Paper short abstract:

Photography offers potential within the field and through the use of accompanying software has the ability to expand ways of representing information. Through working collaboratively with participants images can be expanded into places of interiorities creating hypertextual self-scapes.

Paper long abstract:

When looking at embodied experience, trapping the body into words on the page creates limits on the embodied knowledge that can be communicated. Photography challenges this limitation and with continuing technological advancements this has the potential to expand. Photographs are often storytellers and have the potential to create sensory narratives as they elicit imagination and the senses in creating discourse. In working with people where experiences are not easily photographed and where photographs create distance and separation from participants knowledge, photography needs to develop its forms of representation. Researchers, through the use of digital technology, have the potential to "expand and harness an evolving medium that can respond to some of photography's frailties, its lies and limitations" (Ritchin 2009:146). In this paper I examine the position of photography as a place of representing knowledge of participants' interiorities. Through a dialogue between standard photographic techniques and digitally altered photographs which are combined visually with participants' lived experience I look at how photographs, when put in a visual context, have the potential to communicate sensory narratives. I call these images 'hypertextual self-scapes'. Working collaboratively with participants enabled representations of lived embodied experience to take photographs beyond static representations accompanying text into a dialogue of lived sensory experience. These hypertextual self-scapes challenge photographic boundaries of representation through mediating the seen and unseen experiences for people with Chronic Illness. Where photographs of the lived every day could reinforce existing beliefs digital technology enables interiorities of experience to become visible.