Hello.  I have been spending some time this week considering the subjects, the participants, the artists of this research-giving thought and exploring how they understand the (my) goals for the project and then, how the research project itself then informs their image and level of participation.

My arbitrary definition for my sample had started as women of color working within NYC public education. A small sample size was desired, and necessary given some obvious constraints of  time and resources.  This is not to say that the project could not be scaled; or that it is closed ended. The initial group of participants was a convenience sample; the women that I reached out to were drawn from a broad but specific group  of colleagues connected to High Schools within the NYC Department of Education.

In conversation explaining the goal of personal narrative through self portraiture; the style and historical context of James Van Der Zee and the African American experience,  the participants in many instances were able to recommend and enlist others to contribute. This nomination sampling has/will result in a group that  is broader than my initial sample, but contains shared standards of understanding and purpose to their created artwork.

I have three new self-portraits that were added this week. The individuality expressed and variety of composition continues to be inspired. All three of these subjects/artists nominated other participants.

I have been captivated by Victoria Restler’s dissertation from the moment it was introduced to me and made available. From the opening title and its politic challenge to quantified, metric driven evaluation of educators, I was immersed and ignited by a fresh investigation into  to this severely limited  and problematic attempt to measure and regulate the process of teaching; the process of learning.  It was and is more than just academic research. Dr Restler’s assemblage of media: leaping from the text, referring back to the printed words, or liberated from and definitive on its own without unrequited tether to the text, both answers questions of how art gives meaning to academic work and research, and how it provokes greater investigation into the qualitative aspects of learning and experience.

Even the collection and creation of art that will be purposed in research involves considerations of positionality. Restler invokes Luttrell’s comments on “training” those experiencing multimodal research to have a reflexivity not impeded or influenced by knowledge of the researcher (at first).  Those initial experiences with the work(s) and the meanings conveyed are important, to  be built out through further interaction discussion and reflection within the framework of the study.

One undeveloped thought I have is how we/I still have the paradigm of art and written text as dualities that can be (uneasily?) integrated into research, merely complimentary in their strengths and weaknesses towards a goal of enriching the work. But is that duality only because we are enculturated to  separate the two modalities?  That with greater experience and familiarity, our understanding and expectations will recognize research with a flowing and seamless interplay of art and text, qualification and emotion, towards a more perfect support of thesis?

In the time since we last met, I have been coalescing and preparing my project for this course.  I found that this weeks assigned readings were both ones that I had read immediately in the week before our semester began.  I realized that they had directly informed the premise for my project and, in the case of Bell Hooks, not just the execution/representation, but then the interpretation of the research.

James Van Der Zee was a commercial photographer who worked in the early to middle of the 20th century, and was known particularly for his images and portraiture of middle class African Americans in Harlem.  His photography illuminated a people not just marginalized, but largely made invisible in the dominant segregated culture of America at the time.  I have been familiar with his work and ethos for many years,  and  I have also been thinking of the power of the portrait and who wields that power.

I am taking Van Der Zee’s portraits of African American Women, and using that as an informing framework for a new series of images of women of color, all from a subset of NYC women in the universe of public education.  But rather than the gaze of the outsider composing and capturing, these images will be self-captured.  Not casual “selfies” but leveraging the ease of use and quality of digital photography so that the subject Is the photographer.  The gaze is their own; the narrative in their hands/eyes.

Hooks is invested in knowing that the representations in imagery are not controlled by an outside or colonizing gaze; Cole, through Ariella Azoulay reflects that regardless of the creators control, “(Taking photos), looking at photos and being the subject of photos are mutually reinforcing activities in which the participants are interdependent and complicit.”

I hope to guide and help produce a diverse and representative study through contemporary portraiture, where agency is in the hands of the subject and the narrative is their own.

Jordan, C. M. (2017). Directing energy: Gordon Matta-Clark’s pursuit of social sculpture. In Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect (pp. 36–63). New Haven, CT: The Bronx Museum of the Arts and Yale University Press.

Pink, S. (2011). Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and phenomenology of perception. Qualitative Research, 11(3), 261–276. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794111399835

In reading Sarah Pink there is an effort to take the current definitions of sensory modality and expand them.  She writes that Guerts and Howes have demonstrated that the 5 senses we utilize are a western cultural construct, and further illustrates that KL Guerts, in studies of Angolan tribes, found that their perceptions of sensory stimuli did not map directly to our 5 sense modality.  She uses terms like synaesthesia, implying a blending of sensory inputs to create a unique perception, to describe that for which we in our culture do not have an accurate language taxonomy. 

The sensorial  dichotomy between written language and visual art is explored, with both critique of, and expansion on, some of the work of anthropologists. Kress’ assertion that words are in themselves “empty and vague” and that images specific and inherently precise seems a forced binary, and didactic; words can be quite precise and even totemic, while images can be filled with layers of meaning and possible perceptions.  Pink proposes the use of “affordances” a term that allows for both relational sensory perceptions and the inclusion of work of other scholars in broadening the language of meaning.

…

Revisiting CM Jordan’s piece on Gordon Matta Clark I was able to look at his work in a way that eluded me only a week ago.  In my first exposure to his photography I recognized the journalistic aspect and the gaze of the outsider. There were elements of the political (to me) in images of poverty and urban decay; the lens I viewed it through was that of distance and privilege.  In learning more of his immersion in the communities and environments I found his gaze to be less journalistic and more integrated sociologically. He was illustrating the life of the community in imagery that exists as both a single “journalistic” statement (photo-accuracy),  but allows for meaning to be derived through complete immersion in the social framework of that community in depiction and presentation.  As Matta Clark intended his work to be social anthropologic, and grounded in socialist democratic principle, I found ironic how his work “Graffiti Truck” which was meant to be the work of all the various graffiti artists that embellished the vehicle, wound up being viewed as his singular creation.

In reading the first piece by Eisner and Barone I was introduced to a a new world in approaching inquiry, and indeed in finding a place for the aesthetics of art to inform and give meaning in qualitative research.

I will admit at this early stage that the possibilities and questions this addition presents are both overwhelming. I read through Victoria Restler’s dissertation, and initially perceived the artwork as merely complementary non textual media; I needed a framework to understand how the various pieces were more than just additive but integrated and coalesced into the support of the underlying thesis.

It is the Wang, et al paper that provides a framework for how to organize and understand the approach of ABR.  The 3 “families” of classification – Research about Art, Arts Based Research, and Art in Research, delineate perspectives, and clarify function and intent.

I was then able to revisit Restler’s work,  now seeing the use of Art In Research as liberating way of approaching understanding. It enhances the thesis that has been supported both quantitatively and qualitatively in text, and the format introduces meaning, thus broadening understanding that would not exist in the more traditional textual research format.

I’m particularly interested in how the paradox of interpretation between artist intent and audience interpretation will play out.  Will integration of art in support of a thesis lead a reader to the direct conclusion in alignment with the scholars thesis?  Or will the interpretative and deeply subjective perceptions of art inject different meaning and understanding;  that possibly counters the argument of the research?