This article retraces the emergence of visual ethnography before deconstructing the uses of photographic evidence gathered for my book Changing Works: a visual ethnography of industrializing agriculture in 20th-century America. It discusses techniques of visual documentation and argumentation, including the formal properties of pictures, the influence of framing and captioning, and the use of existing photographic archives and how to control their built-in biases. Recognizing that visual information is selected and constructed in distinct ways does not destroy or diminish their worth. Rather, it allows the alert ethnographer to utilize them with more caution and subtlety.
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Douglas Harper (2003) studied this question.
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