What people do with pictures

Abstract

This article argues that there is no single ‘voice’ that picturing makes audible, nor any single image that it makes visible. It examines how members of two different groups – hospital in-patients and homeless people – talk about photographs they had taken using cameras supplied by the researcher. Examples of these photographs are used in the article to examine conventions of picturing, different ways of narrating content and production, and movement of pictures through space and time. The argument is made that these features are variously deployed in explanations of what photographs mean. This leads to the conclusion that what pictures portray and what stories narrate are better thought of as versions of our experience of the world than as constructions of the world that we experience.

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