Aesthetics,Ethics,and Visual Research in the Digital Age: ‘Undone in the Face of the Otter’

Visual Research in the Digital Age

The moment of encounter is differently inflected when undertaking visual research and is different again in the context of digital spaces. The digitalisation of social life gives access to a wealth of information that was previously unavailable, and it fundamentally changes the nature of the research encounter when our research participants are, for example, those who comment on a globally-shared news story on Facebook or who tweet responses to a media release, or when our ‘data’ are ordinary images of ordinary people who are somehow entangled in our analyses of global politics as a result of the easy manipulation, reproduction, and circulation of such images in the digital age.

The increasing digitalisation of social life ‘has further expanded the sites at which popular culture manifests and blurred the lines even further between the cultural, the political and the popular’. ¹⁰ The differences are many and various: The digital circulation of images and text means that content previously unavailable except through library requests or archive visits can now easily be accessed; the news cycle plays out over a 24-hour timespan and has global reach; individuals feature not only as consumers but producers of media, with the widespread availability of smartphones and ubiquitous internet connectivity; and individuals become enmeshed in the lives of others in new and interesting ways, through social media communities on Facebook and Twitter, and through open sharing of photographs and videos via platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo. An aesthetic approach to digitised visuality demands an account of the ‘micropolitical spaces’ in which we operate and through which we are produced (Brent J. Steele, this volume). It is not only the lines between ‘the cultural, the political and the popular’ that blur in the digital age, ¹¹ but the lines between fact and fiction, ‘real life’ and virtual existence, where our ‘real selves’ are at least in part constituted by and through our digital performances, and where social life exists in part in the digital realm.

Much of the guidance on ethical practice provided to scholars working with images relates to the use of image data, and is, in this sense, not so far removed from the guidance provided to scholars working with written text. ¹² There are, however, complications that arise from working with images that are entirely different to those that arise from written texts, and there are complications that are similar but differently inflected. ¹³ I want to discuss three such issues here (although there are of course many others): First, there is the purportedly unique property of image representation that renders its truth status quite different to the truth status of words and the ethical issues that flow from this; second, there is the question of anonymity, and the issue of whether it is ever possible in practice to protect the privacy of a research participant when using images captured during the research encounter; and, finally, there is the issue of ownership, particularly pertinent in the digital age, when images once captured can circulate virally thus reaching an audience potentially far greater than ever anticipated even if consent to construct the image was once given by those depicted.

At the heart of debates about the truth status of images, specifically photographic images, is the idea that ‘[p]hotographs are really experience captured’. ¹⁴ ‘The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture’, ¹⁵ which lends authority to research claims. Although not the same thing as photojournalism, research that creates visual representations of people, places or things, therefore, is subject to the same concerns about credibility and authenticity that inform current debates in photojournalism. Research that uses visual representations as evidence or data must similarly hold these concerns in mind. There are two layers to excavate in the investigation of the truth status of images. First is the recognition that the perceptions, views, and beliefs of the researcher inevitably have an impact on the composition of the image, in just the same way that the positionality of the researcher affects and effects the research process when working with written texts. Ethical practice in the construction of image data, then, requires reflexivity about composition, framing, lighting, and perspective and so on. ¹⁶ In the moment of photographic representation – the split-second opening of the shutter to commit to digital memory the scene composed in negotiation between the photographer and the photographed – various subjects and objects are fixed and a relationship between them constructed, such that meaning can be made of the image thus produced.

The second layer of practice relates to image manipulation. Photojournalist communities have long been acutely aware of the tensions inherent in image-production (the tensions between creating desirable artefacts and the need to ‘minimize fiction within a particular context’) ¹⁷ and much of the debate seems to be framed in terms of ethics and professional practice. ¹⁸ There are no easily applicable guidelines to ethical practice in this realm, with different commentators disagreeing over whether a degree of image manipulation is acceptable (tinting the sky a darker shade of grey, for example, to increase the sense of foreboding in an image of a war-torn landscape) or anathema to the principles that should guide news photography. The same tensions exist in visual research, ¹⁹ as the same image manipulation tools are widely used and widely available. When constructing a visual ethnography, for example, a researcher might crop an image to cut out the side of a building that she deems irrelevant to the component of the story she wishes to tell, or use image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop to block out the face of someone from whom she has been unable to secure consent for the use of the image in the project. While the wholescale manipulation of images such as that undertaken by some (now discredited) photojournalists is unlikely, ²⁰ the process of collecting, editing, and then circulating images as part of research entails a series of ethical decisions about accuracy, authenticity, and representation.

The issue of anonymity is a ‘core problem’ in visual research. ²¹ Luc Pauwels, in his careful exploration of ethical issues that arise in visual research, proposes that the issue of anonymity – the difficulty in affording anonymity to research participants when the data gathered during research is image-based rather than written – is linked to the nature of the relationship between image and reality alluded to above:

The “irreducible nature” of the camera image means that it forfeits much of its communicative strength when converted to an alternative medium, such as words or numbers, or if parts, such as a subject’s face, are made “illegible” to protect anonymity. ²²

Visual researchers have suggested that the need to anonymise images captured during the research process can be negotiated on an image-by-image basis with the research participants, as it is often difficult – if not impossible – to guarantee anonymity at the outset of the research process. It may be relatively straightforward to anonymise written data generated during an interview and still retain the contribution that the data makes to the overall interpretation of the research environment, ²³ but much less straightforward to anonymise images. Further, ‘[i]t has long been argued that visual methods can reveal important information that text or word based methods cannot’, a benefit of visual research that may be undermined if there is no consideration of the circumstances under which anonymity should be provided. ²⁴

This element of visual research draws attention to the fact again that research is a social encounter; ethical practice in this context requires that the research participants and researcher, ‘I’ and my ‘others’, navigate together the issues of anonymity and attribution in a way that is mutually beneficial. In the case of participatory action research utilising visual methods, it may be that the aim of the research is to communicate using images certain aspects of a given environment or situation; in this case the research participants may well not only have a claim to authority over the research design but also actively desire identification in the research product rather than anonymity. ²⁵ This gives rise to a ‘situated approach to image-based ethics’ ²⁶ wherein the decision not to anonymise images is not simply a neat solution to the problem of how to anonymise images, including those images relied upon in interpretative research (where the researcher may not create the images but instead use existing images to support or develop an argument). The decision itself is a form of ethical practice that complicates the conventional hierarchical research relationship that posits the researcher as the arbiter of research decisions, with the research participants subject to the decisions made. ²⁷

The question of ownership is the final dimension of visual research that I want to touch on here. This is an issue distinct from legal considerations of copyright, the laws under which the creator of the image retains the right to limit its reproduction or circulation. In visual research, this means that scholars are required to identify, and seek permission from, the creators of images that they wish to reproduce in the course of their analysis; in the case of visual ethnography, where the images may be created in the course of the research itself, there is usually some kind of document signed at the outset outlining the conditions under which images produced by the research participants can be used by the researcher. ²⁸ Ownership cannot be interpreted in this narrow, legalistic sense, however, when discussing the ethics of working with images. The issue of ownership is complicated by the presence of human subjects in images, especially when, in disciplines like anthropology, the subjects of the images may be depicted in ways that render the dissemination of the images beyond the research team potentially disruptive to the lives of the subjects or even dangerous.

Ownership is not simply transferable, nor is it simply attributable to the person that created the image(s) in question. The ‘subjects’ of research, particularly in the humanities and social science disciplines, have frequently been the ‘subjects’ of photographs aimed at capturing the essence of the exotic, the foreign, the Other. Ethics of ownership are thus related to discussions of the imperialism of Western social scientific knowledge and the exploitation and/or misrepresentation of non-Western people. Given the historical association of anthropology in particular with colonialism, it is not surprising that much attention has been paid to the issue of colonisation and imperialism in the development of visual anthropology as a distinct sub-discipline over the past few decades. There are sophisticated critiques of the colonial logics of visual research ²⁹ that reflect on the politics of this kind of encounter, but careful consideration is needed in the construction and reproduction of these images so that these structural inequalities and dynamics of oppression are not perpetuated in the research. The researcher’s responsibility to the encounter, and also to the ‘others’ involved is paramount. There is a sense in which the person or people depicted in an image ethically, if not legally, have a claim to own that image, and thus the analysis and dissemination of the image is necessarily a complex issue.

In Conclusion (Perhaps)

An aesthetic sensibility proceeds from the assumption that the ethical and the political are inescapably imbricated with each other, rendering ‘vulnerable’ our engagements with the social world and the knowledge claims we make, as Aida Hozić explains (this volume). As these engagements are increasingly visual and are increasingly digitally mediated, this raises questions about the ways in which we make sense of the world, not only as its inhabitants but also as its researchers, those who seek to analyse and document as well as encounter. The ethical tensions that are manifest in visual research in global politics are a reminder of our collective struggles with matters of visual competency and authority: with questions about what constitutes ‘the visual’, who owns it, who can reproduce and educate about it, where it resides, how it can be manipulated and construed, and with what effects, and who has the skill to manage it … At stake, thus, are major issues of accountability, responsibility, social justice, authorship, rigour, specificity, and overall proficiency and training in image production and circulation. ³⁰

These issues are inescapable because these are the issues that arise in our encounters with ourselves in research and our others (even our otters). Who, and how, we represent, and how we are constituted as researchers in relation to those representations, are fundamental to the research encounter, a necessarily social event. Whether my research practice interrogates humans, words, or images, then, I must understand how each decision I make in the process of research is an ethicopolitical decision with implications for the lives of others. This is to bring a necessary ethic to research that admits the interconnectedness of my being with the lives of the others, whether they are represented corporeally, linguistically, or visually. I am, and remain, undone in the face of the otter.