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This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work, and on my use of photovoice as a research method.
“The camera kept seeing what I was working so hard to look past.”
About two weeks into my thirty days in Loreto, I looked back through the photographs I had been taking each morning and felt something turn over in my chest. I had thought I was photographing the sea. Light on water, a pelican, the long bar of the Sierra de la Giganta going pink at dawn. But laid out together, the images were saying something I had refused to say out loud. Again and again I had framed thresholds: a doorway half open, the gap between two rocks, the narrow channel where the bay met the open water. I had photographed edges and openings for two weeks while telling myself I was at peace. The camera kept seeing what I was working so hard to look past. It knew, before I did, that I had come to Loreto to find a way through.
I am a researcher who uses photovoice (a method in which people make photographs of their own world and then interpret them, so that their way of seeing becomes the data). I have spent years trusting that a participant’s photograph carries knowledge that words alone would miss. What surprised me in Loreto was having the method turn around and work on me. This post is about why that happened, and about a quiet idea at the root of both human geography and photovoice: that perception is a form of knowing, and that the way a person sees a place is itself a kind of evidence.
The Perceived Environment
Geographers have long been interested in something more than the measured, objective landscape. They have been interested in the perceived environment (the world as a person actually senses, feels, and interprets it, which can differ sharply from the world a survey would record). This is the tradition that takes seriously how a place is lived from the inside. My morning photographs were perceived environment in its purest form. The bay held no literal doorways. The thresholds were in me, and the camera was the instrument that made my perception visible enough to read.
Photovoice grew directly out of this conviction that perception is knowledge. Maclean and Woodward (2012), evaluating photovoice in research with Aboriginal communities in northern Australia, describe how visual methods that use photography have become powerful participatory tools precisely because, when people take and interpret their own images, the process reveals values, beliefs, and understandings that other methods leave buried (Maclean & Woodward, 2012). They emphasize that participants become collaborators who add their own knowledge to the inquiry rather than serving as subjects to be studied by an expert (Maclean & Woodward, 2012). The photograph, in this account, is far from a neutral record. It is a way of knowing that belongs to the person who made it.
Lombard (2012), reflecting on her use of auto-photography in informal neighbourhoods in Mexico, sharpens the point in a way that speaks to my own days by the sea. She argues that the method offers rich access to participants’ perceptual observations, the things that are harder to reach through conventional interviews, and that it is especially suited to showing how the less powerful see their place in the world (Lombard, 2012). Reading her, I recognize what my camera was doing. It was reaching the perceptual observations I could not yet put into an interview answer, even an interview with myself.
When the Image Knows More Than the Words
The strange gift of photography as a method is that it can outrun the stories we tell about ourselves. Klingorova and Gokariksel (2019), in a study where young women photographed the everyday places tied to their emotions, found that ordinary settings with no obvious significance, a door, a staircase, could turn out to be sites of strong emotional intensity once the photograph brought them into view (Klingorova & Gokariksel, 2019). They argue that pairing the image with the photographer’s own narration reveals the anxieties and desires of place-making that would otherwise stay hidden (Klingorova & Gokariksel, 2019). A door. A staircase. A threshold between two rocks. The resonance with my own images was almost uncanny when I read them.
There is good reason the image can know more than the words. Barron (2025), writing about photographic methods for studying people and place, describes how visual materials work as facilitators of thinking rather than as factual mirrors of the world, prompting reflection and surfacing feelings and memories that a direct question would miss (Barron, 2025). My photographs were doing exactly that. They were thinking on my behalf, holding up a pattern I was too defended to assemble myself, until the day I spread them out and the pattern assembled me.
This is why I trust perception as evidence, in my research and now in my own life. The morning I understood what my camera had been saying was the morning my retreat actually began. The images had done the knowing first. I only had to catch up to them.
Seeing as a Practice of Dignity
There is one more dimension I want to honour, because it is the ethical centre of photovoice and the reason I am careful with it. To treat a person’s way of seeing as knowledge is to grant that person authority over their own story. Tuck and Habtom (2019), describing a photovoice project with Black and Indigenous youth in Toronto, show how the method can centre participants as the experts on their own relationships to place, and they build into their design a respect for refusal, the right of a participant to decide which photographs to take, which to share, and which stories to keep (Tuck & Habtom, 2019). Seeing, in their hands, becomes a practice of dignity and self-determination rather than extraction.
I hold this close because it disciplines how I read even my own images. The camera’s authority to know me belongs to me, and the choosing of what to make visible is itself the point. In my teaching and my research, when I introduce photovoice to students, this is the heart of what I want them to carry: that asking someone how they see their world, and then believing the answer, is a profound act of respect. The perceived environment is never a lesser, softer version of the real one. It is the real one, as lived, and it deserves to be treated as true.
What I Brought Home
The foundational work behind all of this belongs to Wang and Burris (1997), who created photovoice as a way for people to record and reflect their own communities’ strengths and concerns through the images they choose to make. I have cited them for years in my scholarship. In Loreto I finally understood their method from the other side of the lens, as a participant whose photographs knew the truth before the participant did.
I came home to Oliver with a camera full of thresholds and a clearer sense of why I make images at all. Perception is knowledge. The way I see a place is evidence of where I am and where I am trying to go. My camera kept faith with that truth through two weeks when I could not, framing the openings I was too frightened to name until I was ready to walk through one. That is what the perceived environment means to me now. It is the world as my seeing knows it, often a step ahead of my words, always worth believing.
References
Barron, A. (2025). Photo go-alongs for researching the relations between people and place. Area, 58(1), Article e70050. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70050
Klingorova, K., & Gokariksel, B. (2019). Auto-photographic study of everyday emotional geographies. Area, 51(4), 752-762. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12537
Lombard, M. (2012). Using auto-photography to understand place: Reflections from research in urban informal settlements in Mexico. Area, 45(1), 23-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01115.x
Maclean, K., & Woodward, E. (2012). Photovoice evaluated: An appropriate visual methodology for Aboriginal water resource research. Geographical Research, 51(1), 94-105. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-5871.2012.00782.x
Tuck, E., & Habtom, S. (2019). Unforgetting place in urban education through creative participatory visual methods. Educational Theory, 69(2), 241-256. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12366
Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369-387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309
ACADEMIC LENS
This post grounds the concept of the perceived environment in peer-reviewed scholarship on photovoice and auto-photography, framing perception as a legitimate form of geographic knowledge. Wang and Burris (1997) anchor the methodological lineage as the originators of photovoice. Maclean and Woodward (2012) establish the core epistemological claim that participant-made photographs reveal values and understandings other methods miss, and that photography repositions people as collaborators rather than subjects. Lombard (2012), working in Mexico, supplies the argument that auto-photography accesses perceptual observations beyond the reach of interviews and foregrounds how the less powerful see their world, which resonates with the writer’s own retreat setting. Klingorova and Gokariksel (2019) provide the striking finding that ordinary thresholds can hold intense emotional meaning surfaced only through image and narration together, mirroring the post’s central scene. Barron (2025) theorizes images as facilitators of thinking rather than factual mirrors, explaining why the photograph can precede conscious articulation. Tuck and Habtom (2019) supply the ethical core, linking photovoice to refusal and self-determination, which connects the post to the writer’s Indigenous-studies touchstones and disciplines the interpretation of even her own images. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the post performs a reversal of the photovoice gaze: the researcher becomes the participant whose perception, captured photographically, constitutes knowledge in advance of language, enacting the very claim the literature makes.
