Using Photo-Methods to Empower Participants in Education Research: Creating Knowledge and Change

The Ideology Behind The Camera

In On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag explained that photography, unlike painting was part of a larger project. She posed that the industrialization of film, cameras, and the images they created “… carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images” (p. 7). The publication of photos from faraway places indulged this notion of exploration from the comfort of home as photos from anthropological fieldwork were made available in magazines. Alexander Graham Bell became the president of the National Geographic Society in 1897 and moved the magazine from a mostly descriptive journal to the picture-rich format recognized today. “He told his editors to ‘let the world hear from you as our representative’” (National Geographic Virtual Library, 2015). The work of the society became synonymous with Anthropology in the minds of the public throughout the 20^th century and the photos of African, Middle Eastern, Central and South American people were fascinating to Americans and Europeans. While outwardly in the pursuit of science, these early explorers were less concerned with uncovering the ways of knowing that indigenous people hold, than revealing exotic, strange, and titillating characters that propped up their own ideology of White/European superiority. The historical entanglement of colonialism and this type of exploratory anthropology has been a topic in the anthropological literature and was summed up by Gogh (1968):