Visualizing nature: A review of photovoice as a method for understanding environmental change

Originally developed in the field of public health, the participatory photography research methodology known as “photovoice” has increasingly been used by interdisciplinary environmental scientists. This scoping review assesses this trend, identifying and analyzing 132 relevant journal articles to evaluate how researchers deploy this methodology to understand environmental change processes and perceptions. We find that photovoice has been applied to a range of environmental topics, including environmental health, climate change, water governance, and rural and urban development, complementing a turn towards community-based research methods and co-production of knowledge within the field. We interrogate who is included in photovoice projects and how they were conducted, showing how the original intent of the method - to highlight the perceptions, voices, and experiences of rural women - has been broadened to capture lived experiences of marginalized groups such as resource-dependent, low-income and Indigenous communities. We highlight what we see as the core contribution of this method - understanding alternative epistemologies of environmental change – and argue that photovoice has high potential to capture, explore, and share the views and voices of marginalized people. While we caution that studies should consciously consider the trade-offs involved in this time-consuming and open-ended method, we argue that increasing use of this method can contribute to our understanding of a range of empirical topics as well as fostering epistemological pluralism and insights that can lead to action.