Photo Stories Research Articles

After Indenture: Three Photo Stories

A photographic portfolio published as a special section “Art After Indenture,” in which five scholars characterize and respond to eight contemporary visual artists who are descendants of indentured workers. The author Andil Gosine as guest editor also raises questions about the commemoration of indentureship and calls for greater contention with its traumatic legacy. Abstract and introduction to photo stories: Face Up: Life and transgressive acts on screen Roshini Kempadoo A screen-based video installation as character ‘idents'1 that combine photographs and short stories about living in London. As the inevitable eavesdropper, listener, earwigger, I can’t help but overhear partial conversations and oversee occurrences on screen – at the bus stop, in the supermarket queue, walking along the street. These are starting points for imagining what happens next. Bus 321 northbound, November 24 2015, Lewisham, London. I witness a young black man being refused entry onto the bus. In protest, he stood in front of the vehicle, challenging the driver. The bus driver revved the engine and inched forward, escalating the state of play. The man and the driver were at an impasse. I and others look on and use phones to document and screen share what happens next. It soon went viral. Deirdre takes a look at the state of her hair on the laptop whilst waiting to speak to her cousin. Her connections are international and ubiquitous; she knows her Skype conversation gives news about family in Guyana and the place she remembers. She feels it is right to offer what she can, which may mean money, arranging documents, or accommodating an unknown relative who is passing through. As a Londoner – of colour and diasporic, who knows about at least two places called ‘home,’ she keeps track of and maintains her tenuous and multiple ‘identities.’ Her screen use is dynamic and multiple. It is the hyperspace for intimate correspondence that closes distance, a transparent mediated tool for gathering evidence or self-affirmation. It is a semi-autonomous sensing instrument for sharing encounters and experiences. As a popular cultural space of performance the screen becomes ‘profoundly mythic… a theatre of popular desires, a theatre of popular fantasies.‘ 2 As it feeds our senses as eye and ear candy, her screen facilitates performance and acts of transgression. It is where she and I ‘do’ and perform life on the screen. 1 ‘idents’ is derived from the promotional video sequences associated with television identification/promotional videos. 2 Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 477.

NARRATIVE TAKES COMMAND: REVISITING MANPLAN AND FOTOROMANZO, PHOTO SEQUENCES IN ARCHITECTURAL MAGAZINES AROUND 1970

The 1960s testified an important change in architectural representation and more widely in the discipline’s periodical press. The themes, the approach, the graphics and the materiality itself of many European magazines shifted and were contaminated by the profound cultural and societal changes of the moment, as the Clip/Stamp/Fold’s selection largely demonstrates. Indeed, a large number of issues incorporated society matters and no longer restrained themselves to the architectural object. The role of photography in this process is widely recognised, as proven by the images used by the Smithsons on the IX CIAM’s grid. Authors refer that architectural photography increasingly resembles photojournalism in the late 1960s, depicting people not buildings. This communication proposes an analysis of cases of architectural publications where a series of photos is organised sequentially, building true narrative sequences. The representation of an urban space through several frames, like the ones popularised in Townscape, such is the movement inside a building that we can identify through the organisation of a series of photos that will condition the way we perceive a certain architecture. However, we will concentrate our attention in examples of photo essays that is more clearly identified as photo stories or fotoromanzi / fotonovela. We will focus in two examples. The first is Manplan, an eight-issue long series of The Architectural Review, published between 1969 and 1970. One of “the bravest moment in architectural publishing”, this sort of “dark manifesto” in a practise magazine, attempts to re-define a series of categories – health, welfare, education, housing, communications, industry and religion. By articulating black and white photos with a text that extends through the pages of each entire issue, the essays (especially the first one) succeed in creating an impact in readers unused to that approach in an architectural magazine. The second example is the collection of three Fotoromanzi produced by the Italian radical group Strum as a participation in the MoMA’s 1972 exhibition Italy: the New Domestic Landscape, after reproduced in Mendini’s Casabella. Associating an equal amount of text and photos in a comicslike sequence, the architects attempt to disseminate quite dense essays on housing problems in Turin, Utopia and the city appropriating a form of communication that was quite popular at the time. Although those cases are very different in nature, context and form, we argue that they both demonstrate that the incorporation of narrative sequences through images, even when dealing with issues that might appear not central in architecture or “on the surface” of the discipline, can be powerful attempts to strike right in the core of the architect’s activity.

Twentieth-Century British Periodicals: Words and Art on the Printed Page, 1900–1999, 4 July 2017, University of Reading, UK

Twentieth-Century British Periodicals: Words and Art on the Printed Page, 1900–1999, 4 July 2017, University of Reading, UK

Migrant narratives as photo stories: on the properties of photography and the mediation of migrant voices

This article examines how the properties of photography might mediate voice, defined as the capacity to speak and to be heard speaking about one’s life and the social conditions in which one’s life is embedded. It focuses on the affordances that the image provides for migrant cultural minorities to articulate such a voice within the context of collaborative research. I look at the case of Shutter Stories, a collaborative photography exhibition featuring the photo stories of Indian and Korean migrants from Manila, The Philippines. Using participant observation data, I show that it was photography’s ability to be all at once indexical, iconic, and symbolic that became important in voice as ‘speaking’. It allowed migrants to tell rich, multimodal narratives about their lives, albeit with some key limitations. I also show that it was photography’s inability to fix meanings with finality that mattered in voice as ‘being heard’. Although the locals who visited the exhibition engaged with the photo stories in an overwhelmingly positive manner, they often did not completely grasp the migrants’ complex narratives. All these data indicate that collaborative photography exhibition projects should not just be about how migrants speak and are heard. They should also be about how migrants can listen, so that they can adjust what they say to how they are being heard. This is a valuable reminder that in conceptualising photography and migrant cultural minority voices, we also need to take into account the broader process of multicultural dialogue.

Development of a Communication Intervention for Older Adults With Limited Health Literacy: Photo Stories to Support Doctor–Patient Communication

Successful doctor–patient communication relies on appropriate levels of communicative health literacy, the ability to deal with and communicate about health information. This article aims to describe the development of a narrative- and picture-based health literacy intervention intended to support older patients with limited health literacy when communicating during their primary care consultations. We performed a formative evaluation that included a review of the literature and interviews with stakeholders on relevant health literacy issues, qualitative studies with the target group, intervention planning, and a small-scale evaluation. Cocreation with the target group was a major component. Seven photo stories were developed incorporating principles from narrative and social learning theory and covering communication themes and strategies identified during focus group discussions and role-play exercises. The intervention was developed in 3 different formats: 1-page photo stories, narrated video clips using the original photo story pictures, and interactive video clips covering participation and communication during primary care consultations. In our small-scale evaluation, older adults considered the cocreated intervention appealing and comprehensible. The intervention shows promise for improving the health of older adults but needs further evaluation. This study provides a rigorous template for the participatory development of health literacy interventions.

The overlap between false belief and spatial reorientation in the temporo-parietal junction: The role of input modality and task

ABSTRACTNeuroimaging research has demonstrated that the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is activated when unexpected stimuli appear in spatial reorientation tasks as well as during thinking about the beliefs of other people triggered by verbal scenarios. While the role of potential common component processes subserved by the TPJ has been extensively studied to explain this common activation, the potential confounding role of input modality (spatial vs. verbal) has been largely ignored. To investigate the role of input modality apart from task processes, we developed a novel spatial false belief task based on moving shapes. We explored the overlap in TPJ activation across this novel task and traditional tasks of spatial reorientation (Posner) and verbal belief (False Belief vs. Photo stories). The results show substantial overlap across the same spatial input modality (both reorientation and false belief) as well as across the common task process (verbal and spatial belief), but no triple overlap. This suggests the potential for an overarching function of the TPJ, with some degree of specialization in different subregions due to modality, function and connectivity. The results are discussed with respect to recent theoretical models of the TPJ.

Effects of Concept Mapping on Creativity in Photo Stories

This research tested the use of concept map planning to support the development of creativity in photo stories, hypothesizing that skills taught to support organization would improve creativity. Concept maps are a type of graphic organizer, used to represent an ordering of ideas with nodes and linking words that form propositional statements. They were applied to story development under the assumption that the creative development of narrative elements requires organization. Undergraduate education students were randomly assigned to either concept map or text-based planning groups for the production of digital photo stories. Creativity was operationalized using dimensions of novelty, interest, clarity, and ability to be understood. A multivariate effect of planning method was found for these dimensions favoring the concept map group, due largely to greater clarity in the photo stories. Clarity in photo stories adds to their utility as creative products. This study represents first steps toward empirically assessing concept maps for a creative purpose, and further investigation, with a larger sample in an authentic context, over a longer period of planning time is recommended.

The influence of transport on well-being among teenagers: A photovoice project in New Zealand

Transport mobility has the potential to greatly affect teenagers׳ ability to independently access their social networks, key activities and destinations. Consequently, it makes sense to consider the role that transport plays in influencing well-being among older adolescents. The aim of this study was to investigate how older teenagers perceive the impact of transport on their well-being. Participatory photography or “photovoice” uses photographs taken by those with seemingly little power or status in order to enhance community needs assessments, to empower participants, and to provide a comprehensive description of an issue. This method was utilized among senior secondary school students aged 16–18 in Southland, New Zealand (n=18; 50% male). Their group discussions of common themes concerning transport and well-being provided richness and depth to each photograph displayed. Photographs and resulting discussions suggested that transport infrastructure played a key role in supporting well-being among participants. Regardless of the destination, photos and narratives by participants who lived close to town, and who were able to walk to destinations as part of their daily trip chain, displayed independence, happiness and positive social aspects of well-being. Living farther away from town elicited photo stories of loneliness and decreased autonomy, with respect to transport. Transport had an influence on the well-being of this group of teenagers. Photovoice projects are a valuable way to engage youth and provide context for new research topics such as this. New knowledge generated by this project will inform future research focused on transport as a correlate of well-being among youth.

Visual body pedagogies: how anti-oppressive education informs the teaching and learning of sporting bodies

In this article, the authors borrow from anti-oppressive education theory for its potential to disrupt how students visually conceive sporting bodies and to problematize the teaching and learning of these bodies within undergraduate physical education (PE) programs. Fourteen photo stories produced by students enrolled in PE programs at two universities were analysed using a semiotic approach to excavate the emergent themes of sporting bodies from the narratives. Relying on Kumashiro's anti-oppressive educational theoretical framework, the authors found that most of stories reified discursive practices that (re)produce gender oppression in sport. Despite these findings, the authors also discovered anti-oppressive pedagogies are useful for teaching against the body oppressions conveyed in the photo stories. How anti-oppressive education informs other areas of PE should be examined in the future.

Introduction

The presented papers are a collection of conference contributions. The conference titled Beyond Borders: Migration and (In)Equality in Central Europe in Comparison was both the major and closing event of an 18-month international project Migration to the Center funded by the EU program Europe for Citizens, the International Visegrad Fund, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. The project examined how the EU Community acquis and other instruments impact migration and integration policies, practices, and lives of migrants in Central Europe and beyond. The participatory countries were represented by the following institutions: The Center for Independent Journalism (Hungary), the Institute of Public Affairs (Poland), the Peace Institute (Slovenia), the Human Rights League (Slovakia), and People in Need and the Multicultural Center (Czech Republic), the latter serving as the project coordinator. The project aimed to create an active network of Central European partners and their counterparts from the rest of Europe focused on migration and integration while drawing the attention of policy makers, experts, and the public to the common and country-specific challenges and successes in the implementation of migration legislation across the region. Its objective was to contribute to the cultivation of the migration-related issues debate and create conditions for inclusion of migrants into the policy-making process. The project covered the following themes considered crucial by the participating countries in the migration and integration process: (a) work and residence permit, (b) family reunification, and (c) study and training in the EU. The themes were explored by each of the project partners via two expert analysis articles, five migrant outputs related to the theme (in a variety of forms ranging from a recorded interview to photo stories, poetry, and short articles), and a national public debate in each country that was recorded and provided with English subtitles. These outcomes have been publicized on the project’s web pages www.migrationtothecentre.migraceonline.cz.

The Future of Digital Photo Clutter

The future of digital clutter - trigger happy consumers today are capturing thousands of photos a year and inadvertently creating digital clutter on their hard drives or cloud storage services. This digital clutter has become a barrier in print fulfillment and/or enjoyment of photos. We will propose a solution which is a combination of technology and the trained human eye that can take a "heap" of digital photos and transform them into a beautifully laid out "photo story" that can be printed or enjoyed on a digital display/mobile device with zero work from the user. Conversion rates of this solution for photo stories (from photo upload to print) are north of 75% in comparison to the best photo book tools that are in the range of 30%. We will discuss sharing of these photo stories across platforms - mobile, web and TV.

Self-management and Representation of Reality in Photo Stories

The aim of study was to investigate whether the process of making photo stories in health care (the photo instrument) matches with requirements of self-motivation in self-management programs. Although training and advice in self-management were absent, the photo instrument shared important elements with self-management: the call upon responsibility, the focus on concrete (visual) details of the life world, and the sharpened awareness of choices to make. Expressing one's views, prolonged reflection, a dialogue, and sharing of the photo stories are components that can be considered building stones for commitment to self-representation of an illness story and a life beyond illness.

Did that Professional Education about Mental Health Promotion Make Any Difference? Early Childhood Educators’ Reflections upon Changes in Their Knowledge and Practices

Educators are at the heart of educational reforms, such as the introduction of mental health promotion initiatives into early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. Good quality implementation of reforms requires educators to engage in high quality professional learning: If educators have not had opportunities to gain appropriate knowledge and expertise, new initiatives may be poorly implemented and may consequently achieve limited outcomes. This article reports ECEC educators’ perspectives about the impact on their knowledge and practices of the professional education component of the KidsMatter mental health promotion initiative. Educators from 111 ECEC services across Australia contributed a range of types of data, including questionnaires about their knowledge and self-efficacy, feedback about each professional education session, and photo stories about their changed professional practices. Participants indicated that their professional learning led to changed practices in areas such as interpreting children's behaviours, interacting with children, approaching parents, and collaborating with colleagues. Participants’ photo stories illustrate how professional education that focuses on content, active learning, coherence, and collaboration can positively influence knowledge and practices. However, if such gains are to last beyond relatively highly resourced start-up phases of initiatives, professional education needs to integrate with, and draw from, the ongoing availability of other professionals such as guidance and counselling staff, who have complementary knowledge and expertise; be recognised and embedded as a core component of ECEC educators’ roles and their workplace practices; and be culturally and contextually situated. Staff accounts of the impact of their professional learning on their practices can highlight to policy-makers the practical outcomes of strong investments in professional education. Awareness by other professions of the affordances and constraints faced by ECEC educators may contribute to interdisciplinary synergies among the range of professions involved in mental health promotion in educational settings.

Photo-based narratives as communication mediators between grandparents and their children and grandchildren living abroad

Media-sharing Web sites are facilitating modern versions of storytelling activities. This study investigates the use of photo-based narratives to support young parents who are geographically separated from their aging parents to share stories about their young children. The case analyses Malaysian young mothers living in the UK, communicating regularly with their families back home, sharing experiences living in another country, looking for parenting advice, and opening opportunities for sharing the life and development of their young children. Sixteen families participated in the study by providing access to their social networking and web spaces and participating in exercises for creating photo stories. We identified the characteristics of the mediating system serving to establish the contact between grandparents and grandchildren as well as the characteristics of the photo stories and the practices around sharing them.

False Belief vs. False Photographs: A Test of Theory of Mind or Working Memory?

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to reason about other people’s thoughts and beliefs, has been traditionally studied in behavioral and neuroimaging experiments by comparing performance in “false belief” and “false photograph” (control) stories. However, some evidence suggests that these stories are not matched in difficulty, complicating the interpretation of results. Here, we more fully evaluated the relative difficulty of comprehending these stories and drawing inferences from them. Subjects read false belief and false photograph stories followed by comprehension questions that probed true (“reality” questions) or false beliefs (“representation” questions) appropriate to the stories. Stories and comprehension questions were read and answered, respectively, more slowly in the false photograph than false belief conditions, indicating their greater difficulty. Interestingly, accuracy on representation questions for false photograph stories was significantly lower than for all other conditions and correlated positively with participants’ working memory span scores. These results suggest that drawing representational inferences from false photo stories is particularly difficult and places heavy demands on working memory. Extensive naturalistic practice with ToM reasoning may enable a more flexible and efficient mental representation of false belief stories, resulting in lower memory load requirements. An important implication of these results is that the differential modulation of right temporal–parietal junction (RTPJ) during ToM and “false photo” control conditions may reflect the documented negative correlation of RTPJ activity with working memory load rather than a specialized involvement in ToM processes.

Facades of Suffering: Clients' Photo Stories About Mental Illness

In this article, photo stories are examined that were the result of working with photography as a therapeutic instrument dealing with suffering in mental health care settings. The purpose is to describe the role of facades in the process of suffering and acceptance. Clients took photographs, talked about them in group meetings, and exhibited them to a broader audience. Their photo stories were analyzed using a mixed-methods model. Data from two narrative approaches (semiotics and hermeneutics) were compared with information from other informants and official records to find discrepancies between the photo story and the real life context. Although facades are usually perceived as an obstacle for personal growth, the visual narratives revealed that facades can function as an alternative to common acceptance strategies, such as facing one's losses and reconciliation. Facades can create a distance between the person and the suffering. We conclude that visual narratives can reveal and foster agency in clients.

Photo Stories, Ricoeur, and Experiences From Practice

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how a particular narrative approach in nursing, namely the photo instrument can be connected with Ricoeur's hermeneutic philosophy. Ricoeur's concept of mimesis, when supplemented with the concept of performance, is shown relevant for understanding how patients construct and reformulate meaning in illness experiences. A single-case study is presented for a tentative exploration of how the key concepts of mimesis and performance can broaden our understanding of practice. More specifically it concerned the use of photographs in a group with psychiatric patients.

Beliefs About Aggression and Submissiveness: A Comparison of Aggressive and Nonaggressive Individuals with Mild Intellectual Disability

Recent research has examined the relevance of the social information processing model of aggression to individuals with intellectual disability (ID). This study investigated the “response access” and “response decision” steps of this model. Photo stories were used to compare aggressive and nonaggressive individuals' beliefs about the outcomes of responding aggressively and submissively in situations of interpersonal conflict. Coding of participants' open-ended answers indicated that aggressive individuals anticipated that aggressive responses would result in more favorable outcomes than their nonaggressive peers. The aggressive participants also made more negative evaluations of submissive responses. These findings have important implications for the assessment and treatment of aggression with people who have mild ID.

Kids, Cameras, and the Curriculum

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 18 No. 2 (2008) ISSN: 1546-2250 Kids, Cameras, and the Curriculum Barrett Dragan, Pat (2008). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; 107 pages. $15. ISBN 9780325009544. In her book Kids, Cameras, and the Curriculum, Pat Barrett Dragan presents an engaging, creative, and practical guide to using cameras in the classroom. Dragan's ideas and suggestions for integrating cameras across the curriculum have been developed and refined throughout her 30-year career as a first-grade teacher in South San Francisco. Although most of the ideas presented in the book are aimed for use in the primary grades, they can be easily adapted for use in the intermediate grades as well. This book serves as an important resource for teachers who wish to expand their teaching in new and interesting ways by connecting the required curriculum with technology, children's interests, and the school community. The book is organized into nine chapters, each of which contains a myriad of useful ideas, suggestions, and resources for incorporating cameras in the classroom. Aside from using cameras with students, Dragan describes how cameras helped her problem-solve social conflicts that arose in her classroom. As she photographed her firstgraders working in cooperative groups, she captured students' facial expressions and interactions among one another and was able to modify her instruction and classroom community-building accordingly. She states, "a small vignette of classroom life can be illuminating ... these photographs are also a permanent timestopping device: evidence to use as we think about things later" (p. 3). In addition to using photographs to inform her teaching, Dragan describes numerous activities she uses to engage students in their learning. For example, she asked students to take cameras home and take pictures of things that are important to them, things they have seen, as well as memorable experiences. She incorporates 283 their photo stories with writing they are doing in the classroom. Dragan states, "the writing is inspired because children are telling intense stories that matter to them" (p. 17). Dragan also writes about ways in which photographs can be an effective tool for teaching English language learners. She relates the story of her friend, Dr. Ryan James, who builds all of his course work around photographs in order to ask and answer questions, learn vocabulary, and practice descriptive language and sentence structure. Questions he uses in his instruction include:  Where do you think the photo was taken?  What do you observe in the picture?  What would the photograph say if anything in the picture could talk to you?  What was this person doing right before (or after) this picture was taken? Dragan emphasizes that English language learners are able to express themselves through photographs and use them as a tool to show who they are as well as what they know. The use of photographs and visuals allow them to build confidence and language skills at all ability levels. Perhaps the most impressive project Dragan took on with her students was creating a weekly school newspaper with her firstgrade class. Her students were highly engaged in this task, as they were writing for a purpose, took turns being photographers and reporters, and collectively published and distributed the paper every week.This project not only made a positive impact on her students' confidence, but also resulted in their progress in reading, writing, listening, and speaking for a variety of purposes. An impressive result from this project was the sense of community it built among the staff and students of the school, as all grade levels, teachers, and school personnel looked forward to reading the weekly paper. Many of the students and staff in the school were featured in the newspaper, and this project kept everyone informed of what was happening at the school and helped to create a sense of unity for the entire school community. 284 The last few pages of the book list a variety of resources that Dragan uses to inform her instruction as well as books to use with children while exploring different ways to incorporate the use of cameras in the classroom. She also references numerous resources throughout each chapter.Kids, Cameras, and the Curriculum is an invaluable resource for...

Narrative dependency and the false belief task in autism

Several studies have used a cognitive approach to teaching people with autism to pass false belief tasks with a broader aim of developing theory of mind abilities. However, these tasks have certain executive features that may influence performance on the tasks and the potential for generalization. The study examines the influence of narrative support and language level on the ability of children with autism to pass tests of false belief and control tasks of “false photo”. Thirty-four children with ASD, with a range of age and ability, were shown six video-recorded false belief stories and six matched false photo stories, half narrated and half not. Results showed that the children performed similarly on the tasks overall in narrated and unnarrated conditions. However, the narrative support aided responses to the control questions, highlighting the executive load in these tasks. Results showed a significant effect of verbal age on the children's performance on both sets of tasks.