Visual Ethnography

Visual methods

Photos, videos, and recordings of sound were used to document the experience as a supplemental tool to field notes. This draws on aspects of visual ethnography and new media (Holm, 2008) and the new materialist reconfigurations of anthropocentric imagery. Pink has written on visual ethnography in Doing Visual Ethnography (2005) and Working Images: visual research and representation in ethnography (2004). Images do not replace words but rather are a meaningful element of ethnographic work, and were incorporated when it was appropriate, opportune, or enlightening to do so (Pink, 2005, p. 6). For example, I kept my iPhone in my right trouser leg pocket (it fit perfectly!) as it was secure when walking and easily accessible. My Canon spent most of the trip in my pack! The iPhone’s ease and quick camera access allowed the affective moments to be captured instead of a planned arrangement (what’s the word?). The intent of visual ethnography is not to replace words or text with images, but

…to explore the relationship between visual and other (including verbal) knowledge.This subsequently opens a space for visual images in ethnographic representation...In practice, this implies an analytical process of making meaningful links between different research experiences and materials such as photography, video, field diaries, more formal  ethnographic writing, local written and visual texts, visual and other objects. These different media represent different types of knowledge that may be understood in relation to one another. (Pink, 2005, p.96)

Photography and video was used to document human infrastructure of Khumbu but also the more-than-human and the natureculture contact zones.

The use of photography was not intended to represent just what was in the past, or what might be there now, or a frozen moment. It is intended to engage the reader in the assemblage of the presentation of data (Chapter Four). I include photos of my feet on trails, dirt and ice, assemblages or rocks, or features that connect with the language of my writing to give further context to the discussion. Pink discussed the issue of returning home from the field and how the ethnographic photos taken change based on the context (of her, a reader, the location of the image, and so on). She wrote: “Now extracted from their [Spanish] contexts, these images, memories, experiences and artefacts had already become re-situated within my personal narrative, as well as having moved to a new physical location where they would inevitably be made meaningful in relation to new objects, gazes and commentaries” (Pink, 2005, p. 124). This is intentional, as I provide imagery to shift the hegemonic norms of even landscape photography of Khumbu. Alas, however, there are some photos where the presence of these mountains are so massive and commanding on the horizon or right in front of my face, that the photo mocks similar snapshots (e.g., Everest above Namche).