Empowerment through Photo Novella:

of Participation

Portraits

Caroline Wang, DrPH

Mary Ann Burris, PhD

Photo novella does not entrust cameras to health specialists, policymakers, or professional photographers, but puts them in the hands of children, rural women, grassroots
workers, and other constituents with little access to those who make decisions over their
lives. Promoting what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has termed "education for critical
consciousness," photo novella allows people to document and discuss their life conditions
as they see them. This process of empowerment education also enables community
members with little money, power, or status to communicate to policymakers where
change must occur. This paper describes photo novellas underpinnings: empowerment
education, feminist theory, and documentary photography. It draws on our experience
implementing the process among 62 rural Chinese women, and shows that two major
implications of photo novella are its contributions to changes in consciousness and in-

forming policy.
The

camera

is my tool.

Through

it I

give

a reason to

everything around me.

Andre Kersetz

INTRODUCTION
The goal of photo novella is to use peoples photographic documentation of
their everyday lives as an educational tool to record and to reflect their needs,
We greatly appreciate the support and insightful suggestions offered by Meredith Minkler, Ann
Robertson, Tom Diedrich, and the editors and reviewers. We aslo wish to acknowledge the support
that the Ford Foundation provided to the photo novella project. This article reflects the opinion of
the authors, not the Foundation as an organization.
This work could not have been undertaken without the commitment and diligence of the Yunnan
Ministry of Public Health, the Yunnan Health Education Institute, and the Yunnan Academy of
Social Sciences. In Yunnan Province, Chengjiang County, Luliang County, and Haikou, Yangzong,
Damogu, and Fanghua townships, the Womens Federation cadres carried out photo novella with
extraordinary skill and dedication. Of most importance, we thank the rural women of Chengjiang
and Luliang Counties, our teachers.

Caroline Wang is Postdoctoral Fellow in Demography, University of California at

Berkeley.
Mary Ann Burris is Program Officer, Ford Foundation, Beijing, China. She received
her Ph D in International Development Education from Stanford University.
Address reprint requests to Caroline Wang, DrPH, University of California, Department of Demography, 2232 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94720.
:

171-

172

promote dialogue, encourage action, and inform policy. It does

not entrust

health specialists, policymakers,

professional photographers, but
puts them in the hands of children, village women, grassroots community workers, and other constituents with little access to those who make decisions over
their lives. Photo novella is designed to include new voices in policy discussions
by facilitating collective learning, expression, and action. Two major distinctions
of photo novella for empowerment education are its contributions to changes
in consciousness and to informing policy. Photo novella is a participatory process
that integrates empowerment education, feminist theory, and documentary pho-

cameras to

or

tography.
FOREMOTHERS AND FOREFATHERS: BACKGROUND
of many mothers. Although grounded in pracdearth of theoretical underpinnings nor ambition.
This section offers a critical summary of theoretical and practical approaches to
empowerment, feminism, and documentary photography, each of which makes
a unique contribution to photo novella.
Photo novella is the

daughter

tice, it suffers neither from

Empowerment

Education

The theoretical and practical basis of photo novella is problem-posing education. In the application for health education set forth by Wallerstein and
Bernstein, based on an adaptation of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freires
methods, problem-posing education starts from the central issues in village
womens lives, and through dialogue, seeks to empower them to identify their
shared issues. It begins with a concern for individual development. Discussion
efforts then become directed at individual change, community quality of life,
and institutional changes.1
In Freirian terms, photographs serve as one kind of &dquo;code&dquo; that reflect the
community back upon itself, mirroring the everyday social and political realities
that intluence peoples lives. In photo novella, the womens images and words
form the curriculum. Just as Freire developed word lists for literacy classes from
the life experiences of his students, and avoided a vocabulary removed from
their experience, photo novellas curriculum is the womens own portrayal of
their lives and community. The process seeks to empower participants to determine how the project unfolds, and to avoid approaches that foster dependency
or powerlessness. Facilitated discussions encourage participants to analyze critically and collectively the social conditions that contribute to and detract from
their health status. The pedagogy is problem based and contextual; the knowledge that results is practical and directed toward action.
In photo novella, empowerment also includes communicating identified needs
to policymakers. The basis of this approach is both practical and ethical. Even
the most effective group dialogues cannot alter the reality that social problems
such as poverty do not lend themselves to quick solutions. Change often is
difficult and slow.,5 Photo novella enlarges its approach to empowerment by

173

providing a concrete way for people to communicate their vision and their voice
in order to inform policy.
An empowerment project based in Peru served as a useful model for photo
novella. In 1984, Asociacion Peru-Mujer began an enterprising project to encourage illiterate and semiliterate rural women to participate in local health and
family planning initiatives in ways that better protected their own health interests. Working together with local women, Peru-Mujer developed booklets that
consisted of a series of simple line drawings accompanied by descriptive text
depicting the lives and problems of families in the community. Four booklets
reflected conditions of different areas of the country. Envisioned as a catalyst
to stimulate group reflection, the booklets told stories of family life-including
unemployment, living costs, alcoholic partners, domestic violence, housework,
visits to the clinic, and decision-making. The familiarity of the stories made it
easier to talk about embarrassing topics like anatomy and contraceptive use.
The substance of the topics spurred discussions about the social and economic
realities underlying health and family planning conditions.
The booklets were designed as coloring books. Each woman who participated
in the program was provided with colored pencils or crayons. Women colored
the booklets as a group activity or took the booklets home, sometimes coloring
with their children and husbands. Trained community workers met with the
women to discuss the colored images and listened as they spoke with one another
about their lives and problems.
Many of the women reported that they had never used pencils before, or been
offered the opportunity to study anything. The last page of the booklet was a
diploma. Women reported that their families and communities were impressed by
their having completed a course of study. Aided by increased self-confidence, some
women enrolled in literacy classes. In many communities, women continued to
meet long after the formal project had finished.~ Participants reactions to the
process, including the creative activity of coloring, was overwhelmingly positive.
Women reported a greater sense of self-worth. They also had opportunities to work
together to solve community problems. In one village, the women organized to
replace an unsympathetic clinic doctor; in others, they worked to set up health
posts closer to their homes, to organize community pharmacies, or to support
women living in violent family settings. In its attention to creativity, dialogue, and
action, photo novella learned much from the work of Peru-Mujer.
In his famous essay, &dquo;On Practice,&dquo; Mao Ze Dong stated that social change
occurs when people &dquo;change their cognitive ability and change the relations&dquo; between their own subjective world and the objective world. Both Freire and Mao
highlighted, in their ethic of change, community participation, personal and social
transformation, and justice. Similarities in their approaches may have made it easier
to facilitate critical consciousness strategies with the Chinese village women. Most
of the older participants had had previous experience with &dquo;study sessions&dquo; on
Maoist theories of social

change.
Feminist

Theory

Feminist theories and methods, diverse as they are, have consistently critiqued
those studies that have assumed women were objects of other peoples actions,

174

rather than actors in the world. Feminist inquiry into womens realities is carried
out by and with women instead of on women, in ways that empower people,
honor womens intelligence, and value knowledge grounded in experience.8 The
choice to promote empowerment through an educational practice that revolves
around womens documentary images draws on the version of feminist thought
which has questioned our understandings of power, representation, and voice.
Feminist research views women as authorities on their own lives; it enables
them &dquo;to construct their own knowledge about women according to their criteria
as women, and to empower themselves through knowledge making. &dquo;9 Grounded
in an ideology of accountability, feminist scholars have contended that knowledge or practice that exploits or oppresses is unjustifiable. They have argued
for an inclusive form of knowledge construction.
Similarly, a major contribution of feminist consciousness-raising groups of
the 1960s was to assert the value of womens experience. From that model, as
Frankenberg has observed, &dquo;the private, the daily, and the apparently trivial
in womens activities come to be understood as shared rather than individual
experiences, and as socially and politically constructed.&dquo;
In &dquo;Toward a Feminist Research Method,&dquo; Rhoda Linton&dquo; identified six
characteristics of the process and content of &dquo;feminist activities&dquo;:

the active central focus/subject.

2. Cooperative group activity is the predominant working mode.
3. There is a recognized need for liberation from the oppression of the status
1. Women

are

quo.
4. Issues

affecting

women are

identified, and strategies for action

are

devel-

oped.
an open, inclusive, accessible, creative, dynamic process between
among activities, or in relation to ideas.
6. There is a commitment to respect and include womens ideas, theories,
experiences, and action strategies from diverse experiences that appear to
be, and sometimes are, in conflict.

5. There is

people,

In line with the characteristics proposed by Linton,&dquo; photo novella has emphasized Yunnan womens own voices and visions. Women represent their lives to
themselves, to one another, and eventually to outsiders.
In our approach to empowerment, we find it useful to think about power to,
power with, and power over as three different kinds of processes, ones that in
reality are rarely distinct. Power to is affirmative power, the ability to accomplish things. Power with is the ability to work with others toward a common
purpose. Power over is the ability to influence or to direct other people, or the
physical or material environment. Photo novella attempts to create the conditions
in which women can further develop power to, power with, and power over, in
order to effect positive changes for health in their individual lives, and in their
communities. Village women might acquire, for example, the power to muster
the townships support for a village nursery. They might develop power with
one another to petition leaders to clean up a polluted reservoir. They might
strive for power over village attitudes that for girls to attend school is unimportant, or power over the allocation of resources by participating in community

175

decision-making. Collective knowledge, and then action, arises from a

sharing experiences and understanding the dominating institutions that

group
affect

their lives.2
Finally, the positivist assumption that neutrality exists in the research process
has been critiqued by feminists, Marxists, and other scholars. Feminist research,
like any research, creates knowledge. It differs, however, from &dquo;objective&dquo;
research in that its methods are in part also its findings. In the oft-quoted twist
on convention, &dquo;the means are the ends.&dquo; As empowerment education has
challenged traditional approaches to schooling, so have feminist critiques of
positivist research methods and the construction of knowledge pushed new aims
and methods of inquiry.

Documentary Photography

Documentary photographers have used the visual image to record violence,

isolation, poverty, and social humiliation. Broadly defined, documentary photography has portrayed the social and mental wellness of both its subjects and
the society of which they are a part. Yet however skilled a photographer may
be, Martha Rosler13 has raised concerns about the potential unfairness of liberal
documentary photography. Her concerns parallel those suggested by many scholars about the presumed benefits of research focused on minorities or other
subcultures and problems that arise from disparities in social power between the
researcher and the subjects.9.14.15 In her exploration of the politics of representation, Roster3 has argued that &dquo;the expose, the compassion and outrage, of
documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy
hunting-and careerism.&dquo;
She 13 has noted, for example, that &dquo;Migrant Mother&dquo; (Fig. 1) by Dorothea
Lange &dquo;became the worlds most reproduced photograph.&dquo; In 1978, the then
78-year-old Cherokee woman in the photograph, Florence Thompson, was living
in a trailer in Modesto, California. Thompson was quoted by an Associated
Press reporter as saying, &dquo;Thats my picture hanging all over the world, and I
cant get a penny out of it.... What goods it doing me?&dquo; Although Langes
famous photograph may have helped other women like Thompson, it may also
have failed to be accountable to the woman who, with her children, lent her
visage to become an internationally known icon.
As a practice that counters conventional documentary photography, photo
novella puts cameras directly in the hands of people who otherwise would not
have access, and allows them to be recorders, and potential catalysts, in their
own communities. The act of training nontraditional photographers to record
their own lives perhaps has been most closely identified with the documentary
photographer and popular educator Wendy Ewald.
In 1975, she went to Kentucky and taught children there &dquo;to photograph
themselves, their families, their animals, their community, stories they could
tell with pictures and finally their dreams or fantasies.&dquo; She guided the young
photographers to describe what they wanted to say with their pictures, and their
classmates to talk about how they were affected by them. The book Portraits

176

1.
Dorothea

Figure

&dquo;Migrant Mother&dquo; photograph

Lange, Nipomo, California, 1936.

of Florence

Thompson

and children

by

and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians 16 invigorated social history, popular education, and documentary photography by allowing the children to speak for themselves, and to engage in self-portraiture
in both visual and literal form. Recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation
Fellowship, Ewald has continued to teach children in Colombia, India, and North
Carolina both to photograph and to write their lives.
In the early 1980s the photographer Jim Hubbard began to take pictures of
homeless families. He taught one child he regularly visited, Dion Johnson, how
to use a camera. He recruited more photographers to teach other children. In
1989, Hubbard founded the Shooting Back Education and Media Center in the
nations capital. The book Shooting Back: A Photographic View of Life by

177

Homeless Children&dquo; is another major contribution to the genre that allows the
*
most vulnerable people within society to convey their own vision of the world.
Finally, the training conceived by Alex Harris at Duke Universitys Center
for Documentary Photography provided a valuable model for the photo novella
curriculum. A premise of both the Centers and Ewalds approach is that when
a photographer is completely integrated within the community she photographs,
she is often imaginative and observant in ways that exceed more experienced
photographers and photo journalists.
Using cameras to explore social reality has political implications. John Collier,
Jr., and Malcolm Collier8 put it this way: &dquo;We feel that the humanistic and
theoretical issues are more important than the technology.&dquo;
PROGRAM INFRASTRUCTURE

Context: Photo Novella

as a

Component of the Womens Reproductive

Development Program

Health and

In our version of photo novella, rural Chinese women discover their common
and different views of the world through large and small group discussions.
Talking about their photographs allows them to find similarities and differences
in how they were raised as young girls, or treated as wives, or regarded as
mothers. The goal of the large and small group dialogues is to cultivate peoples
ability to take individual and collective action for social change.
Among the most stigmatized members of Chinese society are peasant women,
who are often viewed as being of &dquo;inferior quality&dquo; by the cadres who serve
them, the intellectuals who have no interest in them, and the city people who
look askance at them. We carried out photo novella as one component of the
larger, Ford Foundation-supported Womens Reproductive Health and Development Program conducted among rural women in two counties of Chinas
Yunnan province.
Yunnan borders Burma, Laos, and Vietnam, and is known for its abundant
population of non-Han minority people. The province covers a poor, mountainous, and remote region in southwestern China. Prior to 1949, many pernicious communicable diseases, such as the plague, cholera, and malaria, devastated the region. While great progress has been made in disease prevention,
improving womens reproductive health has remained a central primary health
care need. 19 The problem is worst in Chinas rural poverty areas, where maternal
death and illness have remained at rates much higher than in wealthier areas. 20
Both Yunnan counties of Chengjiang and Luliang have a per capita income
level within the bottom quartile for the nation. The premise of this comprehensive, community-based undertaking was that womens reproductive health is
inseparable from womens social and economic status. The Womens Reproductive Health and Development Program was devoted to improving village
womens health status, and creating conditions so that the experiences in the
two counties could influence actions and understandings at a provincial level.
*In a now oft-recounted story, the title of the project
he was taking pictures: &dquo;Were shooting back.&dquo;

why

came

from

9-year-old boy who explained

178

Laying

the Groundwork for Photo Novellas Policy Link: The Provincial and
County Guidance Groups

As a first step, the Womens Reproductive Health and Development Program

established the provincial and county guidance groups in order to improve coordination among policy leaders who address the social, economic, cultural, and
biomedical factors that affect womens health. Put another way, a horizontal tie
was created among vertical programs. The guidance group provided a structure
to address policy questions that would emerge from the womens photographs
and discussions.
The guidance groups were made up of provincial and county leaders from
the bureaus of poverty alleviation, education, family planning, and health; researchers from universities and policy organizations; and provincial, county, and
township cadres from the All-China Womens Federation. The Womens Federation is a party organization dedicated to the protection and advancement of
womens well-being. i Coalition meetings among the guidance group members
marked the first multisectoral dialogues on reproductive health in Yunnan Province.

From Needs Assessment to

Empowerment

Education

Photo novella originated as a tool for assessing the needs of rural women of
and Luliang counties. It was at guidance group meetings that needs
assessment research was proposed, discussed, and revised. With assistance from
a team of national and international advisors and with counsel from the
guidance
group, initial needs assessment began in late 1991. The needs assessment had
four parts: (1) a broad-based questionnaire administered to 8,548 women and
men in the two counties; (2) a nominal group process with guidance
group
members to assess how they defined reproductive health and perceived womens
health needs; (3) focus group interviews with women and men of all ages, health
care providers, family planning workers, and government officials; and
(4) photo
novella.
In our version of photo novella, people photograph the home place, village,
or environment in which they work, play, worry, and love. As a needs assessment
tool, photo novella provided a creative and appealing method by which village
women and several Womens Federation cadres could document the health issues
of greatest concern, communicating them to policymakers, donors, program
planners and implementers, line agencies, the provincial and county guidance
groups, and their own communities.
At the same time, photo novella explicitly focused on other forms of empowerment through participation. The process emphasized the use of village
womens documentation of their everyday lives as an educational tool to increase

Chengjiang

tThe All-China Womens Federation is a huge organization, with national, provincial, prefecture,
county, township, and village representation throughout China. Federation members, known as
womens cadres, engage in various activities aimed at mobilizing women and protecting their rights.
Although they rarely dispense health care services, womens cadres sometimes do act as health
educators.

179

their individual and collective knowledge about womens health status and to
empower women to mobilize for social change. Photo novella originated as part
of the needs assessment. Yet as the term &dquo;needs assessment&dquo; suggests, women
are often in a supplicant position to more powerful authorities and institutions;
the purpose of photo novella was to promote a process of womens participation
that would be analytical, proactive, and empowering.
In 1992, a team of international health workers and provincial, county, township, and village Womens Federation cadres began to implement photo novella
in the two rural Chinese counties. Local Womens Federation cadres selected
the photo novella participants not primarily on the basis of previously demonstrated creativity, but with the goal of convening a representative group of rural
women who would reflect to policymakers the range of their peers concerns.
The participants included 9 cadres of the Womens Federation, and 53 village
women, each from a different village. The village women ranged in age from
18 to 56 years. Some women had no formal education; others had received up
to 10 years of schooling. We sought women from households with economic
standards that ranged from good, middle, and poor, and included both single
and married women. Married women had between one and five children. Among
the participants were ethnic Miao, Hei Yi, and Bai Yi minority women. All of
the village women were rural laborers. In Chengjiang County, the estimated per
capita annual income in 1991 was 807 yuan or approximately 142 U.S. dollars,
but for certain villages it was only about half this amount.
A total of 62 women, representing over 50 natural villages, received intensive
training in the techniques and process of photo novella. A person need not have
possessed the skills of the &dquo;elite,&dquo; such as the ability to read or write, to participate in photo novella. As our project demonstrated, photo novella can be
taught to a person who has little or no formal education, providing an opportunity
to document creatively and to discuss the communitys problems, concerns, and
hopes, and communicate them with policymakers.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF PHOTO NOVELLA TO

EMPOWERMENT EDUCATION
True Tales:

Photographs

as

Voice

The name photo novella denotes &dquo;picture stories.&dquo; Photo novella provides
participants the opportunity to spin tales about their everyday lives. These images
and tales have the potential to reach generations of children to come. Most
important, photo novella is a process. From the outset, we envisioned photo
novella as a method that would not only contribute to the needs assessment,
but also enable women to document, discuss, and organize around their collective
health interests, with the shared aim of improving life conditions in their com-

munities.
One of Freires oft-cited premises rejects a model of teacher as expert and
student as receptacle. Freire- noted that learning instead occurs in dialogue. The
moral center of the photo novella process is that what the women have to say
is, despite their low social status, important. Facilitated group conversations

180

encouraged women to share their voices by and among themselves. While describing the photographs that were most important to them and why, concerns
about community, family, and personal health naturally arose. They discussed
the photographs taken by women in the other county, and shared their images
with women, men, and children in their own village.
Empowerment includes at least four kinds of access: access to knowledge,
access to decisions, access to networks, and access to resources (Chu, personal
communication). Implicit in our version of photo novella as well as the broader
approach of the Womens Reproductive Health and Development Program was
the need to enchance access by village women and men in all of these four areas.
As described earlier, the purpose of this empowerment was to understand and
improve reproductive health conditions in rural Yunnan. Photo novella worked
to make it possible for the ideas of village women to be voiced and heard. It
thereby focused much of its attention on increasing access to decisions by village
women and the building of networks among them and between them and others
who could influence policy, or allocate resources. As a collectively directed
educational process, photo novella also shared knowledge between peers and
fellow participants.
We learned early on the necessity of including the womens explanations for
their photographs. The combination of their images and their words explaining
what they represent to them was not just compelling the way only a picture can
be, but they were true to the eye behind the camera. In most representations
of Chinese women in literature and film, Rey Chow 2 has noted that in a crosscultural context, the women are caught between &dquo;the gaze that represents her
and the image that is supposed to be her.&dquo; Photo novella envisions a self-defined
space that would diverge from depictions by outsiders superimposed on a culturally charged background. The womens own words represent their own lives
as they see them and speak about them.
Women from almost every village reacted strongly to a photograph of a woman
weeding her cornfield as her baby girl lay alone (Fig. 2). The image was virtually
universal to their own experience. When families must race to finish seasonal
cultivating, when their work load is heavy, and when no elders in the family
can look after young ones, mothers are forced to bring their babies to the field.
Dust and rain weaken the health of their infants. Like many village households,
this family has to work four mu of land. The photograph was a lightening rod
for the womens discussion of their burdens and needs.
Similarly, photographs provide both evidence and validation for shared concerns. Another womans picture showed that village children less than 4 years
old commonly learn how to help care for their younger siblings. This 3 1/2-yearold boy was feeding his less than 1-year-old baby brother (Fig. 3). Within the
different townships, reflection, dialogue, and analysis of this photograph could
&dquo;voice&dquo; issues ranging from child care problems (including how the older boys
studies will be affected by having to look after his brother) to family planning
policies (this family was fined because the children were not born at least 4 years
apart) to childrens health (the babys bare hands and feet often have cuts).
Finally, one woman took many photos that showed a tiny, distant speck of
a person engulfed in a field of rice. When encouraged to take some
pictures
from a closer range next time, she said she had wanted to show that one woman

181

Figure

2.

Hoeing

Corn.

Figure

3.

Feeding

Photograph by Li Oiong Fen, Chengjiang County farmer,

age 37.

Meal.

Zhu Yu Zhen,
42.
age

Photograph by

Chengjiang County farmer,

182

huge piece of land. She taught us how even well-intentioned

feedback to the photo novella participants could overlook and obscure-or at
worst, discourage-the point of their photographs. Her imaginative photo accomplished exactly what she wanted. She made the woman in the field look like
must

an

grow this

ant to show that relative to her herculean task she is.

Meaningful

Tales:

Photographs

as

Policy

Policy is a power relation. As a set of choices in a world of limited possibilities,

policy is the articulation of voice through the concrete distribution of resources.
Even when there is a shared vision, everything cannot be accomplished at once.
Policy-making elects priorities. In China, for example, should health policy focus
on providing potable water? Building a clinic at a county site? Constructing a
road to make the clinic more easily accessible? Teaching girls and boys nutrition
and hygiene? Providing ways for parents to keep their children in school instead
of putting them to work in the fields? Whose voices participate in the policy
dialogue determines which actions are chosen.
A central aim of photo novella was to contribute to an environment where
rural womens self-defined concerns entered programmatic and policy discussions. Although many programs have been promulgated on behalf of rural
women, it was almost unheard of to seek out, systematically and deliberately,
their point of view. The extraordinary logistical constraints of feasibility (e.g.,
resources and transportation) and the top-down and vertical structure of Chinese
bureaucracies did indeed pose challenges to the photo novella process, but
overcoming these obstacles was itself one of the successes of the programs.
We stated earlier that this process is ambitious. In Yunnan, photo novella
south to facilitate concrete, positive changes in policy through a process of
empowering women to speak for themselves. There was a gendered dimension
to the effort to

promote womens voices. Just

as

&dquo;we have been used to

virtual

monopoly of the production of scientific knowledge and discourses about

science, its history, and meaning, 22 we have become accustomed to a virtual
monopoly of the production of policy and international development programming by outsiders, people who are not primarily its &dquo;targets.&dquo; Photo novella is
an effort, in the tradition of many other community health programs, to engage
the community to act on its own behalf.
In visual and evocative ways, the photographs &dquo;listen into speech&dquo; womens
voices that ordinarily would not be heard, and broadcast them into the halls of
decision-making power. Photographs elicit visceral reactions, and that is one of
the key advantages of photo novella in reaching policymakers. Following the
first phase of photo novella training, for example, we gave a photo novella slide
presentation to the provincial and county guidance groups. It was attended by
several photo novella participants, and provincial, county, and township policymakers who represented the government agencies most responsible for reproductive health conditions in the province. The presentation began with an
introduction to the objectives of photo novella, and then moved to slides that
demonstrated how photographs have been used to educate and empower, to
reach policymakers, and to achieve social reform in other settings around the
male

183

world. Described were how the village women were selected to participate and
their overall demographic characteristics; the remainder of the presentation
offered the womens own photographs and their words.
One photo taken by Fanghua township Womens Federation cadre Ta Shu
Qin left a lasting impression with the audience. It showed a young girl standing
in the doorway of her home, carrying her little brother on her back. The entrance
of her home had a big iron door; the wall of her courtyard was made of brick.
These characteristics revealed the familys relatively high economic status in the
village. Ta recalled that she took the photo during school hours, yet the girl was
not in class. Instead, she had to care for her brother. Although her family could
afford sending her to school, their attitude was, &dquo;For female children to attend
school is useless.&dquo; The photograph sparked an animated dialogue about the
reasons families choose to school their daughters and sons so differently. Professors, officials, and cadres noted that the image all-too-accurately depicted
attitudes towards girls education. They talked about the broad-ranging impact
that low school attendance by girls might have on the community, why this
problem is underreported, and what could be done to improve the situation.
Photo novella participants from the two counties also compared the situation in
their communities; policymakers listened to the womens ideas about strategies
for action.
A rural woman normally could not gain access to a county-level official, or
communicate with a westerner. Her photos do. Through them, her ideas and
hopes may receive a powerful audience. Photo novella exhibits recently were
organized in Chengjiang and Luliang counties. Rather than initiate the
exhibits in a provincial or national site, the decision to start exhibits in the
counties reflects the projects core theme of local empowerment. Secondarily,
photographic exhibits outside of China will be organized, adding another major
dimension to photographs as voice, and a new set of challenges.
We argue that photo novella can be an appealing and effective tool to reach
policymakers. At the same time, this expectation assumes policymakers openness to constructive criticism or to unconventional ideas. Without this receptivity,
the focus of photo novella may instead shift to training the participants to work
outside the system through critical consciousness-raising and mobilization.
Otherwise, photo novella may become a form of window dressing, raising ethical
questions about its role in preserving the status quo. 21 In Yunnan, we were
backed by a political will for change, enlightened leaders, and a field of receptivity prepared, in part, by the Ford Foundation-supported reproductive health
program that emphasized participation and empowerment. In provincial and
county leaders we have had a receptive audience with which to share and discuss
the preliminary results of the womens photographs. One provincial cadre observed that although Chinese officials preached &dquo;walking the road of the
masses,&dquo; photo novella successfully embodied this commitment.

CONCERNS AND LIMITATIONS

Several inherent tensions in the photo novella process should be acknowledged. Photo novella requires considerable investments in time and resources.

184

example, the logistics of developing and handling film and facilitating regular meetings were formidable. The Womens Federation provided
a capable and committed infrastructure of insiders for accomplishing these tasks.
Even so, they felt they needed to provide each participant a subsidy equal to
the number of days field wages that were missed in order to participate fully.
We never assumed that the village women had extra time on their hands nor
that their everyday work responsibilities were easy.
Criticism may be directed at the worthiness of funding photo novella. In countries
where financial resources to improve peoples health are extraordinarily precious,
the devotion of capital to an innovative process of self-knowledge, creative expresIn Yunnan, for

sion, and critical consciousness may be viewed as frivolous. Leaders may be envious
allocated to people with less power than themselves. Intellectuals or
professionals may view participants as too uneducated to benefit from the project;
this was a view encountered painfully often, especially among male leaders. It was
our view that no matter how poor a person is, the opportunity to be creative and
expressive is valuable. We argue the importance of recognizing the power of creative
expression to engage people and affect change.
In the beginning, one professional photographer in the provincial capital wondered why the photo novella project didnt simply buy him a single high-quality
camera, a budget for film processing, and the means to travel through the two
counties and the entire province. Surely, the photographs would be of higher
quality, he claimed. Even the expense would be lower. Indeed, photo novella
required that cameras be provided to women with no particular technical expertise.
The project goals could not have been reached by an expert outsider producing
beautiful photographs. The photo novella approach allows that meaningful change
comes from the center.
We were acutely aware of other dilemmas within the process, as exemplified by
the issues suggested by the woman who took the photograph of another woman
as small as an ant in a field. We recognized that teaching the women to improve
their technical and artistic photography skills was one way to validate their intelligence and to affirm personal efficacy. At the same time, we sought to avoid
singling out a small minority of participants, and making potentially divisive judgments about the value of their work. In short, we wanted to define success broadly
and inclusively so as to encourage a sense of team spirit and &dquo;community efficacy.&dquo;
People can experience photo novella in many ways. We found that especially
during Yunnans harvest season, the women who labored in the fields from dark
until dark, traveled home, and moved to household chores, sometimes were simply
too tired to take pictures of their busy lives. Photo novella happens in the reality
of peoples experience. Our understanding of how to apply Freire was enhanced
by Minklers24 case study, which acknowledged that empowerment education is
most effective when flexibly adapted to the circumstances demanded by the cultural
and social setting.
of

resources

CONCLUSION
Photo novella makes
through its two-pronged

unique contribution to empowerment education

emphasis on participation and policy. In identifying
a

185

participation as a key element of empowerment, photo novella adapts Freires

method of problem-posing education. As Wallerstein~ has noted, this method,
with codes and group discussion, involves people in a process that shifts their
roles from learners to emerging teachers and social actors in their communities.
Furthermore, photo novella takes the Freirian approach to the discussion and
codification of visual images a step further. The power to seek out images and
consciously to document them belongs not to outsiders, strangers, nor photojournalists, but rather to the people who experience powerlessness as their
dominant social reality. Learning arises from analyzing images not made by
others but by themselves, from portraits of participation.
In identifying policymakers as agents who may repress or promote womens
health, we sought to influence Chinese government reproductive health and
rural development policies. We also wanted to instigate a participatory process
that would influence the assistance priorities in one provinces poor rural areas.
We had structural access to the first through the guidance group system, and
access to the second through the participation of the Ford Foundation. The two
were partners in an effort to better understand and more responsively address
reproductive health problems.
In their influential work The Meaning of Things, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 25 observed that photographs are among the things people in different cultures most value. Photo novella is a literal form of history-in-themaking. The photographs taken by the village women are an exquisite history
of a place, a community, and a way of life that is unseen by most outsiders and
that is undocumented by insiders and outsiders alike. Like &dquo;undocumented
a different context, the rural Chinese women we worked with had
little money, power, or status. For these otherwise &dquo;undocumented&dquo; women to
photograph their lives evokes a double power: It records for future generations
what is happening now, and it enables the village women to define for themselves
and others, including policymakers, what is worthy to remember and where
change must occur. Finally, that the women of rural Yunnan will be seen and
heard inspires the process of photo novella.

workers&dquo; in

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