Theoretical-methodological trips and maps. Logbook of a journey between the notion of visual representation as a reflection to one ofpractice and its application in a case study with personal family photographs.

Abstract

This article aims to explain the methodology developed in a research with family and personal photographs. The methodology bears the imprint of the disciplinary journeys that were made around the notion of representation. Throughout this journey, it is possible to identify certain transformations in the senses of this notion. On the one hand, the abandonment of a referential and heteronomous idea of visual representation, for the sake of considering their ways of producing meanings and their capacity for agency. On the other hand, the passage from its exclusive use as sources of empirical information towards its consideration as objects with a social and cultural life and the relevance of the ways of seeing of a determined epoch. Approaches form history, art history, gender studies and visual studies will be analyzed. How to solve different and distant answers to the meaning of an image? We will make explicit our methodological proposal to give an answer to this question. The intention is to ponder in a choral way the instances of production and use of the images as well as their content and the relationship with other representations. The objective underlying this methodological approach is to analyze the agencial quality of visual representations in the construction of the social. The notion of performativity that is used in gender studies will be central. Through this notion and practices of re-presentation we can trace how the images do something specific in the construction of social differences, how they are linked to a wider context, what the spectators do with them and what possibilities there are resistances.