Photovoice

Family collection of photographs will show how photography has changed so rapidly: from black and white or sepia prints, moving into handpainted colors and into the era of vivid technicolor.

Photography was synonymous with Kodak and in the Philippines, “kodakan,” meaning to take a photo, entered our vocabulary and, in the United States, a “Kodak moment,” used by the company to market its products, captured the magic of the cameras clicking for posterity.

Among life’s passages were the cameras, as we moved from simple ones like the Kodak Brownie, into the more complicated ones. We learned to be “adult” with the cameras, taught how to hold the camera, how to adjust the lenses, and how to shoot.

Video cameras came around too, still on the high-end but affordable enough for many households; but “home movies” still meant, well, home movies, not for showing in cinemas.

Enter digital technology. People can take pictures anywhere, any time, no more “sayang ang film” (don’t waste the film), no more adjusting the lens, no more waiting to see the photograph. Kodak went bankrupt in 2012, and recovered by selling their assets and licenses, and trademark, to corporations in the digital world.

The digital technologies have not been without problems. If there’s fake news, there’s “photoshopped” visuals, retouched to deceive. Then there are all kinds of violations of privacy, the visuals taken without permission and, worse, made public. Revenge porn is a more extreme example but we forget that to share photographs, especially by posting on the internet, you need permission from the people concerned.

There are many tough ethical challenges now, but digital technology is here to stay, offering immense possibilities for all kinds of applications.

Participatory research

I wanted to zero in on how digital photography will push a fairly new form of research. Photovoice, a participatory research method, was first introduced in the 1990s to get people to use photography to talk about and reflect on their situation as they search for solutions. Photovoice has also become a tool for advocacies for change.

Even before digital photography, we were using photos to tell our stories, about the many landmark events in our lives: births, children growing up, graduations, weddings, even deaths. In many cultures, including some in the Philippines, the corpses were sometimes made to sit up to join the living for a photograph!

Today, with digital photography, people snap shots of every sundry event. In one Facebook site I visited, the celebrator of a first birthday was overshadowed by photographs showing the preparation of lechon, from the grisly slaughter of the poor piglet to its consumption.

In photovoice, people are asked to take photographs around a particular theme. One of its earliest uses, in a Ford Foundation project, had rural women in Yunnan, China, taking photographs of their environmental resources, which were then used to talk about the problems of environmental degradation. Some of the photographs captured the grandeur of nature, which made people more appreciative of what they had.

Another Ford Foundation-supported project in Indonesia had sex workers taking photographs of their daily routine. No cheesy photographs of bar scenes here; instead, the women took photos of meals, of spouses and boyfriends, of children. There were photographs of themselves waiting in train stations to go home, visiting cemeteries. A book was published together with women’s letters and poems. The project humanized the sex workers, giving them faces and voices.

Interviews sometimes make people uneasy, as they censor themselves with what could be said. Photovoice helps to overcome those reservations. Steffen Jensen, a Danish anthropologist studied structural violence among the urban poor in the Philippines and one method he used was to ask adolescents to mount an exhibit with photographs they had taken of themselves and their lives. The adolescents were asked to explain their photographs, including why they chose particular photographs … and why other photographs were excluded.

Migrants and passages

I thought about photovoice last week when I had to give welcome remarks for an exhibit in the Vargas Museum in UP Diliman that will run up to the end of March. “Beyond Myself” features the artwork of Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong, with several partner agencies involved, the artwork coming out of workshops where the workers, mostly women, were encouraged to tell their stories as migrants investing in the future.

At the opening, there was a short video clip featuring Joan Pabona, a domestic worker in Hong Kong who recently won second place in the National Geographic Wheelock Youth Photo Competition 2017. Her winning entry was a black and white photograph, “Sacrifice,” showing a worker entangled in safety nets and was taken from the eighth floor apartment of her employer. Pabona’s other photographs can be found on the internet, stark, haunting, powerful. She acquired an interest in photography while still in the Philippines, and uses a DSLR camera.

In 2016 Pabona led a “photo walk” activity organized by Lensational Academy, where she was studying photography. The activity had Filipino and Indonesian domestic helpers walking through a busy part of Hong Kong, taking photographs with mentors. The description of “photo walk” reminded me of scoping, a research method where you just walk around, trying to pick up ideas and issues for further investigation.

Pabona is not the only Filipino domestic helper who is leaving a mark with digital storytelling. Look up Xyza Cruz Bacani on the net; she was made a human rights fellow at New York University’s
Magnum Foundation because of her photographs.

Not everyone will be able to tell their stories through photographs but their voices might still be heard. We have seen how the pictures taken by “nightcrawlers,” news photographers who dare to document the war on drugs, have challenged the assumption that dead men (and women) tell no tales.

Talking about young people, families might want to explore a different kind of photovoice. We complain about how obsessed they are with Facebook, which has become more of a forum for bragging, and for putting other people down. Wean them away by assigning them to be the official family photographers at events, vacations, life’s rhythms and passages. Explain the concept of “framing” as a choice of who and what goes into the photograph, and the responsibility that goes with that framing as we preserve and discard, memories.

Then let them produce their own galleries and presentations, explaining what the photographs are and why they matter.

Give them the freedom to voice a whole spectrum of feelings that might include anxieties, frustration, even anger. The photographs might allow parents, or children, to initiate discussions about more sensitive matters that come with young adulthood: “Wait, wait,” you might interrupt a picture-viewing session: “I see a lot of pictures of this boy. Is he someone special?”

Digital photography blurs distinctions between the formal and the informal, the serious and the playful. It, too, can bridge generation gaps. Get Lolo and Lola to do their photovoice too, with old faded photos, as well as the instant digital shots.

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