Academic literature on the topic 'Hermeneutic photography'

Purpose Only few festival studies in the Philippines attempted to examine the capability of festivals as folk media to communicate development. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the development-oriented activities and messages in the San Isidro Pahiyas Festival in Lucban, Quezon. Design/methodology/approach The researcher conducted participant observation, ethnographic photography, key informant interview and record review. A historical analysis of the festival’s background, thematic analysis of its list of programs, visual analysis of the photographs guided by Barthes’ (1964) semiology and hermeneutics were employed. Findings Formerly a native ritual before the Hispanic rule in the country, the San Isidro Pahiyas Festival is currently held by the Local Government of Lucban, Quezon, primarily for touristic purposes. The festival’s activities in 2015 reflected the municipality’s dependence on agriculture and the residents’ religiosity, skills and creativity. The adornments during the said celebration likewise gave a glimpse of the residents’ social status, livelihood sources and reverence to Saint Isidore. Through hermeneutics, the researcher also found issues on the residents’ idolatry and their motivation to display their produce during the festival. Research limitations/implications The findings of this study can only hold true for the 2015 celebration of the San Isidro Pahiyas Festival. Despite this, the study finds hermeneutics and Barthes’ (1964) semiology useful for festival studies. It also appeals to folk media studies and postcolonial theories. Originality/value This research provides an unconventional methodology for festival studies, which contributes to the very limited hermeneutic tourism studies abroad and folk media studies in the Philippines.

The purpose of this article is to illustrate moral learning in persons with a psychiatric disability who participated in a nursing intervention, called the photo-instrument. This intervention is a form of hermeneutic photography. The findings are based on a multiple case study of 42 patients and additional interviews with eight of them. Photo groups were organized within three settings of psychiatric services: ambulatory as well as clinical, all situated in the Netherlands. Data were analysed according to hermeneutic and semiotic principles. Two cases are presented. Findings show that voice and face are concepts that help to identify elements of moral learning in the rehabilitation process of persons with a psychiatric disability. During the process patients become more aware of their responsibilities towards themselves and others.

This article examines transnational kinship relations between Gambian parents in the UK and their children and carers in The Gambia, with a focus on the production, exchange and reception of photographs. Many Gambian migrant parents in the UK take their children to The Gambia to be cared for by extended family members. Mirroring the mobility of Gambian migrants and their children as they travel between the UK and The Gambia, photographs document changing family structures and relations. It is argued that domestic photography provides an insight into the representational politics, values and aesthetics of Gambian transatlantic kinship relations. Further, the concept of the moral economy supports a hermeneutics of Gambian family photographic practice and develops our understanding of the visual economy of transnational kinship relations in a number of ways: it draws attention to the way in which the value attributed to a photograph is rooted in shared moral and cultural codes of care within transnational relations of inequality and power; it helps us to interpret Gambians’ responses to and treatment of family photographs; and it highlights the importance attributed to portrait photography and the staging, setting and aesthetics of photographic content within a Gambian imaginary.

Abstract The paper signals the foundations of the new method of teaching mathematics that is currently emerging from the concept of human cognition and the constructivist paradigm. The presented examples of the hermeneutic research conducted for 17 years are concerned with an analysis of the formulated mathematical problems in the language of photographic metaphors. Thoughts expressed through the photographic image and text consisting of the caption and the description (dual coding) reveal the structure of cognitive networks of authors of photographs, which has a special significance in creation of the new didactics that will fulfil the needs of the contemporary photosociety. Mathematical photoeducation free transition between art and mathematics lies on the student’s artistic sensitivity and on enlivening the student’s cognitive expression in a space distant from the classroom (at a lake, in the playground, on the skating ring or during a field excursion to a mineral museum). It utilizes the student’s natural interest in observable natural phenomena and in man-made objects. This kind of creativity, which relies on independent uncovering or constructing of knowledge with the help of a photographic camera, opens the gates to an entirely new space of mathematical didactics, as it brings to students’ awareness specific ways of association leading to accomplishment cognitive processes in relation to abstract mathematical objects.

Why exactly do paintings and photographs affect us, despite being flat, inanimate objects? Merleau-Ponty and Barthes both attempted to answer just as much and arrived at two conflicting accounts of the ontology of image consciousness. In Merleau-Ponty’s conception, paintings offer an infinite number of hermeneutic possibilities, while in Barthes’, photographs are a “closed field of forces,” thereby making their meanings necessarily contingent and circumscribed. In an effort to identify the point of contention between the two theories, this paper first outlines Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of painting and contrasts it with Barthes’ theory of photography. Next, it considers both theses through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, positing that both Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of art and Barthes’ notion of the studium correspond to Sigmund Freud’s idea of the pleasure principle, while the Barthesian notion of the punctum maps onto the Freudian concept of the death drive. Finally, I argue that the crux of Merleau-Ponty’s and Barthes’ disagreement on the metaphysical status of images has to do with the possibility -- or impossibility -- of meaning.

The paper analyses and discusses the perspectives of young people on World Cultural Heritage (WCH), focusing on their presumed reasons of its imbalanced global distribution. The qualitative study is based upon focus groups conducted with 43 secondary school students aged 14–17 years from Lower Saxony, Germany. The findings reveal Eurocentric thinking patterns. Furthermore, a site visit took place after the focus groups exploring the universal and personal values the participants attach to the WCH using hermeneutic photography. Due to these results and building upon an education for sustainable development that empowers learners to become sustainability citizens, the authors provide suggestions for a critical and reflexive World (Cultural) Heritage education.

The main goal of this work is to understand the different uses and social practices expressed in Parque do Flamengo [Rio de Janeiro, Brazil], a World Heritage Site since 2012. Much more than just a leisure space, disputes and tensions are also manifested in Aterro do Flamengo. Sports, commercial, educational, recreational, spiritual and medicinal practices inscribe in this site different logics as well as different memories and body techniques. In the practices of work, sporting and commemorative that were observed in 2018, the body appears as a place of memory. In our analysis, we used a hermeneutic-interpretative approach and a relational anthropological look. The methodology used in this work, has a qualitative nature and makes use of bibliographic and fieldwork research and also photography.

Photography and tourism have been developing in parallel with each other and leaving memories of the trip in photographs still remains as a significant part of traveling today. Tourist photograph is an effective tool to display the way tourists see the destination they visited. However, while there are studies regarding general relationships between photography and tourism, what tourists see and photograph in each destination has not yet profoundly been investigated.This study first investigates images of Kiruna, Sweden, utilized in its promotion as atourist destination to understand how it is expected to be perceived by tourists. Then these images are compared with tourist photographs to understand how they actually respond to this expectation.Also, this thesis aims to add a new perspective to the concept of ‘hermeneutic circle’ proposed by John Urry (1990). Specifically, it takes particular note of ‘nationality’ and ‘culture’, and focuses on two specific tourist groups in Kiruna, Japanese and German tourists, to investigate differences between these nationality groups in the way they perceive Kiruna as a tourist destination. In order to fulfill this aim, Volunteer Employed Photography (VEP) was applied and photographs they took in Kiruna were collected. In order to enrich the photographic data, semi-structured interviews were also conducted with each study participant.The results revealed that the study participants photographed subjects that were both appeared and not appeared in the promotional images of Kiruna. The study also revealed that there were certain differences between Japanese and German tourists in the way they perceived Kiruna and each nationality group has its own hermeneutic circle.

The "linguistic turn" in early twentieth-century philosophy established that through language we not only live in a world but create it as well. Language, in this sense, incorporates the entire range of media and cultural artifacts through which we create and share meaning. In contemporary post-industrial societies, photographic images play a central role in communicating and creating the world in which we live. In part, this increasingly visually oriented culture is possible because we tend to equate what we see in photographs with what is real. Photographs, however, bring to light a vision of the world, not the world itself. From the inception of photography, traditions of aesthetic interpretation have challenged this dominant view. Here, the created image becomes a vehicle for the artist's unique expression. Proponents of social scientific and critique of ideology perspectives, however, reject the aesthetic view and typically see art objects as social constructs, instruments which enhance and maintain a certain social order. Each of these perspectives ultimately holds that the meaning of photographs can be determined objectively. At the same time, each presents a world view which tends to exclude the insights of the others. Any attempt to preserve the apparent insights of these views must, then, transcend the basic contradictions and incompatibilities between them. Philosophical hermeneutics holds that the presumption of an absolute, objective grounding represents a failure to grasp the nature of the path toward understanding, a path which can never arrive at its destination because it always exists in history. It argues that (1) the photograph cannot be transparent to the world for the world is constituted in our representations of it; (2) art is a creation whose origin and meaning always exceeds the artist's own understanding of it; (3) critique is not the application of universal reason but a reading from a particular vantage point and is always grounded in a tradition of its own. Most importantly, however, it calls us to recognize the participatory nature of all understanding, the universality of language and provides a criterion for assessing the relative value of our interpretations across the entire language world.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2009.<br>Title from screen (viewed on August 27, 2009). School of Nursing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Melinda M. Swenson, Kathleen M. Russell, Deborah Stiffler, Larry J. Zimmerman. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-185).

Thesis (M. Tech.) - Central University of Technology, Free State, 2011<br>The purpose of the study is to mitigate the restrictions of ocularcentrism by employing an interactive hermeneutical approach to the creation and interpretation of the implied meanings in a photograph. The principles of hermeneutic phenomenology are applied to outline the putative strengths and weaknesses associated with ocularcentrism as applied to photography and to attempt to illustrate how the proposed model of aesthetic participation may overcome these weaknesses. The literature review shows that ocularcentrism is a mode of perception concerned with a one-sided preference to sight over the other senses and may limit photographers and perceivers to create or interpret meaning in a photograph solely on what they see. Concerning ocularcentrism, it is not the art object alone, but the self-centred worldviews of the photographer and perceiver that limit the basis for the development of an interactive aesthetic experience. The photographer who successfully challenges the ocularcentric worldviews of perceivers in the world of the work succeeds in initiating participation between all the coordinates of the proposed interactive hermeneutical model of aesthetic participation. Interactivity between the coordinates artist, perceiver, artwork and worldviews is achieved through the application of creative strategies during the creation of photographs. These creative strategies may include facets that contradict consistency building, illusion building, defamiliarization, irony, the deliberate stimulation or frustration of a perceiver's interpretation and the use of a known theme placed within an unknown context with a view on challenging the ocularcentric perceptions of perceivers. The application of any combination of these strategies is the decision of the photographer, who applies them according to the imaginary embodiment of the photographer in the position of the perceiver. The photographs produced by the author for analysis in this study presents three images which elicit allegorical, figurative and esoterical forms of interpretation. Each step of the hermeneutic phenomenological process was carefully documented prior to the analysis and are presented in the hermeneutic phenomenological format in conjunction with the proposed interactive model of aesthetic participation. The main point that emerged from this study is that a hermeneutical approach to creative perception as an element in photography will give rise to interactive participation between all the coordinates of the proposed interactive hermeneutical model of aesthetic participation and thus ocularcentric restrictions may be overcome by photographers and perceivers by employing an interactive hermeneutical approach when creating as well as interpreting the implied meanings in a photograph.

“Phenomenology is the place where hermeneutics originates, phenomenology is also the place it has left behind.”(Ricoeur ). In this thesis I shall examine possibilities for bringing into dialogue the practice of social documentary photography and the conceptual resources of the post-Structural and critical philosophical hermeneutics of text and action developed by Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) from the 1970’s onwards. Ricoeur called this an ‘amplifying’ hermeneutics of language, defined as ‘the art of deciphering indirect meaning’ (ibid). Social documentary photography is an intentional activity concerned with the visual interpretation, ethics and representation of life, the otherness of others, and through them something about ourselves. The narratives form social histories of encounters with others. They raise challenging questions of meaning and interpretation in understanding the relations of their subjective agency to an objective reality. Traditionally the meaning of such work is propositional. It consists in the truth conditions of bearing witness to the direct experience of the world and the verifiability of what the photography says, or appears to say about it. To understand the meaning of the photography is to know what would make it true or false. This theory has proven useful and durable, although it has not gone unchallenged. The power it has is remarkable and new documentary narratives continue to be formed in this perspective, adapting to changing technologies, and reverberate with us today. A more subtle way of thinking about this is given by a pragmatic theory of meaning. This is what I am proposing. The focus here is upon use and what documentary photography does and says. A praxis that I refer to by the act of photographing: a discourse of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary utterances in whose thoughtful and informed making are unified theories of visual texts within the theories of action and history. The key is the capacity to produce visual narratives made with intention and purpose that in their performative poetics and their semantic innovations attest to the realities of 1 Ricoeur, P. 1991: From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. 2nd Edition 2007: with new Forward by Richard Kearney. Evanston. NorthWestern University Press. experience and sedimented historical conditions witnessed, and communicate those to others within a dialectic of historical consciousness and understanding. The narrative visualisations disclose a world, a context in which the drama of our own life and the lives of others makes sense. In their interpretations of an empiric reality can be found ethical concerns and extensions of meaning beyond the original reference that survive the absence of the original subject matter and the original author of the photography whose inferences our imaginations and later acquired knowledge can meditate upon and re-interpret. Thus in the hermeneutic view, the documentary photographic narrative is a form of text that comes to occupy an autonomy from, a) the author’s original intentions, b) the reference of the original photographic context, and c) their reception, assimilation and understanding by unknown readers-viewers. Ricoeur argues that hermeneutic interpretation discloses the reader as ‘a second order reference standing in front of the text’, whose necessary presence solicits a series of multiple and often conflicting readings and interpretations. Consequently Ricoeur’s critical, philosophical hermeneutics brings us from epistemology to a kind of ‘truncated’ ontology that is only provisional, a place where interpretation is always something begun but never completed. Interpretation according to Ricoeur engages us within a hermeneutic circle of explanation and understanding whose dialectic is mediated in history and time. For Ricoeur this implies that to be able to interpret meaning and make sense of the world beyond us is to arrive in a conversation that has already begun. His hermeneutic wager is, moreover, that our self-understandings will be enriched by the encounter. In short, the more we understand others and what is meaningful for them the better we will be able to understand ourselves and our sense of inner meaning. The central thesis of his hermeneutics is that interpretation is an ongoing process that is never completed, belonging to meaning in and through distance, that can make actively present to the imagination what is objectively absent and whose discourse is undertood as the act of “someone saying something about something to someone” (Ricoeur 1995: Intellectual Autobiography).

abstract: The emergence of social media in concert with improved camera and cell phone technologies has helped usher in an age of unprecedented visual communication which has radically changed the tourism industry worldwide. Serving as an important pillar of tourism and leisure studies, the concept of the tourist gaze has been left relatively unexamined within the context of this new visual world and more specifically image based social media. This phenomenological inquiry sought to explore how image based social media impacts the concept of the tourist gaze and furthermore to discover how the democratization of the gaze in concert with specific features of image based social media applications impacts the hermeneutic circle of the tourist gaze. This in-depth analysis of the user experience within the context of travel consisted of 19 semi-structured photo elicitation interviews and incorporated 57 participant generated photos. Six salient themes emerged from the study of this phenomenon; 1) sphere of influence, 2) exchange of information, 3) connections manifested, 4) impression management and content curation, 5) replicated travel photography, and 6) expectations. Analysis of these themes in conjunction with examples from the lived user experience demonstrate that the tourist gaze is being accelerated and expanded by image based social media in a rapid manner. Furthermore, democratization of the gaze as enabled by technological developments and specialized social media platforms is actively shifting the power role away from a small number of mass media influencers towards a larger number of branded individuals and social media influencers. Results of this inquiry support the theoretical assertions that the tourist gaze adapts to social and technological developments and demonstrates that the concept of the tourist gaze is increasingly important within tourism studies. Practical implications regarding the prevalence of real-time information, site visitation, and “taking only pictures” as sustainable touristic behavior are discussed.<br>Dissertation/Thesis<br>Masters Thesis Community Resources and Development 2019

Thesis of (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2009.<br>Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on September 8th, 2009). "Fall, 2009." At head of title: University of Alberta. A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduates Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta. Includes bibliographical references.

This project documents my process of visual and hermeneutic enquiry centred on the Tswaing meteorite impact crater, north of Pretoria. In my visual investigation I attempt to apprehend the landscape through a cyclical process which involves walking within it, photographing it in 360° ‘visualisations’, editing the imagery and returning, often frustrated, to repeat both encounter and process. The cycle of reflection leads me to consider my circular process itself as a dialogical mode of interpretation and response to the primeval, circular landscape of the impact crater. Informed by Gadamer’s (1975) notion of a hermeneutic circle which extends interpretation and understanding, the reflexive process is extended and enriched through dialogue with the work of pertinent scientists, artists, poets and writers. Landscape is considered as an artefact of deep time, challenging entrenched traditions and notions while considering significant contemporary responses. The dissertation attempts to demonstrate the layered accretion of concept and meaning contained within the visual and theoretical components of the investigation

AbstractDrawing on sociological Grounded Theory and ethnographic semantics, this chapter argues that analysis is a genuinely creative practice. Analysis entails not simply classifying the data found or produced in the field in accordance with everyday, common-sense knowledge but rather looking for aesthetic and semantic clues in it. It is also not a fixed program, but rather a hermeneutic and explorative search for new connections and patterns of meaning. This is demonstrated through examples of various data materials, such as transcripts of interviews, observation protocols, photographs, video, and material culture.

The chapter analyses and discusses the perspectives of young people on cultural World Heritage and its imbalanced global distribution. The qualitative study is based upon focus groups and hermeneutic photography conducted with 43 secondary school students aged 14–17 years from Lower Saxony, Germany. The findings of the focus groups, which are presented in this chapter, reveal deeply rooted Eurocentric thinking patterns, that structure the understanding of cultural World Heritage in general and are used to justify the dominance of European cultural World Heritage sites. Due to these results, the authors call for including post- and decolonial approaches in World Heritage Education to foster the adoption of critical and reflexive thinking.

This short introduction explains how Part II, “Visual Images,” engages with existing debates in visual international politics through chapters addressing the aesthetic turn in international relations (Chapter 4), visual securitization (Chapter 5), and ethical witnessing (Chapter 6). To make these arguments, it uses a range of visual images—photographs, documentary films, feature films, online videos, and visual art—to discuss visuality/visibility, ideology/affect, and cultural governance/resistance. Using these examples, Part II examines how visual culture studies and visual IR have used the visibility strategy to deconstruct visual images in order to reveal their hidden ideology. It argues that while exploring important issues, this research agenda is also limited by its hermeneutic mode of analysis and by its narrow focus on Euro-American images of security, war, and atrocity. It seeks to push beyond this verbally-inflected mode of analysis to see not just what images mean, but what they can “do” in provoking affective communities of sense. Part II thus employs comparative analysis and critical aesthetics to juxtapose concepts, practices, and experiences from different times and places.