Community Photographs

The research subject of this article is formed by a project with the title Two Pictures of My Town. The project was carried out during spring 2002 in the town of Tampere, Finland, when town district or suburb communities, and in one case a sixth-form class, were asked to ‘get to the bare essentials’ of their town district and present them in two photographs with short captions.

The following research questions were asked:

What kinds of visual orders can be found in the paired photographs? What kind of politics of representation is included in these orders? What kind of identity work is expressed by the photographs’ visual orders and politics of representation? The photographs were interpreted through a theoretical researcher reading.

Photographs in which the local identity was constructed on the basis of familiar and safe visual orders offered a relatively solid and legitimate basis for local identities. These photographs repeated the visual orders of traditional tourist photographs and nature photography. If the two photographs commented the changes in the look of the neighbourhood, for example the differences between old and new architecture, they offered a more discontinuous basis for local identity construction. On the other hand, they provided alternative surface of identification for those who do not accept prevailing visual orders of the neighbourhood.