What is ethnography and what kind of visuals can be considered ethnographic?

 Ethnography (from Greek čovos ethnos “folk, people, nation” and ypáow grapho “I write”) is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research involving the examination of the behaviour of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members’ own interpretation of such behaviour.

Ethnographic research is a qualitative research approach that involves observing variables in their natural environments or habitats in order to arrive at objective research outcomes. As the name suggests, ethnographic research has its roots in ethnography which is the in-depth study of people, cultures, habits and mutual differences. This type of systematic investigation interacts continuously with the variables and depends, almost entirely, on the data gathered from the observation of the research variables.

Ethnographic research is sometimes referred to as a thick description because of its in-depth observation and description of the subjects. In recent times, ethnography has been adopted to the internet in the form of ethnography.  This means that researchers can now study how online communities interact in order to identify social communication patterns.

Discussions of photography in the emergent traditions of visual sociology and anthropology have been concerned with two principal areas: the use of still photographs as a methodological tool in social research, and the use of photographs as a means of presenting social research. Using pictures in social research requires a theory of how pictures get used by both picture makers and viewers. In order to use photographs either as data or as data generators we need to have some notion of how viewers treat and understand photographic images, whether those viewers are informants or researchers.

Ruby (1973, 1976) has drawn attention to the pitfalls awaiting people who take up photography as a research tool with too little awareness of the social practices surrounding photographic production and use. The following discussion offers a theoretical foundation for using photography in qualitative research.  In his study of family photography, Musello (1980) found that his sample of middle-class –Euro-American” families approached photographs as -mechanical recordings of real events,” not as symbolic articulations. The viewers he studied paid little conscious attention to the role or intentions of the photographer in the process of articulation.

The use of family snapshot photographs within a ‘home-mode” context placed a specific behavioral frame around the act of viewing which excluded consideration of the formal characteristics of the image. Viewed as works of art, photographs are thought to embody the personal concerns of the photographer-artist. These concerns can range from the exploration of formal aesthetic issues to the expression of the photographer’s inner emotions. Viewed as records, photographs are thought to reproduce the reality in front of the camera’s lens, yielding an unmediated and unbiased visual report.

Approached from either of these perspectives, photographic meaning is conceptualized as being contained within the image itself. The photograph becomes a receptacle from which individual viewers withdraw meaning.  However, these two perspectives fail to consider the role of the spectator in the process of constructing photographic meaning. The viewing process is a dynamic interaction between the photographer, the spectator, and the image; meaning is actively constructed, not passively received.

Barthes (1964) characterizes photographs as “polysemic,” capable of generating multiple meanings in the viewing process. Byers describes photography similarly: … the photograph is not a “message” in the usual sense. It is, instead, the raw material for an infinite number of messages which each viewer can construct for himself. Edward T. Hall has suggested that the photograph conveys little new information but, instead, triggers meaning that is already in the viewer (1966, pp. 31).

The tendency to treat photographs as objective evidence ignores the convention-bound processes of both image making and interpretation. In order to benefit social research, the use of photographic methods must be grounded in the interactive context in which photographs acquire meaning.

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