Migrant narratives as photo stories: on the properties of photography and the mediation of migrant voices

Abstract

This article examines how the properties of photography might mediate voice, defined as the capacity to speak and to be heard speaking about one’s life and the social conditions in which one’s life is embedded. It focuses on the affordances that the image provides for migrant cultural minorities to articulate such a voice within the context of collaborative research. I look at the case of Shutter Stories, a collaborative photography exhibition featuring the photo stories of Indian and Korean migrants from Manila, The Philippines. Using participant observation data, I show that it was photography’s ability to be all at once indexical, iconic, and symbolic that became important in voice as ‘speaking’. It allowed migrants to tell rich, multimodal narratives about their lives, albeit with some key limitations. I also show that it was photography’s inability to fix meanings with finality that mattered in voice as ‘being heard’. Although the locals who visited the exhibition engaged with the photo stories in an overwhelmingly positive manner, they often did not completely grasp the migrants’ complex narratives. All these data indicate that collaborative photography exhibition projects should not just be about how migrants speak and are heard. They should also be about how migrants can listen, so that they can adjust what they say to how they are being heard. This is a valuable reminder that in conceptualising photography and migrant cultural minority voices, we also need to take into account the broader process of multicultural dialogue.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank Helen Kennedy and David Hesmondhalgh for their invaluable questions and comments, which contributed to shaping the direction of this research. I also want to thank Kristel Acedera, Jonathan Ong, Bethany Klein, and Lee Edwards for their important inputs, which were very helpful in the process of revising this work. Likewise, I want to thank Violet Valdez, Cheryl Borsoto, Jimmy Domingo, Manpreet Grewal, Kyungmin Bae, and the staff of the Konrad Adenauer Asian Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University for all their help in planning and implementing Shutter Stories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Couldry refers to this definition of voice as ‘voice as a process’ (Couldry 2010, 10). And in this article, it is this particular conception of voice that I focus on. It is important to note, however, that Couldry posits that there is a second register to voice that is about ‘the act of valuing, and choosing to value, those frameworks for organising human life and resources that themselves value voice (as a process) … [and] discriminating against frameworks of social, economic and political organisation that deny or undermine voice’ (10–11). He refers to this conception of voice as ‘voice as a value’ (10).

[2] There is another set of relevant literature that provides important insights into how various social formations shape people’s practices of photography (for example, Bourdieu 1990; Burgess 2006; Kendall 2006; Slater 1995). However, even these do not necessarily pay enough attention to the role that the characteristics of photographs play in people’s ways of taking photographs.

[3] Chandler defines these modes as follows: (1) the index as ‘a mode in which the signifier is not arbitrary but directly connected to the signified,’ (2) the icon as ‘a mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling or imitating the signified,’ and (3) the symbol as ‘mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional’ (Chandler 2007, 36–37).

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Jason Vincent A. Cabañes

Jason Vincent A. Cabañes is Lecturer in International Communication at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. His current research is primarily about using ethnographic approaches to explore (a) how media contribute to shaping the texture of people’s experiences of migration and multiculturalism, (b) how various media might be harnessed for social and political development, and (c) how diverse media audiences engage with particular texts and technologies. He has recently published in journals such as New Media and Society, Media, Culture, and Society, and Southeast Asia Research.