Review: Caruana & Fox, Behind the Image: Research in Photography, Chapter 3: Practice as Research, 2012

Practising photography – taking photographs – is a primary part of the research process. It is easy to just shoot photographs and not record what you do, yet if you stop for a moment and consider the significance of how you are photographing – when, where, why, with which tools and what assistance – it all starts to become part of an interesting research story.  p61

The main idea here is that image making is not the final act in the process of photography, but an ongoing practice informed by other types of activity, what the authors refer to as research - reading, viewing images, listening to and participating in discussions.  Photographers are encouraged to go out early in the planning stages and start capturing preliminary images.  These become objects on which to reflect and develop.

I was interested to see how they would flesh this out, but the chapter turns into a collection of lists that don’t seem to have much to do with the process of research.

First up is a discussion on the differences in studio and the street shooting, followed by brief descriptions of photographic types (landscape, documentary, fashion, art), as well as paragraphs on editing, post production, and reflection.  An evaluation form covering many of the steps in the Proposal outlined in chapter 1 is included as handy reference and is perhaps the chapter’s best feature, which concludes with another interesting activity only loosely related to the theme or content of the chapter, that of recreating a classic photo.

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