ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one particular textual methodology used to extract ideologies from narrative text that may accompany photographs or other forms of visual communication. It explores the more traditional approach to visual narrative typified within the photographic discipline. The chapter defines the textual methodology known as ethnographic research poetry. Photography and ideology have danced with one another since nineteenth-century European and American practitioners crafted their earliest images. During the American Civil War of the early 1860s, capitalistic ideologies manifested themselves in photographs created by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardener in their attempts to secure monetary reward by showing dead bodies at the expense of those soldiers. Oftentimes, narrative is defined as story. Stories are common and occupy numerous formats within society, such as literature, magazine articles, newspaper journalism, TV, and movies. Poetry in ethnographic research and writing has endured back and forth arguments, similar to a Ping-Pong match, in regards to acceptance in qualitative research.
