ABSTRACT
This chapter explains significant tension in qualitative research in education which derives from the re-emergence of qualitative research in a context dominated by measurement. For evaluation and research the distinction between public and private uses for photographs has considerable importance. It provides the key to purposes that depend on developing uses for photographs that go beyond the positivist assertion that photographs provide a literal truth and it provides an alternative to viewing photographs as inert visual records. There are other researchers and other projects, generally more influenced by European social theory, whose concern is with directly confronting the issue of subjectivity: the subjectivity, of both the subject and the researcher. In evaluating educational programs and in educational research, pictures are more often misused than well used. It is a strange paradox that in its striving for status as ‘science’, educational research appears to have missed the fact that much of science research is visual.
