The politics of visibility and visuality in camera-based research

This article examines the social dynamics provoked by filmmaking as a primary engagement during fieldwork and how camera-based interventions can be meaningful for qualitative research. Conceptualizing the camera as a catalyst that fundamentally shapes the ethnographic encounter, the author attends to what the presence of the camera inspires and not solely to what it records. Making reference to the author’s ethnographic research on memory practices in post-war Peru, the article contends that the circumstances and conditions of making people’s stories visible, and the practice of giving these stories aesthetic and narrative form, are essential to developing a theoretical argument. In other words, as social scientists, there is a point to be made about critically reflecting on the discourses and frameworks that enable or disable camera-based storytelling practices that are not solely epistemological but fundamentally political.