1) Photographic Documentation Task.
Photographic documentation is a popular branch of photography, it is most of the times used to tell a story, relevant to history or everyday life.
Matthew Brady, one of the pioneers of documentary photography, known for his pictures of the American civil war said: “The camera is the eye of history”.
Since the creation and development of photography, documentary photography has always been central in news documentation and in artistic purposes. As true professionals, documentary photographers need to face some key issues. Based on Charles Suchar’s studies who questioned photography as a research method, studied the gentrification of Chicago and Amsterdam through photographs explaining the process. Photographic documentations start with shooting scripts and ends with a redefinition of the scripts and legal issues, which shows how central is to abide by the law.
We have been asked in class to walk around campus and capture images of students using media on campus. Along in pairs, me and my classmate took photographs of students using the Library facilities, we are lucky to have such a library in this campus so we thought it was central to focus on it.
Our main concern was the consent of the subject being photographed. It is said that photographers need the consent of the subject before taking a picture, as a legal matter, but if the photograph is taken in a public space it is acceptable to shoot without consent. It is important for a documentary photographer to respect everyone’s privacy and not to be invasive. As the Library being a space reserved to students, we made sure not to capture any faces.
Indeed, since the 1860’s photographs can be used as a proof of evidence, which can solve a large amount of legal cases but can also be very delicate. As for documentary photographs, there is a process to follow, the photograph should include the place it has been taken, the time, by who, the medium (camera or mobile phone) and of course the circumstances, which have to be legal, meaning no privacy breach.
We can conclude stating that documentary photography is central in order to get evident visual information, nevertheless it is a delicate practice since issues have to be considered.
Images of Library facilities and students using them.
2) Photo Elicitation Task.
Interviews are a method of face to face consultation, they allow to the interview to gather significant information from the interviewee about any topic. In class we have studied photo-elicitation, which a method of interviewing through photographs or any visual content being relevant to the interviewee’s memory such as photos, videos, reports or maps.
Since photographs are something very personal and relevant to our own memory it is a way to gather information that we couldn’t get using a normal face to face conversation interview. In Class, we did a photo elicitation task: we have been asked to take 5 photographs of things we consume daily and make up questions in pairs in order to create an interview. The result was surprising since we discovered not to consume the same things and we made up very different questions, as my interviewee’s top 5 was including a high consumption of Social Media, I made up a few questions regarding social media.
This exercise benefits both the interviewer and the interviewee since it gives a real insight on what consumption is and what we daily consume, furthermore the fact that photos are involved makes it a Photo-elicitation interview and allows both of them to receive and give precious information.
Being a photographer myself, this exercise gave me a positive insight as I truly believe that photographs allows the interviewee to give a more emotional and layered response on the subject discussed, indeed I have been a close friend from my interviewee and I managed to understand things that I did not know about him and I think he felt the same as we swapped roles.