by Daniela Miranda, Ph.D.

Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for Community Research and Action at the Universidad of Sevilla [CESPYD], Visiting Researcher at Lancaster University, Division of Health Research.

I open WhatsApp to see a message from my mom asking, “What are you doing right now?” My answer: a selfie with my brother as we sit in his car at a grocery store parking lot. I press send. The photograph is received by my mom. She “likes” my photo. We connect. I ask, “And you?” She sends a photo back. If I start to think of all the photographs I have taken to answer the question, “What are you doing right now?” the moments it captures, the places I go, the people I am with, things that catch my eye—most likely, too many pictures of my cats (automatically categorized as: “Cat Like Animal” by my phone)—all these images really do capture the ins and outs of my daily experiences and my way of seeing the world, in essence, my reality.

Aren’t we all, in our own way, constantly amid a Photovoice project? Being asked a question and answering with a photograph? As someone who has been using Photovoice as a research tool for many years now, I have given a lot of thought to this, conceptually and methodologically. I wonder if now is not the perfect time to reimagine our understanding of this powerful method, including our role as Photovoice researchers and/or practitioners.

Here are a few questions to consider as we continue to implement and develop Photovoice projects with the purpose of empowerment, advancing community-led knowledge, and advocating for systemic change:

People are increasingly using visual representations for learning, doing, and telling their own stories in the digital world. Perhaps we need to stop and ask ourselves how we can turn this everyday way of communicating, using its adaptability and flexibility as something that truly can be what we know as ¨co-production¨ in a research or practice. In our experience, using people’s own phones, WhatsApp groups, and audios, has been a way to transform the everyday methods of communicating into a research tool that does not require the researcher to be the “expert”. If the goal of Photovoice is to activate community power through images, does it not make sense to review the ways in which people already hold their own power on their own devices?

“Aren’t we all, in our own way, constantly amid a Photovoice project?”

The images we hold, and share, can make us feel, connect, and act. When I see photographs on my phone of my father who passed away, I am transported back in time; I feel a flood of emotions—a sense of loss, nostalgia, and warmth. I send it to the Family group, and we feel this together. If I think about this simple moment, this truly is the essence of Photovoice: Images that tell a story, provoke an emotion, and build a shared narrative. Taking it a step further, images can even spark a global movement. The Black Lives Matter movement took off when a video of George Floyd went viral and activated people around the world to respond in protest, both online and in the streets. Even during a pandemic, the injustice this video showed was felt and reverberated worldwide. Today, the image of George Floyd has become symbolic and a way of building a community narrative—around mourning, social justice, and a call for action. The fact that an image can connect people’s stories from various places and evoke such a profound effect in a globalized world where problems are shared, prompts us to think about Photovoice’s magnitude in the digital world. As Photovoice facilitators, how can we revise our role in the digital age and build on this tendency?

In a Photovoice project, images are data. In daily life, images are data too. We are constantly producing data on Instagram, TikTok, or WhatsApp stories. Through the videos and photographs that people share, steps in the Photovoice process are already underway. With these daily expressions, people categorize, post captions, send a message, and create identity in the public sphere. Press send. Now the world can see. In a way, you are telling your story on your own terms with your data and the way you wish to use it. But…we are all tacitly aware that companies are using our own personal Photovoice for economic gains and in fact, increasingly controlling the information we receive. Our digital data is being utilized in ways unknown to us (for example, see Instagram Data Policy). If our images are already considered data for companies or other institutions, who continue to increase their power, can we somehow revert this process of data ownership to give power back to people?

Photovoice is becoming very popular—in both its explicit and implicit forms—and, as researchers, we feel a need to stay true to its original steps and procedure. Or perhaps we simply need to shift our way of perceiving and understanding it. Since its beginning in the 1990s, much has changed. For example, in many cases (though certainly not all), we do not need to give people cameras, as they already have cameras on their mobile phones. I urge those of us using this method to be on the lookout for examples of Photovoice being used in our daily lives, recognize the data being produced in the form of stories and knowledge that are already being captured, and move the conversation forward.

About the author: Daniela E. Miranda is a first-generation Latina from the United States who has built her academic career in Sevilla, Spain, at the Center for Community Research and Action at the Universidad de Sevilla. Her dissertation offered a framework that linked psycho-social-political empowerment to the advocacy process, alongside Romani women and girls, grassroots organizations, and other local partnerships, in projects financed by the Open Society Foundation and the European Commission. The results of her work laid the foundation for subsequent projects financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the regional Andalusian government, of which she is Principal Investigator, that gives continuity to her dissertation.