By Bridget Anderson and Emma Newcombe.
Between February and July 2024 MMB was delighted to host Victoria Hattam, Professor of Politics from the New School For Social Research, New York, as Leverhulme Visiting Research Professor. One of the key themes emerging from her visit was how we can incorporate visuality into our methodological toolbox. We realised we are always active viewers, framing and focussing, but also that we do a lot of looking, and that looking and seeing are not at all the same. While it sounds very focussed, looking is what we do when we are inattentive. Seeing demands attention and raises questions. Looking accumulates assumptions. Seeing can start to dispel them.
On 22nd May 2024, here at the University of Bristol, we participated in a workshop on visual methods run by Professor Hattam and Dr Nariman Massoumi (Department of Film and Television) exploring bordering and the university. We all used smartphones to take images, which you can see in the gallery below.
It felt strange printing out the images during the session given that we do so much digitally nowadays. But, in fact, it really made a difference to the group discussion because we could look at the images together, move them around and group them in different ways. We haven’t wasted the paper either as participants took away their own images and the rest are on the wall in the MMB office.
Some of the participants were worried that they didn’t have photography skills up to the task. Look through the images below and you will notice that they needn’t have worried. We all felt that wandering around Royal Fort Gardens at the heart of the university allowed us to pay attention to small details that you might ordinarily pass by without a thought. The exercise helped us to ‘see’ differently, which made it easier to frame a thoughtful image. We also saw many different interpretations of borders – apart from two people who managed to take virtually the same shot of a blue canvas tent pegged to the grass! Despite photographing different subjects we found connections through form and colour. Almost all the images were close ups, and there were no distance shots. Why was that? Does that tell us something about how we see borders? Or how our visual framings are affected by smartphones? Or maybe it was just easier to find meaning on a close-up scale.
