The photo-elicitation interview as a multimodal site for reflexivity

Photo-elicitation interviews involve more than the addition of photos as prompts that serve to augment narratives or enhance the accuracy of participant remembering. They create opportunities for greater participant agency by allowing some selective control over what is discussed. This chapter presents some reflections on the author's experiences of using photo-elicitation interviews in the study of autobiographical memory and photographic practice, and highlights some opportunities and challenges for psychological research. It discusses the need for reflexivity not only during but also after the interview, arguing that theoretical precision is important in identifying the relationship between the researcher’s understanding of photography and retrospective accounts, what constitutes the object of analysis and the area of enquiry. Finally, the chapter cautions against analysing the visual and verbal in isolation of each other, since this can lead to reduced understandings of the social and material context in which the data are produced, as well as problematic positions in relation to truth and evidence.