Research Methods for Cultural Studies

chapter 7
Analysing Visual Experience
Sarah Pink
prologue: a story from the field
I arrived at David and Anne’s house one morning in autumn 2005, to interview
them about the community garden project David was involved in. I was
ready with the tool kit of a contemporary visual researcher: digital video and
stills cameras, audio recorder, and pen and notebook. My research involved
photography, audio-recording our interview and collaboratively exploring the
garden site with David on video. It also led me to attend closely to the visual
elements of the project itself. When I interview people about their experiences,
projects and passions, they usually pull out visual images with which to tell me
stories about their lives. So I was not surprised when David began to narrate
the story of the community garden project in spoken words, interjected at
times with Anne’s comments, written word-processed documents, drawings
and plans through which the local residents had visualised their ideas about
the garden, and printed photographs. I was gripped by the story and this was
partly because it gained my attention through multiple media. The combination
of spoken words and visual images provided me with multiple ways to
start imagining how the garden already was, how they planned to create it and
what it would feel like when it was finished. This was not simply visual imagining
since our discussions of the garden included plans for a ‘sensory’ area
with sweet smelling plants and for a brickweave path – a textured route
through the garden that, although it could be represented visually in photographs,
would also be a haptic experience, felt underfoot by those who
walked in or through the garden.
Before I photographed David and Anne, we discussed the composition of the
image. Since the choice of a brickweave path for the garden was a key issue at
that moment in time, we agreed they should be holding the photographs that
illustrated the type of path they hoped for (Figure 7.1). David’s communication