiversity of the Arctic ecosystem, from the sea ice to the sea floor.

Nature 628 , 919-921 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01181-7

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• Art Full Text (EBSCO)
• Art Index Retrospective (EBSCO)

Photography Publications

Here are examples of some of the Library's current subscriptions to photography journals and periodicals, all available online.

Academic (Peer-Reviewed) Journals:

American Art

Critical Photography Series

Imaging Science Journal (12 month delay for full text)

International Journal of the Image

Journal of Visual Art Practice

Periodicals/Magazines:

American Photo

American Suburb X

BlackFlash  

Humble Arts Foundation 

Photo District News (up to 2014)

Photograph Magazine

Photoworks Annual

Popular Photography

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• Last Updated: Feb 20, 2024 12:33 PM
• URL: https://csus.libguides.com/photography

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Vogue Club Special: Met Gala Photographer Hunter Abrams’ Tips for Peak Creativity

By Eoghan O'Donnell

Illustration by Hannah Monaghan

When it comes to capturing fashion’s epic moments, New York-based Hunter Abrams is often the first person on the scene. From backstage and street photography at fashion weeks to the seemingly endless red carpets of awards seasons, Hunter has established themselves as one of the most creative—and adaptive—fashion photographers of the moment.

The instant respect Abrams commands in his field is the result of both years of hustling and an unwavering dedication to the pursuit of timeless—yet utterly of-the-moment—photography. What started as a passion project chased after on the side (after dropping out of college, Abrams juggled shooting New York Fashion Week street style on top of his receptionist job on Long Island) eventually evolved into an industry-leading professional career shooting guests at events like The Met Gala and the hottest tickets at global fashion weeks.

With a portfolio of A-listers and icons (including everyone from Dua Lipa and Megan Thee Stallion to Meryl Streep), Abrams is here to share the stories and secrets behind his hard-won professional journey in Vogue Club’s latest episode of Career Secrets .

Three key takeaways from the episode—whether your heart is set on following Abrams into photography—or have set your sights on an entirely different career.

Research, Research, and Research!

Photographed by Hunter Abrams, Vogue , May 2023

It doesn’t matter if you’re still figuring out what you want to do in life or if you’re simply eager to lean into a new career: Hunter advises you to do your research: “If something interests you, keep at it until you’re almost sick of it,” he says, “and if you’re still not sick of it, chances are you never will be. That should be where you keep going.”

Find That Thing That Makes Your Work Stand Out

Photographed by Hunter Abrams, Vogue , February 2024

Having found your niche, “Develop your work, experiment, and make it feel distinctive. A lot of people in this business love to say that ‘Everybody is replaceable’ If they’re good, they’re not—you will never find the same amount of technical skill, artistic vision, and personality in the next person. It’s about those three elements coming together to make someone that everyone wants to work with.”

Phone A Friend

Hunter Abrams and Vogue's Lynn Yaeger

By Lorena Meouchi

By Hannah Coates

By Daniel Rodgers

Having people you can rely on for advice or consultation is invaluable: “Becoming friends with people in the industry is one of the most important things you can do,” Abrams says. “That’s how you know when to trust a client—and how to figure out whether somebody is easy or difficult to work with.”

Want to hear more advice from Abrams? Join Vogue Club to watch our  Career Secrets with Hunter Abrams video now!

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