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Article published In: Instructing Bodies
Edited by Leelo Keevallik, Emily Hofstetter and Jan Lindström
[Interactional Linguistics 5:1/2] 2025
► pp. 201–228

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Instructions in the photography studio

How photographers treat and orchestrate the bodies of the clients

ORCiD logo with link | Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University
Published online: 17 July 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/il.24018.tek
Abstract
This paper examines the instructions produced by photographers in photography studios. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this study elucidates the instructive practices deployed by photographers in their work of designing photographable poses. This paper concentrates on the interactional aspects of how photographers arrange their clients’ bodies for individual portraits and group photographs. While organizing the individual portraits, the photographers instruct their clients by dealing with different bodily aspects, such as postures, head orientations and facial expressions, in a successive fashion, treating their bodies as disarticulated. When arranging group photographs, the photographers orchestrate intercorporeal contact between the bodies, often engaging in tactile instructions in which they use instructive utterances together with tactile practices such as touching and moving. The photographers’ instructive utterances notify and inform the clients about their projected touch and imply the relevance for them to adopt docile bodies. By way of producing tactile instructions, the photographers not only formulate the instructions but also perform the relevant instructed actions by manipulating the clients’ bodies. In this way, the photographers exhibit their entitlement to touch their clients’ bodies as part of their professional service and exercise a specific form of embodied agency. Participants in the data speak Turkish.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Instruction sequences
  • 3.Data and phenomenon
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Organizing a disarticulated body in a successive way
    • 4.2Orchestrating intercorporeal contact between two bodies
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
References (51)
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