Photovoice for Development and Social Change

Abstract

Although photography is seen as art, it has a power beyond that and could serve – as a technique – in many disciplines. In this paper, the focus will be around on how photography contributed to development and social change. Some photographers helped us see the other side of the world; just by exposing some marginalized communities, their photographs succeeded to have an impact on these people. The first step of achieving community development is to reveal communities that need development. Besides being a researcher in rural community development, I was lucky to be also a professional photographer, which inspired my research work. Photography can reflect people’s real lives and deliver what words or other ways can’t. Triggered by literature and some personal observations, I realized that in many cases, photographers are outsiders on the community. Some of them take advantage on some marginalized communities to get popularity and wealth. Using this medium has led some researcher and photographers to exploit these communities – especially marginalized communities – by taking what they can and giving nothing back. Further, an outsider might see/analyze things differently which may not serve the community members, and harm the society instead of helping them. For this purpose, this paper promotes “photovoice”. Photovoice is a methodology that uses photography as a technique, and satisfies the purposes of community development. It empowers community members to be the photographers of their own community, which minimizes the conflict of interests, encourage community members to reflect on their own lives, and decide on what is important and what is not, through photographs. In this way, photography would fit in community development. It can become more than an art, it would become a “message” used under community development work and satisfy its purposes, and most importantly it can lead to social change. However, there is no clear guidance on how to use photovoice, in addition to the lack of books that address solely this methodology. This paper analyzes some case studies that adopted photovoice as a methodology, within different context. The paper builds on the nine steps of photovoice invented by Wang and Burris (1996), to describe each of the case studies. For every step, and projecting on each case study, I led a discussion based on literature and personal observations and came up with recommendation and suggestions that could serve as a guidance for photovoice.