(Re)presenting the self: Questions raised by a photovoice project with people with physical disabilities in South Africa

Abstract

Photovoice is presented here as an emancipatory, participatory research method with the potential to put minority subjects in charge of their own representation. Drawing on research with disabled people conducted in South Africa, we argue that the meaning of images is often hostage to interpretations which reify untruths about the subject. We consider how photovoice projects may give rise to images that perpetuate the subjugation of their subjects, but could also facilitate an emancipatory politics of self-representation through photography, constituting a challenge and not only the discursive regimes and ideologies which underlie dominant aesthetics.

Keywords:

• Photovoice
• self-representation
• participatory action research
• disability studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term Coloured refers to a South African census racial group. Historically of mixed European, African, and Asian ancestry, self-identifying Coloured people constitute about 8.9% of the population (Statistics South Africa 2011).

2 An exception to this general desexualisation of disabled people in the popular imaginary is its opposite: the fetishisation of disability and bodily difference. Think, for instance, of Lady Gaga in her music video for the song ‘Paparazzi’, or Michael Stokes’ photographic series ‘Always Loyal’. In both instances, a very specific type of bodily difference – the merging of body and prosthetic – is eroticised. Whilst such images undoubtedly speak back to desexualising imagery of disabled people, they do so within a very specific and potentially problematic grammar (see Hickey-Moody 2015).

3 In the case of disabled people who may have difficulty using a camera, the assistance of another may be employed in photovoice work, an individual who then captures images upon instruction from the participant.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by FIRAH for the project Disability & Sexuality in South Africa. And then XH was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.