Evocative Encounters: An Exploration of Artistic Practice as a Visual Research Method

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to discuss a rethinking of knowledge production that involves the incorporation of artistic practice as one aspect of its methodology. The point of departure is still photography as one such practice, and the fact that it is almost entirely banished from mainstream social anthropological methodology and analysis. To acquire a new position for photography within social science research practice, a repositioning of both the researcher and the role of the image itself is sought. It is suggested that a visual methodology based on still photography must move beyond the interpretational boundary of the realist representational paradigm and approach the expressive aspect of the photographic medium. The empirical foundation for this article is the author's experience as an art photographer as well as a photographing social anthropologist in the northern province of Ethiopia, Tigray (Tigre).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Prof. Arnd Schneider for valuable comments and encouragement and all the participants at his Oslo Summer School workshop Contemporary Art and Anthropology, 30 July–3 August 2007, at the University of Oslo, Norway, for the creative discussions that inspired this article.

Notes

See www.thera.no and http://www.thera.no/?document_id=142.

Mead's photographs, however, were not reprinted in several subsequent editions from 1932 onward. The reason for this is not clear, but the disproportionate number of photographs of the young woman Fa'amotu, Hammond [2003] suggests, could be one reason, especially when it was discovered that she was of different social status and came from outside the community that Mead studied.

Christopher Morton's [2005] discussion of this particular photograph points to the different interpretive readings suggested by consulting the original print or negative as a historical object in an archival context or the differently framed published versions of the image within a text.

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Thera Mjaaland

THERA MJAALAND (b. 1955) is trained as an art photographer and, in the period 1979–93, she exhibited frequently in art galleries in Norway and abroad. She taught photography at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway (1996–99), and was head of the department of specialized art for two years (1999–2000). In 2004, she received her Cand. Polit. degree (MA) in social anthropology and is now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bergen. Her interests range from photography as research method, cultural object within social relations, narrative strategy and discursive practice in shifting sociocultural settings, to gender and development issues relating to North–South questions in general and Ethiopia in particular.