Paper short abstract:

How can visual sources help us understand and interpret security and insecurity? Are there specific methodological and practical problems in using visual sources, especially photography, in an understanding of security, securitisation and insecurity? If so, can those problems be addressed, drawing on the work of work on visual ethnography applied in other fields? The paper accepts that photography is an unreliable and easily manipulated source but nonetheless seeks to reject the sceptical claim that it has little value in building an interpretation of conflict and insecurity, drawing on the work of Pink and others, and building on the author's earlier work on Paul Ricoeur.

Paper long abstract:

Interpretations of security and securitisation have tended to draw heavily on written sources, including literature, travel writing, biography and poetry as well as official discourses of varied kinds. Typically, these methods involve versions of textual or discourse analysis and/or narrratology.This paper asks how we might extend, but also challenge, these more conventional ideas about security drawing on methods from visual ethnography. It asks whether and how the approach might need to adapt in dealing with visual sources, and questions whether photography in particular provides any kind of reliable source base, especially in the age of digital technologies and Photoshop manipulation. The paper recognises the valuable work of Pink and others in building the approach, and also draws extensively on Paul Ricoeur's core approach to textual analysis (and the author's previous work on Ricoeur), while proposing ways of addressing the more sceptical claim that photography is an unreliable source for the re-reading of security and violence. Cautiously approached, it argues, a visual ethnography approach to security can be a fruitful way of illuminating security dilemmas and the experience of insecurity.