My father spent much of his working life fixing the invisible infrastructure of connection. Mobile phone masts, relay stations, the engineering that allows voices and data to travel across space. I can remember trips with him as a boy to visit that infrastructure across Yorkshire. The masts situated in the best locations for reception, also happened to be in the best locations for views across the countryside. Not that the masts cared. They went on doing their quiet work indifferent to the beauty around them. What I understood then, imperfectly, was that technology was reshaping how people interacted with each other and to the place itself.
There are knots along that thread through my working life. Computational social science at university. Data analysis to inform policy in local government. Now, questions of what large language models can and cannot know about human experience and how they can be applied in the work place. Technology and its relationship to the social world engages and excites me.
Photography has been a constant companion. In the work place, it’s first practical application was during project classifying small geographies in Cheshire as rural or urban. The technique was quantitative - K-means clustering, working from census and land use variables. It worked well for most areas. But some sat in the ambiguous middle and the statistics alone couldn’t resolve them. Cue field work visits. Photographs of houses, the fields at the edge of town, bridges over railways, the blurring of categories that happens at the fringe. Those images formed part of the consultation material for colleagues to examine and consider. Photography had enriched an analytical piece of work. A modest beginning, but you have to start somewhere.
I saw Sarah Pink’s Doing Visual Ethnography as a methodological text. A way to turn this appreciation of the visual into a viable research contributor. It turned out to be considerably more.
Sarah’s under riding theme is to challenge the assumption that the written word is inherently a superior form of research. The antidote that photography is a lesser, more subjective instrument. Sarah argues that subjectivity is not photography’s problem, it is photography’s honest acknowledgement of what all research involves. Every methodological choice — the framing, the angle, what is included and what is excluded from the image — involves interpretation. The same is true of survey questions, interviews, workshop themes and the decisions we make about which data to use. Objectivity in social research is often a veneer of objectivity more than the thing itself. The person being asked and the person doing the asking both come with their own interpretation of the situation, saying nothing about the decline of engagement with such work and the resulting reliability issues, for example what’s wrong with Labour Market statistics.
The answer lies in reflexivity. The following outline by Sarah’s sums up this approach beautifully.
“Visual ethnography, as I advance it, does not claim to produce an objective or truthful account of reality, but should aim to offer versions of ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are as loyal as possible to the context, the embodied, sensory and affective experiences, and the negotiations and intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced. This may entail reflexive, collaborative or participatory methods. It may involve participants in a variety of ways at different points of the research and representational stages of the project. It should account not only for the observable, recordable realities that may be translated into written notes and texts, but also for objects, visual images, the immaterial, the invisible and the sensory nature of human experience and knowledge. It should engage with issues of representation that question the right of the researcher to represent other people, seek ethical ways for us to do this, recognise the impossibility of ‘knowing other minds’ (Fernandez 1995: 25) and acknowledge that the sense we make of research participants’ words and actions is ‘an expression of our own consciousness’ (Cohen and Rapport 1995: 12).” Page 40
This matters for how we understand visual methods and their place in social science. The challenges to positivism in the late 1980s and 1990s created space for methods that were honest about their situated, interpretive nature. Photography entered as an epistemological commitment, not just an aesthetic one.
Whilst the phrase ‘the invisible sensory nature of shared human experience’ may seem esoteric, it has a practical application. A link to un-recordable human aspects. Ai does not have the shared human experience that we all take for granted - whether that is our human Collective Unconscious in a Jungian sense, our unwritten growing up pains, the unshared thoughts or personal diaries, some things may never make it into the training data of a large language model. In this sense, can Ai truly replicate or understand human experience? Even if such things are articulated into words, can a model truly feel and understand this in the same way humans can intuitively? This is precisely where human-centred research has a role. The camera, pointed by a person, interpreted reflexively can access a world that no language model can.
One of the most practically useful ideas in the book is what Sarah — borrowing from Collier and Collier — describes as the camera as a “can opener.” Photography creates an entry point. In Sarah’s own fieldwork in Spain, attending events alone, speaking little of the language, having a camera gave her an identity. People understood what a photographer was doing. Over time, that role became something richer. Participants began sending Sarah their own images. Photographs of events she could not attend, places she had not seen. The project evolved into something genuinely collaborative. Some participants come to think of Sarah as ‘their researcher’ rather than as subjects in someone else’s project. They invested in it. They contributed to it. They invited her into closed networks, online and offline.
This is a fundamentally different relationship than previous covert ‘objective’ observation approach. It is less an extraction of data from participants and more a shared construction of meaning. Sarah notes that photos created during research and with people may never be published or even formally archived, but they still contribute to understanding. This principle of co-production, of engaged trust-building rather than detached documentation, runs throughout the book and shapes how I am thinking about my own fieldwork. Sarah suggests that we should not be a researcher who arrives, photographs, and leaves, but one whose presence in the community is recognisable, whose work participants feel a stake in, and who can offer something back. It is long term engagement in what Dan Milnor would call ‘attached photography’.
“working with older people, Suzanne Goopy and David Lloyd (2005) used participant photography in a project about quality of life amongst ageing Italian Australians. Participants were asked to photograph ‘those places, people, objects and/or situations that lend them identity and express or add to their quality of life’ to produce series of snapshots that represent ‘a spatial discourse of place and self. They interviewed the participants about these photo-diaries and then asked them to produce a second photo-diary. The second stage was crucial because Goopy and Lloyd report ‘the participants became more intimately involved in creating an amateur auto-ethnography’. The final stage of the research built on these diaries and interviews: the researchers and participants collaborated to produce a composite photographic image from photographs taken by the researchers. This aimed to reflect ‘their [the participants’] overall sense of identity and quality of life’. These composite images contribute to the research process by giving ‘the participants the opportunity to select and emphasise aspects of their domestic environment” Page 114
Sarah’s treatment of technology and futures is where the book opened the most unexpected reflections for me. How do digital platforms reshape how people move through cities? What does the rise of apps like Strava tell us about the changing relationship between behaviour, place, and social life? What are the implications for public health policy, urban design, the texture of everyday life in places that technology has quietly reconfigured? Digital apps shape behaviour in the physical world.
This connects to something I have been turning over since a recent visit to the Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World. The carousel feels dated compared to some of the technologically advanced rides which surround it. Yet it is this forward look at technology, that incrementally and over time, has the potential to improve human lives.
Revisiting the cell phone masts on Yorkshire hillsides that extend human connection, Sarah asks researchers to consider how they can extend the reach of their own work. Through screenings, project websites, short-form ‘incisive clips’, design cards that carry research findings into workshops and public conversations, exhibitions that bring participants’ voices into rooms they might feel alien. The ambition is interventional, not merely describing the world, but contributing to shaping of what might become. Sarah believes social scientists have a responsibility to be engaged in public discourse, not to remain in academic debate.
The futures work Sarah describes is not fearful or reactive, it is engaged, interventional and directed toward possibility. Her own career spanning universities, government bodies, and commercial partnerships with organisations like Volvo and Unilever, is evidence that visual methods done well can inform and influence the world. That combination of academic rigour and applied practice is something I see myself drawn toward. Not just the thesis, the exhibition, the book — but the question of where this kind of work can go and what it can do in the world. The breadth of Sarah’s work is exciting, but also illustrative that this can be a career.
At the risk of re-iterating - the book and Sarah has given me a methodological and ethical framework for my own work. It also reminded me that the question underneath it all, of how technology shapes and reshapes human experience, from those cell stations to the language model in the browser, has been a connecting thread.
The book can feel a little academic and dense at times, but it is packed with material. I read the book in small sections over 7-8 weeks, to allow the ideas to percolate slowly. Despite being relatively short, I have taken pages and pages of notes, more so than any book in the last few years. Whilst the book deals with academic issues, there are practical tips for working researchers and photographers. For me personally it made me realise that visual research could be a career. I will be returning to it and Sarah’s work.
