Making art and making sense: youth photoethnographers materialising the invisible through analytic art-making

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the potential of participant art-making as an ethnographic analytic method for materialising otherwise invisible experiences in the everyday lives of people. To describe this methodology, I share examples from a two year project conducted in a photography classroom in the northeastern United States. Teenage participants made photoethnographic self-studies about their engagement with texts and then used mixed-media art-making as an analytic method to study their photographs. As a result, in every art piece the youth photoethnographers were able to surface, through colour, line drawing, and annotation, that which would have remained invisible otherwise: affective intensity, sensory experience, and mercurial or ephemeral relations. Using participant art-making as an analytical method may be of great use to ethnographers who are seeking tools that will provide access to affective intensity and complicated or hidden relations experienced in/by their participants.