2.5 My Word, That’s Riches 21
2.6.2 Photographs as Artefacts
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haphazard and all-over-the-place writing was my therapy for coming to terms with the issues I wrote about. When rereading my reflective journal, I was sometimes shocked by what I had written because, at times, it sounded rather silly whilst at other times, the writing was emotional, captivating, and meaningful. I found that I enjoyed the journal writing and sometimes I could not stop writing. I wrote pages-long reflections and got carried away because I felt that writing about my teaching helped me to come to terms with many aspects of my teaching that had posed a problem to me. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write.
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in order to plan the direction my future could take. However, as Mitchell and Weber (1999) cautioned, I had to be aware of how artefacts, especially school photographs “evoke rituals and idealised” (p. 74) images of events that have been captured by the camera. Regardless of the circumstances captured in the photograph, when we look at the photographs later, we tend to see the events with rose-coloured spectacles (Mitchell & Weber, 1999).
I used photographs to seek and reconstruct past events and experiences that I believed were profoundly significant to my personal and professional development. Not only did photographs help me to reconstruct the past, but they assisted me to rethink experiences of the present and give new meanings to these experiences so that I developed a deeper understanding of the experience (Harrison, 2002). I came to see how a photograph is “worth a thousand words” (Sadiq, 2013, p. 12) when I understood complex and abstract meanings through a single image.
Photographs allowed me to express my feelings and my thoughts in a nonverbal way because I found that photographs had multiple layers of meaning and could be viewed from different perspectives depending on the context in which the photograph was taken, as well as what the person who took the photograph intended. I found that photographs acted like a conduit by conveying my innermost emotions in an artistic manner. I also experienced photographs to be a form of self-interpretation (Sadiq, 2013). In addition, I recognised that photographs acted as evidence of existence. For example, the only photograph I have of my father (Figure 3.4) solidified my emotions—because I
“knew” my father did exist even though I have no memory of him. Although I cannot remember anything about him, the photograph made him into a real person for me. The photograph acted as a bridge between the present and past experiences (as described in Chapter Three). Photographs took me back to events long forgotten, and I probed deeper than the surface of the photographs and gave meaning to certain events and experiences that I believed were most relevant to my development because they preserved a specific reality (Expressuser, 2011).
The photographs that I selected as remnants from my lived experiences produced an overflow of intense, powerful feelings at times inflamed by compelling emotions. Sometimes, it was sorrow when the artefact awakened memories about a sad experience. Certain artefacts awakened feelings that I had suppressed, while at times I was elated at the memory and feelings of happiness that an artefact evoked. Handling the artefacts or looking at photographs of them drew my attention to significant aspects of my personal history. Not only did this help me understand who I am and where I came from but, more importantly, where I was going.
58 2.6.3 Taking Photographs
In composing this thesis, I took new photographs and used them as illustrations to the text. Although, I had old photographs of family members, I found the need to take new photographs of certain places that were noteworthy to my personal history narrative because I felt exactly like Jones (2006), who used photographs for presenting data. He argued that analysing a photograph and then converting the analysis into written text would not give “an equally full lively and complex picture” (p. 66) as the visual text of the photograph. He also claimed that including photographs was more interesting than written text alone.
As Warren and Karner (2005) highlighted, “photographs taken by the researcher tend to focus on aspects that the researcher has found interesting, important or something that could have made an impact on their lives” (p. 171). For example, the photograph of my parents’ old home (see Chapter Three). I thought I was exceptionally fortunate in being able to find the house in the original state as when my parents lived there 55 years ago. However, going to the now sad and neglected home heightened my sense of desolation and abandonment. The house being vacant added more to my disappointment. Although I was too young to remember the events surrounding my father’s death and the expulsion of my mother from our home, there was an eerie and uncanny atmosphere when I walked around the house. I felt the sadness and hurt my mother must have felt on the day my father passed away. I just wanted to get out of there because the feelings I experienced weighed me down.
I also took photographs of my former primary and high schools, (see Chapter Four, Figure 4.1 and Chapter Five, Figure 5.1). As discussed in Chapter Four and Chapter Five, my school was initially a primary school and then it became a high school. However, certain buildings that were there when the school was a primary school are still there now, for example, the music room, which also served as a needlework room. On seeing this building, I had bittersweet memories. At the time of taking the photograph, although I was haunted by the sad memories, I was also relieved that I could come to that place and walk away with my dignity intact. I realised then that I was at peace with myself and that I had moved on from the hurt and the anger. I think the best thing for me was taking the photographs of my primary school.
In the same school grounds, I walked to where the new buildings of the high school now stand. As I walked around, I could still get the smell of fresh paint and the varnish on the doors as they were on my first day of high school. I could see the gleaming chrome and glass notice boards, and the
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shiny taps in the bathrooms. In my mind I saw my English teacher—who literally gave me back my life, my dignity, and my self-respect—dramatising a history lesson, and I could see myself and my friends all dressed up in our costumes acting out our poorly written plays (Chapter Four).
I also took photographs of my process of developing my first collage portrait (see later in this chapter). Creating the collage portrait was a very rewarding exercise for me because although I felt I had no artistic ability or creative abilities, I was able to use an arts-based research method. It was a thrill for me to photograph every step of the collage portrait-making process and, once I developed the skill of taking a photograph with my cell phone and sending it to my computer, I became an old hand at taking photographs and wanted to photograph everything. I even took photographs of myself in my bedroom in the middle of the night, rearranging my collage portrait because “photographs show us how things really are, they are seen as documenting reality and the truth” (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003, p. 105). As Denzin (2001, p. 26) explained, “the meanings of lived experiences are inscribed and made visible in these photographs.”
I also took photographs of my accounting pedagogy teaching and learning activities (Chapters Seven and Eight). These photographs showed the transformation in my teaching activities as I introduced purposeful pedagogies from a social constructivist perspective. In order to protect the identities of the people in the photographs for ethical reasons, I used the “artistic effects” tool on my computer to blur the photographs and block some of the faces. Whilst the images are still visible, the faces are now unrecognisable.