Who Can Take Photos of What? Promises and Constraints in Auto-Produced Photo-Elicitation Interviewing.

In the last twenty years, the development and expansion of the technical conditions of photographic production and the growing interest of the social sciences in visuality have generated new debates –and updated old ones– on the powers and limits of visual methodologies.

This presentation proposes an exercise in situated reflexivity on three effects or promises that the specialised literature points out as strong points of the incorporation of visual methodologies in general and photo-elicited interviews in particular into research designs: 1) the promise of the emergence of unexpected information, 2) the promise of informational enrichment and 3) the promise of a bridge to the participants’ worlds.

For this purpose, an experience of auto-produced photo-elicited interviews is analysed in the framework of a research on educational trajectories, identities and aspirations among a group of young people.

Regarding the promise of emergence, we point out the fundamental role of the directivity of the designs and instructions proposed to the participants in the photographic production. Regarding the promise of informational enrichment, the key role played by the –unequal– engagement to the project and the researcher who triggered the proposal for photographic production and the possibility for participants in certain designs to anticipate the discourses they would project during the interviews is highlighted. Regarding the promise of the bridge to the world of the participants, the importance of the conditionings of photographability of the different realities about which the young people were asked is identified and the analytical tool of the models of photographability is presented.

The article synthesises and concludes the reflections in the form of a decalogue of questions that contribute to greater reflexivity in the design of photo-elicited interviews and auto-produced visual methodologies.