can be found at: Qualitative Research Additional services and information for KEYWORDS: autophotography, display, frames, home, memory, photography, practice, repre- sentation, visual methods
ABSTRACT This article reflects upon the collection and presentation ofphotographic data. The problem of representing the visual as more thanillustrative of written research findings is the methodological focus. Anempirical study in Cardiff explored practices of cultural display in thehome, focusing on the living room mantelpiece. First, I discuss themethodological debate concerning the ‘crisis of representation’ of visualdata in social research. Following a brief discussion of a year-longautophotographic project by informants, the debate centres onphotographs taken at the time of the interview. I show how the ‘crisis ofrepresentation’ in social enquiry can be illuminated by recognizing bothdomestic display and presentation of data as cultural practices/methodsof researching and remembering. Finally, I argue that multi-modalrepresentations of these mediated frames of experience can illuminatecomplexities of ‘doing’ home cultures and enquiry into the domesticinterior.
It is another thing to try and make over our existence into an unchanging lapidaryform. Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise. Most of usindeed would feel safer if our experience could be hard-set and fixed in form.(Douglas, 1966: 163)
This article focuses on methods of presenting photographic data that were col-lected as part of a study in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. This explored howmaterial cultural display practices in the home are ongoing accomplishments,bound up with negotiations of space, time and identity. Its focus was on themantelpiece in the living room, since this was where particular artefactsseemed to be set apart and ordered according to combined practices of socio-cultural convention and personal selection.
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Focal points: framing material culture andvisual data
As conference presentations of these data in other countries and to audiencesof varying national origin have shown, the mantelpiece as ‘focal point’ of themain living room in the house is a British cultural convention. This distinctionemphasizes the importance of sociological enquiry into the minutiae of every-day practice, since ‘the most seemingly trivial fields may turn out to hold thegreatest potential for cultural analysis’ (Gullestad, 1993: 159). Similarly, pre-sentations of visual data are culturally bounded ‘fields’ that require the samemethodological attentiveness in current debates regarding the ‘crisis of repre-sentation’ (Atkinson, 1990).
First, I discuss methodological contexts for my decision to use visual datacollection and analysis methods. Second, I reflect on the many selectionprocesses that were involved in presenting them as part of a research text. Theaim is to show how these processes are partially analogous to ongoing, con-tingent practices of positioning, selecting and editing material culture in thehome. The article is specifically concerned with methods of framing and dis-playing visual findings as an ‘end-product’, and how that product can relate toprocesses both of data collection and of ‘first-order’ domestic display.
This mirroring of the management and ordering of visual productions prob-lematizes seemingly static, finished aesthetic products and their relationshipswith ongoing negotiations of identity. The mantelpiece is not ‘only a picture’,as one informant stated, although it might seem so during an hour-long inter-view visit. It is an element of ‘domestic process art’ (Hunt, 1989). Similarly,visual data displayed in a text or other modes of representation are not justsnapshots: they are materials that have been through processes of framing,developing, editing and selection. In conclusion, I suggest that the ‘social life ofthings’ (Appadurai, 1986), such as display items and photographs, must beacknowledged in the landscaping of research findings.
Further, interview accounts of the provenance, acquisition and selection ofobjects for display give these objects a biography (Kopytoff, 1986), just as pho-tographs are socially produced material objects with histories, rather thanabstracted, decontextualized images (Edwards, 2002). Therefore, this account ofpresenting photographic findings demonstrates the necessary inter-relatednessof the visual and the spoken, the material and the narrative, for interpretiveresearch in the home. A full discussion of the interaction between informant,researcher and object in the co-construction of narrative can be found elsewhere(Hurdley, 2006a). It therefore contributes to the ongoing debate regarding multi-modality and mixing methods (Mason, 2006).
Seeing double: words and visionsThe aim of the Cardiff study was to pay attention to taken-for-granted, con-ventionalized display spaces in the home, focusing particularly on the livingroom mantelpiece. I distributed 450 questionnaires in three areas of the city,selected for the age and design of the housing. Participants were asked to
answer questions about their mantelpiece display (or other display spaces theyselected), and also to draw a labelled sketch in a designated frame on the paper.Of the 150 who completed the questionnaire, I interviewed all 30 (togetherwith other household members) who volunteered. These interviews were tape-recorded in their living rooms (with one exception, a man who saw me in hisoffice) and transcribed. I also took snapshots of the mantelpieces and other dis-play spaces that we had talked about. Half the interviewees had mantelpieces,and half did not, but chose other display spaces in their homes, such as shelfunits or the top of the gas fire. I gave disposable cameras to the 16 informantswho had mantelpieces so that they could photograph them at fortnightly inter-vals over a 12-month period. One year later, I visited the photographers to pickup the cameras and hold a short interview with them, in order to find out theeffects of photographing their mantelpieces, and their suggestions for alteringthis autophotographic method.
The three modes of visual data – my photographs, the fortnightly snapshotsand questionnaire sketches – were stored digitally prior to producing a ‘finalversion’ for the purposes of a research text. While the treatment of all thesedata deserve full critical attention, I shall focus my empirical enquiry in thisarticle on one type of data: the snapshots I took at the time of the interview.Nevertheless, the methodological discussion that follows seeks to engage moreextensively with the ongoing debate concerning visual methods in socialresearch (Banks, 2001; Emmison and Smith, 2000; Morphy and Banks, 1997;Pink, 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman, 2005; Ruby, 2005).
The ‘writing’ of the visual has increasingly been problematized. Benjaminnoted the displacement of the cult value of photographs with exhibition value,when ‘For the first time, captions have become obligatory’ (Benjamin, 1955:220). As part of the project, I interviewed museum curator and design histo-rian Charles Newton, in the archive cellars of the Victoria and Albert Museumin London. This visit highlighted the ‘crisis of representation’ (Atkinson,1990), since ‘exhibiting authenticity’ has been a longstanding problematic inmuseum curatorship (Phillips, 1997). Newton had curated the 1990‘Household Choices’ exhibition, part of a project that also produced a book(Newton and Putnam, 1990). A variety of methods were used in the produc-tion of both book and exhibition, including photo-elicitation, autophotogra-phy by children and adults of their own and others’ homes, and what isconventionally understood as ‘expert’ photography of domestic interiors. Inthe book, some of these photographs illustrate the text; in contrast, Newtondeliberately kept text to a minimum in the exhibition, since his experience sug-gested that the business of keeping up with the captions exhausted visitors.The photographs were relatively unframed, simply mounted on cardboard ingroups, with a short printed title.
As Berger (1972) comments, a caption will dictate how a picture is inter-preted, while Gell (1998) went further by resisting the notion of a grammaror linguistics of visual culture. If we allow that cultural materials can be
matter in and out of place (Douglas, 1966), we can interpret any textualcaption or more complex verbal/written accounting for the visual as displac-ing it to another realm or order, to which it does not belong. As Newton com-mented in our interview, however, photographs of private, contemporarydomestic interiors are not conventional ‘museum exhibits’. First, pho-tographs by ordinary people are not the sort of thing to be raised above themilieu (compare with artefacts literally raised up in the home, onto the man-telpiece above the hurly-burly of daily activity and ephemeral goods). Second,the subject matter – the ordinary, private British home interior – is not extra-ordinary. For these reasons, the cardboard mounts for the ‘HouseholdChoices’ exhibition were stored differently from other more conventionalexhibits. They were kept flat, uncovered, in document drawers on top of oneanother, and Newton handled them to lift them out and show them to me. Iwas permitted to take two photographs of them. He contrasted these ‘rules’with those for a large fragment of William Morris wallpaper, which wasframed and covered in glass on a wall in the archive room. It was literallyintangible, since no one was permitted to touch it, nor even photograph it. Itwas possible only to look at the ‘real thing’, in situ. This artefact really wassuspended above the busy-ness of the everyday, invested with uniqueness byage, and with rarity by, paradoxically, the fragile ephemerality which hadonce made it the height of fashionable taste. A postcard, perhaps, from theMuseum shop would allow some facsimile to be displayed and remembered inthe visitor’s homes, yet it was ‘unphotographable’.
This attitude to the materials of ‘Household Choices’ was particularly appo-site for a consideration of methods in my research design, since it resonatedwith Mass Observation methodology. I had incorporated an analysis of MassObservation methodology, together with archive material collected in 1937about mantelpiece displays into my design (Mass Observation, 1937). The aimof Mass Observation was the practice of observation by and of the ‘masses’, tocounter (with a certain ambivalence) elitist social enquiry (Stanley, 2001). In1937, only two photographs were submitted for the Mantelpiece Report, sincephotographs were positional goods (Hirsch, 1977), displayed on a very fewmantelpieces, and most participants had submitted handwritten lists on paper.Similarly, ‘Household Choices’ photographs were cultural materials gatheredby the ‘mass’, using what is now no longer a positional instrument or tech-nique, of their everyday domestic settings. Yet it is because of their ordinari-ness that they occupy a curious space of meaning and value. They are neithermuseum exhibit, in the conventional understanding of the term – whereas anold fragment of wallpaper is – nor are they disposable. They were used to illus-trate verbal accounts and written ‘expert’ analyses, but also ‘spoke for them-selves’ in a museum – albeit with a short text caption (unlike other exhibits,which might have an expository audio-guide or brochure). They are mounted,but unframed. It is at this point that the ‘mirror’ of my methods of data col-lection and presentation becomes the focal point of the paper.
As Bourdieu has argued, photography performs social functions, for invalorizing what is ‘photographable’, it is never independent of social class,norms, hierarchy and prestige. Its function is the ‘recording and compilation of“souvenirs” of objects, people or events socially designated as important’(Bourdieu, 1965: 7). He also comments that, as a product, it occupies a middleground between nobility and the masses, distinguishing it from paintings andmass-produced prints. Writing about family photographs, he notes that, in thehouses of the petits bourgeois in the village of Lesquire, ‘they even invade thatshrine of family values, the drawing-room mantelpiece,’ relegating medalsand trophies to a dark corner. He views the production of family photographsfor display as the ‘domestic manufacture of domestic emblems’ (1965: 25).Certainly, this observation concerns a specific time and place; yet we mightnote his observation that people photograph what is ‘photographable’ andthat in a particular French village family photographs had displaced the mate-rial markers of past family achievements in the public realm. Similarly, Banks(2001) notes the cultural specificity of domestic photographic displays: no dis-tinction is made by British middle classes between displaying photographs ofliving and dead family members, compared with Hindu practice in India. Healso notes that the top of the television is a ‘shrine’ in his mother’s house to hisdead father, and that in middle-class homes the mantelpiece may serve a ‘sim-ilar shrine-like function’ (Banks, 2001: 119).
Unlike medals and rare fragments of old wallpaper, photographs are repro-ducible; yet who would want to, outside the family circle? Curiously, thesereproducible, yet unique markers and products of social convention do, from adistance, all look the same. Selected to be raised above the business of domes-tic practices onto the drawing room mantelpiece, these photographs occupyan ambiguous place. Like the photographic exhibition from the ‘HouseholdChoices’ project, they valorize the domestic, the familial as ‘photographable’,and are therefore in circulation as social/cultural goods. In contrast to the‘unphotographable’, yet desirable (to those ‘in the know’) Morris wallpaper,their content is of interest only to those who already know all those babies,brides and birthday boys.
Incidentally, it is worth noting at this point how both Bourdieu and Bankslabel the mantelpiece a ‘shrine’. In contrast, the fieldwork I did in Cardiff foundan ambiguity in mantelpiece displays that mirrored, from some angles, theliminal position of the ‘domestic emblem’, the family photograph. It did raisesome precious artefacts above the common circulation of domestic goods, butalso acted as a storage facility, temporary ‘home’ for displaced objects anddumping ground. Likewise, I cannot pretend, in this laborious consideration ofthe ‘problem of images’ (MacDougall, 1997), that the photographs I took werenot to be used as aide-memoires when listening to interview tapes and conve-nient illustrations for accounts about the displays. Like informants’ mantel-pieces, the photographs performed many parts, and deserve similarattentiveness. Ball and Smith (1992) justify the exploration of signs with
reference to Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological approach to society as members’ongoing work, ‘with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postpone-ment or buy-outs’ (Garfinkel, cited in Ball and Smith, 1992: 25). This was myfirst motivation for scrutinizing the unseen mantelpiece, and it thereforemakes sense to show how my work in selecting, editing and framing was thenproduced.
The landscape of visual methods in social enquiry
A mantelpiece is only a picture. It’s a piece of art that you look at. (David, aged 70)
Visual data have been collected in recent sociological/anthropological studies ofdomestic space and material culture of the home (see edited collections byBirdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zuniga, 1999; Cieraad, 1999; Miller, 2001).Of particular relevance to this project were two recent research projects aboutart and the home (Halle, 1993; Painter, 2002). Halle’s study of art and class inthe American home invites photographs as illustration to the text, as doesPainter’s edited collection on the ‘At Home with Art Project’. This not only turnsart works into photographic subjects, but also other elements of the project – thepurchasers, the developers of the project, the places in the home where the artwas placed, and also other objects of art or design, such as the Krupps coffee pot,Gormley’s statues, elements of the ‘Household Choices’ project and so on.Although an edited collection, this overall topic seems to lend a resonance andcoherence that ‘makes sense of ’ the photographic plates. Nevertheless, this is areminder that final productions flatten out the processes and conditions of theirmaking, just as the static, neat tableau of the mantelpiece can, in a moment, foolthe visitor into viewing this condition as permanent and unproblematic.
Pink (2004) argues cogently for the combination of interview accounts andvisual data when exploring the home, as this can help to convey the ‘pluri-sensory’ aspects of home. I knew that photographs were essential to my datacollection, since I wanted them not only as aide-memoires when analysing inter-view accounts, but also to add their ‘multivocality’ to the final text, rather thanbeing ‘mere illustration’ (Banks, 2001: 144; also Pink, 2004). Recognizingmemory as a cultural practice was vital to employing visual research methods,since this was so central to informants’ methods of ‘doing’ home, family, identityon the mantelpiece. Photography and photographs were one means by whichthey and I did memory work, as culturally bounded methods of collecting, stor-ing and displaying the ‘rememberable’.
Douglas makes an explicit connection between museums and houses as‘memory machines’ (1993: 268) – the former for public memories and the lat-ter for private – by the display of artefacts. Maleuvre (1999) makes the connec-tion between collecting and displaying objects in the home, and its transitionfrom a building to a place that is constitutive of identity. Similarly, De Certeau cel-ebrates places of everyday practice as warehouses of memory (1984). Historical
surveys of domestic art and culture emphasize the constructed character ofpractices of collection and display, and their historical, cultural specificity (forexample, Camesasca, 1971; Saumarez Smith, 2000). Likewise, media imagesand the visual consumption of other people’s homes, in which the informantis the ‘other’, or the spectator, can have effects beyond mediation (Gregory,2003), creating a remembered ‘background’ for landscaping one’s owndomestic interior. This emphasis on close, local empirical work is iterated inMiller (2002), in order to uncover object relations and meanings that accu-mulate and change over time, thus contesting the ability of grand narrativesto engage with the complex mediations of cultural consumption within indi-vidual experience (see Miller, 1998). Importantly, the power of houses, roomsand objects to evoke memory is not always read as a benign effect (Bahloul,1999; Taylor, 1999) and has been criticized as a masculine discourse of home(Morley, 2000).
By personalizing ‘past’ as memory, individuals can link houses, spaces andthings to self-identity and autobiography. If artefacts are parts of a society’s‘characteristic ways of history-making’ (Mills, 1959: 7), photographs occupya boundary between the ‘memory objects’ on display at home (Saunders,2002: 177) and public monuments and museums as ‘memory work’ (Douglas,1993; see also Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Loukaki 1997;Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003; Rowlands, 2002).
Edited collections by Cieraad (1999) and Miller (2001) show how memoryis an ongoing accomplishment by means of the material culture of home, indisplayed goods and other practices. One in particular is significant (Chevalier,1999) in that it shows how audience assumptions about a plate picturing thepope are confounded by the personal memory motivating its display. It was nota memory of seeing the pope on which the plate ‘turned’, but the visit of theinformant’s daughter. Such micro-studies show not only how memory affectsthe meaning of home, but also highlight lines of friction in ‘history-making’processes. Further, this emphasizes the importance of mixing methods in away that might illuminate ‘gaps’ in the rendering of a research text.
Thus, any photographs that I chose to take, like the mantelpiece displaysthemselves, would be ‘multiply embedded’, like the ‘many visual forms thatsociologists and anthropologists deal with’ (Banks, 2001: 79). They wouldbe open to multiple interpretations, since ‘internal narrative’ could be con-structed within their frames, as well as advancing the argument of the text(Banks, 2001: 114). Hunt (1989) gave informants cameras with which tophotograph significant objects and spaces in the home, and the photographsthen took the role as prompts for an interview (see also Woodward, 2001).A more radical example of using auto-visual material to elicit interviewresponses is that of Marcus (1995), who asked participants in her researchinto the home as a reflection of the self to draw their houses and talk to thepictures. Pink (2003) emphasizes the need for an awareness of the historicalcontext of current visual anthropology by other disciplines: it is not a new
method, and has a long history both of practice and debate. Photographs arenot just simple tools for eliciting interviewees’ responses, although, as Ifound with the questionnaire sketches, a picture can be a practical starting-point for discussion.
A recent review of visual anthropology argues that viewing the ‘visible andpictorial worlds as social processes…provides a perspective lacking in othertheories’ (Ruby, 2005: 165). Audiovisual technologies can record visual cul-ture, based on epistemology that ‘culture is manifested through visual symbolsembedded in gestures, ceremonies, rituals and artefacts situated in con-structed and natural environments’ (Ruby, 2005: 165). Like Pink (2003),Ruby therefore criticizes naive approaches to the production of ethnographicfilm. Pink also argues that:
reflexivity should be integrated fully into processes of fieldwork and visual or writ-ten representation in ways that do not simply explain the researcher’s approachbut reveal the very processes by which the positionality of researcher and infor-mant were constituted and through which knowledge was produced during thefieldwork. (2003: 189)
In addition, data collection involves the use of instruments that similarly affectprocesses of knowledge production (Michael, 2004), as well as considerationsof self-presentation (Coffey, 1999; Goffman, 1959). I did not use a video cam-era in the interviews, precisely because, at the time, I considered the presence ofthe camera would disrupt the interview talk, and that my lack of technicalknowledge might indeed result in no data collection at all. I also wanted to seehow my photographs and the informants’ photographs might differ, in terms offraming and the literal position from which the snapshots were taken. Despitethis difference in technique, it seemed important to practise a similar reflexivityand awareness, particularly because of the seductive ordinariness of takingdomestic snapshots.
The use of photographs as illustration of the domestic interior in acade-mic texts seems almost too natural, precisely because photographs are‘domestic emblems’ (Bourdieu, 1965). Yet Chalfen (2002) makes a usefuldistinction between the problematic of home media such as photographs,where the focus is on product rather than process, choosing to view pho-tographs as a type of ‘data base’, thus distinguishing it from the problematicof visual anthropology, which is about process, and the problems of viewingvisual anthropological products as ‘evidence’. I found that informants didproblematize the display of the ‘product’. However, my current intent is tofocus on the ‘crisis of representation’ (Atkinson, 1990), and the problem ofintegrating, conjoining – ‘marrying’ (in some awkward pastiche of the wed-ding photo on the mantelpiece) – verbal accounts and written analyses withvisual materials. It seems ridiculous to elucidate visual meaning with words:consider the tale of the pianist who, when asked what a piece of music‘meant’, played it again.
Having framed the empirical content with a discussion of historical and ongo-ing debates in visual methodology, I shall first discuss the decision to useautophotography as part of the research design. This collection methodreflected, in some senses, informants’ ongoing visual/material productions ondomestic mantelpieces. In turn, this resonates with the subsequent principalempirical discussion, a reflexive debate about the process of transposing mysnapshots into a text. This prior consideration of autophotographic data col-lection will therefore illuminate the problem of representation.
The decision to give informants cameras for a 12-month period followingthe initial interview and photographs was motivated by a desire to avoid‘swooping god-like into other people’s lives and gathering data (includingvisual “data”) according to a pre-determined theoretical agenda [which]strikes me not simply as morally dubious but intellectually flawed’ (Banks,2001: 179). Of course, a study of people’s mantelpieces is not fraught with thesame moral and ethical dilemmas as ethnographic studies of child prostitutesor bull-fighting (Pink, 2001), but the research is about people’s homes andlived experience in their homes, a space which is still considered a private, emo-tionally charged place of negotiation and conflict (see, for example, Chapmanand Hockey’s edited collection, 1999). Also, Loizos suggests that, for example,regular photos of room contents can be ‘revelatory’ as a historical document(Loizos, 2000: 96), and that it is important to note absence and presence in thevisual record (2000: 101). Thus, in the belief that autophotography would bemore appropriate to the research agenda, which concerns material cultureproduced, performed and consumed on the mantelpiece, I literally handed overthe mechanics of the research process to the participants, by giving all of themdisposable cameras to take fortnightly photographs of their mantelpiecedisplays. This was intended to foreground the timed aspect of domesticcultural displays, their rhythms and tempos (Adam, 1995) and also, in a spiritof curiosity, to see what would happen when informants were given cameras.Having interviewed the photographers at the end of the photo-study period,I developed their films into material and digital photographs. I shall returnbriefly towards the end of this article, to discuss how the informants’photographs were eventually presented.
On first viewing the developed photographs – on a computer screen andcorkboards – I realized that the translation of these to a bound, textual formatwould not be a simple process, if I wanted to avoid using them only to illustratethe writing. This would have been at odds with the aims of the project: toexplore taken-for-granted space in the home, using participative methods ofdata collection. I shall now discuss in detail the processes of producing pho-tographs for final display in a research text. The principal empirical focus willbe on the photographs I took at the time of the interview, which are viewed
from that same, slightly askew angle that motivated the study and its design:of making methods of cultural material display visible.
Framing
I guess we don’t sit around chatting about it, or looking at it, or looking at thingson it – it’s just there. But in terms of design, in the sense of how this little bit of theroom is organized, I guess it is a focal point. Well, it competes with the TV. But, I’mnot sure. (Eleanor, aged 25)
The initial quality of the photographs I took in the interviews was contingentupon the quality of the camera and the photographer; there were no master-pieces in the original productions. Also, crucially, many of the photographshad to be taken at an angle to the fireplace, since the size of the rooms andpositioning of furniture often did not allow direct shots. This oblique perspec-tive affected interpretation, as did the decision of how much context shouldsurround the mantelpiece in the finished product. In addition, there were nooriginal close-ups of individual objects. This was because the initial intentionwas to consider the mantelpiece display as a single entity, rather than pullingobjects out of context.
The mantelpiece, according to all informants, was the focal point whenentering the room. However, everyday functions of the living room (when notbeing used as an interview room!) meant that sofas, televisions and coffeetables tended to get in the way of straightforward camera angles.Paradoxically, not arranging the room for a photo-shoot, as a magazine pho-tographer might do for public consumption, lest the ordinary domestic aspectbe lost, resulted in many oblique images. These hinted at artistic preciousness,or attempts to elicit plodding ‘Meaning’ from the inane. Informants might notdeliberately have placed the clock in the centre of the mantelpiece, or left deadflowers on it, yet interpretations of such presentations are inevitable. Similarly,these incidental, contingent perspectives became the subject of interpretativespeculation once they were translated into material objects as photographs.
The mundane practices of domestic life had effected an obliqueness thatestranged the everyday. This highlighted relations between everyday routineactivities and the domestic aesthetic, and specifically how these were mani-fested in the material culture of the home, the physical geography of the houseand the ordering of space. As such, the photographs forced a reconsiderationof the normal and normative practices of ordering domestic space, in the sameway, perhaps, that the formal structure of the mantelpiece can lend apparentlyunintended prominence to certain objects. Thus, everyday home life, and itsattendant props (the sofa, the coffee table and the television), can be seen ashaving effects in the aesthetics of home: the focal point of the mantelpiece dis-play, and my photographic productions. Meanwhile, my initial judgements ofthe meaning of mantelpiece displays as visual manifestations of taste, cultural
and social capital, life course and social relations within the household werechallenged by the accounts given by the producers of these displays. Peopletold different stories about the same things (such as clocks), and the samestories about different things (such as collections of model hedgehogs and cud-dly sheep). Thus, initial categorizing of informants through viewing theirvisual/visible domestic cultures opened up to different interpretations whenamplified by their accounts of objects and displays.
Selection
If I dismantled something and was meaning to reassemble it, I might chuck thepieces up on the mantelpiece while I left it in pieces… I would use it at least withthe intention that it should be a temporary storage place… Even though in thenature of things… temporary might slide into the long term. (Brian, aged 36)
The photographs were not intended to be works of art; taken in a hurry, theywere a prelude to the ‘real work’ of the interview. Thus, it was not until theywere mounted on corkboards and stored as computer images that I began toconsider them as aesthetic objects detached from the oral narratives given dur-ing the interview, and as a distinct collection. The process of arranging them onthe boards for viewing was striking in its similarity to the action of arranging amantelpiece. For many of the informants, the arrangement had been cumula-tive, or had been done so long ago that it was forgotten. However, two of thefemale informants had made it a priority following recent house moves, consid-ering the practice of ornamenting the mantelpiece with their objects as a vitalconstituent of making their ‘mark’, of personalizing space. By arranging thephotographs on corkboards, specially purchased for the purpose, I wasperforming a similar act of appropriation. The practice also demonstrated whatmany informants had spoken of: the problem of things, in that they necessarilydemand space. This ordering of domestic space and an apparent imperative tosupply appropriate display areas for aesthetic objects shows how objects can beactively constitutive of identity production in the home (Knappett, 2002).
There was no room for all the photographs on the corkboards, but no roomfor putting up another board in my study at home. This seemingly simple actof sticking the photographs to the two boards became heavy with meaning,and I could not view it as a random selection process. Those selected to go backin the box took with them ‘trajectories of knowledge’ (Strathern, 1999), whichmight be lost permanently. These that remained had to be categorized andordered, yet chance juxtaposition or central placing would alter any interpre-tation. Eventually, common sense prevailed, and they were arranged for thebest fit in the limited space. It occurred to me that the chance groupings oninformants’ mantelpieces could be transformed, like this arrangement, intohighly symbolic arrangements, and subsequently into typologies that wereentirely detached from original intent or function.
Furthermore, the interviews were, like these photographs, only a snapshotof the process of domestic life. An entirely contrasting interview interaction,another mantelpiece display of fresh flowers, unposted letters or new birthdaycards and a different photograph might be the materials of social enquiry onanother day. The effects of time (and the interviewer) then came to promi-nence, emphasizing the role of the year-long autophotographic study by infor-mants in presenting findings. As many informants said, they had not thoughtmuch about this focal point, as they called it, until I brought it to mind. Thepresence of the mantelpiece display was important for many only as anabsence of absence; it formed a comforting background to their domestic lives.Thus, the narratives were framed by the interview, and the displays by the pho-tographs I had taken, now sliced from their domestic framework to be recon-structed as book chapters and photographic plates.
Editing
It’s certainly not a display area, it’s just another shelf … You can always makeanother display area if you really had to. … It’s just that this is so unattractive, ithasn’t been developed. (Jane, aged 41)
As the photographs became productions in their own right, they invited spec-ulative editing. The ease of computer editing permitted repeated changes.Complicating this technological process, however, were the meanings attachedby informants to certain possessions, which at first appeared to compete withmy interpretations, including aesthetic considerations, for centre ground. Theinformants are omitted from the photographs, yet their presence is felt, as ismine, by chance reflections in the mirror or television screen. Both the editingprocess and eventual appearance in print raise questions about framing.Judicious editing and a good frame can conjure masterpieces from dross, yetmeanings can be lost if a picture is edited and framed carelessly.
The photographs displaced what they displayed from the social, domesticcontext in which once they dwelt. As ‘matter out of place’, they were open tocultural reordering (Douglas, 1966). Despite the embodied character of theinterviewing process, in which my bodily presence was such a concern (Coffey,1999), and in which both protagonists performed a number of roles (Holsteinand Gubrium, 1995), little of the human remained in these stills from theinterview. There are no people in the photograph, even though one knows theyare there. The informant, once the apparent focus of the interview (the objectson the mantelpiece being only our props), has disappeared. Occasionally, a footappears in the corner of the picture. This disturbs the aesthetic integrity ofthese perfect display shelves, and so in the editing process the limbs are slicedout. It is an easy procedure, since they are in the lower corners of the photo-graph. Rather more difficult to discard are the reflections of the flash, or theodd glimpse of a face in the mirrors above the mantelpieces. I cannot forget
that I was there, that an interview took place between other people and me, orthat the photograph captures a moment in my life, and theirs. And yet, timehas passed since that moment, and the photographs now inhabit elsewhere,plucked from their original homes. Edited and framed with a certain intent thedepictions could be transformed into museum pieces commemorating‘Domestic Material Culture’ and ‘Past Lives’.
Again, reflections can be seen between the photographic collection and thedomestic mantelpieces. Any sociological interpretation that proffers the pho-tographs as perfect pieces of objective ‘history-making’ is superficial. Thepeople remain in the picture, possessors still of these silent images. In thereflection of a mirror, or a television screen, darkly, the shadows remain, dar-ing me to ignore their presences. It remains a negotiation – or contest – forspace and voice, for ownership of these images. And yet, these spectres, like theobliqueness and odd diagonals of some photographs remind me of somethingelse, a duty to commit them to memory, just as informants have memorializedso many others on their mantelpieces.
The photographs and interview accounts, rather than the material mantel-pieces, have become the focal point of the final explanation, fixed in straightlines of text and rectangular photographs, far removed from the wandering,elusive processes that constituted the mantelpiece display and the interview.Several layers are sedimented upon these two original actions, which oncewere separate, but are now conjoined in this textual ‘marriage’. In an idealrealm, the explanations offered for why and how people put these miniaturedisplays on show on their mantelpieces would be a production whose ‘infor-mants’ would have equal billing – they and I. But they will always be ‘the oth-ers’, whose ideas are given credit, as their voices sink to the whispers of ghosts,sinking with the ‘material’ down into the past. As time goes on, the fleshly bod-ies that produced the interviews are fossilized into flat black text, their produc-tions crushed into the perfect frame of the edited photograph. The question,then, is how to produce a text which frames all these times, places and people:neither a grotesque chimera, which shows all too literally the creatures fromwhich it is made, nor a smoothly rendered piece of art that conceals theprocesses and relations of its production.
Display
You go to other people’s houses, don’t you, and you just get an impression, ‘That’swhat goes on a mantelpiece’. That’s just the kind of stuff people keep there. … Youwouldn’t put a saucepan up there, would you? It would be inappropriate. And it’skind of half storage, half display. (Catrin, aged 25)
Mantelpieces are joint efforts, even though the final displays might be the actof one person, usually (in this Cardiff project) a woman. Indeed, the negotia-tion and contestation of space resonated through many accounts, as women
spoke of the desire to preserve the mantelpiece as a tidy, uncluttered place,undisturbed by the ephemeral clutter of the husbands and children.Nevertheless, many mantelpieces are about families, human relations andhuman histories. But the seemingly simple act of taking a photograph at theinterview exerted a curious change over these creations, for the slant ofmemory twisted these photographs into nostalgic visions (see Rybczynski,1986, for an illuminating discussion of nostalgia). The mundane, manipu-lated by the passage of time, and the aesthetic dignity lent by a photograph,became newly framed by memory.
Indeed, the danger with mantelpiece displays is the temptation the structureoffers to aestheticize the past: that proscenium arch writes a narrative whichmight be lost in the random scattering of objects. As one informant said, ‘I talk,and you can create a narrative out of it.’ Not only he and I, but also the apparentcoherence of the mantelpiece, are participants in the co-construction of mean-ing. These are specifically visual productions: some look very nice, while othersare a terrible mess of papers and photos and bowls of screws. Ongoing lives arepresent in the oddments, between the gaps of the permanent or ideal display: thewedding invitation, the confiscated toy, or the film awaiting development.Informants viewed their very beautiful set pieces, perfect in symmetry, as repre-sentative of a life already lived. In the interviews, they constructed biographiesaround these permanent displays, which connected them with absent times,places and people. Yet these commemorations could be seen as idealized versionsof the past, a neatened bricolage that occludes anything disruptive to the smoothstream of memory. The same can be said of the photographs, which begin asawkwardly angled conglomerates of the mantelpiece, the television perhaps andodd parts of feet, bookshelves and toys. These are then cut to size, to fit the frameof paper and text. The final text somehow confers on this collection of picturesand writing a certainty which unedited confusion of spoken words and pho-tographs does not possess. Similarly, one informant spoke of the need for the ‘per-fect’ photograph for an empty frame on the mantelpiece, and another of findingthe right frame for a badly framed picture above it. A frame sets something apart,inviting another look and interpretation.
Therefore, I was left with the question of how to present visual materials inthe final text as a part of the whole: attached, having an effect, and affected byimmediate textual context and wider networks of cultural assumptions. Just asthe mantelpiece appears as neat linear display, hinting at the temporal linear-ity of narrative accounts, thus the written part of the text took on the appear-ance of a tidy account, despite the fact that its production had been a processmore akin to making a garden (Munro, 2002): apparently chaotic, disrupted,affected by the weather and involving pruning, planting and moving theshrubbery. Winstanley (2000) incorporated small pictorial and photographicparts of her doctoral thesis within the body of the text; this had an effect ofintegrating, at least in appearance, written and pictured elements, and alsohighlights the often-ignored characteristic of text: it is a visual substance and
cultural artefact. Visual anthropology is moving more into digital and hyper-mediated realms, further problematizing representation, presence and inter-pretation (see Rothenbuhler and Coman, 2005 for discussion; also Dicks et al.,2006; Pink, 2004).
In order to open up multiple perspectives for interpreting the data collected, Idecided to extend the research findings beyond the principal ‘book’. I wanted thisto stand alone (since it is very trying for a reader constantly to be directed to otherplaces), but to make exploration into other modes of presentation and interpre-tation possible. Thus, the photographs that I took and those taken by informants,together with their questionnaire sketches, are all presented, unedited, in a CD-Rom at the back of the book. This allows what would have been impossibly bulkyin material form, showing readers all visual data in its imperfect, poorly angled,badly drawn, shadowy, unflashy form. In addition, a supplementary booklet con-nects informants with their mantelpieces, providing a short biography of eachperson using information they gave in the postal questionnaire, together withtheir pencil sketch and photographs I took of each mantelpiece. Meanwhile, theyear-long autophotographic studies and other visual data are currently storedand displayed in galleries on a password-protected website, which will be thefocus for a planned participative project with the informants. The use ofautophotography as a research method is too complex for brief discussion here,and will be ‘written up’ following the new project.
Of course, this method of display (and storage) also allows me to be ‘showy’in the body of the text, since the mess has been tucked away in the margin.Therefore, flanking the chapters, and in the gaps between each of those writ-ten artefacts are these visual spaces. Like the ‘gaps’ on the mantelpieces, theyare not really empty, but accounted for differently from the rest of the display.Whereas vases, candlesticks, photographs and mirrors had narrative, oftenbiographical accounts constructed around them by informants, the things inthe gaps were of a different order. These ‘intruders’, temporarily displaced fromtheir proper homes, such as toe-nail clippers, letters for the post, or an unde-veloped film, were unmentioned until I asked informants about them, makingthe gaps ‘visible’. Similarly, then, the visual plates in the final text are uncap-tioned, deliberately separated from the written/verbal accounts of the ‘remem-berable’. They are highly edited, aestheticized versions of the originalcollection of photographs and sketches: a gold-framed collage of mirrors; aseries of mantelpiece/television pairings; 16 Christmases and so on. In con-junction with the text, the biographic supplement and the CD-Rom, they aredesigned to highlight the problem of method in re-presenting research find-ings (see Hurdley, 2006b).
Conclusion
Life may not be an imitation of art, but ordinary conduct, in a sense, is an imita-tion of the properties, a gesture at the exemplary forms, and the primal
realization of these ideals belongs more to make-believe than to reality. (Goffman,1986 [1974]: 562)
The recent ‘material turn’ in social research recognizes that ‘objects, technolo-gies and material environments are simultaneously material, cultural and social’(Haldrup and Larsen, 2004). Rather than ascribe affectivity to objects as a theo-retical postscript, a ‘genealogical ethnographic approach’ (Borgerson and Rehn,2003) can bridge the perceived gap between immaterial and material, theoryand everyday practice. Recent discussions in visual methods have recalled thephotograph from abstract image to framed materials of social and cultural inter-action (Edwards, 2002). This discussion of collecting and presenting data hasbrought into focus the relationship between material culture as everyday prac-tice and the study of material culture. The processes and materials of fieldwork,analysis and presentation must engage with material cultural practices in a waythat does not freeze-frame the relationship as a neat snapshot.
I have already discussed the relationship between accounts constructedaround objects and the co-construction of moral identities during interviews(Hurdley, 2006a). I concluded that discussion by commenting on the addeddimension to analysis that the collection and presentation of visual data wouldbring to the project. Yet I would argue that, just as visual and narrative ver-sions of data analysis add richness to the interpretation, so visual materialartefacts and narrative/biographical accounts are all materials with whichinformants build versions of mediated experience. These are cultural practices,of which the material culture of the home is one category. The narrative/pho-tographic accounts I gathered can be seen as drawing on the ‘moral traditionsof the community…’ (Goffman, 1986 [1974]: 562), just as mantelpieces andtheir displays are iconic or mythic in British culture. Further, if we followGoffman’s view, ‘everyday life, real enough in itself, often seems to be a lami-nated adumbration of a pattern or model that is itself a typification of quiteuncertain realm status’ (1986 [1974]: 562).
It is not my intent here to explore further the uncertainty of this (possibly)‘ideal’ realm. I wish, rather, to emphasize the point that the problem of fram-ing visual data within the conventions of an academic text can be perceivedsimply as one of authenticity, interpretation and authorial power. However, Iargue that the problem is of a different order, relating to the framing of expe-rience by individual members by means of various types of social materialsand techniques. Thus, while photographs can be viewed as second-order rep-resentations of particular mantelpiece displays, they can also be taken as non-verbal, non-textual frames of experience, of the ‘rememberable’.
The presentation of text and photographs can present the common materialsof everyday domestic life as extraordinary. By acknowledging that space, culturaldisplay and personal accounts (material, spoken and visual) are negotiated andfrequently contested – particularly when interpreted as parts of the ‘history-making’ process (Mills, 1959) – it has also illuminated complex relationsbetween the permanent ideal and the poorly arranged, unpolluted mess of life,
and the problem of presenting visual data from researching mundane domesticpractices. Finely edited and framed photographs might show the bones of thestory, a pure anatomy of domestic display that any museum might show us, butthese can be wrapped in the mistakes, lies even, that are the flesh of story,memory and experience. ‘Framelessness is itself a frame’ and in museum cura-torship there has been a recent turn ‘towards explicit contextualisation’ (Phillips,1997: 208), directing the viewer just as Benjamin (1955) had noted of photo-graphic captions. Also, as Berger (1972) shows, a caption can utterly change theway in which a picture is perceived. And so, my artfully disordered ‘familyalbum’, or album of families, is another prism, just like the perfectly presentedsymmetry of ordered themes, tidy frames and neat conclusion of the text. It isanother frame, a presentational genre (Atkinson, 1990), just as the mantelpiecesI photographed were a particular rendering on a particular day of the ‘focalpoint’ of the living room. Yet this can be seen as a part in a broader comment onhow people organize experience, mediated through various frames of materialsdisplayed in their homes and the narrative accounts they construct around thesedisplays, when prompted by an interviewer.
After a series of processes, these visual materials have undergone a certaintransubstantiation. They are now parts of something else, a research text,and without going (apparently) back and back into these processes (seeGoffman, 1986 [1974]: 16–20), that is how they will stay, for now. I havechosen to organize some into certain neatened orders on the page, to offer dif-ferent interpretations. Others, however, are purposefully disordered spatter-ings across the page, or poorly cut and coloured, like a bad hairdresser’s work.The viewer will doubtless find meanings in them. In showing the inter-relat-edness of social interactions, of domestic space, objects and narratives, and ofphotographic and spoken accounts, multi-modal methods of presentationcan illuminate the complex dimensions both of home lives and of enquiryinto the domestic interior.
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
This was developed from a paper presented to the American SociologicalAssociation annual meeting in 2005. I would like to thank the three anony-mous referees for their helpful and stimulating comments on an earlier versionof this article. I am also grateful to the ESRC, which funded the doctoralproject (Award no. R42200134124), and the informants who took part.
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RACHEL HURDLEY recently completed her doctoral thesis exploring domestic displaypractices. She is currently workiing as a research associate in the Cardiff School ofSocial Sciences. Her research interests include mantelpieces, corridors and other cul-tural materials and practices. Address: School of City and Regional Planning, CardiffUniversity, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK.[email: [email protected]]
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