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What people do with pictures

Alan Radley

Available online: 01 Dec 2010

To cite this article: Alan Radley (2010): What people do with pictures, Visual Studies, 25:3, 268-279

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 Visual Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, December 2010
What people do with pictures
RVST
ALAN RADLEY
What people do with pictures
This article argues that there is no single voice that
picturing makes audible, nor any single image that it makes
visible. It examines how members of two different
groups hospital in-patients and homeless people talk
about photographs they had taken using cameras supplied
by the researcher. Examples of these photographs are used
in the article to examine conventions of picturing, different
ways of narrating content and production, and movement
of pictures through space and time. The argument is made
that these features are variously deployed in explanations of
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what photographs mean. This leads to the conclusion that
what pictures portray and what stories narrate are better
thought of as versions of our experience of the world than as
constructions of the world that we experience.
INTRODUCTION
Photographs are not just pictures of the world (as it is),
but are also resources for communicating how it might
have been and what it could be in the future. As such,
pictures are more than representations, because they are
also resources, mediators that, along with words, give
shape to ideas. This is true not only of a society that is
photo-literate but also of cultures where the use of
cameras is less common. In the examples I will discuss in
this article homeless people and those who are hospital
inpatients a camera is something that they rarely use,
for quite different reasons. An important issue arises,
therefore, as to what these people might want to show
and tell about their situation or even be allowed to show
to a researcher. The status of the image is therefore
dependent upon what has been made visible and why;
what has been kept hidden, unarticulated or unvoiced;
and what has been made opaque or suggested (Wagner
2006). These are not just technical decisions but derive
from and bear upon the relationship of the person taking
the photograph to the researcher. This means that the
analysis of a photograph is tied up with the role the
depiction has in that relationship, and the place that it
finds (or is given) in the world it represents.
These points bear directly upon questions that form the
focus for this issue of Visual Studies, especially those
Alan Radley, of Loughborough University, UK, is founding editor of the journal Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and
Medicine. He has used visual methods to study recovery on hospital wards, homelessness and communication in the area of outpatient consultation. He has
recently published a book on the aesthetics of communicating the experience of life-threatening disease, Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing and the Social
Response to Serious Disease (InkerMen Press, 2009).
ISSN 1472586X printed/ISSN 14725878 online/10/030268-12 2010 International Visual Sociology Association
DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2010.523279
concerning the production of voice by disenfranchised
groups or populations and its relationship to those asked
to make and talk about their pictures. By pictures
I mean in this case photographs, although it could mean
other ways of picturing, including drawing, painting or
video. The use of the term voice found its rationale in
work that encouraged less powerful populations to use
photography as a way of articulating their situation
(Lykes, Terre Blanche, and Hamber 2003; Wang, Burris,
and Ping 1996). As such it is part of the wider approach
of photo-elicitation, as outlined initially by Collier
(1967) and more recently described by Harper (2002).
Where the use of photographs with disadvantaged
people can, for example, communicate the voices of
women who ordinarily would not be heard (Wang,
Burris, and Ping 1996), other ways of using photographs
in interviews reveal a more complicated version of whose
voice might be heard as a consequence of using this
technique. For example, Harper (2002) describes the way
that he took two kinds of photographs that were used as
the basis of interviews with farmers. One set led to
deeper reflection on their part, while one set failed to do
this. The reason for this difference lay in Harpers initial
pictures being made at eye level, while the second (and
more useful) set included some taken from an aerial
view, together with historical photographs. The latter, he
said, broke the frame of the farmers normal view,
providing them with more than one perspective on their
situation. This procedure is not so much a giving voice
to individuals who are failing to be heard as it is an
invitation to them to reflect upon their situation afresh.
The researchers involvement in the making and
selection of pictures for consideration, as compared with
photographs made by respondents themselves, is one
distinction that problematises the issue of whose voice is
being heard. Even if the researcher provides no input
into the interpretation of the pictures, their display
alongside whatever is said about them will structure the
meanings they attain on presentation in a written report.
This is not an attempt to undermine the interpretation
that might be made by the researcher, whose voice it
seems to me is of a different but nonetheless equal

significance to that of the respondent. Rather, it brings
forward the issue of how pictures are made and
displayed as part of the interviewing and research
process. For example, Becker (2002) described the work
of Berger and Mohr (1982) on migrant labourers as
embodying not just an idea, but a connected and
coherent argument. Becker goes on to say that what
Berger and Mohr provide with the photographs is
evidence in sufficient quantity and variety that the reader
can draw the conclusion that what is being offered as
explanation is possible: this kind of thing can happen, in
this way. The photographs provide not a scientific proof
or a summary of individual and separable stories, but
rather a concrete statement of a social condition. If there
is a voice here, it is not of the men and women as
individuals but of these people as a disadvantaged group.
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And this voice is heard only through the willingness of
the reader/viewer to acknowledge that these things are
possible: that it can be like this for these people.
Photographs do not reflect or give access to the true voice of
a person or group any more than, as a culturally informed
depiction, they show pictures of the real world. As an
interim conclusion, what goes on in the making and
interpretation of photographs by all parties involved is
central to any discussion of what voice can mean in this
context. Only then can we comprehend the different ways
in which people use pictures to make meaning, in their
production, in their viewing, and also in their display. What
people choose to picture, using which devices, what they
choose to hide, to whom and how the pictures are
shown these are all part of what we might term
photo-production, a term richer in potential than the
methodologically inclined term photo-elicitation.
Respondents not only talk about what their pictures show,
they also talk about how they made their photographs,
which ones they could not achieve (Hodgetts, Chamberlain,
and Radley 2007), and the various interpretations that
might be made of them. Many respondents (depending
upon cultural position) are also educated about images, and
able to talk about their uses and effects. To that extent,
people can draw upon voices of the media (a visual culture)
as well as their beliefs about what pictures show, are trying
to show, or are trying to avoid.
Bringing the act of photography into the analysis raises
questions about the status of what is termed the image,
and about the reasons for the selection of what is shown.
We move from an interest in the meanings of pictures
alone to an attempt to understand what has been made
visible and why. (And, of course, which things have not
been pictured, or have been left unclear or are there for
others to see but fail to be mentioned.)
What people do with pictures 269
If photographs portray something important among
people, then they do so by giving information; they attest
to the instantiation of the moment (it happened). But
by slicing up time and space into units of infinite
number the camera makes reality atomic, reinforcing a
nominalist view of the world (Sontag 1979). As Sekula
(1978) has put it, the camera serves to ideologically
naturalize the eye of the observer. The use of
photographs to picture reality is itself a form of social
representation. If one wishes to understand the
photograph as more than an unproblematic source, one
must ask questions such as those posed by John Tagg:
what does it do; . . . how does it inflect its context; . . .
where must the observer be positioned to accept it as real
or true? (Tagg 1988, 119).
To these I would add the following questions: How was it
made? What does it do for the relationship between
photographer and viewer? Where does it find its place in
the world of things that it represents?
These further questions bear, first, upon the idea that the
productive context of photographs is crucial to their
scope of meaning making; second, upon the idea that
photographs do work, now, between their maker and
those who view them; and third, upon the idea that they
intervene as objects in the material world. All these
things relate to the question of how photographs
represent or what a researcher might find out by
use of them.
As a technique for holding on to the past and for
capturing fleeting moments of the present, the cameras
interventions have come to articulate our very sense of
situation (Sontag 1979). And as with other methods of
technical reproduction which make images available to
all our relationship to the original object is
transformed (Benjamin 1970). Photography is more
than a medium; it is a way of making known and, indeed,
of shaping the observer by virtue of its potential to
fashion an image.
WHY PHOTO-PRODUCTION?
Before considering some photographs in detail it is
necessary to explain the differences between using
photographs as ways of eliciting interview material and
making the photographic exercise part of the analysis. I
do not wish to underplay the role of photo-elicitation in
gathering information, nor the potential of showing and
making pictures for widening the social relationships of
respondents who might work together. Instead, my
intention is to direct attention to what people say about
 270 A. Radley
how they made their pictures, and how they use them in
the course of explaining their situation. This is, in effect,
seeing the photo-making activity as a fragment of the
context (the persons world), not as a procedure that
stands outside it, providing a view or a voice. In the work
my colleagues and I have conducted with hospital
patients (Radley and Taylor 2003a, b) and with homeless
people (Radley, Hodgetts, and Cullen 2005; Hodgetts,
Chamberlain, and Radley 2007), the photographic
exercise was constrained by their situation and in turn
reflected those constraints. For example, while
recovering from surgery, ones body is weak and ones
mobility limited; a homeless persons scope to take
pictures is compromised because there are situations
where obtaining pictures will involve risk of physical
danger. To talk about how and why photographs were
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obtained is to understand, if only in a limited way, what
it means to be a person in this situation. But it is also to
place within the analytic frame the ways that respondents
choose to communicate their experience through the
photographic medium. The sign-making activity of
picturing then becomes part of the analysis, rather than
something passed over in order to get to either the
subjectivity of the respondent or the features of their
social situation. Photo-production is not just about
making pictures: it also involves making episodes and
breaches in the lives of the people concerned.
To illustrate, I will draw upon the two studies mentioned
above. In the first, we asked hospital inpatients to take
photographs of the ward five or six days after abdominal
surgery. Once patients had given consent, we explained
to them that the study was about their experience of the
ward and that we wished them to photograph up to 12
things that they thought significant about their stay.
They were told that the pictures could be of anything on
the ward that was significant to them these might be
positive or negative things. They might select spaces,
things that were part of the hospital, or objects that they
had brought in with them. Written guidelines about the
photography exercise were left with them, as well as a
sheet on which they could plan their shots in advance.
The following day the researcher discussed the list of
planned photographs and checked that these were viable
within the guidelines of the project.
We had hoped to leave the camera with the patients for
twenty-four hours so that they could take photographs
on their own, but the hospital did not allow this.
Concerns of hospital management about the use of
photography, particularly the taking of photographs by
patients themselves, led to restrictions on the project.
Patients could photograph only places and objects; no
photographs of people were allowed. As a consequence,
the researcher stayed with the patients while they
selected and took their photographs. The fact that
patients were unable to take photographs of people
might seem a singularly damaging constraint. In fact,
although the focus of the work was upon the setting and
the picturing of objects, it did not preclude patients
talking about these images in relation to other people
(staff or patients) who were associated with them.
So, people did get into the study through patients
inserting them into the pictures, not through being
photographed in the flesh.
The requirement that we stay with patients while they
took their photographs meant that we gained knowledge
of the context in which the pictures were taken, and
became aware of the kinds of questions that arose when
patients decided what to photograph or what not to
photograph. These exchanges involved some requests by
patients for information from investigators (Is it
possible to take this? Can you help me take that?).
Although we had not planned to record this
information, we made field notes immediately after
every interview and made particular mention of the way
that the photography had been conducted. From these
notes we sensed the differing involvement of patients
with the activity, depending upon the persons state of
health, their understanding of the project (its perceived
worth), and the scope they had to frame their experience
through the choice of images.
The point here is that the photographs gained their
meaning from the act that produced them; they were not
meaningful only in the sense of their pictured content.
The act of photography is one of separation of self from
surroundings even if only briefly so that what is
picked out defines boundaries, transitions, preferred and
disliked orderings and invocations. To be given a camera
in this situation is to be invited to turn upon ones
setting, to objectify a relationship that one has so far
been living out. To photograph things is to detach
oneself from them even for a moment and to do this
while you are in hospital is to make small breaches in
ones ongoing engagement as an ill person.
In the interviews based upon the photographs obtained,
conducted first in the hospital and later in patients
homes, the photographic activity remained within the
focus of inquiry. Each patient was asked to comment
upon their choice of shots, whether they had been able to
photograph things they wanted to select, and the
limitations of the exercise for showing something of their
time in hospital, and also to say something about the act

of photography itself. In the follow-up interview in their
homes they were asked to comment again on the act of
photography while they were in hospital, to say what
they would have taken if they had had the opportunity,
and to express their feelings about the photographs as
presently displayed in front of them.
The situation of homeless people is also one where the
physical setting matters, and where the persons involved
are dealt with and deal with others by virtue of where
they are required to be, or where they are denied access.
People in the city do not enter into each others field of
vision as whole or rounded persons, but only in terms of
what is necessary for particular exchanges to take place
or what can be seen by virtue of the space that they must
share together. That is, they experience fragments of
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each other in terms of glimpses of faces or bodies, shreds
of conversation, smells of fellow travellers on buses or in
lifts/elevators. This is not the same as saying that city
people are fragmented selves because they are members
of diverse groups, but that they expose themselves to
others and see others in fragmentary form. It is a world
of glimpses (Goffman 1976) that is traded upon by
presentations that exploit surface qualities using
clothes, possessions and the occupancy of places having a
social cache. Such encounters define the life of the city,
so that estrangement makes possible the elaboration of
appearances as well as the establishment of distance and
reserve (Radley, Hodgetts, and Cullen 2005).
Using photography allowed us to collect a series of such
glimpses of the city as seen by homeless people. Because
homelessness is about displacement, the use of cameras
to capture spaces and places is important on two counts.
First, it depicts settings that are identified with
homelessness; and second, it shows other spaces that the
homeless share with domiciled people. The research
again took the form of a photo-production study
involving 12 homeless people recruited from two hostels
and one day centre in central London. Written
information was provided and signed consent obtained
regarding the giving of interviews, the photographic
exercise and the rights to use of text and visual material
obtained. There were three phases to the research. First,
an interview was conducted with each participant
exploring their pathways to homelessness, significant
events in their lives and the pattern of their typical day.
At the end of the interview each participant was given a
disposable camera and asked to take pictures that
represented their experience of being a homeless person.
They were told that photographs could be of key times in
their day, of typical activities and spaces, or of anything
else that portrayed their situation. Taking the pictures
What people do with pictures 271
and returning with the camera constituted the second
part of the study. The film was then developed, a further
meeting arranged and participants were offered a copy
set of the pictures they had taken.
In the second interview, conducted one or two days after
the photography session, participants were asked about
their photographs, now set out in front of them.
Following the procedure used in the hospital study,
participants were asked to say what each photograph
showed and what its focus was, and to give their response
to the person, place or object depicted. All photographs
were then spread out and the person asked to identify the
ones that best captured their experience of homelessness.
They were also asked to comment on the act of taking
the photographs and to express their feelings about
the pictures they had taken. Both interviews were audio-
recorded and later transcribed for analysis. Photographs
were digitally rendered for ease of inspection.
This approach allowed respondents to engage the visual
material in a number of ways, not least to explicate what
the pictures did not show (Hodgetts, Chamberlain, and
Radley 2007). Particular issues and generalities were
brought out through accounts that justified the inclusion
and the exclusion of people/places/objects from the
photographs being addressed. Equally important, the act
of photography was an acceptance of an invitation for
the person to engage his or her world in a different way.
While taking pictures with a disposable camera might
not seem special for most people, for homeless
individuals who rarely pick up a camera still less use it
the legitimation of this exercise cannot be
overemphasised. Like the hospital patients, by being
given permission to turn upon their environment and
objectify it, homeless respondents were allowed to make
a breach in the taken for grantedness of their lives. In
this context, encouraging them to make and present
their snapshots was an invitation to objectify the
glimpses that the city offered them. As interpretive
practice, this comes close to Mitchells (1994)
description of representation as something assembled
over time out of fragments. It is the structure of this
representation that photo-production foregrounds in
the attempt to understand not peoples worlds as such
(as if one could look through the photographs), but their
versions of it made, put together, offered to others at a
particular time.
SHIFTING THE FOCUS
In the remainder of this article I want to outline some
different ways in which respondents from these two
 272 A. Radley
studies put together their pictures as a way of showing
versions of their worlds. My aim in doing this is to
illustrate the different ways in which photographs are
made up as sign vehicles, both in the course of their
production and during their interpretation within the
interview setting.
Miss B. was a 27-year-old woman who had been in
hospital for just over a week before the interview took
place, but who had had several periods of admission
previously. Her photographs taken as a set were
different from those taken by any other patient, perhaps
because she was in for tests rather than surgery. The
following comment is from the notes I made at the time:
On arrival I found that Miss B. had prepared
the list of 12 photographs she wanted to take.
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She appeared to have understood the purpose
of the interview though her photographs, and
the reasons given for taking them, suggested
that she had slanted her choice towards what
might be useful for any patient to know about
the hospital. The order of the pictures
(beginning with the main entrance to the
hospital) was consistent with the idea of a
generalised passage through the hospital
experience. She said that she had planned the
pictures by imagining what it is like to go into
hospital.
The following list of photographs, in the order she
made them, was accompanied by her brief description
of each one:
1. Hospital main entrance
People can see what the environment is like. Shows
what sort of atmosphere the new patient is going
into. Makes you feel secure handrail on side, slope
for wheelchairs, camera for security, map shows
where you are, no-smoking sign.
[Interviewer: Is it an entrance or an exit for you?]
Mostly an entrance but sometimes an exit, when I
sigh a big sigh, Im getting better. But on arrival I
think, Ive got to get it over and done with.
2. Mini bank in reception
Elderly/young people on their own with no friends
or family you can get money out when you need it.
Once inside the hospital you are not going to get
robbed. Use money for newspapers/cards etc.
3. Hospital shop
To get some essential items. Very handy for basic
goods. If you cant leave hospital they give you a
green band. When you see the goods you feel you
are in the real world if you see the packages. In the
hospital the food is put straight onto plates you
dont see what package it comes from.
4. Ward entrance/reception desk
To get to know the ward. Shows what sort of
environment you are coming into. Photo shows
notices computer signs about visiting. If you are
off the ward for treatment and return, you come
back to where you are safe. Nobody is going to
touch you. This a positive picture.
5. Bed area
To show where they live be sleeping. [She gave a
very detailed description of the image. She said,
You know this is going to be your area.]
6. Noticeboard on ward
To keep up to date on information. Where people
can read about illness, whats going on, information
for them and their relatives. Not many people use it
or as much as they should. I think its important.
7. Kitchen
To ensure cooking facilities are kept safe. Where
food prepared where you can put stuff in the
fridge and also help yourself to it at other times.
Allowed to go in and ask for tea. Allowed to get
drinks at other times. At home you are usually in
and out of the kitchen.
8. Dayroom
To help them relax. Really essential. Part of the build
up to recovery. You can get really comfortable. I
spend time in there reading. In the Dayroom I can
talk to other people. But at other times I go there to
find peace and quiet. To get away from the bed area
where the other patients make me feel helpless. Its
nice to take yourself off for a while.
9. View Outside from Dayroom
If you feel like a walk. You can put chairs outside
with family and have a cigarette. Can let thoughts
wander when looking outside about what the Dr
says or does not say. In hospital there are too many
distractions outside there are no distractions. It is
the noise of trolleys, nurses walking, other
patients, beds being made or moved, toilets flushing.
These photographs (only one is shown here) were
interesting for a number of reasons, but especially
because they constituted an ordered series that was
designed to show a journey. Miss B. was quite explicit
about the fact that she planned this ordering, and that
 What people do with pictures 273

she had done this so that the photographs might show

anyone being admitted to hospital what they might
expect. This offering was unique in the study because all
other patients took photographs to illustrate something
about their own stay, about their personal experience of
being a hospital patient. We might also say that her
photographs form a pictorial narrative, in showing the
places and spaces that the potential patient will meet as
she comes into hospital. Seen in this way, the
photographs denote situations as waypoints, and they do
this by virtue of the way she organised and talked about
her pictures in relation to one another. In this way they
constitute a single set, linked by the passage into hospital FIGURE 1. Dayroom.

that Miss B. generalised out of her own experience.

This way of using her photographs to denote stages in most significant as a marker of her stay. She chose the
dayroom because, she said,
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the passage through admission to hospital is emphasised

by the fact that they were planned as part of the story she
wished to tell. Tell to whom? Clearly to the researchers
who asked her to take the photographs, but also with an
eye to future patients who might follow her into this
territory, with all its uncertainties and anxieties. She
offered them as a pointer or guide that any other patient
might use. As well as this, however, the photographs
were indexical of this session they were products of my
meeting with her so that they do more than denote
matters relating to the generality of her story. They attest
to the time we spent together making a record of her stay
in the hospital. This reminds us that the photo session
was not quite separate from her hospital experience but,
in a sense, was part of it. It was an opportunity for her to
make sense, perhaps in a different way, of her time on
the ward.
What I am arguing here is that, with the aid of discourse,
photographs can be used as labels for, which means
representing by pointing (Goodman 1968). But they are
also more than labels, because they can be used to
illustrate something of the situations that they denote. To
illustrate is to show or to display in some way, and to do
this with photographs is to set out both more and less
than the pictures labelling function. By less, I mean
that syntactically the picture may be less precise in
delimiting a class of events; we need words here to do
this. By more, I mean that the photograph does
something as well as denote, and that this is important to
the semantic potential of visual media in this kind of
research.
To explain this second aspect we need to examine the
picture of the dayroom (see Figure 1). Once Miss B. had
commented on each of the photographs in the order in
which she had taken them, I asked her which one was
When sitting there can I think about whats
happening and about my own anticipations. I
can turn myself off from the hustle and bustle
of the ward and have a good cry, with nobody
watching you. Ive had several episodes cried.
In the dayroom you are all by yourself, and you
can cry.
Focusing upon this photograph in this way taking it
out of the set that made up her public story the image
that she conjures is very different from the one implied
in the idea of the dayroom as a place to relax: it is now a
place of retreat. She appropriates the dayroom as a
private space where she can cry in the act of collecting
herself together. This photograph is now more than a
label denoting a stage in the narrative of any hospital
patient, and more than something indexical of the
photographic exercise we asked her to undertake. It is
made more in the course of her talking about it, so that
the photograph no longer just denotes the dayroom as a
place for any or every patient.
Instead, what the picture now indicates for her and for
those of us who can hear what she is saying is the
dayroom as the location of times of crying. But it is also
more than this. In being used to indicate crying
occasions, the place that is pictured exemplifies Miss B.s
unhappiness in the hospital. It says something along the
lines of this kind of thing can happen in this way. The
photograph carries meaning by virtue of the pictured
location being coloured by the crying, so that what the
photograph means is something that cannot be pointed
to on the photographic print. She invites us to see the
picture in this different way. The photograph is if we
look long and closely enough expressive of her personal
experience, something different from its use as
 274 A. Radley
a label for denoting a way-mark in the experience of the
generalised patient. It supports, psychologically, a quite
different image. Goodman (1968) has argued that an
expressive representation, while it denotes its content (it
points), also involves the referent exemplifying features
that it shows forth. In the case of Miss B.s picture of the
dayroom, these features are articulated into significance
though her talk, so that the photograph comes to display
tones (of feeling, not colour!) that do not inhere in
it and neither, it should be said, can their meaning can
be located in the picture itself.
By speaking about this particular photograph in this
way she invites us to look at it differently. No
longer seeing just a room, we might look at the
photograph for signs of it being a retreat, a place of
safety. Where particular features of the picture
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denoted this as a dayroom, now we might look to see
which other features might show it as a sad room one
occasioned by tears. However, the features that the
pictured dayroom now possess are owned
metaphorically rather than intrinsically. (Our individual
experiences of times of despair mean that each viewer
can read this particular photograph in this way.) The
bare furnishings that denote the rooms function
perhaps take on a bleaker aspect. And that viewing of the
picture mattered when we listened further to what she
had to say as her interview progressed. There is an
important crossover here between the visual medium
and other ways of telling.
It might be said that, though somewhat different, this is
just another story that Miss B. is offering. However, she
deploys the photograph in a significantly different way,
by picking it out for special attention, and thus
particularising it. The way she uses it as a resource makes
for a different kind of story, which is grounded in the
way that the visual material is made to signify. What is
apparently the same photograph supports different
interpretations, and, in effect, different images that can be
apprehended. That is why I prefer not to use the word
image to refer to the picture content, as if pictures
captured one image that could then be re-interpreted by
different people, or at different times. An image, in my
view, is a constellation of features, feelings and
sensations that adheres to, or can be constructively
justified by reference to, what is shown in the
photograph. The photograph is a fragment of that
experience, a trace not just of a physical reality but also
of an occasion crying in the dayroom.
What is described here is not a matter of different
readings of a single picture, but rather is Miss B.s
representation of the dayroom for anyone, contrasted
with her re-presentation of that occasion for her and
for the researcher. Her world of sadness is not
represented in the picture, but is re-presented by virtue
of the way she brings another way of telling into being.
Why, one might ask, did she initially present her
photographs as a public narrative, rather than a private
account? Part of the reason, she said, was her deliberate
choice not to photograph places in the hospital where
she was taken for tests. This is because such pictures
would remind her of negative things and bring back
unpleasant memories for her. She wanted to take nice
pictures that had good memories. She said that when
she returned to the ward after a bad experience outside
it the ward staff helped her to relax, to feel better. In
that sense, taking her chosen pictures was in itself a
record of this pleasantness against a background of
uncertainty and discomfort. This highlights the fact that
the different ways of talking about this photograph were
also ways of addressing different audiences, even though
it was the same audience (the researcher) to whom she
talked in the interview session. And she made it clear
that, while her photograph descriptions were addressed
to patients in general, she remained an audience at risk
throughout an exercise that was yet another
interrogation of her health status.
Arguably, Miss B. integrated the photographic exercise
into her hospital stay so as to make her time better, or,
more precisely, to articulate its positive aspect that is,
she acknowledged it as a fragment of her time in
hospital. At the end of the interview she reported that
taking the photographs was a nice experience. At the
same time, I suggest that making the photo-narrative was
for her a kind of pulling-together of selected experiences,
transformed in the course of becoming a story for any
patient. This making sense of her stay is also significant
because, as a person undergoing extensive and extended
diagnostic tests, she was faced with considerable
uncertainty about her condition. The interview about
her photographs was perhaps another prodding and
probing exercise to which she looked for some result.
What did we find out? What could we tell her? She did
ask at the end of the interview whether we would give her
a report back as if the exercise might illuminate her
medical condition.
USING PHOTOGRAPHS TO MAKE SENSE WITH
Interviewing people about their photographs leads them
to explain why they take particular pictures, to remember
things that related to objects or places pictured, as well as
to anticipate the possible outcomes of events or the

progression of their lives. This should not be taken to
mean that because pictures are open to interpretation
they are passive in the face of alternative constructions.
Before the viewing, the making of photographs a
socially constructive act is realised by the use of
conventions familiar to anyone who has ever held a
camera. To illustrate this, consider the following
photographs made by two homeless men (Figures 2
and 3). These were each part of a varied set, and did not
try to tell a story like Miss B. did with her photographs.
Robert was concerned to present himself throughout our
interviews with him as someone who, though homeless,
not only aspired to be like domiciled people, but also
asserted a claim that he should be treated in this way. He
also told us that he liked to pass as a domiciled person in
his journeys around London. Among the photographs
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that he took with the camera with which he was supplied
was the one shown in Figure 2, which is in the style of a
tourist photograph. In the picture he stands on the
Embankment in London, with the Houses of Parliament
as the backdrop. He holds a bag and smiles directly at the
camera. What he did, he said, was to give the camera to a
FIGURE 2. Robert.
What people do with pictures 275
passing tourist and ask him to take the photograph just
like any of us might do on a visit to a foreign city:
Its because its London again, homeless again
see. The wandering around, aimlessly
wandering around the big city. You know, Im
also doing it. I go to Westminster, its boring.
He told us that he, too, was entitled to be pictured in this
prime location, and to treat this event as other city
dwellers or tourists would do. He said that he also visited
the Palace of Westminster often enough to be blas
about it and this picture helped to establish his claim to
exercise the gaze of a tourist.
If anything, the explanation Robert gave about this
photograph undid the conventional tourist photograph
it suggests itself to be. This is because he pointed up the
distance between what the picture purports to show and
the reality of his daily life.
In this case, something different is happening from the
dayroom photograph made by Miss B., or is happening
in a different order. By this I refer to the way that the
photograph was made, with what intention, and in what
order it was explicated for the researcher. Robert first
makes a conventionalised photograph in which he is
exemplified as a tourist, but then uses it in the interview
to denote the distance between his situation and that of
real tourists. Again, the picture has no single image: the
images of Robert we gain from these two viewings
overlap but are not the same.
Another homeless man Michael used a different
picturing convention drawing on aesthetics to
express, rather than just denote, his distance from
domiciled people, something that Roberts picture was
designed to conceal. Michael made three pictures of the
river Thames in order to portray his situation as a
homeless person, something from which he said it was
impossible to break away. The word portray is
appropriate here because he was explicit about the
difficulty of conveying in words or in pictures what it
was like for him to be homeless.
His picture shown in Figure 3 is of birds flying over
the river. This is an interesting photograph because its
use of light and contrast together with the figures of the
birds in motion appeals to an aesthetic that draws
upon the practices of photography as art. (By this I mean
that it has a certain functional aesthetic, where the
clarity of its intent is used as a measure of the evidence of
its worth its success as a kind of picture; see Bourdieu
1990). The image of the river evokes a natural world (not
 276 A. Radley
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FIGURE 3. Birds.
an urban one), its flowing waters the idea of passage
(beside the static bench on which he sat), while the birds,
as he explained, are symbols of freedom to me. His
pictures showed, he said, what a homeless person can do
and what a homeless person cant do. This photograph
does more than denote the spaces and places of
homelessness it expresses the hopelessness of the
yawning gap between the domiciled and those without a
home. As part of displaying Michaels situation, this
photograph leaves open certain questions; it resists
closure in part because it avoids declaring his
disadvantage (Edwards 1997).
In this case the photograph might well be said to stand
up on its own (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) as an
aesthetic picture, if it were framed and put on the wall.
Or else it might serve, as intended, as a resource for
telling about Michaels situation. In this respect it is
different from Miss B.s photograph of the dayroom,
which remains for other viewers for all its personal
meaning to her as a mundane photograph of a hospital
room. The successful use of conventions of portrayal (as
in Michaels picture) enables it to travel across contexts, to
claim through exemplification that it is a kind of
picture, in this case, perhaps, a good photograph.
RE-PRESENTATION, THE MOVEMENT OF OBJECTS
AND TEMPORAL DISTANCE
I want to return to the point that photographs are not
just representations but are also traces of the world that
remain within it. In their printed form, photographs are
material objects. They can be handled, stored, displayed,
given away or destroyed (Edwards and Hart 2004). All of
this relates to the fact that representations move across
time and contexts, being affected by these contexts and
helping to shape them. What a picture shows what it
means will be shaped by the work people do to
encourage or hinder these movements. As traces of a
world that was, or of a situation that no longer obtains,
photographs play a role in increasing or decreasing the
distance between past and present. The meaning of the
picture is not separable from this work or from the
temporal distance that is desired. As has been noted, the
meanings and memories deriving from viewing a
photograph can change with time, and may even be an
occasion for an expression of conflict (Kuhn 1991).
We followed up the patients with a home interview some
four weeks after their discharge from hospital. We asked
them to focus upon the photographs, rather than to just
tell us about their time in hospital. These instructions

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FIGURE 4. Gorilla.
directed them to the photographs as a resource, with the
implicit assumption that they would draw upon them in
the way that people are used to doing, using
photography as a cultural medium in order to capture
the past. By laying out the photographs and asking
patients to choose, successively, which one was most
significant in capturing her experience of being in
hospital we set up a task that opened up a number of
possibilities about how they might use the pictures in the
course of recall. The acts of choosing a photograph and
speaking about it, handling it or passing on quickly to
another are also disclosures of a particular kind. They
refer to and sometimes exemplify ways of dealing with
experiences and material in the course of establishing a
sense of time and place. In that sense, they were
fragments of recovery that were being enacted in front of
the researcher in the course of the interviews.
We found that talk about recovery had, as its aim, the
distancing of the hospital experience from the interview
situation. The establishment of this distance involves
both a re-making of the past as well as a fashioning of the
What people do with pictures 277
present, each hinging upon the practical requirement to
establish oneself as a credible and healthy individual. As
part of this, the movement of objects from home to
hospital and vice versa played an important role.
To give an example of where respondents saw this
as done successfully, I will show a photograph that a
patient, Ann, chose as second most important in the
hospital, but as only eighth in rank order when she was
interviewed at home.
This was a photograph of a toy gorilla, something she
said had been brought in the hospital by her husband
(see Figure 4). They shared jokes about this gorilla; it had
accompanied her on previous stays in hospital. It helped
her, she said, to retain a sense of humour and it brings
back your relationship. By doing this the toy gorilla
established a presence in the clinical emptiness of the
hospital room that could provide her with support and
comfort. By the time of the home interview, the
supportive work that the toy gorilla made possible was
completed and seen as over:
Interviewer: Which would be the next photograph
best representing your stay in hospital?
Ann: That gorilla [laughs]. No association with the
hospital at all. Its strange because it was with
me in hospital three and a half years ago, and
again this time. Its now upstairs at the end of
my bed. And when I am making my bed in the
morning I do not think of anything to do with
hospital at all.
Interviewer: What job did it do in hospital, being
with you?
Ann: Part of bringing some of my home comforts,
personal objects, just to . . . more comforting.
One or two things that were yours from the
home surroundings, your home environment .
. . Having it in hospital, it was quite
comforting, home wasnt too far away. A bit of
reassurance really. . . . A kind of substitute for
that constant comfort and reassurance that
you get when your partners there. Quite a
comfort really and it reminds me of our
relationship as well.
Interviewer: So when you look at it [the photograph]
it is not associated with hospital?
Ann: No, I think I just think of him at the end of my
bed. Nothing to do with hospital. (Radley and
Taylor 2003b)
In this exchange, Ann separates out two representations
of the toy gorilla depicted in the photograph. One refers
to the gorilla in the hospital, sitting in the chair. The
 278 A. Radley
other is the (same) gorilla that sits on her bed at home. It
is, one suspects, to the latter that she pointed, laughingly
(that gorilla), when identifying the object of the
photograph. It is this object, in the present, that she
elaborates upon to distinguish it from the hospital
surroundings, and herself from that time. She does not
think of anything to do with the hospital (she is not
reminded) when she sees and handles the gorilla, and so
its appearance in the picture is responded to in a similar
way. In being nothing to do with the hospital, the toy
gorilla symbolises the establishment of a healthier
present, one that is distant from the hospital, both
spatially and temporally.
It should be noted that the hospital was mentioned here
almost by its absence. It is something she is not
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reminded of, though aspects of it are clearly depicted in
the photograph. This is partly a consequence of the
exchange between interviewer and respondent, but it
highlights the fact that all that is represented is not
discussed. In this case, the double representation of the
toy gorilla, made possible by its physical re-location, and
the movement of the photographs, enables the separation
of time and place so that her time in hospital is made
background. This demonstrates that letting go of
difficult memories is facilitated, or made possible even,
by a process of transposition revealed through Anns
inspection of her photographs.
Anns interpretation of this particular photograph as not
reminding her of hospital (or of her hospital stay) refers
to a distinction between worlds, a difference reproduced
by the movement of objects to and from hospital.1 This
allows a double depiction, in which the original
photograph-object relationship from hospital is
displaced by reference to the object in the home context.
It is this that is used by her to project this sense of a
separation of then from now. With that separation
comes the possibility of emphasising positive aspects of
her hospital stay, something that also projected into the
interview an image of her as a person making a good
recovery. The photograph is seen in a different way, and
as an object, it is now apprehended in a different way.
Offered the photographs at the end of the interview, Ann
(like the other patients we spoke to) declined.
CONCLUSION
In these studies, asking patients and homeless people to
make their own photographs and to talk about them was
crucial to comprehending not only what they wanted to
show us but also how they went about doing so. Using
photography tests notions about the visual and the
represented, as well as assumptions about the
constructive role of narrative. The point to be made is
this: while pictures can be and are treated as
representations of an agreed reality, their use in
ethnographic research reveals something rather
different. Instead of being primarily representations of
the world showing what is there photographs are
often used to do other kinds of important work.
Included in this is using visual depictions to represent in
different ways or, in other words, to speak in different
voices. This is about showing the kind of world that
people live in; the kind of experiences they have
undergone or continue to undergo, as well as the person
they are or would like to be seen as being. An integral
part of this is the way that individuals employ cultural
devices to put together pictures as sign-vehicles, and how
they will speak to the photograph in ways that relate to
these ways of signifying. Using conventions can make it
appear that the photograph simply shows what is there,
or that it can be narrated in ways that identify a single
image (i.e. a scene, a voice) with what is shown on the
print (Bourdieu 1990). Reading from the photograph
(perhaps we might say through the photograph) enables
a reverse reading that allows the image to stand as
denoting a single idea. However, from what I have said
above, this is to be seen as a special case, and is certainly
not the basis for the explanations given by the
respondents in the studies discussed here.
In the case of both hospital patients and homeless
people, the act of taking photographs involved more
than providing a visual display of their setting. Rather,
the photographs were used as ways of making sense of
their world, and doing this for us, the researchers.
Making the world sensible is a phrase that captures
both of these aspects, where that sensibility might vary as
to the form of representation involving denotation
primarily, or expression. The photographs they made
became sign-vehicles for defining their location in those
worlds, and included ethical judgements as to how that
world should be (the response of medicine, the response
of a housed society). However, what was there in the
photographs apparently to be revealed depended
upon an imaginary relationship of the person to the
pictured settings. It was this imaginary relationship that
was conveyed in the different ways in which the
individuals talked about their pictures. As we have
pointed out previously:
This relationship is imaginary not because it is
unreal, but because it enables the observer to
envisage his or her stance towards the image to
be of a certain kind, to anticipate a certain state

of affairs, and to allow a reconstruction of past
actions. (Radley and Kennedy 1997; emphasis
in original)
This anticipation involves the constructive justification
of the relationship with the audience, so that where a
researcher is involved this will be different from telling
about photographs to others, or for different purposes.
Both anticipation and reconstruction (of the past) will,
as I have shown, also differ according to mode of
representation, so that these always involve an
articulation of the individuals location with respect not
just to how the world should be, but to how the world
might be (or might have been).
With reference to the concept of voice, it follows that
attending to the way that photographs are made and
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used in the course of discussion shows that there is no
single or truer voice unlocked by the use of visual
methods. Instead, voices with different tones or grains
are produced by virtue of the way that photographs are
made as mediators of meaning, and shown and described
to different audiences, sometimes with different
purposes in mind. This mediation is constructed both
visually and through narrative, and can be emphasised
or, at a later time, contested by either the respondent or
others. This conclusion underlines the message of this
article, which is that what pictures portray and what stories
narrate are versions of our experience of the world, not
constructions of the world that we experience. To address
this point, the fruitful question for us to ask is what do
people do with pictures? The act of picturing, and with that
the expressive use of visual depictions these are then
brought within the bounds of our inquiries.
NOTE
[1] For an extended discussion of this point, see Radley 2009,
Chapter 6: Works and Worlds.
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