摘要：Flint Photovoice represents the work of 41 youths and adults recruited to use a participatory-action research approach to photographically document community assets and concerns, critically discuss the resulting images, and communicate with policymakers. At the suggestion of grassroots community leaders, we included policymakers among those asked to take photographs. In accordance with previously established photovoice methodology, we also recruited at the project’s outset another group of policymakers and community leaders to provide political will and support for implementing photovoice participants’ policy and program recommendations. Flint Photovoice enabled youths to express their concerns about neighborhood violence to policymakers and was instrumental in acquiring funding for local violence prevention. We note salutary outcomes produced by the inclusion of policymakers among adults who took photographs. “PHOTOVOICE” IS A participatory-action research methodology based on the understanding that people are experts on their own lives. 1, 2 It was first tried among village women in Yunnan Province, China. 3 Using the photovoice methodology, participants allow their photographs to raise the questions, “Why does this situation exist? Do we want to change it, and, if so, how?” By documenting their own worlds, and critically discussing with policymakers the images they produce, community people can initiate grassroots social change. 4 In practice, photovoice provides people with cameras so they can record and represent their everyday realities. It uses those pictures to promote critical group discussion about personal and community issues and assets. Finally, it is designed to reach—and touch—policymakers. By having people who live in the community take photographs and describe the meaning of their images to policymakers and community leaders, photovoice embraces the basic principles that images carry a message, pictures can influence policy, and citizens ought to participate in creating and defining the images that make healthful public policy. 5 Photovoice combines a community-based approach to photography and health promotion principles, built on the theoretical understandings established in the literature on education for critical consciousness and feminist theory. 1, 2 Adopting Paulo Freire’s approach to education for critical consciousness, 6, 7 photovoice participants consider, and seek to act upon, the historical, institutional, social, and political conditions that contribute to personal and community problems. Photovoice draws from a position in feminist theory described by art historian Griselda Pollock in which “Everyone has a specific story, a particular experience of the configurations of class, race, gender, sexuality, family, country, displacement, alliance. . . . Those stories are mediated by the forms of representation available in the culture.” 8(xv) The photovoice methodology expands the forms of representation and the diversity of voices who help define, and improve, our social, political, and health realities.
