Affecting photos: Photographs as shared, affective ethnographic spaces

Abstract

Scholars point to the ubiquity of visual images in media and popular culture as driving striking developments in visual research over the past decade. Yet, with this popularity, there is less attention paid to affective, non-representational dimensions of visual images and specifically to the ways that photos animate and inform ethnographic fieldwork. The felt, sensory qualities photographs hold play a role in not only what gets documented, but also what photos produce as shared, felt objects that circulate during fieldwork. This article redresses a gap in qualitative research literature on the affective, embodied co-experiencing of visual methods that happens during fieldwork by spotlighting a research study on family photographs. In the article, I begin by defining affect, then I profile extant non-representational, affect-driven visual methods and discuss how matter invites affect, and then I spotlight a larger research study I was involved in on visualising the modern Canadian family. In the article, I offer insights that emerged from photo-sharing interviews which produced what I call in the article, affective figured worlds. Built on Holland's concept of 'figured worlds' coupled with Ahmed's notion of 'sticky objects', the article explores the notion of affective figured worlds to attune researchers to more of the non-representational methods in play during visual research.

Keywords: affect; ethnographic approach; family photos; figured worlds; multimodality; sticky objects; visual methods.

Figure 1.

An affecting childhood photo.

Figure 2.

Light through my bedroom window at dusk.