It moved beyond pathways to represent the historical perspective that each photo suggested. But after really looking at the photos selected and asking myself some questions, I was able to start pulling together some meaning. At first it was an unconscious decision to take this kind of photo. When I was first selecting my own photos for my sequence, I selected those that represented a pathway in some way (See Image D). This question continually occurred to me during my walks and was something I was pondering post-walk when I looked at the photos captured during the day. I used sequencing to help me understand a bit more about why my geographic area is so important to me. Like most of you, I usually travel a lot, but during the first year of the pandemic, I spent most of my time around my home. I’ve been doing a lot of walking lately and taking photographs while I walk. This is an example of looking for ultimate meaning that is “intensely personal and thus the most elusive.” To illustrate how a moderator or a facilitator might use sequencing to dive into a deeper meaning, I will first use a personal example. I started to look at the meaning of the whole sequence, as well as different interpretations based upon different orderings of the photos/cards, and always dug deeper. These three levels of meaning-descriptive, symbolic, and ultimate-caused me to think differently about the use of images in my own practice. The superficial meaning is descriptive the underlying meaning is symbolic and the ultimate meaning is intensely personal and thus the most elusive.” Bunnel, photographic historian, former curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and former professor of photography and modern art at Princeton University, in the book Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit, “White’s sequences have many levels of meaning, but these can generally be categorized into three main groups: superficial, underlying, and ultimate. White explained, “To engage in a sequence, we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.” It is this combination of the photograph’s underlying meaning and the ordering that made White’s sequencing special and transformative in providing deeper meaning.Īccording to Peter C. Paul Getty Museum, in his book Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit, “Viewers of his sequences must not only read each individual image in relation to adjacent images but also consider all of the images in the highly structured grouping as the complete expression of an idea.” White took the concepts of “ordered matter” and “order creates deeper meaning” and made them a central part of his life’s work.Īccording to Paul Martineau, associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Stieglitz was also interested in the ordering of photos, especially when visiting an art gallery and seeing the sequence of art as he walked through. He was influenced by another famous photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who believed strongly that a photo stands for something other than the depicted subject matter. White, however, took this dictionary definition and transformed it. I was exploring several famous photographers and the various ways in which they approached their photographic craft.ĭictionaries define a sequence as “the following of one thing after another succession” or a “continuous or connected series”-these are the general definitions I was following when I first asked participants in my facilitated discussions to pick beginning, middle, and end cards from a photo deck (See Image C). I first became acquainted with White’s sequences while I was in college and took a photography tutorial during the last semester of my senior year. It’s amazing what the subconscious can do (See Image B). Without realizing it initially, I was using the concept of sequencing, championed by Minor White, an American photographer and editor. I had respondents pick cards that would reflect the beginning, the middle, and the end of their use of a particular product, and then tell a story about it. In my own facilitation work, I played around with using photo decks of various kinds, from Visual Explorer to tarot cards. This worked well for many years, and I appreciated the keen insights that the photos prompted (See image A). In the beginning, I would cut photographs out of magazines and have a “photo deck” with images that were close to the topic being discussed and some that weren’t related at all. Like many marketing researchers and facilitators, I use photos and visuals during focus groups and facilitate meetings in order to prompt responses. Author’s note: I share this approach of sequencing, which I fully explain in this article, coming from the perspective of being deeply involved in the corporate world of marketing research, as a meeting facilitator, and as a photographer.
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