Working with Photographs and other Qualitative Visual Evidence
February 16, 2010
In research writing in the humanities (and to some extent in the social sciences), the use of photographs, or other qualitative visual evidence (as opposed to the quantifiable data found in charts and graphs) requires that you have a very clear sense of a given item’s relevance not only to one section of your text, but to your argument as a whole. Like charts and graphs, qualitative visual evidence needs to have a purpose, and it needs to be fully integrated into your writing. It can be awfully tempting to rely on the old adage that “a picture is worth 1,000 words,” but in truth, your picture is only that valuable if you’ve used the 1,000 words that follow to explain its relevance.
OK, maybe you don’t have to spend 1,000 words explaining it. 😉 But if you don’t prepare your reader for the introduction of your visual evidence, and then explain its relevance, it will have far less power and far less energy within your work. It might even drain your work of its otherwise intense focus and purposefulness.
Click “more” to see an example.
Working With Qualitative Visual Evidence: An Example
Starting At The Very Beginning, OR: You Can’t Talk About It Until You Know What’s In It
Here is a photograph taken by Leroy Lucas in 1965. It is part of a larger book–a collection of both text (by Ed Dorn) and pictures–called The Shoshoneans: People of the Basin-Plateau:
(Note: an annotated version of this image can be seen here.)
In working with this image in preparation for a 2007 conference talk, the first thing I did was take notes on everything I saw in it:
1st photograph – opening of Chapter II of Dorn’s text, before he gets too far along, is broken up by the first section of Leroy’s photographs, “The People.” The fifty-one photographs in this section begin with a shot inside a cemetery. In the foreground is the headstone of a 37 year old Native American who died in Idaho and was, according to the stone, “Buried like a White Man.” Behind and to either side of the central headstone are numerous graves marked by white crosses. The sky, which makes up fully half of the background of the shot, is full of fast-moving clouds.
In taking notes on the photograph, I considered the photo’s relation to the text it was published with, as well as the technical aspects of the photo itself. If your photographic evidence is a photo alone (i.e., not part of a book or in a larger exhibition), your notes will ideally emphasize the photo’s construction. Consider the following:
- color
- contrast in color or in shape
- the relative size of objects
- where your eye goes first upon viewing the photograph
- background and foreground
- where there is or is not movement
- what the photographer seems to be trying to emphasize, in your opinion
- what isn’t in the photograph (especially if anything gets cut off)
- what is and isn’t in focus
- angle at which the subject of the photo is approached by the camera
- any visible text (your reader’s eyes will immediately jump to this and try to analyze it)
You’ll note that I didn’t consider all of these things in my initial note-taking, but I did locate the movement in the photograph (clouds), and the relative size of the objects in it. I also focused on the visible text–something I was later able to use as a starting point for my analysis of the photograph.
Integrating The Image Into Your Text
It is only after exploring the image itself (and in this case, the image’s placement as part of a larger overall work) that I was ready to place it in my writing. Here is how I wrote about the image itself in my talk (the book from which this image was taken was passed around the room for my listeners:
…of ritual ceremony’s potential to create change. The first time the reader encounters Lucas’ photographs is (not coincidentally) on the page opposing Dorn’s “handprint” map of the Basin-Plateau. Breaking into the opening lines of Chapter II of the travelogue is “The People,” fifty-one images, primarily portraits of individuals, aging as the series progresses. The very first image, however, is not of an infant but of a cemetery. In the foreground of the photo is the headstone of a 37-year-old Native American, who was, according to the engraving on the stone, “Buried Like A White Man.” Behind and on either side of the central headstone, numerous graves are marked by white crosses. The sky, which makes up fully half of the background of this photograph, is full of fast-moving white clouds.
A depiction of the results of assimilation— that is, an early death and a less-than-honorable memorial—while also an acknowledgement of that conquest’s inevitability as time moves forward and the clouds gather, this image is an explicit foreshadowing of ideas Dorn will later examine in the travelogue—particularly the questions of assimilation which arise during the pair’s visit to Reno, chronicled in the middle of the book. At this point, however, the photography is disconnected from the narrative. The text on the page opposite this image is a general introduction to the “Basin-Plateau area of the western United States,” an orientation to the physical geography that Dorn and Lucas traversed in 1965 (16). The only human beings mentioned in this description are obvious outsiders, “a few gamblers, professional criminals, movie stars, divorcees, and, of course, the people who live there” (16). While it is easy to imagine the dead man buried beneath the headstone on the opposite page as belonging to one or more of these marginal categories, there is no reference made to the photograph itself. The marker could be on anyone’s grave. The photographs are textually invisible…
In the first paragraph, because I’m writing about an image that is part of a collection, I have tried to contextualize it—I’ve begun to explain how the images relate to the text in which they were originally found. If I were discussing an entire gallery of images, I would make this kind of contextualizing effort as well. I then go on to explaining what is found in the image itself. It is generally useful to describe the image as a whole before emphasizing particular elements. This can be condensed if the image is directly above the text, but it really should not be omitted.
In the second paragraph, note that my summary of the image is directly followed by my explanation of its relevance. Later on, I again explain the context in which I found the photo. This is again an attempt to make the context of the photo relevant–not only in this particular moment, but to my work as a whole.
Were I continuing to write, I would then move on to either another image or to further discussion of the points which were raised by that image.
(Note: click here to see my writing about this photograph in PDF format, with commentary.)
Entry Filed under: Macaulay,Pedagogy. Posted in Macaulay ,Pedagogy .
