Douglas Harper

Talking about pictures: A case for photo elicitation

This paper is a definition of photo elicitation and a history of its development in anthropology and sociology. The view of photo elicitation in these disciplines, where the greatest number of photo elicitation studies have taken place, organizes photo elicitation studies by topic and by form. The paper also presents practical considerations from a frequent photo elicitation researcher and concludes that photo elicitation enlarges the possibilities of conventional empirical research. In addition, the paper argues that photo elicitation also produces a different kind of information. Photo elicitation evokes information, feelings, and memories that are due to the photographs particular form of representation.

Visual Sociology: Expanding Sociological Vision

This article is an overview of the contributions of photography to sociology and a discussion of potential uses of photography in sociological research. Visual sociology, after contributing to several studies in the early decades of American sociology, disappeared to reemerge during the 1960s. In the meantime, the use of visual methods in ethnographic description, the study of social processes in the laboratory, in studies of social change, as a key to interviewing grounded in the perspective of the subject and as a means through which phenomenological sociology may be constructed and communicated. Visual sociology, with increasing organizational success and emerging electronic aids, appears to be on the verge of greater recognition and use within mainstream sociology.

Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys

In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city’s status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city and a hub for global migrations. Hong Kong is a tour of the city’s postcolonial urban landscape, innovatively told through fieldwork and photography. Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper’s point of entry into Hong Kong is the unusual position of the British expatriates who chose to remain in the city after the transition. Now a relatively insignificant presence, British migrants in Hong Kong have become intimately connected with another small minority group there: immigrants from Southeast Asia. The lives, journeys, and stories of these two groups bring to life a place where the past continues to resonate for all its residents, even as the city hurtles forward into a future marked by transience and transition. By skillfully blending ethnographic and visual approaches, Hong Kong offers a fascinating guide to a city that is at once unique in its recent history and exemplary of our globalized present.

The visual ethnographic narrative 1

This paper is a brief overview of narrative, reflexive, phenomenological and scientific approaches to visual ethnography, and an examination, in more depth, of the visual ethnographic narrative. To illustrate the visual narrative I draw on photographs made as part of an ethnography of tramp life in America. The narrative in this paper is incomplete and suggests the basic form for a comprehensive visual ethnography or film.

Framing Photographic Ethnography A Case Study

This article retraces the emergence of visual ethnography before deconstructing the uses of photographic evidence gathered for my book Changing Works: a visual ethnography of industrializing agriculture in 20th-century America. It discusses techniques of visual documentation and argumentation, including the formal properties of pictures, the influence of framing and captioning, and the use of existing photographic archives and how to control their built-in biases. Recognizing that visual information is selected and constructed in distinct ways does not destroy or diminish their worth. Rather, it allows the alert ethnographer to utilize them with more caution and subtlety.