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Focal points: framing material culture and visual data Rachel Hurdley Qualitative Research 2007; 7; 355 DOI: 10.1177/1468794107078516 The online version of this article can be found at: http://qrj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/3/355

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A RT I C L E

Focal points: framing material culture and visual data

Q R

355

Qualitative Research Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) vol. 7(3) 355–374

RACHEL HURDLEY Cardiff University, UK

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.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS: autophotography, display, frames, home, memory, photography, practice, representation, 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 collected 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 the mantelpiece in the living room, since this was where particular artefacts seemed to be set apart and ordered according to combined practices of sociocultural convention and personal selection.

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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 everyday practice, since ‘the most seemingly trivial fields may turn out to hold the greatest potential for cultural analysis’ (Gullestad, 1993: 159). Similarly, presentations of visual data are culturally bounded ‘fields’ that require the same methodological attentiveness in current debates regarding the ‘crisis of representation’ (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, contingent practices of positioning, selecting and editing material culture in the home. The article is specifically concerned with methods of framing and displaying 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 problematizes 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 interview 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 just snapshots: 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 photographs 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-relatedness of 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 multimodality and mixing methods (Mason, 2006).

Seeing double: words and visions The aim of the Cardiff study was to pay attention to taken-for-granted, conventionalized 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

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Hurdley: Focal points

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 taperecorded in their living rooms (with one exception, a man who saw me in his office) and transcribed. I also took snapshots of the mantelpieces and other display 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 intervals 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 historian 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 production of both book and exhibition, including photo-elicitation, autophotography 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 suggested 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 interpreted, 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

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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 displacing it to another realm or order, to which it does not belong. As Newton commented in our interview, however, photographs of private, contemporary domestic interiors are not conventional ‘museum exhibits’. First, photographs 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 mantelpiece above the hurly-burly of daily activity and ephemeral goods). Second, the subject matter – the ordinary, private British home interior – is not extraordinary. 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 ‘rules’ with 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 visitor’s homes, yet it was ‘unphotographable’.

This attitude to the materials of ‘Household Choices’ was particularly apposite 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 few mantelpieces, 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 technique, of their everyday domestic settings. Yet it is because of their ordinariness 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 illustrate verbal accounts and written ‘expert’ analyses, but also ‘spoke for themselves’ 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 collection and presentation becomes the focal point of the paper.

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Hurdley: Focal points

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 middle ground between nobility and the masses, distinguishing it from paintings and mass-produced prints. Writing about family photographs, he notes that, in the houses of the petits 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 material markers of past family achievements in the public realm. Similarly, Banks (2001) notes the cultural specificity of domestic photographic displays: no distinction 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 mother’s house to his dead father, and that in middle-class homes the mantelpiece may serve a ‘similar shrine-like function’ (Banks, 2001: 119).

Unlike medals and rare fragments of old wallpaper, photographs are reproducible; yet who would want to, outside the family circle? Curiously, these reproducible, yet unique markers and products of social convention do, from a distance, all look the same. Selected to be raised above the business of domestic 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 convenient illustrations for accounts about the displays. Like informants’ mantelpieces, 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 Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological approach to society as members’ ongoing work, ‘with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement 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 then produced.

The landscape of visual methods in social enquiry A mantelpiece is only a picture. It’s 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). Halle’s study of art and class in the American home invites photographs as illustration to the text, as does Painter’s 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, Gormley’s statues, elements of the ‘Household Choices’ project and so on.

Although an edited collection, this overall topic seems to lend a resonance and coherence 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 ‘plurisensory’ aspects of home. I knew that photographs were essential to my data collection, since I wanted them not only as aide-memoires when analysing interview accounts, but also to add their ‘multivocality’ to the final text, rather than being ‘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, storing 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 latter for private – by the display of artefacts. Maleuvre (1999) makes the connection 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 celebrates places of everyday practice as warehouses of memory (1984). Historical

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Hurdley: Focal points

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 people’s homes, in which the informant is the ‘other’, or the spectator, can have effects beyond mediation (Gregory, 2003), creating a remembered ‘background’ for landscaping one’s own domestic interior. This emphasis on close, local empirical work is iterated in Miller (2002), in order to uncover object relations and meanings that accumulate and change over time, thus contesting the ability of grand narratives to engage with the complex mediations of cultural consumption within individual 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 society’s ‘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, in displayed 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 informant’s 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 displays themselves, 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 constructed 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 startingpoint for discussion.

A recent review of visual anthropology argues that viewing the ‘visible and pictorial worlds as social processes…provides a perspective lacking in other theories’ (Ruby, 2005: 165). Audiovisual technologies can record visual culture, based on epistemology that ‘culture is manifested through visual symbols embedded in gestures, ceremonies, rituals and artefacts situated in constructed 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 written representation in ways that do not simply explain the researcher’s approach but reveal the very processes by which the positionality of researcher and informant 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 camera 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 see how 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 academic 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 photographs 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 wedding 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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Hurdley: Focal points

A snapshot on method Having framed the empirical content with a discussion of historical and ongoing 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 collection 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 people’s 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 people’s 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 people’s homes and lived experience in their homes, a space which is still considered a private, emotionally charged place of negotiation and conflict (see, for example, Chapman and Hockey’s 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 the visual 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 photographs 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 don’t sit around chatting about it, or looking at it, or looking at things on it – it’s 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, I’m 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 masterpieces 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 perspective 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 coffee tables tended to get in the way of straightforward camera angles.

Paradoxically, not arranging the room for a photo-shoot, as a magazine photographer 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 manifested 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 as having effects in the aesthetics of home: the focal point of the mantelpiece display, and my photographic productions. Meanwhile, my initial judgements of the meaning of mantelpiece displays as visual manifestations of taste, cultural

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Hurdley: Focal points

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 cuddly sheep). Thus, initial categorizing of informants through viewing their visual/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 during 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 cumulative, or had been done so long ago that it was forgotten. However, two of the female informants had made it a priority following recent house moves, considering 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 interpretation. Eventually, common sense prevailed, and they were arranged for the best fit in the limited space. It occurred to me that the chance groupings on informants’ mantelpieces could be transformed, like this arrangement, into highly symbolic arrangements, and subsequently into typologies that were entirely detached from original intent or function.

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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 prominence, emphasizing the role of the year-long autophotographic study by informants 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 photographs I had taken, now sliced from their domestic framework to be reconstructed as book chapters and photographic plates.

Editing It’s certainly not a display area, it’s just another shelf … You can always make another display area if you really had to. … It’s just that this is so unattractive, it hasn’t been developed. (Jane, aged 41)

As the photographs became productions in their own right, they invited speculative editing. The ease of computer editing permitted repeated changes.

Complicating this technological process, however, were the meanings attached by 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 to cultural 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 sliced out. It is an easy procedure, since they are in the lower corners of the photograph. 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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Hurdley: Focal points

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 commemorating ‘Domestic Material Culture’ and ‘Past Lives’.

Again, reflections can be seen between the photographic collection and the domestic mantelpieces. Any sociological interpretation that proffers the photographs 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, daring 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 something else, 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 mantelpieces, 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 miniature displays on show on their mantelpieces would be a production whose ‘informants’ would have equal billing – they and I. But they will always be ‘the others’, 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 bodies that produced the interviews are fossilized into flat black text, their productions 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 the processes and relations of its production.

Display You go to other people’s houses, don’t you, and you just get an impression, ‘That’s what goes on a mantelpiece’. That’s just the kind of stuff people keep there. … You wouldn’t put a saucepan up there, would you? It would be inappropriate. And it’s 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 negotiation 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 of memory twisted these photographs into nostalgic visions (see Rybczynski, 1986, for an illuminating discussion of nostalgia). The mundane, manipulated 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 meaning. 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 representative 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 smooth stream 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 photographs does not possess. Similarly, one informant spoke of the need for the ‘perfect’ 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 linearity of narrative accounts, thus the written part of the text took on the appearance 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

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Hurdley: Focal points

cultural artefact. Visual anthropology is moving more into digital and hypermediated realms, further problematizing representation, presence and interpretation (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, I decided 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 interpretation possible. Thus, the photographs that I took and those taken by informants, together with their questionnaire sketches, are all presented, unedited, in a CDRom 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 connects informants with their mantelpieces, providing a short biography of each person 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 written 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 undeveloped film, were unmentioned until I asked informants about them, making the gaps ‘visible’. Similarly, then, the visual plates in the final text are uncaptioned, deliberately separated from the written/verbal accounts of the ‘rememberable’. 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 conjunction with the text, the biographic supplement and the CD-Rom, they are designed to highlight the problem of method in re-presenting research findings (see Hurdley, 2006b).

Conclusion Life may not be an imitation of art, but ordinary conduct, in a sense, is an imitation of the properties, a gesture at the exemplary forms, and the primal

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The recent ‘material turn’ in social research recognizes that ‘objects, technologies and material environments are simultaneously material, cultural and social’ (Haldrup and Larsen, 2004). Rather than ascribe affectivity to objects as a theoretical 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 interaction (Edwards, 2002). This discussion of collecting and presenting data has brought into focus the relationship between material culture as everyday practice 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 versions 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/photographic 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 Goffman’s view, ‘everyday life, real enough in itself, often seems to be a laminated 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 framing 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 experience by individual members by means of various types of social materials and techniques. Thus, while photographs can be viewed as second-order representations of particular mantelpiece displays, they can also be taken as nonverbal, 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 ‘historymaking’ 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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Hurdley: Focal points

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 curatorship there has been a recent turn ‘towards explicit contextualisation’ (Phillips, 1997: 208), directing the viewer just as Benjamin (1955) had noted of photographic 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 on how 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]: 16–20), that is how they will stay, for now. I have chosen to organize some into certain neatened orders on the page, to offer different interpretations. Others, however, are purposefully disordered spatterings across the page, or poorly cut and coloured, like a bad hairdresser’s work.

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

AC K N OW 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 anonymous 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 practices. She is currently workiing as a research associate in the Cardiff School of Social Sciences. Her research interests include mantelpieces, corridors and other cultural materials and practices. Address: School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK. [email: Hurdleyr1@cardiff.ac.uk]

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