Visual Anthropology

ISSN: 0894-9468 (Print) 1545-5920 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvan20

Gender, Photography and Visual Participatory

Methods: An Ethnographic Research Project
between Colombia and France

Camilo Leon-Quijano

To cite this article: Camilo Leon-Quijano (2019) Gender, Photography and Visual Participatory
Methods: An Ethnographic Research Project between Colombia and France, Visual Anthropology,
32:1, 1-32, DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2019.1568111

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2019.1568111

Published online: 13 May 2019.

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Visual Anthropology, 32: 1–32, 2019
Copyright # 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1545-5920 print/0894-9468 online
DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2019.1568111

Gender, Photography and Visual

Participatory Methods: An Ethnographic
Research Project between Colombia
and France
Camilo Leon-Quijano

This article explores the construction of gender in urban settings, through visual
participatory methods. It is argued that gendered experience may be studied,
described and visualized through engaged visual practices using photography as a
research tool. I suggest that visual participatory methods provide a new support to
explore the multidimensionality of the urban experience in which gender acts. By
focusing on visual experience and in the process of “doing gender,” we were inter-
ested in new ways to depict gender in two cities, Sarcelles, France, and Medellin,
Colombia. In that sense, visual cartographies of gender, a technique developed in
both cities, strengthens new ways of understanding gendered experience through
a multimodal, critical and embodied visual practice.

“There is written ‘equality’ but there is also a small window that may represent a
‘subject in prison.’ This space of prohibition with the camera in it represents … the
interdict, prohibition to cross, danger. It is often with the red [color] that we represent
‘danger,, constriction … If we associate it with the ‘equality’ signal it gives a new sense
[to the image], because we find inequalities everywhere: in our homes, outside, in the
school, everywhere. In a sense we are always reminded that we are the dominated, that
we are unequal by signs, gestures, and looks. We feel the difference between man and
woman, and it’s like that: nothing has changed. There is always a look, a gesture, a
little thing that reminds us that we are different, that we are not equal.”—Samira

Samira, a young Franco-Algerian woman aged 35, living in Sarcelles,1 described

how she feels when passing in front of this window at the Ecole
Pauline
Kergomard, her children’s school. On the wall, engraved in large characters, the


French republican slogan Libert
e, Egalit
e et Fraternit
e is prominent. This abstract
notion, endorsed and promoted by local institutions, is present almost

CAMILO LEON-QUIJANO is a photographer and PhD fellow in the Department of Sociology at

the EHESS, Paris. His work focuses on the use of visual and sensory methods to study urban
experience in Parisian suburbs. He is assistant lecturer at the Gender Studies Department of the
University of Paris 8. He has recently received several photojournalism awards, and also the
Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship from the Society for Visual Anthropology. He was
exhibited at the 6th LUMIX Festival for Young Photojournalism 2018. E-mail:
cleonquijano@gmail.com

1
2 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 1 Photograph taken by Samira (35 years). (Sarcelles, 2015)

everywhere she goes: in the media, the streets, the school, at the hospital, the


prefecture. Egalit
e is an embodied notion integrated into her everyday life.
Samira took her picture [Figure 1] during a photography workshop in 2015.
She wanted to show her daily experience in Sarcelles, a city in which social
and gender equality is promoted though never achieved. Egalit

e is an ambigu-
ous concept, far from the daily inequalities she experiences on the streets. In
her photo Samira showed the slogan Egalit

e above a window. The reflection of
the street in the polarized glass shows a red traffic light. The contrast between
that red light and the blue atmosphere of the window expresses the way she
feels when she passes by. The red color means prohibition and danger, blue
suggests a hostile environment. A blurred street in a window, a red traffic light


and the word Egalit
e at the top are iconic messages (Joly 2009) through which
she wanted to transmit a provocative message to the viewer that there is no
such thing as equality between women and men in Sarcelles. Based on her
own experience she denounces the way inequalities operate in urban spaces,
bringing together contrasting visual messages (the red traffic light, the blue
atmosphere, the word
egalit
e). For Samira, gender inequalities are present
everywhere. As a woman she doesn’t feel equal to men because she is unable
to circulate and interact as men do in domestic and public spaces. She is fre-
quently the victim of street remarks, “nasty looks,” transgressions of civil
inattention (Gardner 1989; Goffman 1963), gendered interactions that restrict the
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 3

way she “lives the city.” She accuses Egalit
e of being an institutionalized excuse
to disguise women’s inequality.
I present Samira’s “depiction”2 of equality as an introduction to the methodo-
logical frame I employed in a research project on gender inequalities in urban
spaces. This article analyzes the construction, representation and visualization
of gender through visual participatory methods in two cities: Sarcelles, France,
and Medellin, Colombia. It argues that gender, a “constitutive element of social
relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” (Scott 1986,
1067), may be studied, described, “visualized” and “challenged” through par-
ticipatory methods that use photography as a tool. We might deconstruct the
social practices that arrange gender relationships of power3 through a visual
phenomenology of urban experience. For this purpose, photography will nei-
ther be considered as a “document,” an “evidence of affect” (Edwards 2015,
248), a means of collecting anthropological data (Collier and Collier 1986), nor
as a way to “comprehend objective conducts” (Bourdieu 1965, 11). Rather, pho-
tography mobilized a set of visual, discursive, embodied and sensory practices
which contribute to understanding of the gendered configuration of power in
Medellin and Sarcelles.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VISUAL PARTICIPATORY METHODS

Photographic practices have, intentionally or not, been part of anthropology

since its very start. Since Balinese Character (Bateson and Mead 1942) methodo-
logical and epistemological issues regarding the use of photography in ethno-
graphic research have been regularly acknowledged. “Anthropology, whatever
its intellectual twists and turns over the years, remains a highly visualized
practice” (Morton and Edwards 2009, 1).
In “Anthropology and Photography: A Long History of Knowledge and
Affect,” Elizabeth Edwards traces a historiography of the relationship between
photography and anthropology, arguing that the relationship between photog-
raphy and anthropology is characterized by a tension between “evidence” and
affect in the production of knowledge (Edwards 2015, 236). For instance, the
early generation of visual anthropologists such as Mead and the Colliers used
photography as one medium among others to record and document social
practices. Nonetheless photography “was also part of the sociability and affect
of fieldwork” (Edwards 2015, 240), “consequently it can be argued that ultim-
ately photographs are evidence of affect, of how people feel, and think and
negotiate their worlds, and as such photography and photographs are at the
very heart of the anthropological endeavour” (Edwards 2015, 248).
Edgar G
omez Cruz calls for a renewal in the conception of ethnographic
photography as a complex practice that goes beyond the representational con-
tent of pictures. In his book De la cultura Kodak a la imagen en red (G

omez Cruz
2012), he considers “photographic practices” as a critical stage during the
research process. Therefore we can only understand the sense of photographic
materials in ethnographic research by looking to the practices (G
omez Cruz
2012, 75) and analyzing the way they were constructed. In my two years of
4 C. Leon-Quijano

fieldwork (2014–16) I studied how photographic practices contribute to the

comprehension of gender. I advocate for a new understanding of gendered
experiences as a dimension of social experience that overtakes observable evi-
dence. By depicting the power relationships, photography—and more specific-
ally visual participatory methods—are useful instruments for exploring the
sensory and phenomenological dimensions of gender in urban settings.
Sarah Pink distinguishes two main paradigms in visual ethnography: on the
one hand, a realist, objective and scientific paradigm, embraced principally by
visual sociologists who treat visual materials as “scientific data” (Wagner 1979;
Prosser 1998);4 on the other hand, a phenomenological and sensory approach
to doing visual ethnography, in which researcher and participants collaborate
to produce ethnographic knowledge through sensory, embodied and situated
visual practices (Pink 2013, 2015; MacDougall 2005; Ingold 2010; Irving 2007;
Cox, Irving and Wright 2015). Following Pink’s phenomenological and sensory
approach, I studied the urban construction of gender using collaborative meth-
ods. I endorsed critical pedagogy (Freire 2012) and participatory action
research (Fals-Borda and Rahman 1991; McIntyre 2008), to explore collaborative
techniques that use photography as a way to describe and (de)construct sub-
jective narratives of gendered experience in urban settings.
Most of the academic literature available on gender and visual anthropology
focuses on visual culture. We may highlight the “Asian Cinema: Gender and
Sexuality in Neoliberalism” issue of Visual Anthropology (2009);5 feminist ana-
lysis of the Western film genre (Schwarz 2014); studies in popular Hindi cin-
ema (Virdi 1998); and of Senegalese telenovelas (Werner 2006). Similarly,
sociological studies have focused on visual culture: Goffman’s well known
Gender Advertisements (Goffman 1979); studies on intersectionality of class
(Edge 1998), and race (Margolis 1999); masculinities (Mosse 1996); and queer
studies on male sexuality (Yeates 2013).
Rarely have visual researchers studied gender through visual participatory
methods but, as mentioned, I approached gender through visual, collaborative
and embodied participatory methods. What visual participatory methods
involve is the active contribution of participants and researchers in the proc-
esses of exploration, immersion, and in the collaborative construction of know-
ledge through visual practices. Literature that analyzed gender through
participatory approaches includes a photovoice (Wang and Burri 1997); research
on feminist methods and “remaining places” (McIntyre 2003); an ethnocinema
collaborative study with young Sudanese women (Harris 2011); a photo-narra-
tive study on women’s everyday experience (Woodley-Baker 2009); and a vis-
ual ethnography of refugee women (Lenette and Boddy 2013). Photo-elicitation6
has frequently been used by semiotic and interactional studies on gender
(Stevens 1993; Stiebling 1999; Frese 1992).
The development of critical, sensory and collaborative approaches in visual
ethnography (Pink 2015; Cox, Irving and Wright 2015) redefined gender stud-
ies through visual and participatory approaches. We can highlight Susan
Hogan and Sarah Pink’s article on interiorities which explores the relationship
between feminism, anthropology and art therapy through subjective and
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 5

creative art-based methods (Hogan and Pink 2010). We can also mention an
embodied and “visceral” approach to gender violence through “body-map
storytelling and shared sensory spatial experiences” (Sweet and Escalante
2015). Pink’s article on bullfighting in Andalusia (Pink 1999)7 retraces the
photographic experience of studying gender through collaborative and reflex-
ive ethnographic techniques. Pink describes her experience of photographing
bullfighting as a woman ethnographer. By doing so she raises the question of
how photography might be an instrument to study gendered identities. In
Home Truths she goes beyond the visual analysis of gendered experience in
domestic spaces. She explores “gender performativity and the home with a
specific question in mind: how do people’s experiences and understandings of,
engagements with and metaphoric references to the aural, tactile, olfactory and
visual elements of their homes figure in the way they performatively negotiate
their gendered identities in this space?” (Pink 2004, 10) Pink’s phenomeno-
logical reflection helps to understand the relationship between gender, the
“multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and practice” (2015), and
visual materials in ethnographic research.

EXPLORING GENDER IN MEDELLIN AND SARCELLES

In public spaces, civil inattention8 allows actors to live in anonymity, to have a

minimal commitment while “preserving face” (Goffman 1963, 84). The trans-
gression of civil inattention plays a fundamental role in the construction of the
gendered socio-spatial hierarchies. Carol B. Gardner’s interactional studies on
gendered spaces (Gardner 1980, 1995) show how the interactions in public
spaces cannot be understood as gender neutral (1989, 43). According to her, we
should “deconstruct” the public space per se rather than study the behavior of
women in the public space. To do this, she first studied women’s “normalized
distaste” for public spaces. She showed how women suffer from “agoraphobia”
as a result of gendered spatial “sanctions” in public spaces. Consequently,
women dress in a certain way, and prefer to be with (or create) a “male escort”
(apparent escort) to avoid male remarks in public spaces. Gardner shows how
street remarks play a crucial role in the social control of women’s interactions.
While in Medellin and Sarcelles physical and sexual violence are a formal
(direct) mechanism of gendered control of social spaces, other types of prac-
tice—less “aggressive”—act as an informal but still aggressive medium control-
ling women’s interactions. On that account I will show how gestures, looks
and street remarks perform gender through situated, embodied and sensory
practices co-produced by women and men in Medellin and Sarcelles during
my two years of fieldwork.
Medellin is the second biggest city of Colombia: it is located to the northwest
of the Andes cordillera, with more than three million people in the metropol-
itan area. Social relationships based on geographical proximity encouraged a
strong social nexus at the barrio level (the neighborhood). These networks are
constitutive elements of the city and are based on solidarity, care and recogni-
tion of the parcero (neighbor). These reciprocal links are the result of a “gift
6 C. Leon-Quijano

and counter-gift” (Mauss 1973) ecology of urban practices in which

“community support networks”9 have ritualized solidarity, particularly in
populous neighborhoods.
In the mid-1980s Colombia saw an upsurge in urban violence. The main
cause was the rise in cocaine trafficking and a battle for the control of the nar-
cotics market. Major Mafia groups were formed, the most important being the
Cartel of Medell
ın, led by Pablo Escobar. Their operational base has been the
territorial control of large-scale drug dealing. The strategy of territorial appro-
priation was organized through violence and cronyism. After Escobar’s death
in 1993 the drug trafficking continued under the control of La Terraza and La
Oficina de Envigado. Their modus operandi was very similar to their predeces-
sor’s: urban crime, drugs and weapons traffic, extortion, political corruption,
sexual violence, smuggling, displacement, land appropriation and promotion
of agro-industrial mega-projects (Bedoya 2010, 19). Progressively the city of
Medellin has become fragmented territorially. At present the control of urban
space is marked by the presence of more than 200 bandas or combos, illegal
armed structures settled at a micro-social level, which control socio-spatial
practices through violence.
On the other side of the Atlantic Sarcelles is a suburb of 60,000 residents, to
the north of Paris. As an effect of the Second World War, France experienced a
baby boom. The influx of workers and migrants encouraged the construction
of large complexes of HLM10 (French low-income housing) in the suburbs of
the major cities. Sarcelles emerged as the biggest HLM project in the country
(with more than 12,000 low-income “social apartments”). Nowadays Sarcelles
is seen as “the city of the 90 communities,” mainly Caribbean, Maghrebian,
Muslims, Chaldean and Maghrebian Jews. The exotic and extensive media
coverage of local problems (violence, drug trafficking, etc.), has transformed
(and deformed) the image of the city: from a mid-1960s functional and modern
image of the city, to a poor, violent and ghettoized one.
It was in this context that I started a transnational research project in 2014.
While I was interested in how women and men experienced gender in both cit-
ies, the double fieldwork allowed me to understand gendered experiences on a
larger scale through visual participatory methods.

PHOTOGRAPHIC WORKSHOPS AND VISUAL CARTOGRAPHIES OF GENDER

How could we study gender using photography as a collaborative tool for

research in these two towns? To what extent might photography be a useful
instrument to re-think the gendered position of the researcher in the fieldwork?
To what degree can a participatory approach using photography not only iden-
tify the gendered configuration of power but also enact a material and sym-
bolic (re)appropriation of urban spaces through creative visual practices?
These questions were the starting-point for a methodical inquiry. In explor-
ing the visual and sensory experiences of gender through photography three
different methodological approaches were deployed: “traditional ethno-
graphy,” photographic interviews, and photographic workshops. By traditional
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 7

Figure 2 Discussion with Medellin women from the Comuna 1, Andaluc
ıa-La Francia (2015).

ethnography I mean an approach based on long-term participant observation

involving a know-how that includes access to the field, taking notes as pre-
cisely as possible, gaining confidence, finding my own “place,” and an analysis
of these materials grounded in the field experience (Cefaï 2013; Atkinson 2001;
Hammersley and Atkinson 2009). Photographic interviews were also part of the
work. In most cases, these were “moments of confidence” with the workshop
participants, many of whom wanted to talk intensively about their own experi-
ence in a more personal and intimate space. Therefore photographic interviews
were subjective and spontaneous extensions of the workshops rather than
“tools with which to obtain knowledge beyond that provided through direct
analysis” (Collier and Collier 1986, 99).
Photographic workshops occupied the greatest part of my time. I organized 20
workshops in Medellin and 25 in Sarcelles, with more than 70 women and
men of different ages, nationalities and social origins. The idea was to explore
forms of interaction and gendered categorization of spatial practices through
visual and verbal exchange. Workshops were organized as follows: a first part
was devoted to collective discussion [Figures 2 and 3]. We discussed different
topics: street harassment, violence, empowerment, experiences and (re)appro-
priation of urban spaces. The collective discussion was essential to discover
how actors situate themselves in their communities, based on gender norms.
The second part was basic training in photography [Figure 4]. Participants
considered the workshop not as a “research project” but as a learning space
where they would acquire some photographic skills. In doing so, workshops
were learning moments in which participants were able to share their experi-
ence through photographic narratives.
8 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 3 Board after a discussion about women’s empowerment in Medellin (2015).

Figure 4 Participants during basic photography training in Sarcelles (2014).

The third part was devoted to photographic practices in their neighborhood.

Starting from a pre-established route made by the participants during the dis-
cussion, we went down the street and took pictures of different places.
Photographic practices were interesting moments in which we analyzed the
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 9

Figure 5 Photographic practices in Medellin: representing gender boundaries (2015).

attitudes, gestures and actions of the participants. It was an occasion to dis-

cover through informal discussion the spaces in which they felt at ease in their
neighborhoods. In doing so, we discovered gendered interactions and gen-
dered spaces [Figure 5]. For example, in both cities participants took photos of
some caf
es because they considered them places monopolized by men, and
thus uncomfortable and sometimes risky places for women. Walks were also
moments in which participants were victims of gendered interaction in public
spaces, mainly street remarks and what they call “dirty looks.”11 Nevertheless,
photographic practices were also creative and militant moments for voicing
disclosures about gender inequalities through imaginative and original vis-
ual rhetoric.
After the photography practices, we selected the images in small groups
[Figure 6]. After this a new discussion was held, this time to create visual and
multimodal narratives of the neighborhood. The selected images were part of a
new exercise generating visual cartographies of gender (VCG). The main idea was
that participants create new narratives of local spaces by mixing photography,
drawings and text [Figures 7–9]. The printed photos were stuck in a certain
order to describe the urban settings. Participants wrote their souvenirs, ideas,
memories and wishes about those spaces on large white sheets (of 1.5 m); then
they wrote, drew and colored the remaining space in which they highlighted
male control and gender inequalities.
Didi-Huberman shows how the images of places are the result of “a dialectic
of a monad and a montage (the very writing that situates this vision and con-
fronts it with other monads)” (2014: 17, trans.).12 Le lieu malgr
e soi (the place
10 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 6 Image selection process in Sarcelles (2014).

despite itself) loses its characteristic spatial configuration and becomes a mon-
tage in which experiences, images and visions fuse (Didi-Huberman 2014,
22–25). In the same way, images of places are not only the expression of a spa-
tial and material configuration of objects and people, but contain histories,
memories, embodied and gendered experiences that go beyond the representa-
tional content that a photograph can show. Accordingly, VCG were spaces in
which “place” was re-constructed and re-imagined [Figures 9–11]. We wanted
to propose a space in which pictures, drawings, oral testimony and collective
discussion redefined local places.
VCG were moments in which discussion led to understanding how partici-
pants experienced gender. By creating new narratives of place, we wanted to
understand: on the one hand, the subjective experience of gender in their
everyday life; and on the other, the collective experience of gender during the
visual practice.
The last part of the workshop was for the presentation and public discussion
of VCG [Figures 12 and 13]. Participants presented the VCG to a broader pub-
lic from other neighborhoods, often in community centers. Discussion and oral
presentations allowed us to understand the sensory and phenomenological cat-
egories of the gendered experience. It was a crucial moment in which partici-
pants coming from different neighborhoods confronted their own gendered
experiences. In Medellin we were able to show some of the VCG produced in
Sarcelles.13 We confronted the gendered experience of women in both cities,
then tried to find out the similarities and differences between them.
Finally, some of the VCG and photographs were shown to the public
[Figures 14 and 15]. We put on exhibitions in an art gallery (Fundaci
on Casa
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 11

Figure 7 Participants creating a VCG in Medellin (2015).

Figure 8 Participants creating a VCG in Sarcelles (2014).

12 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 9 Creating a visual cartography of gender (Medellin, 2015).

Figure 10 Example of VCG made in Sarcelles (2014).

Tres Patios, Medellin), in the streets of Medellin (Museo de la Calle), during a

public exhibition on International Working Women’s Day, and in different
local associations of Sarcelles.
Two exhibitions took place in Paris in 2014 and 2015 at the Sorbonne and in
a local gallery (MIE Bastille). They showed the photographic materials that we
had produced during the workshops. On the one hand I wanted to show the
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 13

Figure 11 Example of VCG made in Medellin (2015).

Figure 12 Public discussion of the VCG in community centers of Comuna 16 (2015).

14 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 13 Public discussion of the VCG in community centers of Comuna 12 (2015).

Figure 14 Sarcelles street exhibition (2014).

 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 15

Figure 15 Exhibition at Museo de la Calle of Medellin (2015).

work that we did together in Medellin, on the other I wanted to highlight the
engagement of women in Medellin by having some portraits of the community
leaders. Back in Medellin, I returned the photos (in large format) to the photo-
graphed people [Figures 16 and 17].

The exhibition … has been very important for me and for many people who know me,
and who do not know me, because they all agree that the photo [that she took]
captured my essence: good energy, warmth and love … .I have been preparing to give
the best I have to the world with security and freedom and, if everything goes well, I
hope I will be a better [community] leader in the future.14
16 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 16 Return of the exhibited photographs to noe of the participants in Medellin.

Photographic workshops were moments of “personal enhancement” for

some of the participants. In a certain sense the exhibition encouraged personal
and embodied reflection about gender and urban spaces by the people who
participated in them. On the one hand, they asserted that workshops encour-
aged them to rethink and deconstruct places through a “gender perspective”;
on the other, they declared that photography was an instrument to “re-appro-
priate” those spaces visually and symbolically by “capturing,” discussing, per-
forming and exposing them in public places.

VISUALIZING GENDER THROUGH VISUAL PARTICIPATORY METHODS

How can we identify and analyze gender through visual participatory meth-
ods? Are photography and visual materials useful tools to understand gen-
dered experiences? In which ways may gender be “visualized” and
experienced? In the next two sections I will present some case studies about
gendered experiences in urban spaces using visual participatory methods.

Medellin

Social and gender geographers have widely acknowledged the spatial arrange-
ments of gender in the city [McDowell 1999]. For instance, Daphne Spain
[1992; 1993] showed how architectural and geographical arrangements of urban
spaces include a design perspective that structures a male-privileged position
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 17

Figure 17 Poster of the exhibition in Paris.

relative to women. Hanson and Pratt [1995] explained the economic, geo-
graphic and symbolic boundaries of gender arrangements, studying labor mar-
ket sex-based segregation with a feminist approach. Doreen Massey explored
the social and gendered dimensions of place also from a feminist approach.
She argued that we have to rethink the way we study “places.” She problemat-
ized the way we consider and to some extent reduce spaces in arbitrary femin-
ine and masculine places. She argued for a new concept of place “which
depends crucially on the notion of articulation. It is a move, in terms of polit-
ical subjects and of place, which is anti-essentialist, which can recognize
18 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 18 Photograph of Parque Bel
en (2015).

Figure 19 Extract of VCG with Parque Bel
en picture and “color code.” … Andrea: “Here we
put it in red (in the CVG) because in general in this place (Parque Bel
en) there’s a lot of old men
and we, as women, feel very exposed … that place is an uncomfortable space because they say
very unpleasant things to us. … ”

difference, and which yet can simultaneously emphasize the bases for potential
solidarities” [1994: 8]. In Medellin I wanted to understand the articulation of
the multiple power relationships that structure places. A nonlinear and anti-
essentialist way to apprehend those spaces has been to discover the “bases for
potential solidarities” through collaborative visual practices.
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 19

One photograph [Figure 18] was taken during the visual practice by Andrea,
a young woman who lives in Barrio Bel
en. She has to cross this square—the
Parque Bel
en, a public square located at the Comuna 16, in the west of
Medellin—almost every morning to catch the bus to work. She wanted to high-
light, on the one hand, the large presence of old men in the square and the
male occupation of the benches; and on the other, the way they interact with
women in that specific place. If the picture’s “iconic message” (Joly 2009)
depicts the male presence, it was only after creating the VCG [Figure 19] that
participants were able to describe and analyze gendered experience through
drawings and oral discussion.15
The photo-ethnographic workshops were moments in which gender norms
were experienced “live.” I had the opportunity to witness the informal sanc-
tions addressed by men to the women taking part in the workshop who
attracted the attention of mostly old men in the Parque Bel
en. Women were
the object of whistles, glances and piropos (vulgar compliments), especially
when they were making pictures individually. In the later discussion, most of
the participants confessed they felt uncomfortable in that square. They were
constantly morboseadas (looked at and treated vulgarly) by the group on
the bench.
The VCG of Figure 18 was made by three young women. They created a
“color code” to classify the different spaces in the neighborhood: red means
“violence and insecurity,” blue, “spaces for men or usually attended by men.”
“We feel unsafe because we are the victims of street remarks and nasty looks
(miradas sucias)”; “we are exposed to vulgar, uncomfortable and indecent
comments.” Color codes, written messages and oral testimony contribute to the
understanding of the gender structure of that place. The male transgressions of
civil inattention (remarks, comments and indecent glances) determined the way
women “should act” in the square according to the gender norm. Through
“little actions”—whistling, piropos morbosos (vulgar compliments)—elderly men
indirectly appropriate a space supposedly open to men and women.
Consequently, gender acts in a “silent” way, transgressing civil inattention.
Small daily actions dictate the norms of female conduct in Parque Bel
en. This
square was maluco (uncomfortable) for young women because their presence
was sanctioned directly through remarks and indirectly through “morbid
glances”: miradas que te dejan desnuda (looks that leave you naked).
Normalized distaste, resulting from a fear of crime or the press of
etiquette obligations, illustrates one major theme in public places that is mark-
edly more salient for women than for men and which Goffman has correspond-
ingly underemphasized; street remarks show the ways one occurrence,
formulated by Goffman to have no very unpleasant consequences, may be expe-
rienced by women as painful and problematic (Gardner 1989, 43). Normalized
distaste undertakes “spatial abstention”: women prefer to be in enclosed spaces
rather than being the target of remarks and indirect aggression in open spaces.
For Paola (35), if public spaces are supposed to be “spaces of freedom” (in
which men and women can circulate without restriction), women “stay behind
the fence” in order to feel safer. She took a picture of a grill [Figure 20]; she
20 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 20 “The Grill” in Comuna 14 (2015).

wrote on the VCG “libertad?” (freedom?) and added a comment, “Do we live
in security? Or do we live in jail because of ‘the situation’?”
During the public discussion the group which made the VCG (a young man
and two women) explained that they wanted to question, through the image,
the way women adapt their daily activities to the gendered environment.
Hostile spaces (with large male presence, street remarks, “nasty looks,” streets
poorly lit) activated some “protection strategies.” The fence should exemplify
the “confinement” of women in public spaces as a “protection strategy.” When
they asked, “Are we in jail because of the situation?” they questioned the way
gender structured their own interactions in public spaces. Thus they do not
merely denounce the “spatial restrictions” but draw an open door near the
fence. Through this sign they wanted to denounce the feeling of confinement
and at the same time suggest an exit: “we need to open the grill.”
The “strategies of avoidance and self-defense” (Gordon and Rieger 1989;
Gardner 1995, 31) function as tactics to deflect gender relations in urban
spaces. For many participants the best way to avoid aggression is to visit
enclosed or protected spaces. If non-enclosed and male-attended spaces were
often considered unsafe, shopping malls were seen as the “safest” and
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 21

Figure 21 Shopping mall Santa Fe, Medellin (2015).

appropriate non-domestic place to be in. Medellin has more than 50 shopping

malls and every three weeks a new one is constructed (Arias-Jim
enez 2015).
For many participants, malls were considered a sort of “urban island” where
people can interact in regulated spaces. This protected space (with armed
guards and a CCTV system) is thought to offer a safe environment so that
women can do several activities at the same time: shopping, eating, recre-
ational activities, going to the bank, to the grocery store, to the public adminis-
tration. In general, malls are conceived as places in which clients should be
able to do “everything they need” in one enclosed and “protected” space.
Here is an excerpt of a public discussion on the picture [Figure 21], made by
Valentina (38):

Cam.: Which spaces do you feel “belong to you”?

Val.: My house and the shopping centers, they make me feel I’m in safety …
Cam.: What makes you feel safe?

Val.: Those spaces are … let’s say “protected” … the people who go there are not
people that I would call “dangerous” (pesados) … I don’t feel insecure in a mall; for
example in my neighborhood, I can stay in the Florida Mall until 10-11 p.m. and I
feel good …
Pat.: There are no cars, no motorcycles …
22 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 22 Bus in Medellin and VCG extract made in Comuna 14 (2015).

Adr.: If there is someone following you (harassing you), you can go into the mall and
you feel calm and protected …

The shopping malls were thus considered “safe havens,” providing a safe
environment that prevents physical or sexual aggression. The increase of
“protected places,” such as gated communities or shopping malls, stimulates
the social and spatial fragmentation of the city into bounded and fenced struc-
tures. In this context, the question made by Paola in Figure 20 makes sense:
“Do we live in security? Or do we live in jail because of ‘the situation’?”
Workshops have been spaces in which to present different opinions about gen-
dered experiences in an urban context. In this case specifically we were able to
discuss the embodied experience of “taking a bus” [Figure 22] from two different
perspectives: the opinion of Gabriel, a young male guard (30), and of three
women: “the woman [in the photo] has to get on the bus, but I don’t differentiate
her experience [from men’s experience] because what happens to the woman
happens to the man. She has to fight, to ride the bus, to sell … and for me it’s the
same, there is no difference … we are all in the same situation … ”
For Gabriel women and men are confronted with the same reality. They
both have to “fight” (guerrearsela) to make a living. Both women and men suf-
fer from traffic congestion and the inconveniences of being transported in old
and crowded buses. Luz, a 55-year-old woman working at the city hall,
replied: “ … it’s not the same thing. For example, for us [women] it’s very diffi-
cult to get onto buses because we are the ones who carry bags and children, as
you see in the picture. When you get onto the bus you have to pass through a
turnstile and to do this you have to be skinny, it’s painful … ”
Like Luz, other women participants explained that in public transport “body
matters”—“If you are not skinny and if you have a bag, it’s very difficult to
cross [the turnstile]” (Maria, 50). Thus men and women don’t have the same
experience in public transport, due to material constraints (children, bags) and
bodily attributes. The discussion we had during the production and socializa-
tion of the VCG allowed us to compare Gabriel’s “gender neutral” point of
view with Luz’s gendered experience in the same space.
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 23

Figure 23 VCG Sarcelles and photography during the practice (2015).

Sarcelles

Photography has been a useful device to identify gender structures and spatial
sex-segregation in the city. However, it has also been a tool for projecting new
ways of living in urban spaces. In Sarcelles, VCG were exercises in which we
didn’t want to show exclusively how women felt and interacted in the city.
Workshops were moments in which we performed gendered places by re-cre-
ating visual and sensory experiences through critical photographic practices.
In January 2015 we organized “exploratory walks” with women of a local
feminist association. The idea was to identify gendered spaces and to operate a
visual and symbolic re-appropriation of them. A photograph [Figure 23] was
taken in a narrow alley of Sarcelles. Eight women participated in this practice,
in which we discussed the way they felt each time they have to cross this
street at night. Most of them said they felt “constantly looked at” by men
(even if there was nobody in the street). They avoid crossing the street because
it is poorly lit and because they have “heard stories” about aggression of
females in that alley. This is a place charged with memories, experiences, sym-
bols and stories. Throughout the workshop the women wanted to “re-create”
the way they “felt fear” in this place. The idea wasn’t just to identify male
presence: they wanted to explore the embodied experience of gender through a
participative and embodied performance of gender. In this case photography
was used to register visually this “emancipatory” experience. They enacted the
24 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 24 Photograms from the performance of “the inverted harassment” (2015).

“fear of being harassed” by using me as the “symbolic victim” of harassment. I

was the only man in the group, and they decided to “denounce” women’s har-
assment through a symbolic inversion of gender norms.
During the short “re-appropriation” performance, they surrounded me and
as I tried to escape they blocked me. I carried a GoPro camera on my DSLR
which allowed me to film “from the inside” [Figure 24]. For a minute they
stayed silent, waiting for my move. I turned around, they looked at me, and
when I tried to move they tightened against each other, some of them making
refusing gestures with their hands. One of them took a pack of cigarettes from
my pocket. They shook and pushed me with their hands inside the circle. Then
Ariana, the one who took my cigarettes, distributed them among the others.
For a brief moment I felt dispossessed and confined: surrounded by a group of
women who symbolically blocked and obstructed my way. To a certain extent
I embodied the experience of being looked at and harassed by a group
of strangers.
The visual performance represented an inverse form of harassment: it forced
me to “embody” women’s feeling of confinement. As an inverse execution of
acts, it stressed a collective re-appropriation of this space visually. Nadia (36),
the photographer, was directing the performance [Figure 25]: she placed us
and she “directed the stage.” When she took the photos, she captured a “new
perceptive layer” of the street. This “new layer” allowed us to describe, depict
and analyze gender collectively by deflecting it.16
Subsequently each one of them wrote down her own feelings in the VCG
[Figure 26]. A common idea appeared in most of their testimonies: “stop
aggression.” As “momentary aggressors” they felt uncomfortable: shame, guilty
and refusing were some of the words that appeared on the board and during
the later discussion. They deconstructed the gendered structures that guide the
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 25

Figure 25 Nadia directing the visual performance of the “inverted harassment” (2015).

Figure 26 VCG—Visual performance of the “inverted harassment” (2015).

patriarchal control of urban spaces through formal and informal actions. In

doing so, they refused to adopt an “oppressive position.” Instead they studied
gendered experiences as a practice of description and analysis that goes
beyond the sex-segregated spaces. During this practice we were able to depict
a feeling by recreating an embodying and situated experience of gender.
26 C. Leon-Quijano

Figure 27 Taking tea at the parking-lot Sarcelles (2016).

Therefore the approach they adopted to study gender was displaced: from a
concrete, geographical and spatialized approach (i.e. sex-segregation in the
streets) (Raibaud 2015; Di M
eo 2012; Coutras 1996), to a visual, phenomeno-
logical and collaborative method in which embodiment plays a crucial role in
comprehending the gendered experience of women in the city. The attention
shifted from “space” to “experience.”
The symbolic re-appropriation of this space through a critical, militant and
active visual practice “emphasize[s] the bases for potential solidarities”
(Massey 1994, 8) when studying gender in urban spaces. This visual and
embodied experience allows us to go beyond the study of gender as a practice
of description and analysis of sex-segregated spaces.
Photography has been a useful tool to understand how participants experi-
enced gender in their own spaces. Downtown Sarcelles is characterized by its
extended buildings with car parks between them. At night, car parks are
spaces often occupied by young men and “as a woman you have to be careful”
(Nadia, 36). For the second performance [Figures 27 and 28] participants staged
an “unusual situation inversing the gender roles” of the parking lot. They
wanted to operate a “symbolic re-appropriation” of this place. They staged a
“teatime,” setting up some objects to reproduce it (couch, seats, table, orna-
ment). They occupied this space briefly to take tea. They have created an
imaginary place in which they occupy and re-arrange a “forbidden” space. The
visual intervention challenged the “invisible gender norms” by a visible, sym-
bolic and material act of disobedient thought, staged and performed by the
participants.
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 27

Figure 28 Arrangement of the place Sarcelles (2016).

CONCLUSION

In this article I have been arguing that gender can be studied through embod-
ied, collaborative and engaged visual practices. Photography has been a cre-
ative tool that revealed the “hidden and silent” action of gender structures in
the city: it allowed us to understand gendered experiences collectively in urban
settings. Visual materials have also been useful tools for analyzing the embod-
ied experience of gender during the visual practice.
Attention has been focused on the experience rather than the space. We were
interested in the process of “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) rather
than in the sex-segregated disposal of spaces. In that sense visual participatory
methods and collective discussion allowed us to explore the multidimensional-
ity of perception in which gender acts. As a “constitutive element of social
relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” (Scott 1986,
1067) gender not only “acts” in the visible, concrete and observational dimen-
sion of perception. It acts in a monadic and montage system (Didi-Huberman
2014) in which urban practices are marked by sensed, imagined and gendered
experiences. Gender performs in non-tangible “supra-layers” of experience in
which visual methods can make sense of it by discussing perceptions, know-
ledge and practices. Visual practices re-situate urban experiences by embody-
ing memories, feelings and knowing.
I have proposed that participatory methods were useful approaches to study
gender from a reflexive, embodied and engaged practice. Therefore visual
practices were collaborative moments in which we were able to describe,
28 C. Leon-Quijano

observe and most importantly re-create new narratives of “place” by decon-

structing together the gendered structures of urban spaces.
The idea of “giving something back” implies that the ethnographer extracts
something (usually the data) and then makes a gift of something else to the
people from whom he or she has got the information … By focusing on collab-
oration and the idea of creating something together, agency becomes shared
between the researcher and participant … in this model both researcher and
participant invest in, and are rewarded by, the project … . (Pink 2013, 64–65).
Workshops were not conceived as a “stage of ethnographic data extraction.”
The “giving something back” question never arose because we proposed a vis-
ual project in which we together constructed new narratives of local space.
These narratives were exhibited, shared and discussed in public. Therefore we
were able to discover new points of view—trying to highlight the gender struc-
tures that restrain women’s interactions in urban spaces. Consequently, the vis-
ual ethnography of gender has provided us with the opportunity to open new
perspectives for studying gender in the city through an engaged, active and
critical activity of visual place-making.
While I was able to explore gender through photographic collaboration,
“participatory activities” (e.g. “giving cameras to the informants”) do not automat-
ically produce collaborative, engaged and critical ethnographic practices. For
instance, Josh Packard (2008) shows how studying homeless people’s everyday
life within a participatory technique “is better than most [methods]”; however, “it
is by no means perfect, and those who suggest that such methods inherently create
co-collaborators are off the mark” (Packard 2008, 75). In the same way, Alex Fattal,
who has led participatory photographic projects with young people in Colombia
and South Africa (Fattal 2016), argues in his forthcoming book Shooting Cameras for
Peace: Youth, Photography, and the Colombian Armed Conflict that “participatory pho-
tography projects are not unmediated … a different set of structural factors is at play:
the philosophical, ideological, and professional views of the projects’ facilitators;
the organizational constraints on NGOs; and the demands of donors” (Fattal,
forthcoming). In sum, “giving a camera” to the informants does not empower or
co-produce engaged, critical or embodied knowledge per se. Only an active and
engaged articulation of ethnographic practices may produce new understandings
of gender as a multidimensional element of social experience.
By focusing on visual experience, we have been interested in new ways of
depicting gender in urban spaces. In that sense, techniques such as the visual
cartographies of gender strengthen new ways of understanding gender.
Discussion, creation and public exhibition of visual materials were stages in
which we were able to discover a deeper “reality” rooted in the multidimen-
sional layers of gendered experience. Therefore our practices have not been
limited to descriptive and observational activities. We have been engaged in
collaborative practices of “sense making” through embodied and reflexive
exercises in which gender emerges as a category of place-making and self-
placement. The acknowledgement of the critical force of photographic practices
engaged in embodied, situated and creative forms of depicting experience is of
major importance for studying and understanding gender.
 Gender, Photography and Visual Methods 29

FUNDING
This research was supported by grants (2014–2016) from the


Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS),
the laboratories LAHIC and CEMS (EHESS-CNRS), and the “Bourse MIEM-USPC” (2014–2015) granted by the Institut
des Hautes
Etudes de l’Am

erique Latine—Universit

e Sorbonne Nouvelle (USPC).

NOTES

1. A suburban city lying to the north of Paris.

2. In the sense of “thick depiction” (Taylor 1996, 86).
3. Gender is “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott 1986, 1067).
4. Becker’s (1995) photography as “evidence” and the Colliers’s (1986) observational project.
5. “Asian Cinema: Gender and Sexuality in Neoliberalism.” Special issue, Visual
Anthropology, 22 no. 2–3 (2009).
6. From photo-elicitation (Harper 2002) or photographic interview (Collier and Collier
1986), I retain the idea of using photographs to explore through ethnographic
interviews the gendered experience of actors in urban spaces. This conception moves
away from an anthropological “data collection” approach in which interviews and
photographs are conceived of as “scientific data.”
7. This article grew from her doctoral thesis, Women and Bullfighting: Gender, Sex and the
Consumption of Tradition (Pink 1997).
8. “By according civil inattention, the individual implies that he has no reason to
suspect the intentions of the others present and no reason to fear the others, be
hostile to them” (Goffman 1963: 84).
9. Such as convites, fiestas comunitarias, invasiones, redes de apoyo, redes de cuidado vecinal;
(Gomez-Hernandez 2012).
10. Habitation a loyer mod
er
e (low-income housing).
11. Miradas sucias (Span.), sales regards (Fr.).
12. Monad understood as tache de m
emoire (memory stain) (Didi-Huberman 2014, 37).
13. In Sarcelles the discussion took place in small, private groups. We weren’t able to
make larger discussion groups because most of the people there didn’t speak
French fluently.
14. Testimony of Maria (36) in a workshop at Comuna 12 (Medellin). She was talking
about one of the photographs she took, which was exhibited in Casa Tres Patios.
15. Trans. from Spanish: “Aqu
ı pusimos rojo (VCG) porque en general
este lugar (Parque
Bel
en) tiene muchos hombres y nosotras como mujeres nos sentimos como muy expuestas …
pues
ese lugar es un lugar muy inc
omodo porque hay palabras muy malucas … ”.
16. The VCG and the photographs were exhibited during the International Working
Women’s day, in two different associations in Sarcelles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Polymnia Zagefka for her comments on an earlier version of this article, and Juliette Rennes for her
comments throughout the investigation process.

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