From photo documentation to photo diagrams: a technique to make civic ecologies present and legible

The visualization of nature in cities fundamentally impacts how we imagine the urban environment and our role in caring for it. Across Australia, the project of urban renewal imagines and designs specific typologies of urban nature. These typologies can obscure grass root forms of environmental stewardship and their connection through civic ecologies. Yet, at this time of environmental change, residents’ engagement with urban ecologies is vital. What role might visual communication play in helping to make these civic ecologies initiatives more legible? This article discusses an experiment creating photo diagrams, which expands visual methodologies used in place-based research, such as photo documentation and visual ethnography. Iterative photography augmented by ethnographies enables us to ‘read’ the landscape. Diagrams support us in expanding the photographs in three crucial moves. First, desaturation reveals examples of civic ecologies. Second, tracing exposes the networks and relations that constitute them. And, third, text and lines of flight draw out how civic ecologies extend beyond specific sites and connect to other places. In this way, this article makes three contributions. The first is to experiment with ways to make grass root civic ecologies legible in their complexities to recuperate practices marginalized by top-down socio-ecological processes of urban renewal. The second proposes photo diagrams as a medium moving between photography as descriptive documentation and documentation of non-representational dimensions. Finally, the third brings a visual communication perspective into debates on conveying the non-representational in visual form.