Photonovella and Photovoice

Photonovella

Photonovella as a research method is linked to photo-based forms of popular literature called fotonovela in [Page 623]Mexico, photoroman in France and Quebec, and fotoromanzi in Italy. Aimed at an adult audience, these magazines featured original tableau photographs or still images from films combined with text balloon dialogue. Like romance novels, radio soap operas, or film melodramas, photonovella typically featured archetypal male and female characters caught in intense relationship crises. As with many popular media, some more recent photonovella have moved to more graphic stories and images. Though photonovella have been commonly available since the 1950s, they were largely ignored or criticized as a low art form in academic circles until fairly recently. In the 1990s, activist Hispanic artists found in the form that was largely unknown to English-speaking cultures a vehicle for exploration and representation. Institutionally, there is evidence back to the 1970s of organizations such as the Peace Corps. in the United States and more recently, health and education agencies such as UNICEF using the photonovella as a means of getting information to communities globally.

The method typically involves participants and researchers in identifying both a story important to the group and an audience for whom the creation and distribution of that story is deemed important. This opening inquiry can take many forms, but ideally should involve visual and performative elements, in anticipation of the tableau process to follow. When the group focuses on creating a story, a collective–creative process of performance tableau and photography results in iconic images that are then assembled in a comic book–style sequence. Just as the details of pose and point of view are part of the visual negotiation, the sequencing of the images and the addition of dialogue each represents significant data analysis and manipulation.

As visual-literary forms, fotonovela, photoroman, or fotoromanzi (now commonly, and perhaps problematically, anglicized as photonovella in the academic literature) have a number of unique advantages that have proven very useful for researchers interested in gathering, analyzing, and dispersing complex narrative data in collaboration with diverse communities of participants. Participant-driven, image-based research has demonstrated the power of the camera as a tool for gathering and representing the complexity of research participants' visual culture.

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