Orkney Auction Mart - Project Introduction

This note deals with the execution and presentation of a Visual Sociology project on Orkney Auction Mart (OAM). A separate note, to be added, will provide a retrospective critique of the overall project and its outcome, with particular reference to its validity and reliability as a research project.

For this project, photographs are not used as illustration for points made in the text but instead text is used to comment on what information can be derived from the photographs. To make this meaningful it was necessary to observe to find out what were the important features and then take the photographs that draw attention to that importance. In some cases the photographs taken have been used in the order taken to emphasise the sequence of events but where this did not matter some photographs have been re-ordered to make their presentation more helpful.

The project has been broken down into sections, each of which has a separate heading and notes below. The notes comment only on some key points that can be drawn from the album of photographs for the section but there are short text notes on the photographs themselves to assist the viewer in understanding what was being focussed on as each photograph was taken.

The albums can be accessed by the link at the end of each section and can be viewed either as individual images or a slide show by selecting the album name at the end of the section. If viewing as a slide show it is recommended that the time lapse is set to 8 seconds to allow time for notes that on images to be read.