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Abstract

This is a narrative inquiry that explores the significance of a photograph that has exerted a hold over me for several years. A single glance, like running a finger along the amassed spines of well-loved novels, tumbles me instantly into memory. Yet, over time I have realized there is more than nostalgia to this photograph’s hold. Like those novels, this photograph holds its own fiction, yet through that fiction it also carries profound truths about how life might be lived. As I live alongside it, I find the photograph unfolding to another, deeper level of meaning that shifts and changes through time, representing a self in flux and guiding a journey through the themes of my life. In telling the story of another, I find that the photograph contains my own narrative too.

Keywords

autoethnography ethnographies methodologies writing as method of inquiry methods of inquiry narrative

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The Photograph

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