The Contact Sheet: Combining Evocative and Analytic Modes into Visual Autoethnography of the Moment

Abstract

This chapter “unpacks” a poster from the CEAD (Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines) conference 2010 and re-situates it within an autoethnographic narrative. The poster presented a project that combined Evocative and Analytic modes in a visual ethnography focused on a collection of tourist photographs taken on Rarotonga in the South Pacific. The framing autoethnography finds in this project evidence of a distinctive tension in contemporary informationalized life between embodied life and data coordinates, plots, or maps of the spaces and times where life takes place. The chapter aligns two sets of terms: on one hand embodied life and the Evocative mode, on the other hand data coordinates/plots and the Analytic mode. With its focus on the photographic image, the chapter also suggests two further terms for both Evocative and Analytic investigation: the image as fantasy and the visual moment. The chapter takes the form of a layered performance text in order to explore these matters.

Citation

Fleming, D. and Nicholson, S. (2013), "The Contact Sheet: Combining Evocative and Analytic Modes into Visual Autoethnography of the Moment", Denzin, N.K. (Ed.) 40th Anniversary of Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 40), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 43-67. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-2396(2013)0000040006