Interdisciplinary agendas in visual research: re-situating visual anthropology

Pink, Sarah. (2003). Visual Studies, 18 (2), 179-192.

In her review of recent literature around visual research methods, which owe much to visual anthropology, Pink notes as common interests among visual researcher reflexivity, collaboration, ethics, and the relationship between the content, social context and materiality of images.
(p. 9)

Looking through the history of visual anthropology and contemporary visual culture studies, Pink concludes that across disciplines, critical approaches to the interpretation of images has departed from positivist truth-seeking.

Pink refers to reflexivity as a key concern among visual researchers, yet calls for clarification of distinct claims to and uses of reflexivity. Calling reflexivity "a kind of autobiography" (p. 130), Rose (2001, Visual Methodologies) writes certain discourses refuse to be reflexive. Foucauldian discourse analysis is one of them, for it analyzes power subconsciously embedded in texts. Pink agrees with Rose to the extent that these methodologies cannot be critical visual ones because they lack reflexivity.

For Pink, reflexivity in ethnography means a researcher's awareness of "how they look and understand when doing ethnography as well as when they look at images" (p. 188).

Pink further traces approaches to reflexivity in research: Whereas visual anthropologists such as Ruby regards reflexivity as an ethical issue, Emmison and Smith (2000, Researching the Visual) interpret reflexivity as a question of validity. For MacDougall, another visual anthropologist, a 'deep' reflexivity requires revealing "the position of the author in the very construction of the work" (1998:89, Transcultural Cinema; cited on the page 188). Critiquing Holliday (2000), who refered to reflexivity as "a mere buzz word" (p. 505), Pink writes Holliday's argument lack historical understanding of issues and debates around visual anthropology in the past couple of decades.

In sum up, Pink writes:

"Across the different approaches, reflexivity has commonly been coined as a need for understanding ‘‘where the researcher is coming from’’ and how this impacts on the knowledge
produced. Some leave this at a question of validity and research quality control. However, most visual anthropologists take a quite different tack. They argue that reflexivity should be integrated fully into processes of fieldwork and visual or written representation in ways that do not simply explain the researcher’s approach but reveal the very processes by which the positionality of researcher and informant were constituted and through which knowledge was produced during the fieldwork" (p. 189)