I Am Not a Camera: On Visual Politics and Method. A Response to Roy Germano

No observational method is "point and shoot." Even bracketing interpretive methodologies and their attendant philosophies, a researcher-including an experimentalist-always frames observation in terms of the topic of interest. I cannot ever be "just a camera lens," not as researcher and not as photographer. Framing research " shots," an observer always includes some features of the research question terrain while excluding others-of necessity, given human limitations and the partiality, always, of what we can know and the knowledge we can claim. With "shutters" open, we are never passive, always thinking, always world-making. While attention to videography and other visual research methods is welcome, researchers doing " visual politics" need to ask "political" questions: who has created the image being analyzed, for what purpose(s), what imagined viewer(s), and what unintended viewer(s), as well as consider the ethical issues that these methods entail.