Workshop

Hosted by: Society for Visual Anthropology

Of interest to: Students, researchers, applied, generalists

Primary Theme: Humanistic Anthropology, Technical Skill Development

(5-0955) Crafting Visual Arguments

Level of Audience: Intermediate

Click here to register for this workshop and add it to your existing Annual Meeting registration.

This interactive workshop will take you from conceptualizing and creating images in the field, to editing choices and post-production software, and end with considerations on publication and display. On the journey we will discuss technical matters as well as explore the ethical, theoretical, and methodological issues key to visual argumentation and communication.

We start with a discussion on what makes a good image (both technically & aesthetically) and how to create one. From there we will advance to a discussion of the opportunities and constraints intrinsic to image-based research and representation. We will work around the question “what constitutes good visual argumentation?” developing specific guidelines for critiquing and constructing academic visual arguments and representations.
Building on this framework, and foregrounding the comparative strengths and weaknesses of visual versus textual media, participants will then be given the opportunity to work on constructing their own “visual arguments.” Further development will then be facilitated via a group debriefing amongst workshop participants. Participants should bring a laptop computer or tablet. Sets of images will be provided, but feel free to bring your own series of 20-40 images related to your research interests.

Learning Objectives:

• Better understand their camera in order to take technically better images in the field as well as how important aesthetics and composition are to an effective photograph.
• Learn how to use photographs as primary text, how to effectively utilize their unique communicative properties to say things in ways text cannot.
• Understand how to best organize one’s digital image collection for retrieval and preservation using a digital assets management program and how to process them to bring out their full potentials.

Organizer(s)

• Jerome Crowder

  Associate Professor
  Inst. for Medical Humanities, U. Texas Medical Branch

Workshop Presenter(s)

• Jonathan Marion

  University of Arkansas