Visual Essays Unbound: Understanding an Interdisciplinary Form

As more and more journals (Visual Studies/Visual Communication/Visual Anthropology) and other venues open up to the possibilities of publishing in creative and image based ways, the question of what makes up a visual essay and how to go about understanding the form and its possibilities becomes more pressing. The visual essay remains a contentious form, yet retains the potential to unite ways of representing scholarship, through its “dynamic and hybrid character” (Pauwels 2012). Grady (1991) argued for the visual essay’s importance in the future development of visual sociology and visual studies: “Not despite, but because [it] is a medium for artistic expression.” However, wariness of the aesthetic power of the visual essay remains, often automatically yet unproductively pitted against its empirical capacities. This workshop approach begins by recognizing images as always already anarchic and post-disciplinary.

The operative notion of visual gestures toward post/disciplinarity by opening to creative expressive means (altered images, metaphoric representation beyond photography e.g., Hansen et al., 2021). Flexibility in modalities accepted within the form include more voices speaking across disciplines. With this workshop we will tease out the potential of visual essays to include and integrate “looking” from various disciplinary angles. After looking at the evolution of the form, we revisit two experiments (Argentina, Mexico) with deconstructed visual essays conducted with students from diverse fields. Second, we model the deconstructed visual essay process to demonstrate how visual essays work as inter-cultural and interdisciplinary tools.

Participants will be invited to bring some photos and to propose a topic for a visual essay, as we work through some activities and check out some of the ethical implications.

For Whitehead (1929): “We can understand order, because in the recesses of our own experience there is a contrasting element which is anarchic.” Relying on this juxtaposition, we consider how working through/with the visual fosters inclusiveness while preserving critical attitudes towards experience, documentation, and creation through the revolutionary format of the visual essay. As a “a cross-cutting field of inquiry” (Pauwels 2010: 559), visual social science ruptures rationales that justify artificially splintered visual scholarly practices through disciplinary gatekeeping. 

This workshop experiments with “the study of the visual and the study through and by the visual” using the visual essay as an interdisciplinary interface by asking: What happens when we do not assume linearity between concepts, ideas, process, data, or bodies?

The workshop will be facilitated by Dr. Carolina Cambre.

This is an event hosted by the Visual Methods Studio, a working group sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture.

Participants are welcome to mask for the duration of the workshop.