Reflections on Visual Methods from a Study of Manitoulin Island’s Penal History Museums

Abstract

Our research team has conducted fieldwork at 45 Canadian penal history museums. Part of our research design incorporates visual methods. We have taken photographs at each site to represent what the eye can see during visits to these spaces. In this article, we assess the contributions to criminal justice studies and criminology that visual methods enabled us to make. In particular, we reflect on the visual itself as aide-mémoire and data for text-based writing and analysis. We also consider the challenges and limits encountered using visual methods that, like other approaches to research, maintain or introduce a gap in knowing between researchers, audiences, and objects of study. We explore these boundaries in knowing about the past of imprisonment and punishment by reflecting on the role of incarceration in the assimilation of First Nations on Manitoulin Island (Ontario) and by examining visual data, including hundreds of carvings engraved by prisoners on a table at Gore Bay Jail Museum. Viewing such a scene, we contend, introduces a paradox for penal spectators. As they pore closely over the prisoners’ table, with cameras flashing, they may never be further away from knowing about the pains of imprisonment.