Visual Research Methods: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?

Holm, Gunilla. (2008). In Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber & Patricial Leavy (Eds.), Handbook of Emergent Methods (pp. 325-341). New York and London: Guilford Press.

Holm pays attention to visual ethnography, action research, and photovoice as recent fields of visual methods. As of visual ethnography, Holm attunes, in particular, to Pink’s argument that reflexivity and intersubjective relationship between researcher and informants are critical to creating “negotiated versions of reality” (2005, p. 20). Holm also observes that recent visual ethnographical research takes on participatory action research by distributing photo cameras, for instance, to research participants. Holm remarks that photovoice, based on this technique, has not been widely used in education, anthropology or sociology, due to the nature of documentary and action research. Holm also notes that there were similar projects even before the groundbreaking photovoice project. She argues that problems with these projects, however, is that they were “mostly informative, and the strong advocacy component has been missing” (p. 330).