Images as ‘potentials’: Feminist new materialist orientations to photovoice

Abstract

This article contributes to sociological and new materialist efforts to reorient and reimagine qualitative methodologies. I explore the more-than-human and more-than-representational potentials of one traditional humanist qualitative method, photovoice and its ‘affordances’ when the epistemologies and ontologies underpinning what images ‘can do’ are opened up. I extend the work of Higgins (2014; 2016) and others who have ‘recalibrated’ visual methods to argue that photovoice has the potential to be an aleatory methodological practice which connects to efforts to mobilise ethics of encounter in feminist new materialist research. I draw on two empirical examples from a study which used photovoice as a key tool to explore young people’s embodiment and wellbeing as emergent traces, formed through entangled processes and relations, rather than inherent properties of human bodies and subjects. The article explores what photovoice ‘can do’ and how it may be useful in contributing to sociological efforts to generate new answers to old questions through attending to the ways structures and material inequalities are themselves produced through the situated and affective practices and embodiments of everyday life.

Keywords

New materialism photovoice visual methods embodiment affect youth

Introduction

Theories and concepts drawn from new materialist ‘styles’ of theory are burgeoning in the intersecting fields of education, sociology, geography, and visual and cultural studies. These approaches extend the post-structural focus on discourses as the basis for subjectivity and social life and draw from the ‘vitalist’ philosophies of Deleuze and Guttari (1987), Barad’s (2007) theories of agential realism and Braidotti’s (2013) theories of post-humanism. It is established that these theoretical developments have the effect of radically unsettling the traditional humanist ontological and epistemological ‘foundations’ of qualitative research (St. Pierre, 2017). However, the practicalities of how qualitative methodologies might incorporate these concepts and theories are less developed (Schadler, 2017b). This article contributes an understanding of how the qualitative visual methodology informing photovoice can be reoriented from new materialist perspectives.

First, I give an overview of the qualitative methodology of photovoice, and detail its epistemological and ontological framings. I then introduce the range of work termed ‘new materialist’ and how these perspectives re-orient the role and status of ‘the subject’ and images in visual qualitative research. I develop an understanding of how the methodology of photovoice can be re-oriented through altering the status of the subject and of photographic images (the participant taking the photo and the photo they take). I develop this methodological re-orientation to photovoice by approaching subjectivity as emergent, multiple and processural (rather than bounded, unified, knowable); and through approaching images as potentials (rather than representations). I illustrate how a different orientation to this qualitative visual method can be used in practice drawing on examples from a study which explored the significance of the body for understanding young people’s ‘wellbeing’. Through this reworking, I argue photovoice can be used as a potentially aleatory practice oriented to open-ness and the sensate dynamics of everyday life.

The theoretical and methodological groundings of photovoice

Photovoice is a participatory, collaborative form of visual research first developed by Wang and Burris (1997) in which the participant, rather than the researcher, takes photos to document and represent their experiences, and advocate for change in their communities (Milne and Muir, 2020). This technique has been widely used in social sciences research to enable voices that are often missing from policy, for example, to ‘speak’ through images they take and the stories they tell (for an overview, see Milne and Muir, 2020). The participatory foundations of photovoice can re-define the research relationship with participants positioned as the ‘experts’ (Catalani and Minkler, 2010). Whilst photovoice is often framed as providing mutual benefits to both parties, the methodology depends on the researcher to enact the process ethically and sensitively (Milne and Muir, 2020). The invitation for participants to take photographs is not inherently liberatory and can raise a range of unintended consequences from suspicion of surveillance to increasing risk to participants in politically unstable contexts (Prins, 2010).

Photovoice originally developed from the humanist approaches of feminist standpoint theory and praxis (Higgins, 2016) with photo-images providing representations of a participant’s reality. In essence, the method is designed to allow a researcher to ‘access’ the visual world of participants, with the images they produce providing a ‘representation’ of key themes and issues in their lives. It relies on a bounded humanist subject who is able to produce ‘knowledge’ about themselves, their identities. It privileges the knowing human actor as the centre of all social action and meaning. Over the past three decades, the humanist foundations of research such as objectivity, knowledge, ‘truth’, and the ‘human subject’ as the focal point around which all social action extends have been thoroughly challenged (St. Pierre and Pillow, 2000; St. Pierre, 2011).

New materialist perspectives: Different orientations to the subject of research and the status of images

New materialist perspectives, under the general umbrella term of ‘posthumanism’,¹ direct attention to the ways in which material things act on and with us to produce human practices. These approaches urge recognition of the interaction between the human and the non-human, incorporating the relationships between forces, events, material objects and humans, insisting on the ‘meaning, force, and value of materiality’ (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008: 10). Barad’s (2008) theorisation of matter is important in new materialist understandings of the emergent processes which constitute human and non-human relations. Matter is ‘not “given” to the human but rather acts on its own terms in an emergent, contingent, and dynamic practice of materialization which includes human and non-human bodies and gives rise to unpredictable, if sometimes enduring, assemblages and conglomerations’ (Taylor, 2016: 202). As Barad (2007: 21) argues, ‘bodies do not simply take their place in the world…rather ‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively constituted’. The ontological and epistemological position of the researcher mediates and affects ‘intra-actions’ between all research ‘phenomena’, including ‘method’, ‘data’, ‘participant’ and ‘researcher’ (Barad, 2007). This is a radical reframing where ethics, ontology and epistemology are inseparable (Barad, 2007), which de-centres the knowing, rational human subject as the focal point for producing knowledge about the world (McCoy, 2012). Ethics become a crucial performative element throughout the study of any phenomena, rather than external to it. Ellingson and Sotirin (2019) propose the term ‘data engagement’ as a way of navigating qualitative research within the critical re-orienting urged by post-qualitative critiques: ‘data are made not found, assembled rather than collected, and ever dynamic’ (Ellingson and Sotirin, 2019: 9, original emphasis).

Feminist new materialist methodologies have been developed in qualitative research to understand the ways in which the material world as well as discourses are implicated in the production of embodiment and subjectivity (Coleman, 2014; Fullagar et al., 2021; Lenz Taguchi, 2016; Mazzei, 2016; Ringrose and Renold, 2014; Taylor and Ivinson, 2013). Methodologies drawing from Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological framework have been developed in ethnography (Schadler, 2017a), longitudinal research (Mauthner, 2015), visual methods including video and photovoice (Higgins, 2016; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Marston, 2019; Renold and Ivinson, 2014; Taylor, 2013), and creative, arts-based methods and digital methods (Austin, 2016; Borovica, 2017; Hickey-Moodey, 2016; Renold, 2018; Renold and Ringrose, 2016; Warfield, 2016). These expanded philosophical groundings for empirical research can offer innovative and compelling insights into human experience and social change, particularly for those complex socio-cultural problems for which ‘knowledge’ garnered through ‘traditional’ methods have failed to fully address, such as gender-based violence (Renold, 2018), health (Duff, 2014), wellbeing (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer, 2014; McLeod, 2017) and obesity (Fullagar, 2017), and climate change (Watson and Huntington, 2014). Methodologies, then, are themselves ‘performative’ and do not merely neutrally describe or observe but also take part in ‘the invention or creation of the world’ (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013: 1). This encourages qualitative researchers to address the ethico-onto-epistemological dynamics producing ‘research’ to ask: what do our methods do?

Expanding methodologies: Photovoice images as potentials

Visual methodologies like photovoice traditionally prioritise images as producing stable representations of reality or identity (Bell, 2012; Vannini, 2015). However, methodologies involving images can be re-oriented to engage ‘more than representational’ readings of images and bodies (Lorimer, 2013). This re-orientation of photovoice is developed from new materialist perspectives which reject the privileging of human existence over the existence of non-human objects; adopts an experimental approach to research and takes material/discursive entanglements of intra-acting phenomena (e.g. place, bodies, architecture, clothing and so on) as the focus of interest (Allan and Tinkler, 2015: 798). This approach locates the image as a ‘cultural artefact constructed in relation to social norms, values, context and processes’ (Taylor, 2013: 45), rather than offering a ‘window’ into a pre-existing reality.

Higgins (2014) has ‘re-braided’ photovoice from a post-humanist lens to unsettle the traditional constructivist underpinnings of qualitative visual methodologies. Higgins stresses the importance of acknowledging the situatedness of photovoice within a research project, and associated relations of power (between researcher and participant primarily), re-figuring photovoice via Indigenous conceptions of praxis, and emphasising photovoice as an ‘ecology of relationships’, rather than providing access to knowledge about a ‘singular, individual, speaking subject’ (Higgins, 2014: 215). From this perspective, photovoice becomes about more than the individual, moves beyond human agency as the locus of action and meaning, expanding to include ‘more than humans’ (Higgins, 2014: 215), including objects, animals, landscapes and so on.

The onto-epistemological underpinnings of ‘voice’ in photovoice has been problematized in the field of visual studies as over-laden with humanist properties of a ‘present, stable, authentic, and self-reflective’ attached to an individual (Mazzei, 2016: 152). ‘Voice’ is reconceptualised as more than simply offering a route to ‘empowerment’ of the research participant, but rather, as a negotiated process involving competing agendas and imbued in power relations (Fairey, 2017). Mazzei reframes the potentials of ‘voice’ as a becoming that emerges through a complex network of human and non-human forces. Through this reframing, photovoice can enable the elements of human and non-human networks to be partially explored beyond the bounded (human) subject.

Visual methods are well suited to explore the relations between embodiment and socio-material processes, and can offer ‘sensorially attentive’ insights into the ‘vitality and liveliness’ of bodies across ‘multiple registers of feeling’ (Bates, 2013: 1). Photo-images in particular can be mobilised as a way of exploring affect beyond representational framings; they can ‘commend themselves to us affectively’ and can engage and mobilise a range of responses and effects in research encounters (Bell, 2012: 155). Images can be understood as ‘potentials’ rather than simply mirrors of ‘reality’; they can suggest intensity and vitality have the affective power to provoke (Bell, 2012). Images carry the affordance of ‘potential’ in a new materialist sense because ‘an image can ‘open up’ – an emotion, a memory, a new understanding, a new critique, even a new subjectification, a new politics’ (Bell, 2012: 161). What an image might produce, however, cannot be known in advance – images must be studied as an affective process of relations (Coleman, 2009). I experiment with this orientation to images – as productive potentials to engage in the research process – to reorient photovoice through a new materialist qualitative methodology which understands images as relational and affective: images as more-than-representational potentials. This shift means decentring the very ontological foundations of the methodology (such as the promise of the method offering empowerment of a knowable subject) to instead approach photovoice as a technique oriented towards emergence and non-predetermined or defined possibilities; or what Lury and Wakeford, 2012: 2) term ‘an orientation to the open-endedness of the social world’.

Through this reworking, approaching images as potentials and subjects as formed as an emergent process, photovoice can be used as a potentially aleatory practice methodologically. I draw on two examples to illustrate the aleatory potential of photovoice in a study which explored young people’s embodiment and wellbeing, and how it might provide a way of exploring the various elements at play in the production of bodies and ‘selves’ and the diverse engagements through which ‘wellbeing’ assembles.

Study details

The examples I discuss are drawn from a study which used in-depth semi-structured interviews and visual methods including digital photovoice and photo elicitation with 25 young people in a coastal, regional area of Australia. These methods aimed to explore the significance of sensations and environments in producing the conditions of embodiment and wellbeing in young people’s everyday lives through speech and verbal interactions and narratives, as well as visual methods including photographs taken by participants and brought to the interviews to illustrate the importance of sensations in how body image is produced in the everyday. The project received Human Research Ethics Approval from the University of Newcastle. Identifying details in photographs have been edited through cropping or blurring tools (for a full discussion of the ethics of engaging the body in visual research, see Allen, 2015a; Clark et al., 2010; Mannay, 2019; Ryan-Flood and Gill, 2010; Sandelowski, 2002; Simonsen, 2012).

Participants were recruited through physical fliers posted around a campus that houses both university and technical college study, online fliers posted on the researcher’s social media accounts, and snowballing techniques. Fliers invited participants to take part in an interview about the topics of wellbeing, the body, work and study. When interviews were scheduled, participants were then also invited to take part in an optional exercise of taking photos in the 3–4 days leading up to interviews of ‘anything in their lives’ which related to ‘wellness’ to them, such as objects, spaces, people and environments. This short timeframe was given to encourage participants to take ‘snapshots’ of moments they registered a feeling related to wellbeing or the body and in an effort to make the task easy to take part in. The short timeframe was also intended to spark the possibility of momentary feelings being captured to discuss close to the interview, so participants could discuss the experience and sensation related to the moment (see Warfield, 2016). These photos were then discussed in the interviews through photo-elicitation. Interviews took place on the University campus in meeting rooms, or outside on park benches when the weather was fair.

Participants interpreted and engaged with the photo-voice method in different ways. Two participants did not take or show any photos. Another two showed and discussed photos in the interviews but did not give permission to use their images. The remaining 21 participants showed and discussed between 3 and 48 images each, and all but two participants then emailed me the photos they had shown me in the interview. Most participants showed a combination of photos that had been taken specifically for the project, alongside others they had organised into a folder in their phones they deemed relevant. Participants took images of trees, water, landscapes, bedrooms, bands in live music venues; friends socialising, drinking cocktails and eating pizza, fishing; cars, gym equipment, tarot cards, candles, mandalas; animals including cats, dogs and horses. They also took photos of ‘healthy’ food, like vegan bowls, and of them exercising with friends or alone in front of the mirror. What is important here is that the method enables wellbeing to be diffractively explored through the broader set of images as including these aspects but is also more than this. This process is shown in participants’ reflections of the ‘moment’ the photos were taken and is specific to each of the photographic moments as partial traces of wellbeing. In this way, photovoice can be understood as a performative ‘doing’ (Vannini, 2015: 8) through the taking of the photo-image which can afford the entangled, sensate, affective, embodied dimensions of wellbeing to be explored.

Traditional methods of interviewing based on ontological and epistemological approaches of representing the ‘speaking subject’ have been re-oriented in post-qualitative and more-than-representational approaches through tracing the embodied, affective relations of participants and interviewer as both active participants in the research assemblage. The research encounter is a process, rather than an objective, knowledge-and-truth-producing exercise (Mazzei, 2014; Walkerdine, 2010). More-than-representational analysis, here, involved initial thematic analysis through reading transcripts and identifying themes associated with wellbeing, the body, and the circumstances of young people’s lives. Analytic ‘techniques’ also extended beyond conventional interpretive frameworks by also exploring the affective intensities of the research encounter, through paying attention to embodied sensations and processes of being affected at all stages – in the research encounter, in reading and writing-with the data. Analysis becomes a process of ‘plugging in’ and ‘becoming undone’ as researchers engage with the data (Mazzei, 2014: 108); an affective enactment which requires us to ‘enter into the midst of things, attune to bodily sensations and relate’ (Marston, 2020: 12).

What can photovoice do?

The most aleatory, unexpected or creative articulations which troubled conventional understandings of wellbeing were produced by participants who took photographs specifically for the study (not drawn from existing photo reels). These had a different quality or register, and did unexpected things – such as blending poetry and image to provide an in-the-moment affective account of how and why the image was taken. The images taken by two participants are included in this article because they provided an in-depth discussion of how they found the process of taking images, and how they registered and photographed a ‘feeling in the moment’. I explore this process and what the methodology of photovoice ‘can do’ through approaching the data diffractively (Renold, 2018), plugging in textual interview and visual data, not to make a coherent narrative or meaning of the bounded subject but to explore affective happenings, and relations of the event, which are meaningful for understanding bodily becomings – or what a body can do. This means including the range of ‘materials’ produced in the research-event, including my own embodiment through affective responses and sensations in the interview encounters; the intra-actions between bodies in the research assemblage; and the ongoing reverberations of data through reading-writing of transcripts, re-encountering photographs.

I draw on Fullagar’s (2018) process of critical-creative analysis to present two different ‘renderings’ (Coffey, 2019, 2021) of examples from two participants’ narratives and images in the study. I do this in an effort to foreground the significance of matter and embodiment and disrupt conventional qualitative attunements to representation and an intentional, rational, interview subject (Jarrod and Steph) to be ‘known’ and represented by the researcher (me). The first account is compiled from Jarrod² and Steph’s³ interview transcripts, with only minimal editing of the text formatting and some paraphrasing for clarity and brevity, accompanied by their photovoice images. The second accounts are my renderings of their embodied narratives and images which I read relationally, attuned to the entanglements of intra-acting phenomena as the focus of interest (Allen and Tinkler, 2015).

Driving to escape ‘hovering anxiety’

My life now has changed a lot since high school, last year. School was pretty easy, it’s a short day, and you see your friends a lot more. Now I have to get up at 5am every morning for my apprenticeship. It’s hard to see my friends because lots of them go to Uni in the city, and I work on the weekends too. I like the work, I’m good at it. But it’s tiring, the workshop gets quite hot. And I have to work with lead, it gets all over you and it’s disgusting. And the wage isn’t great, it’s $11 an hour. I try to do a lot of overtime to get my savings up. I kind of got thrown in the deep end, paying my own bills completely, car and everything. I live with Dad, it’s basically like a share house but it just happens to be with my father.

The main thing I worry about is money. I need to have savings in my bank account in case things go wrong, if crap hits the fan. Like if I have to move out. Or if a branch falls on my dog’s leg, which has happened before. Or a fence needs replacing or a branch falls on the house. Dad couldn’t pay for those things so I had to. And then the clutch went on my car and I got a big speeding fine in the same week. And my rego was due, and I needed new tyres, and my [technical college] fees were due. So yeah, having enough money saved is a big thing I worry about.

There is a lot to being an adult, it sucks, your head gets cluttered I guess. You need a way to clear that. If you don't, everything kind of overwhelms you. So, I go driving. I’m that kid. Last night I just needed to clear my head and think about a few decisions, so I just went for a drive. I’ll just go along the windy back roads, I just love them. It’s just fun. Driving is my escape.

This photo ( Figure 1 ) is just of the interior of my car last night when I drove to the lookout to have a think. When I first read the description [of taking photos for the study] I was like ‘oh I’ll just take photos of everything I’m doing’. So I was just snap-chatting and saving it. I randomly wrote that dumb inspirational quote. And that other photo ( Figure 2 ) is of the back of my car. That was just a random thought that was going through my head when I was sitting there. When it comes to health, mental health… yeah physical health is important, but mental health for my generation seems like a big problem. For all of my friends at some point, they are just broken and shut down and no one understands, so they just crept away from the world. It’s just a waste.

Figure 1.

Interior of Jarrod's car.

Figure 2.

Rear of Jarrod's car and tail-lights.

This account, told in Jarrod’s words from edited excerpts from the interview transcript, describes the affective processes related to driving as a ‘wellbeing’ practice to clear the ‘mental clutter’ and stress which can threaten to ‘overwhelm’. Getting in the car and putting distance between himself and the place of family and financial tensions (home) enables a literal escape. The embodied sensations of driving; of moving through space and time on quiet, narrow, country mountain roads with no stop signs or traffic lights, also provides the freedom of movement and escape from the inertia of stasis. It is also an escape from thoughts – the nasty ones ‘hovering’ and causing ‘anxiety’, and even from the need to think at all. Driving affords the potential to think about nothing, to feel ‘clear’, and feel nothing other than the seat beneath him, his hands on the wheel; the fast-moving trees and sky, and the next corner ahead. ‘There’s something about driving’ communicates the affectivity of the embodied practice as below the threshold of that which can be expressed textually, additionally communicated affectively through photos and poetic text. Through the darkness of the night-time image, the tail-lights and white text illuminate as a moment of clarity and insight, free-flowing and raw (‘Oh, you like them?’).

The car and embodied sensations of driving fast in the darkness on winding back-roads entangle to produce particular sensations related to ‘wellbeing’ (a clear head; uncluttered; escape). Wellbeing is more-than-represented in these images; Jarrod’s photos-with-text communicate the processes and intra-acting more-than-human elements by which wellbeing is felt and assembled through everyday life. Movement towards relief is sensed in body and mind, afforded through the in the speeding car as an ‘escape’ the material circumstances of life (stress of money and bills, hot workshop, tired mornings, tense relationship with Dad). The tension between anxieties and an escape are inextricably entangled through the stories of his friends who became ‘broken’ and ‘crept away from the world’. The affectivity of the ‘hovering anxiety’ of never-ending bills paired with unforeseen events like falling tree branches and an injured dog resonate with the spectre of broken friends who became overwhelmed by their own circumstances; their lives shrunk to the four walls of their bedrooms, ‘wasted’. These affective relations circulate and contextualise the significance of driving and movement in finding clarity and escaping the squeeze of anxiety which could easily become overwhelming.

These images also ‘did something’ to animate new affective energies in the research encounter. I registered a change in dynamic between us when he showed me the images; he laughed and smiled, the mood became lighter. I felt a sense of relief as the stilted rhythm of back-and-forth of question and answer was temporarily suspended. The dynamic felt more equitable when he was showing me the photo; he asks me questions for the first time (‘You like them?’ ‘Does that make sense?’). The statement he made next, ‘mental health for my generation seems like a big problem’ was spoken with a new tone of authority and confidence. It felt like he had planned this statement, and was pleased to deliver it. An entry from my analysis notes reads, did the process of taking ‘random photos of anything’ produce new possibilities, the potential for new ideas to be articulated? Perhaps the taking of photos created new potentials for knowing, which he carried into the interview to give to me: I felt, feel, as though I was being given a gift. The orientation of photovoice towards the open-ness of everyday life created the potential for difficult and deeply private, almost impossible to articulate dimensions of embodiment and life to surface, if only briefly.

The next example is taken from excerpts of Steph’s interview transcript related to body image, and photograph she took for the study which she describes as capturing her ‘feeling in the moment’ articulating the emotions and hard to describe embodied sense and tension related to ‘wellbeing’.

Body image and wellbeing as navigated in ‘the feelings in that moment’

I feel like everyone around me is obsessed with an ‘image’ of being healthy, or being skinny. Particularly my female friends - when I meet up with them it’s always all about their body image and their health and their diet. It's such a big part of everyone’s lives for people my age. And mum too, she'll always bring up her health. She's a fitness freak, very into ‘clean eating’ and stuff, and she'll always bring it up. It surrounds me. At work as well, I work with some really hardcore vegans and my boss who’s really into nutrition, and she talks about it a lot. I feel like I'm really surrounded by health and wellbeing and stuff. Sometimes it really annoys me. I don't know how to explain it. It's a bit obsessive. I don't want to talk about it every day. I guess I just try and be happy with who I am and not talk about it in front of people, and not worry about it so much. Every time I did get into those bad ways of thinking, I feel a bit silly about it, because it's not worth the mental draining process of going through that cycle. It's best to just be comfortable and happy with who you are. But, it's not that easy.

This ( Figure 3 ) was actually last night when I was like in the mirror doing this - looking at my weight and my body and stuff and I thought, I should take a photo. Because that really represents the other side of health and wellbeing, where you're there, and you're obsessing over what you look like. I didn't clean the bathroom either because I thought that was a part of it, like all of these products. Yeah. I like this photo too cos it shows something that is often private. I think even those people that look really healthy have those moments where they're in front of the mirror and they're obsessing over what they look like too. That’s just a reflection of body image and health and what you think is the ideal. I will look in the mirror and just look on different angles and stuff. That’s obviously why I took the photo, because I thought wow this is actually it.

Figure 3.

Steph bathroom selfie.

It was fun, it was fun. I don’t know, it was like a creative way to express myself. I really enjoyed it actually. I think yeah, it was definitely moments. It’s not something that like if I were to purposely try and arrange, it wouldn’t even represent how I felt at that moment where it popped into my head. Like this is what it means to me kind of thing. Yeah, it was - I liked doing that…When I first thought about taking photos of wellbeing, I was thinking food and exercise and things like that. But it wasn’t all that. It was the feeling in that moment kind of thing. Like it’s not just the visible thing that you think of, it’s hard to capture…

The image (Figure 3) captures an intimate but everyday moment, the kind Steph suspects is very widespread but ‘usually private’. Steph ‘catches’ this moment of body image vulnerability, her torso in the mirror, side on, examining her waist, hips, and upper bottom as she stands in her underwear. It portrays a very recognisable but vulnerable moment of critical self-appraisal, where she and others – even those who are possess supposedly ‘ideal bodies’ – will obsess over ‘every little thing’. This image and description captures the intra-actions photovoice invited between gendered body ideals and her own body in the mirror which ‘reflects’ and enables judgements (but can be ‘distorted’ by the mind which can ‘plays tricks on’ the subject viewing her own body) (see Coffey, 2016). Also intra-acting in the example is Steph's engagement with feminist academic literature on sexualisation through her university studies, and the paradoxes and tensions she feels in catching herself in this moment of critical self-appraisal.

Steph describes how the methodology of photovoice invited her to register the body in the mirror differently. Steph registers embodiment as produced through entangled relations between friends, colleagues and her mother who are ‘obsessed’ with wellness, diet and body image. She described how she at first thought of ways to take images which ‘represented’ wellbeing through photos of food, coffee, friends and her ‘aerials’ training (Coffey, 2021). However, she describes wellbeing as exceeding such representations, and sought to identify and register ‘moments’ of ‘feeling’; the unexpected affects or ideas which ‘popped into her head’. The image she took in the mirror shows a ‘feeling’ rather than a representation, something ineffable and ‘hard to capture’. The image does more than represent ‘body image’; instead communicating a complex ‘feeling in that moment’. In this, the act of taking an image invites potential, to engage the embodied sensations of body appraisal – a mundane and ‘everyday’ experience for many young women, which Steph describes as the ‘other side of health and wellbeing’. The process of taking the image through the method of photovoice enabled Steph to engage creatively with the embodied tensions and paradoxes of wellbeing as idealised, to explore the non-textual, and hard-to-say vibrancy in moments of everyday life which are crucial to understanding how gendered embodiments assemble.

Discussion: Photovoice as more-than-representational and enabling an ethics of encounter

I now return to the question framing this article: what can a photovoice methodology ‘do’ when it is reoriented towards exploring the ‘open-endedness of the social world’? The examples from Jarrod and Steph enabled an understanding of the affective potentials engaged through the methodology of photovoice as a process of taking photos ‘in the moment’. The orientation of images as affective potentials which have the power to ‘open up’ and ‘provoke’ (Bell, 2012) (rather than simply represent or mirror ‘reality’) is key to understanding what the method of photovoice might ‘do’ in any research context. This orientation to openness is a key part of new materialist methodologies of encounter (McCoy, 2012). Photovoice can be thought of as a potentially aleatory practice because it is oriented to openness – responsive to feeling, mood, sensation and the dynamic affective happenings of everyday life. It invites a participant to attune to how they are ‘moved’; to register a moment affectively and to capture an image at the point in time of feeling. This responsiveness, then, unsettles representationalist approaches to visual methods and understandings that images offer simple representations of a unitary experience or state of being (identity). The responsiveness, instead, is oriented to process and fluidity; to the ‘onflow of everyday life’ (Pred, 2005 in Thrift, 2008). A perspective of radical empiricism specifically invites the weird realism of everyday life ((Berlant and Stewart, 2019): 109) into research techniques and encounters. A methodology oriented to open-ness enables such ‘feelings in the moment’ to register, surface briefly, through the image as it was taken, and to reverberate in the interview – and now here in this extended connected moment.

Precisely ‘what’ is produced through the image-potential of photovoice cannot be ‘captured as a positivity for social science’ because the outcomes of these potentialities cannot be known or assured from the outset (Bell, 2012, p.161). I have aimed to show the more-than-representational affordances and qualities of this method, and what it can ‘do’ in an experimental, negotiated space of the research engagement. The methodology, approaching images in terms of their affective potentials, is explicitly oriented to enable the aleatory and open-ended possibilities held in everyday life to register and reverberate. It can explore different register of experience – including sensations, embodiment, thoughts, feelings – and potential to communicate the unsayable – the ‘feeling in the moment’ and plug into the processes of production of embodiment and wellbeing in young people’s lives.

Images of the ‘feeling in the moment’ related to ‘wellbeing’ were shown in photovoice images. Images illustrate how wellbeing registers relationally through affective, embodied intra-actions with human and non-human elements, including objects (car, mirror), space and place (bathroom, winding road, lookout carpark, family home), other people and relationships (pressures from father, body-conscious friends and mother), and discourses (gendered body ideals, critical feminist perspectives on objectification, depressed friends ‘hiding from the world’). Approaching images as potentials which ‘commend themselves to us affectively’ (Bell, 2012) can invite the unexpected in relation to ‘wellbeing’, rather than limiting them to rehearse well-worn narratives of individual responsibilisation, self-discovery or overcoming adversity, such as catching a usually unremarkable ‘feeling in the moment’ in the mirror (Steph); or producing poetry and creative expression in a new way (Jarrod).

Whilst participatory methodologies aim to decentre traditional researcher-participant hierarchies and binaries (Milne and Muir, 2020), equitable or ethical relations in a photovoice methodology are certainly not guaranteed (Prins, 2010). As I experienced in the interview with Jarrod, for example, discussing the photo introduced the potential for a new line of thought and feeling, and different affective relations between us where he temporarily seemed less uncomfortable. I was aware of our differential positioning throughout the encounter (I am a woman academic meeting him on University campus, he is a much younger trade apprentice). Classed, gendered, age-based differences were palpable in shaping the embodied relations of the encounter. These intra-personal dimensions do not disappear and cannot be managed out by feminist new materialist methodologies; however, they are able to be surface and become an acknowledged part of the research engagement. The dynamics of relating and engaging in the research encounter require continual negotiation and attunement, and cannot necessarily be overcome or ‘escaped’ no matter our onto-epistemological orientations. What this methodology can do, however, is offer an open invitation to the affective power of images to provoke (Bell, 2012) and to engage the emergent vitality and liveliness of the social world.

This re-orientation of the status of images and the subject in the methodology of photovoice extends from, but still aligns with the original participatory framings of the method where ‘ethics, ontology and epistemology are often inseparable’ ((Ivinson and Renold, 2016): 171). What is different, however, is enabling more-than-human and more-than-representational dynamics to be included in the methodological framing of the research. This approach acknowledges the emergent affordances of photovoice methodologies as offering a partial ‘trace’ that we can learn from and take further, rather than offering definitive representations of participants’ life-worlds (Pink et al., 2017). The examples presented here offer small snapshots or ‘traces’ of these worlds and contribute to efforts to mobilise an ethics of encounter in feminist new materialist research (Renold, 2018; Braidotti, 2013; Renold and Ringrose, 2016).

Conclusion

This article has explored the potential affordances of post-human activations of photovoice for exploring the sensate, affective and embodied dimensions by which young people’s wellbeing assembles through the human and non-human engagements of everyday life. I specifically sought to reorient photovoice from a feminist new materialist perspective. Posthumanist and new materialist qualitative researchers foreground the socio-material mechanics of production of social life; particularly related to deep, persistent inequalities related to current (but not essential) categorisations of gender, sex and sexuality (Allen, 2015b; Renold, 2018; Ringrose and Renold, 2014; Taylor and Blaise, 2017). These approaches can generate new answers to old questions in exploring the ways structures and material inequalities are themselves produced through situated everyday practices (Edwards and Fenwick, 2014). The particular methodological reworking of photovoice developed for this project is situated between and alongside the boundaries between sociological feminist and youth research and qualitative practices of visual research. It attempts to blur wellbeing as an individual property by trying to think self and embodiment as in motion, in process, contingent, emergent. It invites the ‘onflow of life’, felt and registered in the body as sensation, memory, imaginary, spaces, elements, weather, relationships, to be considered as part of the way embodiment and wellbeing is produced.

The article has sought to engage methodologies ‘explicitly oriented towards an investigation of the open-endedness of the social world’ (Lury and Wakeford, 2012: 2). Precisely ‘what’ is produced through the image-potential of photovoice cannot be known in advance. Rather, I have aimed to show the more-than-representational affordances and qualities of this method, and what it can ‘do’ in an experimental, negotiated space of the research engagement. The examples illustrate the method has the aleatory potential to explore different register of experience – including sensations, embodiment, thoughts, feelings – and potential to communicate the unsayable – the ‘random thought that was going through my head’ and to be able to attribute its significance in the processes of production of embodiment and wellbeing in young people’s lives.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is supported by Women in Research Fellowship (University of Newcastle).

ORCID iD

Julia Coffey

Notes

Author biography

Julia Coffey is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research and publications in Sociology are focused on themes of the body, gender, youth and health. Her most recent research monograph is Everyday Embodiment: Rethinking Youth Body Image (2021, Palgrave Macmillan), following from Body Work: Youth, Gender and Health (2016, Routledge), and = co-edited Learning Bodies: The Body in Youth and Childhood Studies (2016, Springer).

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