Whose photo? Whose voice? Who listens? ‘Giving,’ silencing and listening to voice in participatory visual projects

Abstract

This article examines participatory visual projects that aspire to enable social change by providing communities with a platform through photography. It argues that projects are sites for negotiating rather ‘giving’ voice and calls for practitioners and researchers to be transparent and reflexive about these negotiated processes. Examining two sets of participant-produced images by refugee youth, one of which was shown publically and one of which went unseen, this article explores issues of control and the biases that shape editorial decisions in NGO-linked participatory visual projects. It demonstrates how voices that do not fit into dominant visual frames tend to be silenced. It is argued that this negates the critical potential of participatory visual work to enable political listening and undermines the plurality of unheard voices that participatory visual work aspires to facilitate. The article raises the central question of listening to the conception of ‘voice’ in participatory visual initiatives. It argues that the political and ideological promise of these projects relates not only to the voices they give rise to but to the kind of listening they enable.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Photovoice is a participatory action research method that combines photography with grassroots social action (Wang and Burris 1997). Developed to enable community consultation and policy advocacy, photovoice has become increasingly popular with social science researchers. The term has been widely adopted by practitioners working with participatory photography methods and is used by various NGOs, organisations and projects such as the UK based charity PhotoVoice (www.photovoice.org).

[2] Digital storytelling is a short-form digital media production process that enables ordinary people with little or no digital media experience to produce personal stories using digital stories. Pioneered by the Centre for Digital Storytelling (now known as Story Centre: http://www.storycenter.org/), digital storytelling techniques and formats (Lambert 2013) have become increasingly popular as a community development and media tool and have been used all over the world in education, social inclusion and services, public health and international development projects.

[3] Couldry (2010) posits that the recent explosion of ‘voice’ is illusory; neo liberal conditions serve to undermine voice for it is increasingly offered but in important respects denied. There is a crisis in voice because no provision is made for listening alongside offers of voice.

[4] Existing categorisations of participatory visual practice distinguish between public facing participatory visual ‘projects’ that aim to have social impact and affect change and academic-oriented participatory visual ‘studies,’ undertaken for social research purposes with the aim of producing scholarly knowledge (Pauwels 2015; Chalfen 2012). They emphasise that in participatory visual activism ‘projects’ images are treated and celebrated as end points, and disseminated for public consumption, in contrast to research ‘studies’ where images are treated as mid-points in the production of knowledge (Chalfen 2012, Pauwels 2015). Whilst I would challenge the idea that public facing participatory project celebrate images as ‘end-points,’ I agree there are important distinctions to be made between projects that share and disseminate images with public audiences and those that do not. However the proposed dichotomy that seeks to divide the field into public projects and academic studies is unhelpful in the context of this research. It fails to capture the academic based work in the fields of participatory action research and activism scholarship and those academic-grounded practitioners and their projects which represent a blended approach to participatory visual work that draws on both academic and research frameworks and participatory and visual practice expertise.

[5] Theorists rejecting binary views of power have long argued that power permeates all aspects of social relations and call attention to how power operates on and across multiple spheres, through discourse and institutions, self-governance and diverse technologies and regimes; consciously and overtly, unconsciously and subversively, intra-personal and structurally (Foucault 1984; Stewart 2001; Gaventa 2006).

[6] Visual Studies Volume 25, issue 3 contains various articles that address questions around how voice is conceptualised, produced and analysed in participatory visual approaches.

[7] Within development discourse the concept of empowerment has evolved from Paulo Freire’s radical philosophy of emancipatory education which proposes every human being can develop an awareness of self and reclaim the right to define their own worlds (1973). A broad working understanding of empowerment designates it as a multi-dimensional social process that enables people to gain control over their own lives; a process that fosters power (in terms of the capacity to implement) in people, for use in their own lives, their communities, and in their society, by acting on issues that they define as important (Page and Czuba 1999).

[8] Championed by Robert Chambers (1997) and his development of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), at the heart of participatory approaches lies the aim to increase the involvement of marginalised groups in decision-making over matters that affect their own lives. Frierian principles form the basis of participatory approaches to facilitation and training used in international and community developments contexts. Within NGO rhetoric, the concept of empowerment goes hand in hand with the idea of participation. The two ideas share the same concerns but they have also been critiqued by those who argue the terms have lost their radical edge and become meaningless in their ubiquity (Cooke and Kothari 2001).

[9] These arguments are well-illuatrated in the debate generated by the oscar-winning Kids With Cameras film, Born into Brothels (Briski and Kaufman 2004). The filmakers were accused of profiting more than the participants out of the project and film’s success (Banerjee 2005; Frann 2007).

[10] The first four core principals, humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, captured in the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross adopted in 1969 have become the bywords for the humanitarian sector (Barnett and Weiss 2008). The principles of neutrality and independence state that sides cannot be taken in hostilities and that humanitarian organisations or workers must remain independent of government policies or actions and refrain from engaging in controversies of a political, radical, religious or ideological nature. The principles of impartiality, neutrality and independence all seek to assert the non-political character of humanitarianism and its associated activities.

[11] For further information and images from the project please see: http://bhutaneserefugees.com/in-camps/ (Accessed 16 May 2017).

[12] Dinesh is not the photographer’s real name. A pseudonym has been used to protect his identity.

[13] The Bhutanese refugee population belong to a ethnic group called the Llotshampas, the southern Bhutanese whom are of Nepalese ethnicity, and who fled and were forcibly evicted from Bhutan in the early 1990s in connection with discriminatory government legislation and practices (Amnesty International 2000, 2002; Hutt 2003; Human Rights Watch 2003). For a full background to the Bhutanese refugee situation please see www.bhutaneserefugees.com (accessed 10 May 2015).

[14] Amnesty International (2000, 2002); Norwegian Refugee Council (2008).

[15] The suggestion is that complete ownership of photography is possible if mastery of those moments is realised. This corresponds with the historically dominant discourse in photography that focuses on the singular power of the photographer and their claims to ownership and control of the image (Azoulay 2012).

[16] Should complete mastery or sole control of these decisions be the ultimate aim of participatory initiatives? Is that desirable or even possible? When we understand participatory photography as a plural activity in which all the participants – the photographer, the subject, the facilitators and organisers, the community, the implicated organisations, the donors and funders, its disseminators – have the possibility, within their own capacities and interests, of laying claim to the process then photography, like a Foucauldian concept of power, becomes something that no one owns. Attempts to designate full control of the process to participants seem both misconstrued and fruitless.

[17] Authors such as Homan (1991) argue that the notion of true informed consent, where participants are given a full explanation and are able to reach a clear understanding of what participation involves and its consequences, exists more in rhetoric than reality. Despite this, the term is widely employed to designate a consent process rooted in set of principles relating to ethical and responsible consent models.

[18] This position has become particularly charged in recent years with the rapid rise of social media and online culture where concerns about the digital dissemination and potential mis-appropriation and mis-use of digital images have given rise to a raft of new protection issues relating to the public sharing of images.

[19] 1000 copies of Voices in Exile were distributed to participants, camps schools and libraries, agencies working with the Bhutanese refugees, key institutions and figures within media and political scene in Nepal and through selected book shops in Kathmandu (PhotoVoice report to Comic Relief, 2007). A 2nd print run of 500 copies was disseminated in the refugee camps themselves.

[20] This follows a widely accepted argument that when content crosses a line that moves it into the realm of the personalized and political its moral authority vanishes; audiences switch off, untrusting of its content and message (Kester 1998).

[21] Lisa Malkki’s research with refugees in Burundi offers interesting parallels. She highlights the gap between how the Hutu refugees came to appropriate the category of ‘refugee,’ powerfully shaped by the collective memory of violence and past atrocities in Burundi, and how the staff of the international organisations administering the camps defined refugee identity in terms that made this historical and political identity unusable (1996).

[22] The performative character of photography as a form of participatory citizenship is also relevant when we think of how Dinesh’s photographs as a performative act (Levin 2009). It could also be argued that Dinesh’s work could also be analysed as a form of political theatre but the focus of this discussion is on his work as photography, its currency as a visual object and its sites of audiencing (Rose 2007) as a photograph rather than as a performative piece of theatre.

[23] Quotes taken from interviews with NGO communications professionals from the image units of leading INGOs including Chistian Aid, Save the Children and Action Aid. See Fairey 2015a (Chapter 3) for full details.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tiffany Fairey

Tiffany Fairey PhD is a Research Fellow at Photography and the Archive Research Centre, University of the Arts, London and at the Centre for Community and Urban Research in Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, UK. Co-founder of PhotoVoice, she was its director for its first 10 years (1999–2009). www.tiffanyfairey.co.uk.