Analysing visual experience

I arrived at David and Anne's house one morning in autumn 2005, to interview them about the community garden project David was involved in. I was ready with the tool kit of a contemporary visual researcher: digital video and stills cameras, audio recorder, and pen and notebook. My research involved photography, audio-recording our interview and collaboratively exploring the garden site with David on video. It also led me to attend closely to the visual elements of the project itself. When I interview people about their experiences, projects and passions, they usually pull out visual images with which to tell me stories about their lives. So I was not surprised when David began to narrate the story of the community garden project in spoken words, interjected at times with Anne's comments, written word-processed documents, drawings and plans through which the local residents had visualised their ideas about the garden, and printed photographs. I was gripped by the story and this was partly because it gained my attention through multiple media. The combination of spoken words and visual images provided me with multiple ways to start imagining how the garden already was, how they planned to create it and what it would feel like when it was finished. This was not simply visual imagining since our discussions of the garden included plans for a 'sensory' area with sweet smelling plants and for a brickweave path - a textured route through the garden that, although it could be represented visually in photographs, would also be a haptic experience, felt underfoot by those who walked in or through the garden.