Process Photography: How Do Images Produce?

• In Event: 30.065 - Productive Methodological Tensions: Intervening Through Creativity, Collaboration, and Critique

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: The afterimages of some photographs burn their way into our memories – into our collective consciousness – influencing how we know, think, feel, and act. Their aftereffects linger long after we have looked away. In a recent example, Nilüfer Demir photographed an image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose body had washed ashore in Turkey. The 2015 image circulated around the globe and, for many, became emblematic of the Syrian refugee crisis. Soon thereafter, protest artist Ai Weiwei reenacted the photo in a controversial attempt to draw continued attention to forced migration. Though both images were minor gestures (Manning, 2016), each achieved far-ranging effects by materially intervening in ongoing social, political, and artistic debates. These examples demonstrate on an international scale how images matter, not only in what they might mean, but in what they might produce. As such, this paper 1) theorizes photography as a process before 2) examining local visual interventions that demonstrate the productive potential of images in/as methodology.

Perspective(s): To explore what images produce, perspectives draw from early concepts in photography. When William Henry Fox Talbot (1839) experimented with what we now know as photography, he named the process as ‘photogeny,’ or the production of photographic images. Talbot’s influence led to the development of a (now unfamiliar) methodological vocabulary that approached images as active, ongoing processes. In uncovering that vocabulary, this paper first describes the progression of photogeny as negative visual impression (Talbot, 1844) before discussing photogeny as extrasensory perception (Epstein, 1924) and wound (Barthes, 1981).

Techniques, modes of inquiry, and data materials: This paper adopts photography as a technique, mode of inquiry, and data source. Archival images first are sourced from Talbot’s initial photogenic works (Figure 1), in which images reverse into their own negatives and occupy spaces that are unexpected, unanticipated, unvacant. To then explore what contemporary images produce, a second set of digital images document ongoing visual protests in an urban U.S. city. Taken over one year and sampled from a larger collection of digital images (N ≈ 1,900), photographs illustrate how local residents counter oppression through artistic interventions. Images offer minor gestures that contest a different type of forced migration: an urban exodus produced by policies that disadvantage neighborhoods and schools most in need of assistance.

Results: Figure 2.

Significance: Images do not stay still – they creatively intervene in social critique and debate. For example, images highlight the presence – rather than the absence – of residents in shrinking, unvacant cities. In a city where children exist but public schools soon may not, images respond to the need for “critique and methods for making visible different and ever changing relations of power” (Cannella, 2015, p. 596). Images have the potential to intervene, therefore, but perhaps only if methodology attends to images as critical, creative, productive, generative movements – as photogeny. By considering how and what images produce, researchers might be better equipped to address “the diversity of issues, populations, and contexts served in and by educational inquiry” (Gadsden, Arzubiaga, & Davis, 2016, p. 1).

Author

• Jasmine Ulmer, Wayne State University