Materializing Mercurial Relations: Youth Photographic Art-Making as Analysis

• In Event: 34.083 - The Danger of a Single Image? Methodological Explorations of Visual Research in Education

Abstract

This paper considers data created by a group of suburban teenagers in a photography course who used photography and art to study themselves and their engagement with texts in their everyday lives. What follows is more a methodological meditation than a report of the findings from the larger study. Rather, I suggest that using photographic art-making allowed students to materialize invisible or mercurial relations in ways that would have been impossible with more traditional qualitative research methods.
In the study, students completed an assignment wherein they conducted photoethnographic self-studies of their engagement with texts in their everyday lives. This produced a large corpus of both film and digital photos. I then chose a small group of focal students to interview about their projects and invited them to analyze the photos through coding, talk, and, ultimately, art-making. Through the coding and far-ranging discussions about the work, the group developed a desire to find a way, through art, to capture and create the layers of meaning we were making of the work.
We were inspired by the integrated imagework methodology of Maureen Michael (2015), who “used the ways in which the images were made as forms of analysis, and … the aesthetic content of the finished artefacts (sic) as a form of interpretation” (p. 71). We similarly decided to use the photographs the student-researchers took as the focus of individual art-making interpretation projects. Student researcher Kate described her process as a dissection, saying, “I felt like I was dissecting the layers that were already in the photo. Like, this is the way I see the photo but if I had to take it apart for somebody else, this is the way I would do it.”
The students each selected a few photos that spoke to them. We printed enlargements and used a découpage technique to adhere the photographs to large pieces of wood (see Figure 1 below). Students then used sheets of transparency film to create literal layers to overlay the photograph. On the layers, students chose to do a variety of techniques including line drawings, written annotations, and painting to interpret the meanings they made of/with the photograph.


Figure 1: Student researcher Mia creating one of her analytical art pieces
In every case there was some element of students’ art-making that entailed them materializing an idea, affect, force, memory, or relation that would have otherwise been invisible to someone viewing the moment or the representation of the moment captured in a photograph. Accessing the mercurial is possible through photography and photographic art-making for three reasons. First, approaching the analytical task as artistic and creative offered the opportunity to slow down the relations students were studying allowing the ephemeral, immaterial, and temporally fractured elements to surface. Second, art can make the ordinary unfamiliar which is generative when studying everyday life. Finally, art taps into totally distinctive ways of knowing as it has a different relationship with thinking, acting, feeling, and perceiving than other analytical methods.

Author

• Amanda Smith, University of Hawaii - Mānoa