Community participation in place planning is essential in order to integrate elements of meaning and temporal continuity into aesthetic valuation. The landscapes with which we develop familiarity through work and play have aesthetic compositional components and cultural meaning. It may be possible to provide a detached evaluation of scale, texture, color, and form to arrive at an aesthetic sense of space. However, without inputs of valuation, collective experience, and function, the importance of that space to maintaining a sense of community remain invisible. We believe that these visual characteristics of a community can be very effectively captured through resident employed photography.
Photographs can express so many subtleties that a survey questionnaire can never reveal.
Residents within these groups were given disposable 24 exposure Kodak cameras and photographic logs. One purpose of the log was to provide researchers with the photographers' clear intentions regarding the object photographed. As well, the log ordered the photographs in case the photographic negatives were mishandled or damaged. The log also proved a good collection tool for comments and interpretive elements for the associated photos. Analyses were conducted to determine differences and similarities within groups.