The experience of diaspora as the substance of the researcher’s artwork: an autoethnographic exploration

Abstract

This practice-based research project focuses on the subjective experience of the author as a photographic artist living and working in the Bangladeshi community in the United Kingdom. It uses visual autoethnographic methodologies and self-reflexive methods to review photographs taken by the author in and through her own diasporic experience. The project reviews the work made by the author in the context of other artists/photographers working in the same discipline or similar work process and makes comparisons between creative methods and approaches. The project focuses on key emotional experiences that are often common to persons within a diasporic experience, for example, displacement, alienation, nostalgia, homesickness, and liminality. These ideas are explored visually using photographic image-making in the ongoing style of the author as an artist, using photographic cameras—Holga—that produce unpredictable outcomes and analogue film exposure and processing that affect the image in different ways. For the author, this method has a metaphoric similarity to the lived and felt diasporic experience. This research intends to fill an identified gap in the scope of diasporic research and the Bangladeshi community, specifically, visual research that captures such experiences.