Understanding auto-photography in coaching research: A reflexive account

Drawing upon auto-photography as a research method, this article offers a reflexive account of how the visual method was negotiated and analysed with participants in a study of sport coaching in a semi-professional football club in the UK. When engaging with Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) important work, The Production of Space, the ethnographic project encountered challenges between theory, practice, and analysis when drawing upon visual methods. Using Han Wool’s reflexive accounts while doing the ethnographic study, two primary issues were identified: firstly, the strategic role of auto-photography within the design when constructing knowledge with participants; and secondly, the role of auto-photography to inspire, and be inspired by, specific theoretical orientations to produce meaningful insights. In doing so, this reflexive account presents reflexivity-in-action as an on-going practice that can stimulate analysis of the entanglements between participants’ bodies and their rhythms within sport coaching, while also showing how auto-photography can be done with participants in a way that generates insightful, theoretically rich and imaginative knowledge in coaching research.