four note friday 1.23 | The Photonovel and Photovoice

A few weeks ago, I became interested in learning more about a Peace Corps training manual written by Daniel Weaks titled The Photonovel: A Tool for Development. It had been referenced in early writings on photovoice, and, well, I became intrigued. The manual is available online, but I wanted to flip through an original analog version. Interlibrary loan came through, and here we are.

In their pre-photovoice photovoice work published in 1994, Caroline Wang and Marry Ann Burris published an article titled Empowerment through Photo Novella: Portraits of Participation. Yet in the years that followed, they moved from the term photo novella to photovoice, noting in their 1997 article Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment that "the process to be described here is significantly different [from photo novella]; hence, the term photovoice" (p. 369, italics in original). Clearly, the photonovel was inspirational to early photovoice work.

Here are my four take-aways from that manual by Weaks, including some connections I see to more modern approaches to photovoice.