Hurley 07 Focal Points- Framing Material Culture and Visual Data

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DOI: 10.1177/1468794107078516

2007 7: 355Qualitative ResearchRachel Hurdley

Focal points: framing material culture and visual data

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ABSTRACT This article reflects upon the collection and presentation of

photographic data. The problem of representing the visual as more than

illustrative of written research findings is the methodological focus. An

empirical study in Cardiff explored practices of cultural display in the

home, focusing on the living room mantelpiece. First, I discuss the

methodological debate concerning the crisis of representation of visual

data in social research. Following a brief discussion of a year-long

autophotographic project by informants, the debate centres on

photographs taken at the time of the interview. I show how the crisis of

representation in social enquiry can be illuminated by recognizing both

domestic display and presentation of data as cultural practices/methods

of researching and remembering. Finally, I argue that multi-modal

representations of these mediated frames of experience can illuminate

complexities of doing home cultures and enquiry into the domestic

interior.

KEYWORDS: autophotography, display, frames, home, memory, photography, practice, repre-

sentation, visual methods

Introduction

It is another thing to try and make over our existence into an unchanging lapidary

form. Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise. Most of us

indeed would feel safer if our experience could be hard-set and fixed in form.

(Douglas, 1966: 163)

This article focuses on methods of presenting photographic data that were col-

lected as part of a study in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. This explored how

material cultural display practices in the home are ongoing accomplishments,

bound up with negotiations of space, time and identity. Its focus was on themantelpiece in the living room, since this was where particular artefacts

seemed to be set apart and ordered according to combined practices of socio-

cultural convention and personal selection.

A R T I C L E 355

Focal points: framing material culture and

visual data

DOI: 10.1177/1468794107078516

Qualitative ResearchCopyright 2007SAGE Publications(Los Angeles,London, New Delhiand Singapore)vol. 7(3) 355374

Q

RR A C H E L H U R D L E Y

Cardiff University, UK

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As conference presentations of these data in other countries and to audiences

of varying national origin have shown, the mantelpiece as focal point of the

main living room in the house is a British cultural convention. This distinction

emphasizes the importance of sociological enquiry into the minutiae of every-

day practice, since the most seemingly trivial fields may turn out to hold thegreatest potential for cultural analysis (Gullestad, 1993: 159). Similarly, pre-

sentations of visual data are culturally bounded fields that require the same

methodological attentiveness in current debates regarding the crisis of repre-

sentation (Atkinson, 1990).

First, I discuss methodological contexts for my decision to use visual data

collection and analysis methods. Second, I reflect on the many selection

processes that were involved in presenting them as part of a research text. The

aim is to show how these processes are partially analogous to ongoing, con-

tingent practices of positioning, selecting and editing material culture in thehome. The article is specifically concerned with methods of framing and dis-

playing visual findings as an end-product, and how that product can relate to

processes both of data collection and of first-order domestic display.

This mirroring of the management and ordering of visual productions prob-

lematizes seemingly static, finished aesthetic products and their relationships

with ongoing negotiations of identity. The mantelpiece is not only a picture,

as one informant stated, although it might seem so during an hour-long inter-

view visit. It is an element of domestic process art (Hunt, 1989). Similarly,

visual data displayed in a text or other modes of representation are not justsnapshots: they are materials that have been through processes of framing,

developing, editing and selection. In conclusion, I suggest that the social life of

things (Appadurai, 1986), such as display items and photographs, must be

acknowledged in the landscaping of research findings.

Further, interview accounts of the provenance, acquisition and selection of

objects for display give these objects a biography (Kopytoff, 1986), just as pho-

tographs are socially produced material objects with histories, rather than

abstracted, decontextualized images (Edwards, 2002). Therefore, this account of

presenting photographic findings demonstrates the necessary inter-relatednessof the visual and the spoken, the material and the narrative, for interpretive

research in the home. A full discussion of the interaction between informant,

researcher and object in the co-construction of narrative can be found elsewhere

(Hurdley, 2006a). It therefore contributes to the ongoing debate regarding multi-

modality and mixing methods (Mason, 2006).

Seeing double: words and visions

The aim of the Cardiff study was to pay attention to taken-for-granted, con-

ventionalized display spaces in the home, focusing particularly on the living

room mantelpiece. I distributed 450 questionnaires in three areas of the city,

selected for the age and design of the housing. Participants were asked to

356 Qualitative Research 7(3)



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answer questions about their mantelpiece display (or other display spaces they

selected), and also to draw a labelled sketch in a designated frame on the paper.

Of the 150 who completed the questionnaire, I interviewed all 30 (together

with other household members) who volunteered. These interviews were tape-

recorded in their living rooms (with one exception, a man who saw me in hisoffice) and transcribed. I also took snapshots of the mantelpieces and other dis-

play spaces that we had talked about. Half the interviewees had mantelpieces,

and half did not, but chose other display spaces in their homes, such as shelf

units or the top of the gas fire. I gave disposable cameras to the 16 informants

who had mantelpieces so that they could photograph them at fortnightly inter-

vals over a 12-month period. One year later, I visited the photographers to pick

up the cameras and hold a short interview with them, in order to find out the

effects of photographing their mantelpieces, and their suggestions for altering

this autophotographic method.The three modes of visual data my photographs, the fortnightly snapshots

and questionnaire sketches were stored digitally prior to producing a final

version for the purposes of a research text. While the treatment of all these

data deserve full critical attention, I shall focus my empirical enquiry in this

article on one type of data: the snapshots I took at the time of the interview.

Nevertheless, the methodological discussion that follows seeks to engage more

extensively with the ongoing debate concerning visual methods in social

research (Banks, 2001; Emmison and Smith, 2000; Morphy and Banks, 1997;

Pink, 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman, 2005; Ruby, 2005).The writing of the visual has increasingly been problematized. Benjamin

noted the displacement of the cult value of photographs with exhibition value,

when For the first time, captions have become obligatory (Benjamin, 1955:

220). As part of the project, I interviewed museum curator and design histo-

rian Charles Newton, in the archive cellars of the Victoria and Albert Museum

in London. This visit highlighted the crisis of representation (Atkinson,

1990), since exhibiting authenticity has been a longstanding problematic in

museum curatorship (Phillips, 1997). Newton had curated the 1990

Household Choices exhibition, part of a project that also produced a book(Newton and Putnam, 1990). A variety of methods were used in the produc-

tion of both book and exhibition, including photo-elicitation, autophotogra-

phy by children and adults of their own and others homes, and what is

conventionally understood as expert photography of domestic interiors. In

the book, some of these photographs illustrate the text; in contrast, Newton

deliberately kept text to a minimum in the exhibition, since his experience sug-

gested that the business of keeping up with the captions exhausted visitors.

The photographs were relatively unframed, simply mounted on cardboard in

groups, with a short printed title.

As Berger (1972) comments, a caption will dictate how a picture is inter-

preted, while Gell (1998) went further by resisting the notion of a grammar

or linguistics of visual culture. If we allow that cultural materials can be

357Hurdley: Focal points



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matter in and out of place (Douglas, 1966), we can interpret any textual

caption or more complex verbal/written accounting for the visual as displac-

ing it to another realm or order, to which it does not belong. As Newton com-

mented in our interview, however, photographs of private, contemporary

domestic interiors are not conventional museum exhibits. First, pho-tographs by ordinary people are not the sort of thing to be raised above the

milieu (compare with artefacts literally raised up in the home, onto the man-

telpiece above the hurly-burly of daily activity and ephemeral goods). Second,

the subject matter the ordinary, private British home interior is not extra-

ordinary. For these reasons, the cardboard mounts for the Household

Choices exhibition were stored differently from other more conventional

exhibits. They were kept flat, uncovered, in document drawers on top of one

another, and Newton handled them to lift them out and show them to me. I

was permitted to take two photographs of them. He contrasted these ruleswith those for a large fragment of William Morris wallpaper, which was

framed and covered in glass on a wall in the archive room. It was literally

intangible, since no one was permitted to touch it, nor even photograph it. It

was possible only to look at the real thing, in situ. This artefact really was

suspended above the busy-ness of the everyday, invested with uniqueness by

age, and with rarity by, paradoxically, the fragile ephemerality which had

once made it the height of fashionable taste. A postcard, perhaps, from the

Museum shop would allow some facsimile to be displayed and remembered in

the visitors homes, yet it was unphotographable.This attitude to the materials of Household Choices was particularly appo-

site for a consideration of methods in my research design, since it resonated

with Mass Observation methodology. I had incorporated an analysis of Mass

Observation methodology, together with archive material collected in 1937

about mantelpiece displays into my design (Mass Observation, 1937). The aim

of Mass Observation was the practice of observation by and of the masses, to

counter (with a certain ambivalence) elitist social enquiry (Stanley, 2001). In

1937, only two photographs were submitted for the Mantelpiece Report, since

photographs were positional goods (Hirsch, 1977), displayed on a very fewmantelpieces, and most participants had submitted handwritten lists on paper.

Similarly, Household Choices photographs were cultural materials gathered

by the mass, using what is now no longer a positional instrument or tech-

nique, of their everyday domestic settings. Yet it is because of their ordinari-

ness that they occupy a curious space of meaning and value. They are neither

museum exhibit, in the conventional understanding of the term whereas an

old fragment of wallpaper is nor are they disposable. They were used to illus-

trate verbal accounts and written expert analyses, but also spoke for them-

selves in a museum albeit with a short text caption (unlike other exhibits,

which might have an expository audio-guide or brochure). They are mounted,

but unframed. It is at this point that the mirror of my methods of data col-

lection and presentation becomes the focal point of the paper.




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As Bourdieu has argued, photography performs social functions, for in

valorizing what is photographable, it is never independent of social class,

norms, hierarchy and prestige. Its function is the recording and compilation of

souvenirs of objects, people or events socially designated as important

(Bourdieu, 1965: 7). He also comments that, as a product, it occupies a middleground between nobility and the masses, distinguishing it from paintings and

mass-produced prints. Writing about family photographs, he notes that, in the

houses of thepetits bourgeois in the village of Lesquire, they even invade that

shrine of family values, the drawing-room mantelpiece, relegating medals

and trophies to a dark corner. He views the production of family photographs

for display as the domestic manufacture of domestic emblems (1965: 25).

Certainly, this observation concerns a specific time and place; yet we might

note his observation that people photograph what is photographable and

that in a particular French village family photographs had displaced the mate-rial markers of past family achievements in the public realm. Similarly, Banks

(2001) notes the cultural specificity of domestic photographic displays: no dis-

tinction is made by British middle classes between displaying photographs of

living and dead family members, compared with Hindu practice in India. He

also notes that the top of the television is a shrine in his mothers house to his

dead father, and that in middle-class homes the mantelpiece may serve a sim-

ilar shrine-like function (Banks, 2001: 119).

Unlike medals and rare fragments of old wallpaper, photographs are repro-

ducible; yet who would want to, outside the family circle? Curiously, thesereproducible, yet unique markers and products of social convention do, from a

distance, all look the same. Selected to be raised above the business of domes-

tic practices onto the drawing room mantelpiece, these photographs occupy

an ambiguous place. Like the photographic exhibition from the Household

Choices project, they valorize the domestic, the familial as photographable,

and are therefore in circulation as social/cultural goods. In contrast to the

unphotographable, yet desirable (to those in the know) Morris wallpaper,

their content is of interest only to those who already know all those babies,

brides and birthday boys.Incidentally, it is worth noting at this point how both Bourdieu and Banks

label the mantelpiece a shrine. In contrast, the fieldwork I did in Cardiff found

an ambiguity in mantelpiece displays that mirrored, from some angles, the

liminal position of the domestic emblem, the family photograph. It did raise

some precious artefacts above the common circulation of domestic goods, but

also acted as a storage facility, temporary home for displaced objects and

dumping ground. Likewise, I cannot pretend, in this laborious consideration of

the problem of images (MacDougall, 1997), that the photographs I took were

not to be used as aide-memoires when listening to interview tapes and conve-

nient illustrations for accounts about the displays. Like informants mantel-

pieces, the photographs performed many parts, and deserve similar

attentiveness. Ball and Smith (1992) justify the exploration of signs with




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reference to Garfinkels ethnomethodological approach to society as members

ongoing work, with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postpone-

ment or buy-outs (Garfinkel, cited in Ball and Smith, 1992: 25). This was my

first motivation for scrutinizing the unseen mantelpiece, and it therefore

makes sense to show how my work in selecting, editing and framing was thenproduced.

The landscape of visual methods in social enquiry

A mantelpiece is only a picture. Its a piece of art that you look at. (David, aged 70)

Visual data have been collected in recent sociological/anthropological studies of

domestic space and material culture of the home (see edited collections by

Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zuniga, 1999; Cieraad, 1999; Miller, 2001).Of particular relevance to this project were two recent research projects about

art and the home (Halle, 1993; Painter, 2002). Halles study of art and class in

the American home invites photographs as illustration to the text, as does

Painters edited collection on the At Home with Art Project. This not only turns

art works into photographic subjects, but also other elements of the project the

purchasers, the developers of the project, the places in the home where the art

was placed, and also other objects of art or design, such as the Krupps coffee pot,

Gormleys statues, elements of the Household Choices project and so on.

Although an edited collection, this overall topic seems to lend a resonance andcoherence that makes sense of the photographic plates. Nevertheless, this is a

reminder that final productions flatten out the processes and conditions of their

making, just as the static, neat tableau of the mantelpiece can, in a moment, fool

the visitor into viewing this condition as permanent and unproblematic.

Pink (2004) argues cogently for the combination of interview accounts and

visual data when exploring the home, as this can help to convey the pluri-

sensory aspects of home. I knew that photographs were essential to my data

collection, since I wanted them not only as aide-memoires when analysing inter-

view accounts, but also to add their multivocality to the final text, rather thanbeing mere illustration (Banks, 2001: 144; also Pink, 2004). Recognizing

memory as a cultural practice was vital to employing visual research methods,

since this was so central to informants methods of doing home, family, identity

on the mantelpiece. Photography and photographs were one means by which

they and I did memory work, as culturally bounded methods of collecting, stor-

ing and displaying the rememberable.

Douglas makes an explicit connection between museums and houses as

memory machines (1993: 268) the former for public memories and the lat-

ter for private by the display of artefacts. Maleuvre (1999) makes the connec-

tion between collecting and displaying objects in the home, and its transition

from a building to a place that is constitutive of identity. Similarly, De Certeau cel-

ebrates places of everyday practice as warehouses of memory (1984). Historical




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surveys of domestic art and culture emphasize the constructed character of

practices of collection and display, and their historical, cultural specificity (for

example, Camesasca, 1971; Saumarez Smith, 2000). Likewise, media images

and the visual consumption of other peoples homes, in which the informant

is the other, or the spectator, can have effects beyond mediation (Gregory,2003), creating a remembered background for landscaping ones own

domestic interior. This emphasis on close, local empirical work is iterated in

Miller (2002), in order to uncover object relations and meanings that accu-

mulate and change over time, thus contesting the ability of grand narratives

to engage with the complex mediations of cultural consumption within indi-

vidual experience (see Miller, 1998). Importantly, the power of houses, rooms

and objects to evoke memory is not always read as a benign effect (Bahloul,

1999; Taylor, 1999) and has been criticized as a masculine discourse of home

(Morley, 2000).By personalizing past as memory, individuals can link houses, spaces and

things to self-identity and autobiography. If artefacts are parts of a societys

characteristic ways of history-making (Mills, 1959: 7), photographs occupy

a boundary between the memory objects on display at home (Saunders,

2002: 177) and public monuments and museums as memory work (Douglas,

1993; see also Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Loukaki 1997;

Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003; Rowlands, 2002).

Edited collections by Cieraad (1999) and Miller (2001) show how memory

is an ongoing accomplishment by means of the material culture of home, indisplayed goods and other practices. One in particular is significant (Chevalier,

1999) in that it shows how audience assumptions about a plate picturing the

pope are confounded by the personal memory motivating its display. It was not

a memory of seeing the pope on which the plate turned, but the visit of the

informants daughter. Such micro-studies show not only how memory affects

the meaning of home, but also highlight lines of friction in history-making

processes. Further, this emphasizes the importance of mixing methods in a

way that might illuminate gaps in the rendering of a research text.

Thus, any photographs that I chose to take, like the mantelpiece displaysthemselves, would be multiply embedded, like the many visual forms that

sociologists and anthropologists deal with (Banks, 2001: 79). They would

be open to multiple interpretations, since internal narrative could be con-

structed within their frames, as well as advancing the argument of the text

(Banks, 2001: 114). Hunt (1989) gave informants cameras with which to

photograph significant objects and spaces in the home, and the photographs

then took the role as prompts for an interview (see also Woodward, 2001).

A more radical example of using auto-visual material to elicit interview

responses is that of Marcus (1995), who asked participants in her research

into the home as a reflection of the self to draw their houses and talk to the

pictures. Pink (2003) emphasizes the need for an awareness of the historical

context of current visual anthropology by other disciplines: it is not a new




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method, and has a long history both of practice and debate. Photographs are

not just simple tools for eliciting interviewees responses, although, as I

found with the questionnaire sketches, a picture can be a practical starting-

point for discussion.

A recent review of visual anthropology argues that viewing the visible andpictorial worlds as social processesprovides a perspective lacking in other

theories (Ruby, 2005: 165). Audiovisual technologies can record visual cul-

ture, based on epistemology that culture is manifested through visual symbols

embedded in gestures, ceremonies, rituals and artefacts situated in con-

structed and natural environments (Ruby, 2005: 165). Like Pink (2003),

Ruby therefore criticizes naive approaches to the production of ethnographic

film. Pink also argues that:

reflexivity should be integrated fully into processes of fieldwork and visual or writ-

ten representation in ways that do not simply explain the researchers approachbut reveal the very processes by which the positionality of researcher and infor-

mant were constituted and through which knowledge was produced during the

fieldwork. (2003: 189)

In addition, data collection involves the use of instruments that similarly affect

processes of knowledge production (Michael, 2004), as well as considerations

of self-presentation (Coffey, 1999; Goffman, 1959). I did not use a video cam-

era in the interviews, precisely because, at the time, I considered the presence of

the camera would disrupt the interview talk, and that my lack of technical

knowledge might indeed result in no data collection at all. I also wanted to seehow my photographs and the informants photographs might differ, in terms of

framing and the literal position from which the snapshots were taken. Despite

this difference in technique, it seemed important to practise a similar reflexivity

and awareness, particularly because of the seductive ordinariness of taking

domestic snapshots.

The use of photographs as illustration of the domestic interior in acade-

mic texts seems almost too natural, precisely because photographs are

domestic emblems (Bourdieu, 1965). Yet Chalfen (2002) makes a useful

distinction between the problematic of home media such as photographs,where the focus is on product rather than process, choosing to view pho-

tographs as a type of data base, thus distinguishing it from the problematic

of visual anthropology, which is about process, and the problems of viewing

visual anthropological products as evidence. I found that informants did

problematize the display of the product. However, my current intent is to

focus on the crisis of representation (Atkinson, 1990), and the problem of

integrating, conjoining marrying (in some awkward pastiche of the wed-

ding photo on the mantelpiece) verbal accounts and written analyses with

visual materials. It seems ridiculous to elucidate visual meaning with words:

consider the tale of the pianist who, when asked what a piece of music

meant, played it again.




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A snapshot on method

Having framed the empirical content with a discussion of historical and ongo-

ing debates in visual methodology, I shall first discuss the decision to use

autophotography as part of the research design. This collection method

reflected, in some senses, informants ongoing visual/material productions on

domestic mantelpieces. In turn, this resonates with the subsequent principal

empirical discussion, a reflexive debate about the process of transposing my

snapshots into a text. This prior consideration of autophotographic data col-

lection will therefore illuminate the problem of representation.

The decision to give informants cameras for a 12-month period following

the initial interview and photographs was motivated by a desire to avoid

swooping god-like into other peoples lives and gathering data (including

visual data) according to a pre-determined theoretical agenda [which]strikes me not simply as morally dubious but intellectually flawed (Banks,

2001: 179). Of course, a study of peoples mantelpieces is not fraught with the

same moral and ethical dilemmas as ethnographic studies of child prostitutes

or bull-fighting (Pink, 2001), but the research is about peoples homes and

lived experience in their homes, a space which is still considered a private, emo-

tionally charged place of negotiation and conflict (see, for example, Chapman

and Hockeys edited collection, 1999). Also, Loizos suggests that, for example,

regular photos of room contents can be revelatory as a historical document

(Loizos, 2000: 96), and that it is important to note absence and presence in thevisual record (2000: 101). Thus, in the belief that autophotography would be

more appropriate to the research agenda, which concerns material culture

produced, performed and consumed on the mantelpiece, I literally handed over

the mechanics of the research process to the participants, by giving all of them

disposable cameras to take fortnightly photographs of their mantelpiece

displays. This was intended to foreground the timed aspect of domestic

cultural displays, their rhythms and tempos (Adam, 1995) and also, in a spirit

of curiosity, to see what would happen when informants were given cameras.

Having interviewed the photographers at the end of the photo-study period,I developed their films into material and digital photographs. I shall return

briefly towards the end of this article, to discuss how the informants

photographs were eventually presented.

On first viewing the developed photographs on a computer screen and

corkboards I realized that the translation of these to a bound, textual format

would not be a simple process, if I wanted to avoid using them only to illustrate

the writing. This would have been at odds with the aims of the project: to

explore taken-for-granted space in the home, using participative methods of

data collection. I shall now discuss in detail the processes of producing pho-tographs for final display in a research text. The principal empirical focus will

be on the photographs I took at the time of the interview, which are viewed




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from that same, slightly askew angle that motivated the study and its design:

of making methods of cultural material display visible.

Framing

I guess we dont sit around chatting about it, or looking at it, or looking at things

on it its just there. But in terms of design, in the sense of how this little bit of the

room is organized, I guess it is a focal point. Well, it competes with the TV. But, Im

not sure. (Eleanor, aged 25)

The initial quality of the photographs I took in the interviews was contingent

upon the quality of the camera and the photographer; there were no master-

pieces in the original productions. Also, crucially, many of the photographs

had to be taken at an angle to the fireplace, since the size of the rooms and

positioning of furniture often did not allow direct shots. This oblique perspec-

tive affected interpretation, as did the decision of how much context should

surround the mantelpiece in the finished product. In addition, there were no

original close-ups of individual objects. This was because the initial intention

was to consider the mantelpiece display as a single entity, rather than pulling

objects out of context.

The mantelpiece, according to all informants, was the focal point when

entering the room. However, everyday functions of the living room (when not

being used as an interview room!) meant that sofas, televisions and coffeetables tended to get in the way of straightforward camera angles.

Paradoxically, not arranging the room for a photo-shoot, as a magazine pho-

tographer might do for public consumption, lest the ordinary domestic aspect

be lost, resulted in many oblique images. These hinted at artistic preciousness,

or attempts to elicit plodding Meaning from the inane. Informants might not

deliberately have placed the clock in the centre of the mantelpiece, or left dead

flowers on it, yet interpretations of such presentations are inevitable. Similarly,

these incidental, contingent perspectives became the subject of interpretative

speculation once they were translated into material objects as photographs.The mundane practices of domestic life had effected an obliqueness that

estranged the everyday. This highlighted relations between everyday routine

activities and the domestic aesthetic, and specifically how these were mani-

fested in the material culture of the home, the physical geography of the house

and the ordering of space. As such, the photographs forced a reconsideration

of the normal and normative practices of ordering domestic space, in the same

way, perhaps, that the formal structure of the mantelpiece can lend apparently

unintended prominence to certain objects. Thus, everyday home life, and its

attendant props (the sofa, the coffee table and the television), can be seen ashaving effects in the aesthetics of home: the focal point of the mantelpiece dis-

play, and my photographic productions. Meanwhile, my initial judgements of

the meaning of mantelpiece displays as visual manifestations of taste, cultural




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and social capital, life course and social relations within the household were

challenged by the accounts given by the producers of these displays. People

told different stories about the same things (such as clocks), and the same

stories about different things (such as collections of model hedgehogs and cud-

dly sheep). Thus, initial categorizing of informants through viewing theirvisual/visible domestic cultures opened up to different interpretations when

amplified by their accounts of objects and displays.

Selection

If I dismantled something and was meaning to reassemble it, I might chuck the

pieces up on the mantelpiece while I left it in pieces I would use it at least with

the intention that it should be a temporary storage place Even though in the

nature of things temporary might slide into the long term. (Brian, aged 36)

The photographs were not intended to be works of art; taken in a hurry, they

were a prelude to the real work of the interview. Thus, it was not until they

were mounted on corkboards and stored as computer images that I began to

consider them as aesthetic objects detached from the oral narratives given dur-

ing the interview, and as a distinct collection. The process of arranging them on

the boards for viewing was striking in its similarity to the action of arranging a

mantelpiece. For many of the informants, the arrangement had been cumula-

tive, or had been done so long ago that it was forgotten. However, two of thefemale informants had made it a priority following recent house moves, consid-

ering the practice of ornamenting the mantelpiece with their objects as a vital

constituent of making their mark, of personalizing space. By arranging the

photographs on corkboards, specially purchased for the purpose, I was

performing a similar act of appropriation. The practice also demonstrated what

many informants had spoken of: the problem of things, in that they necessarily

demand space. This ordering of domestic space and an apparent imperative to

supply appropriate display areas for aesthetic objects shows how objects can be

actively constitutive of identity production in the home (Knappett, 2002).There was no room for all the photographs on the corkboards, but no room

for putting up another board in my study at home. This seemingly simple act

of sticking the photographs to the two boards became heavy with meaning,

and I could not view it as a random selection process. Those selected to go back

in the box took with them trajectories of knowledge (Strathern, 1999), which

might be lost permanently. These that remained had to be categorized and

ordered, yet chance juxtaposition or central placing would alter any interpre-

tation. Eventually, common sense prevailed, and they were arranged for the

best fit in the limited space. It occurred to me that the chance groupings oninformants mantelpieces could be transformed, like this arrangement, into

highly symbolic arrangements, and subsequently into typologies that were

entirely detached from original intent or function.




13/21

Furthermore, the interviews were, like these photographs, only a snapshot

of the process of domestic life. An entirely contrasting interview interaction,

another mantelpiece display of fresh flowers, unposted letters or new birthday

cards and a different photograph might be the materials of social enquiry on

another day. The effects of time (and the interviewer) then came to promi-nence, emphasizing the role of the year-long autophotographic study by infor-

mants in presenting findings. As many informants said, they had not thought

much about this focal point, as they called it, until I brought it to mind. The

presence of the mantelpiece display was important for many only as an

absence of absence; it formed a comforting background to their domestic lives.

Thus, the narratives were framed by the interview, and the displays by the pho-

tographs I had taken, now sliced from their domestic framework to be recon-

structed as book chapters and photographic plates.

Editing

Its certainly not a display area, its just another shelf You can always make

another display area if you really had to. Its just that this is so unattractive, it

hasnt been developed. (Jane, aged 41)

As the photographs became productions in their own right, they invited spec-

ulative editing. The ease of computer editing permitted repeated changes.

Complicating this technological process, however, were the meanings attachedby informants to certain possessions, which at first appeared to compete with

my interpretations, including aesthetic considerations, for centre ground. The

informants are omitted from the photographs, yet their presence is felt, as is

mine, by chance reflections in the mirror or television screen. Both the editing

process and eventual appearance in print raise questions about framing.

Judicious editing and a good frame can conjure masterpieces from dross, yet

meanings can be lost if a picture is edited and framed carelessly.

The photographs displaced what they displayed from the social, domestic

context in which once they dwelt. As matter out of place, they were open tocultural reordering (Douglas, 1966). Despite the embodied character of the

interviewing process, in which my bodily presence was such a concern (Coffey,

1999), and in which both protagonists performed a number of roles (Holstein

and Gubrium, 1995), little of the human remained in these stills from the

interview. There are no people in the photograph, even though one knows they

are there. The informant, once the apparent focus of the interview (the objects

on the mantelpiece being only our props), has disappeared. Occasionally, a foot

appears in the corner of the picture. This disturbs the aesthetic integrity of

these perfect display shelves, and so in the editing process the limbs are slicedout. It is an easy procedure, since they are in the lower corners of the photo-

graph. Rather more difficult to discard are the reflections of the flash, or the

odd glimpse of a face in the mirrors above the mantelpieces. I cannot forget




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that I was there, that an interview took place between other people and me, or

that the photograph captures a moment in my life, and theirs. And yet, time

has passed since that moment, and the photographs now inhabit elsewhere,

plucked from their original homes. Edited and framed with a certain intent the

depictions could be transformed into museum pieces commemoratingDomestic Material Culture and Past Lives.

Again, reflections can be seen between the photographic collection and the

domestic mantelpieces. Any sociological interpretation that proffers the pho-

tographs as perfect pieces of objective history-making is superficial. The

people remain in the picture, possessors still of these silent images. In the

reflection of a mirror, or a television screen, darkly, the shadows remain, dar-

ing me to ignore their presences. It remains a negotiation or contest for

space and voice, for ownership of these images. And yet, these spectres, like the

obliqueness and odd diagonals of some photographs remind me of somethingelse, a duty to commit them to memory, just as informants have memorialized

so many others on their mantelpieces.

The photographs and interview accounts, rather than the material mantel-

pieces, have become the focal point of the final explanation, fixed in straight

lines of text and rectangular photographs, far removed from the wandering,

elusive processes that constituted the mantelpiece display and the interview.

Several layers are sedimented upon these two original actions, which once

were separate, but are now conjoined in this textual marriage. In an ideal

realm, the explanations offered for why and how people put these miniaturedisplays on show on their mantelpieces would be a production whose infor-

mants would have equal billing they and I. But they will always be the oth-

ers, whose ideas are given credit, as their voices sink to the whispers of ghosts,

sinking with the material down into the past. As time goes on, the fleshly bod-

ies that produced the interviews are fossilized into flat black text, their produc-

tions crushed into the perfect frame of the edited photograph. The question,

then, is how to produce a text which frames all these times, places and people:

neither a grotesque chimera, which shows all too literally the creatures from

which it is made, nor a smoothly rendered piece of art that conceals theprocesses and relations of its production.

Display

You go to other peoples houses, dont you, and you just get an impression, Thats

what goes on a mantelpiece. Thats just the kind of stuff people keep there. You

wouldnt put a saucepan up there, would you? It would be inappropriate. And its

kind of half storage, half display. (Catrin, aged 25)

Mantelpieces are joint efforts, even though the final displays might be the act

of one person, usually (in this Cardiff project) a woman. Indeed, the negotia-

tion and contestation of space resonated through many accounts, as women




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spoke of the desire to preserve the mantelpiece as a tidy, uncluttered place,

undisturbed by the ephemeral clutter of the husbands and children.

Nevertheless, many mantelpieces are about families, human relations and

human histories. But the seemingly simple act of taking a photograph at the

interview exerted a curious change over these creations, for the slant ofmemory twisted these photographs into nostalgic visions (see Rybczynski,

1986, for an illuminating discussion of nostalgia). The mundane, manipu-

lated by the passage of time, and the aesthetic dignity lent by a photograph,

became newly framed by memory.

Indeed, the danger with mantelpiece displays is the temptation the structure

offers to aestheticize the past: that proscenium arch writes a narrative which

might be lost in the random scattering of objects. As one informant said, I talk,

and you can create a narrative out of it. Not only he and I, but also the apparent

coherence of the mantelpiece, are participants in the co-construction of mean-ing. These are specifically visual productions: some look very nice, while others

are a terrible mess of papers and photos and bowls of screws. Ongoing lives are

present in the oddments, between the gaps of the permanent or ideal display: the

wedding invitation, the confiscated toy, or the film awaiting development.

Informants viewed their very beautiful set pieces, perfect in symmetry, as repre-

sentative of a life already lived. In the interviews, they constructed biographies

around these permanent displays, which connected them with absent times,

places and people. Yet these commemorations could be seen as idealized versions

of the past, a neatened bricolage that occludes anything disruptive to the smoothstream of memory. The same can be said of the photographs, which begin as

awkwardly angled conglomerates of the mantelpiece, the television perhaps and

odd parts of feet, bookshelves and toys. These are then cut to size, to fit the frame

of paper and text. The final text somehow confers on this collection of pictures

and writing a certainty which unedited confusion of spoken words and pho-

tographs does not possess. Similarly, one informant spoke of the need for the per-

fect photograph for an empty frame on the mantelpiece, and another of finding

the right frame for a badly framed picture above it. A frame sets something apart,

inviting another look and interpretation.Therefore, I was left with the question of how to present visual materials in

the final text as a part of the whole: attached, having an effect, and affected by

immediate textual context and wider networks of cultural assumptions. Just as

the mantelpiece appears as neat linear display, hinting at the temporal linear-

ity of narrative accounts, thus the written part of the text took on the appear-

ance of a tidy account, despite the fact that its production had been a process

more akin to making a garden (Munro, 2002): apparently chaotic, disrupted,

affected by the weather and involving pruning, planting and moving the

shrubbery. Winstanley (2000) incorporated small pictorial and photographic

parts of her doctoral thesis within the body of the text; this had an effect of

integrating, at least in appearance, written and pictured elements, and also

highlights the often-ignored characteristic of text: it is a visual substance and




16/21

cultural artefact. Visual anthropology is moving more into digital and hyper-

mediated realms, further problematizing representation, presence and inter-

pretation (see Rothenbuhler and Coman, 2005 for discussion; also Dicks et al.,

2006; Pink, 2004).

In order to open up multiple perspectives for interpreting the data collected, Idecided to extend the research findings beyond the principal book. I wanted this

to stand alone (since it is very trying for a reader constantly to be directed to other

places), but to make exploration into other modes of presentation and interpre-

tation possible. Thus, the photographs that I took and those taken by informants,

together with their questionnaire sketches, are all presented, unedited, in a CD-

Rom at the back of the book. This allows what would have been impossibly bulky

in material form, showing readers all visual data in its imperfect, poorly angled,

badly drawn, shadowy, unflashy form. In addition, a supplementary booklet con-

nects informants with their mantelpieces, providing a short biography of eachperson using information they gave in the postal questionnaire, together with

their pencil sketch and photographs I took of each mantelpiece. Meanwhile, the

year-long autophotographic studies and other visual data are currently stored

and displayed in galleries on a password-protected website, which will be the

focus for a planned participative project with the informants. The use of

autophotography as a research method is too complex for brief discussion here,

and will be written up following the new project.

Of course, this method of display (and storage) also allows me to be showy

in the body of the text, since the mess has been tucked away in the margin.Therefore, flanking the chapters, and in the gaps between each of those writ-

ten artefacts are these visual spaces. Like the gaps on the mantelpieces, they

are not really empty, but accounted for differently from the rest of the display.

Whereas vases, candlesticks, photographs and mirrors had narrative, often

biographical accounts constructed around them by informants, the things in

the gaps were of a different order. These intruders, temporarily displaced from

their proper homes, such as toe-nail clippers, letters for the post, or an unde-

veloped film, were unmentioned until I asked informants about them, making

the gaps visible. Similarly, then, the visual plates in the final text are uncap-tioned, deliberately separated from the written/verbal accounts of the remem-

berable. They are highly edited, aestheticized versions of the original

collection of photographs and sketches: a gold-framed collage of mirrors; a

series of mantelpiece/television pairings; 16 Christmases and so on. In con-

junction with the text, the biographic supplement and the CD-Rom, they are

designed to highlight the problem of method in re-presenting research find-

ings (see Hurdley, 2006b).

Conclusion

Life may not be an imitation of art, but ordinary conduct, in a sense, is an imita-

tion of the properties, a gesture at the exemplary forms, and the primal




17/21

realization of these ideals belongs more to make-believe than to reality. (Goffman,

1986 [1974]: 562)

The recent material turn in social research recognizes that objects, technolo-

gies and material environments are simultaneously material, cultural and social

(Haldrup and Larsen, 2004). Rather than ascribe affectivity to objects as a theo-retical postscript, a genealogical ethnographic approach (Borgerson and Rehn,

2003) can bridge the perceived gap between immaterial and material, theory

and everyday practice. Recent discussions in visual methods have recalled the

photograph from abstract image to framed materials of social and cultural inter-

action (Edwards, 2002). This discussion of collecting and presenting data has

brought into focus the relationship between material culture as everyday prac-

tice and the study of material culture. The processes and materials of fieldwork,

analysis and presentation must engage with material cultural practices in a way

that does not freeze-frame the relationship as a neat snapshot.I have already discussed the relationship between accounts constructed

around objects and the co-construction of moral identities during interviews

(Hurdley, 2006a). I concluded that discussion by commenting on the added

dimension to analysis that the collection and presentation of visual data would

bring to the project. Yet I would argue that, just as visual and narrative ver-

sions of data analysis add richness to the interpretation, so visual material

artefacts and narrative/biographical accounts are all materials with which

informants build versions of mediated experience. These are cultural practices,

of which the material culture of the home is one category. The narrative/pho-tographic accounts I gathered can be seen as drawing on the moral traditions

of the community (Goffman, 1986 [1974]: 562), just as mantelpieces and

their displays are iconic or mythic in British culture. Further, if we follow

Goffmans view, everyday life, real enough in itself, often seems to be a lami-

nated adumbration of a pattern or model that is itself a typification of quite

uncertain realm status (1986 [1974]: 562).

It is not my intent here to explore further the uncertainty of this (possibly)

ideal realm. I wish, rather, to emphasize the point that the problem of fram-

ing visual data within the conventions of an academic text can be perceived

simply as one of authenticity, interpretation and authorial power. However, I

argue that the problem is of a different order, relating to the framing of expe-

rience by individual members by means of various types of social materials

and techniques. Thus, while photographs can be viewed as second-order rep-

resentations of particular mantelpiece displays, they can also be taken as non-

verbal, non-textual frames of experience, of the rememberable.

The presentation of text and photographs can present the common materials

of everyday domestic life as extraordinary. By acknowledging that space, cultural

display and personal accounts (material, spoken and visual) are negotiated and

frequently contested particularly when interpreted as parts of the history-

making process (Mills, 1959) it has also illuminated complex relations

between the permanent ideal and the poorly arranged, unpolluted mess of life,




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and the problem of presenting visual data from researching mundane domestic

practices. Finely edited and framed photographs might show the bones of the

story, a pure anatomy of domestic display that any museum might show us, but

these can be wrapped in the mistakes, lies even, that are the flesh of story,

memory and experience. Framelessness is itself a frame and in museum cura-torship there has been a recent turn towards explicit contextualisation (Phillips,

1997: 208), directing the viewer just as Benjamin (1955) had noted of photo-

graphic captions. Also, as Berger (1972) shows, a caption can utterly change the

way in which a picture is perceived. And so, my artfully disordered family

album, or album of families, is another prism, just like the perfectly presented

symmetry of ordered themes, tidy frames and neat conclusion of the text. It is

another frame, a presentational genre (Atkinson, 1990), just as the mantelpieces

I photographed were a particular rendering on a particular day of the focal

point of the living room. Yet this can be seen as a part in a broader comment onhow people organize experience, mediated through various frames of materials

displayed in their homes and the narrative accounts they construct around these

displays, when prompted by an interviewer.

After a series of processes, these visual materials have undergone a certain

transubstantiation. They are now parts of something else, a research text,

and without going (apparently) back and back into these processes (see

Goffman, 1986 [1974]: 1620), that is how they will stay, for now. I have

chosen to organize some into certain neatened orders on the page, to offer dif-

ferent interpretations. Others, however, are purposefully disordered spatter-ings across the page, or poorly cut and coloured, like a bad hairdressers work.

The viewer will doubtless find meanings in them. In showing the inter-relat-

edness of social interactions, of domestic space, objects and narratives, and of

photographic and spoken accounts, multi-modal methods of presentation

can illuminate the complex dimensions both of home lives and of enquiry

into the domestic interior.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

This was developed from a paper presented to the American Sociological

Association annual meeting in 2005. I would like to thank the three anony-

mous referees for their helpful and stimulating comments on an earlier version

of this article. I am also grateful to the ESRC, which funded the doctoral

project (Award no. R42200134124), and the informants who took part.

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RACHEL HURDLEY recently completed her doctoral thesis exploring domestic display

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Social Sciences. Her research interests include mantelpieces, corridors and other cul-

tural materials and practices. Address: School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff

University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK.

[email: [email protected]]


Hurley 07 Focal Points- Framing Material Culture and Visual Data

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