No Free Lunches — Paying One’s Way in Ethnographic Research
As a Visual Sociologist, I am fascinated by identity markers, display, and community formation. I am also fascinated by the idea value, power, and social utility of the picture, as both a social tool and a tool of social investigation. This is actually what I teach in my Visual Sociology classes — and yes, there is a textbook called Visual Sociology, published by Routledge and written by visual sociologist Douglas Harper. It talks about both of the things I just mentioned: the significance of photographs in our social environment and how to use the photograph as a tool of social investigation. But it is lacking in one aspect: that of reading photographs as cultural texts.
In the picture above, the image is a visual record of this community’s formation, as a group of mostly middle schoolers who have become the social undergrowth of the growing “street fashion” scene at Seoul Fashion Week, which I consider to be one of the most sociologically interesting cultural events in the city of Seoul, a marker of a crucial shift in the evolution of popular culture in Korea, not to mention an event that’s a whole bunch of fun to attend and cover. But what’s interesting about this picture is not just the fact that they’re almost all in middle school, or the fact that the girl in the iridescent green jacket is an elementary school student, but also how I came to know these things. Not only is this picture interesting as a collection of visual elements we can see, but the picture itself is also as an excuse for me — a middle-aged, unfashionable, racially Other foreign man who speaks Korean-as-a-second-language weirdly— to interview them, get a sense of their backgrounds, motivation for attending, and also learn about how they came to form a community online.
My camera gave me an excuse to not only attend the event, but to interact with a community that is composed of people who I am very much not like, and in which I am a really strange Stranger from a Strange Land. My camera allowed me to participate in an event that allowed me to be an insider, as a member of a social field concerned with accomplishing various fashion-related goals — amassing more social capital as measured by the number of Instagram followers, making connections and getting more work as a model, photographer, or stylist, or simply being able to make more fashion-interested friends. As a street fashion photographer armed with a fancy camera and lighting equipment, not to mention a large portfolio of pictures and experience (as well as a public figure profile on Naver, which helps), I was able to enter the event as a member of the fashion field, a fellow participant. In other words, I had a reason to be there.
This solves a huge problem in the approach to ethnographic research, which is the kind of research anthropologists such as the (in)famous Margaret Mead did — the study of people and communities through “participant-observation.” A lot of lip service is given to the noble pursuit of being a “participant-observer” — living “with the natives,” so to speak, as one of them. And recording them. And writing about them. But this approach always ignores a fundamental problem in the data gathering, not to mention the ethics.
Nanook of the North was a silent film released in 1922. It’s been called (somewhat erroneously and somewhat correctly, by present-day standards) the first documentary ever made. Butthe entire enterprise was problematic. Robert Flaherty’s colonial gaze was in overdrive as he helped set up shots, staged certain moments, and at times made Nanook and family/friends fit western social definitions as he represented Inuit life through the camera for the screened consumption of “civilized” westerners. As he did so, his way of understanding/interpreting things colored the “reality” he was supposedly observing (but altering as he did so) and which the audience was taking pleasure in consuming. This wasn’t Inuit life-on-a-platter; it was Inuit life as seen through the Flaherty-distortion-field. And such has been the problem with ethnography/anthropology since the beginning of that mode of inquiry, which is related to the birth of the visual medium of film and photography.
The problem is that Flaherty was from a completely different planet and solar system, socially speaking, than Nanook and his peoples. He wasn’t a “participant-observer” in the romantic sense of living with and becoming like the natives. He was always a problematically closed-minded outsider who could only see through the narrow bias of his culture. He only saw the patterns he could easily make out, as trained by his home culture-based frame of reference. Beyond this, he also “staged” particular ways of behaving in front of the camera for an audience that wanted to see a native act native, as in not like them. But then again, it’s hard to look back upon Flaherty with too harsh of a 2018 eye, since the very ideas of the truth-based “documentary” vs. the long-form, fiction film had scarcely really hardened yet. Nor had even the academic fields of Sociology or Anthropology, for that matter. So, while we might call Flaherty a bad participant-observer in the sense of Margaret Mead-in-Samoa sense of the words, we havee to remember that the ethical standards and rules of truth and treating sources had nary been developed at the time, even though film was nevertheless being used to represent the “truth” of peoples and cultures across the world.
But the debate about how the camera and the outside observer creates certain kinds of truths as it enters communities has never ceased to evolve. As has the idea of what outsiders can really see with their lenses as they enter closed communities with particular cultures. For example, documentarian and ethnographer Jennifer Livingston’s 1991 film Paris Is Burning evoked many of the critiques that were leveled at Nanook of the North, which premiered in 1922. Although many of the critiques were updated for modern concerns and were specific to that film and the community it studied, it still centrally approached the crux of the problems as having to do with the motivations and biases of the participant-observer and what her duties and obligations to her subjects were. Although in Livingston’s case, many of the concerns ended up revolving around the question of commercial compensation and alleged exploitation of her subjects, a more fundamental question seems to actually be to what extent can a cultural outsider truly access and know what’s going on inside the group well enough to represent it?
And before we even get to that question, the even more fundamental one of what do the subjects “get “ out of opening up for an outsider? And one that I consider a lot myself has to do with which of my power statuses am I inappropriately leveraging in order to gain access to this community? The unanswered question for most ethnographers seems to be what do my subjects get out of talking/working with me? For academic researchers, it can be quite problematic, depending on what one is doing, to pay one’s subjects or somehow materially motivate them to talk to an investigator. Should they talk to me because I’m a fancy university professor? Or occupy a higher social class? And even if we do not think that to be the reason, what if it is indeed the reason subjects are talking to us? Are we, as participant-observers, really even seeing reality as it actually is for these people, or are we just telling Nanook to put on a show for our camera and our exploitative gaze? Can we really even “participate?” What are we even really observing?
But I approach these questions more directly, simply, and pragmatically. My experience using the camera to look at social groups in Korea has forced me to approach the problem with a different set of questions. I have abandoned altogether the idea that I can or should be considered a member — honorary or not — of the group of people I find interesting. I find it much more natural and reasonable to expect people to interact with me for a fathomable reason besides I am a fancy professor deigning to want to study them. And might it not be better to expect an interaction with subjects to be as reciprocal and mutually beneficial as most other social interactions in the world at large? The question that is rarely adequately answered is Why would I expect this person to talk to me?
Hence was borne my approach of being a “participant-practitioner.” As an ethnographer with a camera, my reasons for wanting to record/get to know a community are best made clear in saying I want to shoot them and provide them with pictures, something which has become valuable currency in many fields of artistic and expressive endeavors. By entering into an interaction with a particular group in an understandable, sensical manner such as a public show, industry event, or coverage for a weekly Korea Times story that can offer a bit of desired publicity, I am able to give the subjects something they might want and need, as opposed to asking for a kind of cultural credit or charity without having earned the trust yet. In this way, I become an equal as a member of the field, in a way that makes sense to anyone within it.
This picture above, from the New Year’s Eve drag show at The Rabbit Hole Pub in Haebangchon, is a zone of interaction that aligns various interests in which the performer can get a picture she might like and find valuable, the venue might be able to use for publicity, and be something I can use to make good content for my column here and add to my portfolio. Aldso, in a general sense, members can see the attention as helping to raise awareness about an inherently interesting and valuable community that others might be able to connect with. It’s a win-win-win-win, I think it fair to say. And I have a reason to be there, with members of the community understanding what I’m doing and why I’m there. It is only in this sense that I think I am a participant in any way, and my raison d’etre in that social space is as clear as saying “I’m here to cover the show.” To best see how this operates, the picture below offers itself as a good example.
Here, to be offered the photographic access to this small community of drag/transgendered performers in Trance in 2002 required the extension of a far longer line of social credit than I had, frankly, earned. Given, it was a different media environment and the Internet did not operate the way it does now, but the parameters of my access were far less obvious and had to be actively negotiated up front, along with strict expectations of privacy (which ended up being, much to my surprise, any performers on stage or who posed for the camera were fair game for publishing, with the owner being quite happy to get nice pictures from an actual photographer).
It works the same way for taking pictures of and getting to know the street fashion culture in Seoul. In 2007, I started to get a sense that something was afoot on the streets of Seoul, so I decided to start taking ethnographic portraits of what people were wearing on the streets, what they were doing with clothing. At the time, I had to do a lot of explaining to subjects to even get them to fathom what I was asking to do with them and my camera. Interestingly enough, in a time when “street fashion” wasn’t a thing, the biggest obstacle was to convince people that a picture of a non-famous person, especially with a super-fancy camera, had inherent value. It just didn’t make social sense back then. But nowadays, it is a thing, with a clear set of relationships, responsibilities, and even protocols. “Street fashion” or being a “street fashion photographer” just makes sense to people now. It’s easy to get. People know why I’m there; they know why the picture is happening; they share a vested interest in its production and publication; and there is a fairly clear set of expectations about our relationship, rules, and roles.
This picture is one of my recent favorites, precisely because the picture is a perfect capture of expectations about roles, relationships, and picture protocols. One of the most common comments with this picture is that isn’t this an “upskirt” shot and “does she know” I’m taking it from a low angle, and “did she approve of the picture”? Firstly, she’s looking dead into the camera. Secondly, she’s dressed in a way such that what normally goes inside the skirt — garters, the tops of stockings , upper thighs— has been purposefully exploded and displayed outside. I was very sure that was the point of the look, as my interview with this young florist made clear.
Before even getting to the fact that other generally inside-the-skirt things were noticeably absent from the purposeful inversion — such as panties or other private parts — it should be clear that yes, she knew what she was doing, she understood the angle and the point (I showed her the pictures as we went, as I do with all my subjects) of having the Korean flags and the sky showing up in the background. And given that I had picked up on the fact that she was showing off her tattoo (not to mention her self-described feminist point for doing so), I think it was a good case of letting the camera align interests while also making it clear to all involved (these professional-level fashion pose-striking subjects know exactly what they’re doing, and they know what’s being shown and what isn’t) what I was doing, low camera angle and all. But she was in it for the better-than normal picture. She knew what I did and where the picture would come out, and that it was going to come out somehow, somewhere. That’s why one goes to a Fashion Week.
In any case, being a participant-practitioner is a much stronger position from which to mount a social investigation while also exploding the fantasy that one is entering a cultural community as some kind of member of equal standing or possessed of similar interests for being there. Being an equal in terms of a social exchange within a field of aligned interests makes much more sense and seems far more pragmatically honest and culturally respectful than any other approach.Being up front about the fact that “I want a picture for my blog/newspaper story/portfolio” is much more honest and respectful of subjects than the delusional assertion “Heeeeey, I’m one of you guys this week. Just do what you normally do and try to look natural for my camera.” That’s Flaherty-era thinking.
Being a participant-practitioner is how I’ve navigated and negotiated access to communities and culture of which I am obviously not a member and will continue to do so to gain the trust of new subjects and access to their valuable stories, which they want communicated to the world. Given the formation patterns and motivations found in communities that form in or through virtual, mediated spaces in Seoul, along with their heavy interest in gaining better media materials and exposure, it makes sense to provide them with the very commodity that canjustify/explain/enable one’s reason for being there in the first place. After all, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” — even, and especially, in ethnography.
