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Introduction and Editorial

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2021): Visual Spaces of Change: photographic documentation of environmental transformations

Photographic narratives of urban transformations

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Abstract

Time, space, scale and movement are essential aspects of visual data production. Significant changes in cities’ flows can transpire in just a few minutes, hours or days, span several years or even decades. A diachronic study of an urban environment could therefore concentrate on the repetitive patterns of many activities and phenomena that occur during a day or focus on transformations over much more extended periods of time. There are several photographic methods that specifically focus on documenting this specific change — it is the case of “interval photography”, “time-lapse photography” and other forms of “repeat photography”.1 All these, and others, explicitly aim at sequentially researching social change, and physical and cultural expressions as they develop, over time in a particular physical or cultural space.
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References

  1. Jon Rieger, “Rephotography for Documenting Social Change”, in The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods (2nd ed), eds.
  2. Luc Pauwels and Dawn Mannay (Beverly Hills, CA/London: Sage, 2020), 99-113.
  3. Luc Pauwels, “Conceptualizing the ‘visual essay’ as a way of generating and imparting sociological insight: Issues, formats and realizations”, Sociological Research Online, 17(1), 2012.
  4. Luc Pauwels, Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
  5. Roland Barthes, “Le message photographique”, In: Communications, 1, 1961