Robyn Hayes, a researcher and a photographer, talked about the connection between photography and research and gave us incredible facts and statistics about child marriage that have blown me away in how critical this issue is. Even though her facts and figures shocked me in how common this issue is and how it’s an unacceptable problem, I found her pictures the most influential part of the talk. Robyn’s favourite picture which was also my favourite is a picture of a girl in a pink dress standing on a road with a village and a few men sitting inside a small house in the background. It showed that girls are free to go outside and she stood out with her pink dress from the dark-looking village. It is stunning that this one moment the picture exhibits women and girls who are free with fewer limitations in their lives. The most striking part of her talk was about her story when she taught girls how to use a camera and asked them to take pictures of their lives. I was amazed by the fact that this project made researchers learn new facts such as women washing their husband’s feet after going on the fields. When she was talking about the connection between photographs and research, I thought that she is the one taking the pictures and add the pictures on her research. Which means that the pictures are just an additional information for the reader to have a further understanding – like most articles. However, the fact that the women and girls are taking pictures of their lives, determine what she writes. In other words, instead of the text being the main thing in her research, the pictures she got from women and girls are the main information in this particular research. I always thought that texts tell us everything and the pictures are just for support but her story made me realize how a camera is a really significant technology that captures things that we don’t know and it can control the text.
January 24, 2018 at 3:00 am
A superb insight, Ami. Yes, it does make us rethink the role of the image in a text. Do you think the photos would work the same without the photographer-written captions?
January 26, 2018 at 12:55 pm
I think it would work. In articles, pictures will give further information to the reader. Photography can be itself, but captions can make the reader understand the meaning of the picture and detailed explanation. You don’t have to see the picture in an article and you don’t have to read the captions in a photography. It just gives you additional information. But I think that it gives extra information in a different way. For texts with images, the images give you specific details of what it is like. For images with a caption, I feel like it clarifies what it wants to show because people may have different ways in thinking about the picture.