Expanding the Role of Digital Photographs in Evaluation Practice

Documenting, Sense-Making, and Imagining

Abstract

Program stakeholders and evaluators routinely generate and share digital photographs. Three frameworks for using photographs in evaluation practice are discussed: documenting social change, facilitating sense-making, and inspiring and imagining social change. These are rooted in scholarship from arts-informed inquiry and visual sociology and anthropology. Using this framework, a review of existing literature demonstrates an extensive use of photographs for documentation and a growing use of photographs for sense-making and inspiring and imagining social change in evaluation practice. The paper concludes with a case example of how an evaluation team used digital photographs in an evaluation of a teacher professional development program.