The Origins of Photovoice
“The village has no kindergarten and at home there are no elderly people to look after the young. Women can only take the children to the field, doing farmwork as they look after them.” — Li Qiong Fen, Visual Voices: 100 Photographs of Village China by the Women of Yunnan Province
Photovoice is not our own invention. It grew out of an early-1990s Ford Foundation-supported program in rural China called the Yunnan Women’s Reproductive Health and Development Program. The original work in Yunnan that would grow into a full-blown methodology foresaw a direction of research that could shoulder social change instead of simply studying it.
In addition to surveys and focus groups, Ford Foundation program officer Mary Ann Burris recommended photography be added as a way to help rural village women document their everyday lives. University of Michigan public health scholar and photography enthusiast Caroline Wang joined the team and helped train sixty-two women from rural villages in Yunnan Province, a very underdeveloped and inequitable region of China in the 1990s, in the basics of photography. The women documented the realities of their health, work, and family lives through their pictures.
Participants shot a roll of film each month and gathered quarterly to discuss their photographs. Program staff helped the women, some of whom could not read or write, by preserving the stories behind their photos in the women’s own words. The women were empowered to engage policymakers and eventually made a real, tangible impact on their communities. This is where photovoice got its name: the photos gave these women a voice.
Fifty three of the women were from the villages and nine women were Women’s Federation cadres of Chengjiang County and Luliang County. They were between 18 and 57 years old and each of whom was a farmer in their own village. They also represented four distinct ethnic groups: Miao, Yi, Hui, and Han.
“For these women to photograph their own lives therefore has a double power: it records for future generations what is happening in their lives now, and it enables them to define for themselves and others, including policymakers, what is worth remembering and what needs to be changed,” Wang recollects in Visual Voices: 100 Photographs of Village China by the Women of Yunnan Province.
The goals of photovoice, both then and now are “(1) To engage rural women to record and reflect their lives, especially their health needs, from their own point of view, (2) To increase their collective knowledge about their own living environment and about women’s health status,” [and] (3) To inform policymakers about health and community issues that are of greatest concern to rural women.”
The process empowered these under-resourced women in Southwest China to articulate their struggles, dreams, worries, and hopes. Before this study, cameras were more or less an alien artifact to the people in Yunnan. The 62 women were given Ricoh YF-20 cameras, which had the advantage of being easy to use. They now had the opportunity to express their daily work and health realities through photos.
During the year-long project, participants composed over 40,000 pictures. Their photos document daily life: walking home and carrying their hoes on their shoulders after an impossibly long day of agricultural work to post-partum photos of mothers after giving birth at home, a common situation at the time due to the hefty hospital bills.
One of the most powerful photos was taken by a 30 year old woman named Li Can Mei. She titled the photo “Priceless Photograph.” It’s a difficult story to read, and it’s the kind of photo that will stick with the viewer for a lifetime. In short, you could say it is empathy distilled into a photograph.
“During this . . . project, I took this picture of my own two children. Not long after, my son and other children went swimming at Yangzhong Lake. To our great sorrow, my son drowned. This photo has become my most precious remembrance.” — Li Can Mei, Visual Voices: 100 Photographs of Village China by the Women of Yunnan Province
Wang, in her article “The Tai Qi of Photovoice,” relates the heartbreaking example of one woman’s profound loss to the larger project of engaging policymakers as a strategy to advocate for change that would positively benefit the health and lives of Yunnan women.
No adults had been nearby to save him. I could never forget the look of warmth and love in her son’s eyes…. The depth of Li Can Mei’s loss, her words, and the photograph of her son, empowered the village women to advocate successfully for day care cooperatives.
Li Can Mei’s tragic and brave story gets at the heart of photovoice: amplifying important unheard voices and catalyzing change. The photos didn’t just etch the problems in a community onto film; they were used to advocate for systemic change. The establishment of the day care cooperatives in Yunnan became an early example of the role of photovoice in social change. Other initiatives to come out of the original project, according to Burris, were midwifery training, increased efforts to encourage girls to attend school, and improvement of health services.
From its inception, empowerment and action have been foundational to photovoice. Over the last three and a half decades, photovoice has been used to address issues such as poverty, housing, mental health and stigma, food access, healthcare, and a host of social concerns.
Our innovation is developing photovoice as an approach to interreligious engagement.
