Abstract
Photography speaks its own language, while also conversing intertextually with oral and written stories, embodied and material relations, and everyday soundscapes. In this paper, we use our experience in a photographer-sociologist collaboration to reflect on the fruitful and sometimes challenging dynamic between ‘the image on its own terms’ and the image as ‘just one’ kind of text among many. Our project builds from Workspace Canada, Martin Weinhold’s singular collection of documentary photographs of more than 600 Canadians at work, created over the space of fifteen years. Weinhold uses analog black-and-white photography to create portraits of working people with attention to iconic gestures, material spaces, and environmental setting. Through our collaboration, called Work-Life in Canada, we are returning to dozens of his original participants to collect a second set of portraits along with oral interviews and recordings of workplace sounds. Our goal is to create an interactive multimedia collection that explores the meaning of work among diverse working people—from ranchers and machinists to musicians and physical therapists. In this paper, we reflect on the process of ‘building out’ from the image and of creating a methodological dialogue among visual, written, and audio modes of capturing and conveying work-life in Canada. We address our process of working in distinct-yet-dialogic modes, deploying sound and word in dialogue with ‘old’ and ‘new’ portraits, and imagining a multimedia digital extension of an existing photo collection.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Portrait Photography, Intertextuality, Researcher-Artist Collaboration, Digital Multimedia
