Starting from Walter Benjamin’s idea of photography as a non-technological conception of art and following Jean Luc Nancy’s claim that the public dimension of research is most obviously articulated in the autonomous portray I want to explore the possibility of an image based research that can be divided from epistemology and methodology. I first will indicate that within the discourse on image-based research, visual images increasingly have been seen as a productive provider of objective as well as communicative data about our reality in terms of i.e. the communication of inner feelings and intimate experiences (Prosser 1998). Within this discourse, image based research is also presented as an alternative to traditional qualitative research inquiries in which so called ‘outsider’ researchers investigate and assess the lives of ‘insider’ research subjects (Kaplan and Howes 2004). I will argue that images in these approaches are not only an expression or articulation of a particular way of doing image based research, but that they also form a part of its technological (re)production (Benjamin, 1977). Secondly I will offer a way of rethinking image based research by distinguishing it from approaches that are always based on the production of a particular way of ‘Cartesian’ subjectivity. To do so, I will in line with Jean Luc Nancy (2000), distinguish the autonomous portray with one that is part of a scene. Whereas the portray that is part of a scene can be considered as a representation of a particular role that can and have to be learned and is restricted to particular codes and conditions, the autonomous portray in contrast is nothing but the representation of itself. This portray is not related to the representation of particular conditions or codes, but could be conceived as a ‘public’ activity of which the gaze of the person, as looking, forms the starting point. Following Nancy, we will indicate that it is precisely the gaze of the person that puts the subject (of which image based research so often is about) at stake. The intimacy that is expressed in this gaze, is an intimacy that reveals the public dimension of the figure of the researcher. Finally, I will conclude with a note on the meaning of the autonomous portray for education.

social ontology of the present

I will argue that portrays in currently image based research are not only an expression or articulation of a particular way of doing image based research, but that they also form a part of its technological (re)production (Benjamin, 1977).