05.06.2024
[Blog:] Taking photos seriously: Ethnography, photography and investigations of urbanity
[G-TURN Photography Workshop:] Thursday, May 16, 8.45am-6pm; French-German Cultural Institute, Tübingen
This workshop, coordinated by Amandine Turri Hoelken and Claire Bullen, brought together nine scholars who use photographs in their urban investigations. The purpose was to create a practical, critical yet non-judgmental space in which to explore epistemological, methodological and ethical questions raised when working with photos to research changing urban lives around the world.
Since the birth of photography as a technology, art-form and social practice urban-scapes and urban lives continue to provide the backdrop or focus for photographers and social scientists alike. Further, the frontiers delimiting photography as a ‘discipline’ or ‘practice’ and social science research have become increasingly fuzzy, as visual ethnography and sociology has developed as sub-genres and as photographers become sociologists and anthropologists (and vice versa) and draw on scientific literature for inspiration in their image making. Diverse photographic genres (portraits, street, documentary, ‘found’ images) and methods now join the assimilation of other visual materials and methods within qualitative social research, the inclusion of photos within urban research can take various forms (Rose 2016 ; Roberts 2011; Becker 1974). Yet, while a thriving literature exists on how photos may be interpreted, how relations between photographs and the field can be differently conceived, and the potential ‘agency’ of photos within social lives, the relations between the social sciences, art and photography remain under-unexplored (Cuny et al. 2020). In much social science research, images continue to be relegated to a purely illustrative role and their analytical potential overlooked. Surprising little attention has been given to the question of how making and/or working with photographs may offer particular insights into ethnographic explorations of urban transformations.
In the presence of Claire Bullen, Manuel Dieterich, Bani Gill, Carlos Nazario Mora Duro and Franca Webel (University of Tübingen) and Oriane Gerard (Aix-Marseille University), Amandine Hoelken (University of Strasbourg), Damián O. Martínez (University of Murcia) and Jérôme Tadié (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Paris/Nice), the day-long workshop was conceived as a way for researchers to reflect upon the above and to think more deeply and critically about (how) can photography help us better understand the urban.
Presentations of each participants of one or two photographs taken from their field-sites served as the basis for discussions of ethical, methodological or epistemological implications (consent, power-relations, representation, material conditions of image production, aesthetic choices, materials, etc., insights into urban social relations, urban changing forms, the urban ethnographic endeavour…).
Workshop participants are now working towards an on-line academic journal, while we hope to continue these discussions on working with photographs within urban research during future G-TURN Critical Conversations.
If you would like to take part in this discussion, please contact us: jan-paul.spyra@student.uni-tuebingen.de