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Paper short abstract

This paper considers visual methods that materially involve landscapes in collaborative processes of image making and knowledge production. Reflecting on an ongoing art project with land workers in UK, I explore the methodological affordances of cameras built with materials from given landscapes.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I will consider experimental visual methodologies that involve landscapes as active partners in collaborative processes of image making and knowledge production. I discuss the development of a creative research practice that explores stories of land work amongst small-scale, first-generation and community farmers in the UK. Sharing reflections from recent and ongoing work, I will explore the methodological affordances and limitations of visual methods that actively embrace the inventiveness and materiality of photography. My practice as a photographer-anthropologist follows Sarah Pink’s proposal for ethnographers to develop similar, parallel or related practices to those people whose experiences they seek to understand (2009). The project unfolds through a series of large format pinhole cameras built using materials from a given landscape – grasses, crop residues, tree stumps, mud, straw bales. Through the co-creation of participants’ portraits, these ‘land cameras’ become ‘fieldwork devices’ – opportunities to work together towards matters of shared concern (Estalella & Sanchez Criado, 2018). If – to paraphrase Marilyn Strathern (1992) – it matters what landscape relations we use to think other landscape relations with, how might collaborating with plant, animal and other materials from the landscape enable me to better understand my subjects’ own embodied and sensory experiences of place? How might an orientation towards the twin materialities of land and photography enable me and participants to develop alternative sensibilities, perspectives, and practices of attention? Furthermore, how do the contingencies, temporalities and historical resonances of pinhole camera photography shape fieldwork relationships and the co-production of knowledge?