Abstrakt
As visibility of homeless people is being discussed in urban research, visual methods of research are being used to inquire the topic. Photovoice is one of them.
Originally coming from the field of health education and often associated with participatory needs assessment, it is used as a productive tool which enables people to document and reflect their own strengths and concerns and to communicate these effectively to the wider public. Based on a photovoice research with homeless persons in Prague and Pilsen, two cities in the Czech Republic, we discuss ambiguities inherent to Photovoice, rooted in the opaqueness and expressivity of visual representations.
In our paper, we draw on the formal-analytical and hermeneutic approaches. The pictures taken by homeless people show their mobility, daily activities, and the ways in which they use and inhabit public space.
By means of their visual immediacy, they can challenge the dominant visual representation of visible homelessness and thus problematize the generally accepted image of homeless to be sleeping rough male. While photovoice has been used to do so by applied and engaged research practitioners, we use our data to discuss the potential pitfalls and problems of such an approach stemming from what we argue is an inherent ambiguity of visual representations obtained by means of photovoice.
We show that although the photographs seem to provide unambiguous and straightforward visual information, they are in fact expressive and opaque, open to multiple readings and interpretation. We argue that while having a potential to disrupt general imaginaries, these images must be very carefully used and contextualized, which requires us-researchers and practitioners-to adopt a fundamentally self-reflexive, theoretically and ethically solid position as well as to conscientiously consider the ways in which we engage with and employ the photovoice results.