Modern life is saturated with advertisements that use images. We see them on our phones, our TVs, on billboards and signs, though very few are memorable or meaningful to us once they have reached the end of their lifecycle. One campaign that challenged the notion of traditional advertisements was HSL’s “Faces of Public Transport” campaign, which ran in autumn of 2013 and winter of 2014 in Helsinki. The HSL campaign featured 526 portraits of people from the Helsinki area who utilize public transportation in a unique and notable campaign in celebration of HSL reaching an annual ridership of one million people in the Helsinki region. The HSL campaign brings up questions about representation, the intersection of identities, and the power of images and the creator of images. Dyer (1997) and Hall (2003), among others, inform the theoretical background of the research on identity and representation, though the main focus of this work is methodological development and practice, specifically in terms of visual research methods and the use of photography as an ethnographic research tool. As the results show, making meaning from images does not produce neat datasets, but instead prompts further interrogation of local, national and global power structures that affect how identities are represented.

In this article, inspired by the idea of using data to think with theory [Jackson, A., and L. Mazzei. 2012. Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. London: Routledge], we explore how our ethnographic visual data will be 'thought', 'theorised' and verbalised using concepts such as the photo elicitation method, punctum and the decisive moment. These concepts are 'plugged in' to the data as we explore what new aspects the concepts produce for our analysis. In our ethnographic data, children photographed their ordinary afternoons during after-school activities. As to the analysis, our challenge is twofold: firstly, how does one verbalise photographs and, secondly, how can one write about photographs, specifically those taken by children. Following Jackson and Mazzei, the specific concepts were 'arrested' in order to help us extend our analysis.