Video Diary Making as a Research Method: Just Another Jargon of Authenticity?

From 2003-2006 I was an AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts investigating autobiographical documentary and video diaries, a project which included including the production of the video-diary based film A Whited Sepulchre . The presentation included sequences from the film, as a way, first of describing how the use of video diary making was itself a research method, and then of raising some of the questions - and the beginnings of answers - that the method provoked. One of my aims with A Whited Sepulchre was - fairly obviously - to investigate the form/genre of the video diary by making one myself: filmmaking as a research method (or in Charlotte Crofts’ words 'the use of practice as a research tool').