 And now, we come to one of the most interesting aspects of visual ethnography, representation or presentation of our ethnographic knowledge through visuals. This is where, to use the analogy of text, we write our research output using visuals and images. As with any ethnographic text, our visual representations need to incorporate certain fundamental characteristics. Constructing such representation requires a keen understanding of meanings embedded in the visuals we create and the media we use. We need to learn to read the images we create and to learn the grammar and language of our chosen visual media. Each visual medium has its own grammar. It uses certain visual and narrative devices which viewers learn to read and interpret for meaning. For instance, use metaphor, sequencing and juxtaposition of images to convey stories, concepts and ideas. As an example, we have for you a clip from a film by David McDougall. You may remember the McDougalls from our earlier module where we had watched and excerpt from their film, Lorang's Way. They use film as a way to record and represent their ethnographic engagements. Since the late 1960s, they have been making ethnographic films and are considered pioneers in the field. David McDougall is also an academic and has written extensively on the visual and ethnography. You can learn more about their work at this link. The clip we are about to see is from their film, The Photovalas, an encounter with photography in Masuri, a North Indian hill station. The film is an exploration of the many meanings people associate with photography. The film is composed of observations and conversations with photographers and photography enthusiasts in Masuri and Dehradun. The sequence begins with an older woman and her companion making photographs of graves in a wooded cemetery. The graves are old and the inscriptions on the epitaphs can barely be read. The woman participant nevates a small anecdote to the filmmakers about falling into an empty grave. But I doubt if it's vandalism. I don't think the vandalism will come here except that it's gone too, hasn't it? That's gone. This is gone too. Yes. Okay. And it's got some sun on it too which is good. 60. Oh. That's too recent. Too modern. Oh I fell into a grave in Dehradun. I want to say 1830s or something. What happened? Well you see these very old graves with very big architectural structures you know on top. What happens is that they're kind of balanced across the opening of the grave. But animals have dug in. So one leg went right in and underneath the grave total vacuum, nothing there. Nothing there. Marvelous for creatures. Oh. That's good. They've received two reports from me through Dr. Kohli, one on the Dehradun cemetery and the one on the Indian Christian cemetery. And Dr. Kohli has reported that they are very pleased and it has led them to think about a booklet on cemeteries of India. So they'll need pictures. And what were these pictures and help from Baksa who has, they have taken a lot of photographs all around India you know. They could produce quite a nice little intact booklet on cemeteries, whoever wants to read it I can't imagine but it'll be a record, heritage record. This sequence is followed by another featuring another old woman, someone who is possibly connected to the family whose name appears on one of the old gravestones. This is my cousin, my only living relative in England. The one with the child standing on the railing is Edith Gawler with her cousin Ray, Ray Malklu her name is. Is that a different Edith? No, the same Edith, myself. Edith was very fond of keeping chickens at one time. She kept Australops and Rhode Island Reds and here she's feeding her Australops. The Gawlers were very fond of keeping cats. So that's one of their many cats. Don't remember his name. I don't remember his name. That's Laltaboo by the television towers, before the television towers. The highest peak in Missouri and that's why we've climbed up the tree to be higher than anyone else. I suppose I'm about ten or eleven years old in that picture. The elephant is in Pudgawna near Gorkbaw and the cousins are riding on the elephant, the little cousins. And yourself? I'm not on the elephant. I don't know. I may be on the elephant. Now I think only the children are on the elephant. And the sequence ends with photographs of missing persons shown on the state's television. Now what are the filmmakers trying to say through these seemingly unconnected scenes? Put together in such a sequence. And what do these visuals and conversations tell us about photographs and photography? Can you think about this and write down your answers? Some of you may have said the sequence conveys the feeling of losing someone or something. Others may have said that the visuals and anecdotes in this sequence all link photographs with memory. These are both possible interpretations of the sequence. The photographs featured in the different scenes stand in for those who are absent. They help people remember and identify those who are lost to them. According to David McDougal, this part of the film is about photograph as evidence of life and death. Photographs are acting documents which bear the traces of real people and which marks the presence of their absence. This meaning, the association of photographs with memory and identification is conveyed in the film by the careful placement of one scene next to another. For instance, the anecdote about falling into an empty grave tells us little about photography. However, it is part of a sequence that speaks about memory and absence. And it appears within a scene that is about photography of cemeteries. Placed in this context, this anecdote deepens the sense of absence that is prevalent throughout the sequence. The emptiness of the grave that she speaks about becomes a profound metaphor for absence and points to the task of the photograph as something that records absence. And so we see visuals become metaphors. By arranging visuals, juxtaposing them around one another, we are able to express complex meanings and ideas. Let us look at another example of visual metaphors and juxtaposition, this time using images and text. For this, we return to the work of Prashant Miranda, the visual artist. Here we have another of his sketchbooks, this one recording his travels in Kashmir. In Prashant's work, words are more than just explanatory captions for the sketches. They express the state of mind of the observer and place us, the viewer in the context. By writing himself into his observation, Prashant makes himself and his interpretations visible. In this work, just like in photovalas, images are juxtaposed against each other to suggest meaning and words are juxtaposed against images to convey the many layers of the artist's experience. You can see some more of Prashant's sketchbook in this link. In any medium, we construct meaning and convey ideas through the narrative and sequentiality of our visuals. We can work with still images or moving ones with sketches, video recordings or photographs with visuals alone or with visuals and text. And in the case of film, the visual is accompanied by the oral and by sound. As an example of this, let us watch this clip from a film by Anjali Montero and K. P. Jaishankar. This is an excerpt from their film, So Heda So Huda. So hi so pase tini sande sochari. So ajal, so ala, so veri, so iwaru. So hi manuwase, so hi so pase tini sande sochari. We had to discuss this for a long time. Because this is very complicated. Every artist says that he loves his son in his heart. So, in this way, don't ask about my love for my son. Meri dil mein unki jo maubat hai bale wo dunya mein prada kar gaya wo abhi dunya mein wo nahi hai. Lekin unki ruhanyaat mai sojtaon meri sath. The film is about the lives and the music of the pastoral tribes of the run-of-cutch. It speaks about the importance that they attach the poetry and philosophy of the Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. In the sequence we just watched, the visuals and the singing together establish the theme and the central premise of the film. They emphasize the place of music and the words of the spiritual masters in the lives of their participants. As seen in the sequence, through the visual medium of film, we can bring the voices of our participants into the representations that we construct. Take, for example, the stitchespeak. The narrative of the film is based on the voices of the artists as they narrate their experiences. Let us pause here for a moment and reflect on our discussion so far. What is the value of including the participants' voices in our ethnographies, particularly in ethnographic films? Note down your answers to this question. Some of you may have said it brings credibility to our representations. Others may have said that it makes the representation more detailed and descriptive. These answers are acceptable. Some of you may have pointed out that it makes our ethnographic engagements more equal and nuanced. This answer is correct. Including the voices of our participants in our representations is one way to bring their subjectivity into our research. It can ensure that they have greater control and ownership over their narratives. And in audiovisual medium, such as film, there is also the sensorial quality of the voice. The sound of the participants' voice is just as important as the words they speak. Sound carries with it all the markers of the participants' history and identity. Regional, socioeconomic and cultural. It expresses the emotions that accompany their words and silences. Think back to an example we had discussed earlier in this module, the work of Donna Barnes with women infected with HIV. You would recall that one of the reasons that the women chose video as a recording medium was because it would carry their complete bodily expressions and not only their words. And it is not only sounds or words, visual representations also bring in other sensorial modalities of touch, smell and taste. Like in this excerpt from another film by David MacDougall. What is this? What is this? How many times have you said it? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten. What is this? Do you mind how you speak? I'm on the street. I'm on the street. I'm on the street. I'm on the street. I'm on the street. I'm on the street. Are you dead? Are you dead? It is only sound and image, but viewing this scene, we experience the physical contact, the texture, the sensation of touch that is part of getting a haircut. Having experienced a haircut or a similar physical contact, we are able to understand the sensations of touch and texture that are depicted here through image and sound. Let us dwell on this point a little bit more with this scene from the film, School Scapes. The film is the MacDougall's exploration of life and learning in the Rishi Valley School in South India. Here too, the composition of visuals and sounds evokes a physical sensation that of flowing water or something being washed clean. Our understanding of visuals is at the level of experience and at the level of interpretation. The maker of the visual and the viewer work together, experiencing and interpreting what they see. Meaning is constructed based on shared and individual experiences. And so a visual is more than just seen. Through a visual, we can experience touch, texture, sound, movement, smell, and any number of sensations. Visual ethnographies, we might say, are not only visual, but multi-sensorial in nature. In visually representing our research, we often try to present our participants' ways of seeing. These ways of seeing may be very different from ours. Visual media, particularly drawing and animation films, are able to represent different ways of seeing because they are not so dependent on realistic portrayals. Sometimes these attempts at presenting the others' way of seeing may take the form of a collaboration between the researcher and the participant. In the Stitchespeak, for instance, the worlds created by the artists follow a visual and spatial logic that is unique. The placement of objects, people, animals depicts a way of seeing that is different from a more commonly seen way of drawing. Where usually all the figures are placed upright. Drawing and animation filmmaking allows us to manipulate their canvases and their perspectives to depict these alternative visions of reality. And through this, we attempt to present our participants' ways of representing their worlds. In the beginning of this section, we had spoken about the grammar of the visual and visual media. Different participants and communities too have different visual languages. Sometimes their grammar is so different from what we are used to that it pushes us to question our own ways of seeing and representing. By representing multiple ways of seeing, visual media are able to convey the constructed nature of reality. Visual ethnographers sometimes like to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction to challenge the idea of objective depiction. By bringing fictional narratives or alternative tellings together with documentary ones, visual representations are able to present diverse versions of reality. This includes reality that are not visible per se, such as imaginations and memories. Memories and dreams form an important part of the ethnography of the graphic novel Memories of the Vani, which present the story of Tamil refugees affected by conflict in Northern Sri Lanka. The ethnography depicts the experiences of refugees during the war and afterwards as they wait to be granted asylum. It represents their lived experiences through fictionalized accounts based on anecdotes, dreams and memories narrated by the participants. The characters portrayed in this work are fictionalized. The fictionalization of narratives empowers the participants by making their stories visible while also protecting their safety by anonymizing them. So we see visual ethnographies often bring fictionalized narratives and mythical stories to create analytical and descriptive presentations of their participants' lives. Instead of compromising the reality or truthfulness of ethnographic representation, we can use forms such as fiction and storytelling to provide a common ground for communication between the researcher and the audience, thus making it easier to convey meanings and concepts without falling back on verbal explanations. In We Make Images, a folk tale, a fictional story becomes an ethnographic film. Representing the meaning of painting in the lives of the Beals. The story is set, as you may have noticed, against a blank background. The blankness represents the nowhere space in which myths and folk tales are situated. The visual medium used in your animation film enables such a representation. The conscious exclusion of detail contextualizes the myth. The blank background seems to say that for the Beals, myths and folk tales exist in the mental landscape and are not confined to one particular place or region. These are some of the elements that form the visual language of different media. They are by no means all the elements to use in constructing visual ethnographies. Our ways of representing can be as varied and unique as our participants' ways of seeing. For those of you who may want to explore this subject some more, here is a presentation by Angelin Montero and K.P. Jai Shankar. Through our course, we have seen many excerpts from their films and have discussed them. In this presentation, they discuss one of their films, Satcha, The Loom, and at the end of the presentation, there is a quiz that you can take to reflect on your learnings.