Images of a Wartime Work Routine: Photography, Micropolitics, and Care in the Street Clinic
Teamwork; Permanent Health Education; Harm Reduction; Street Clinic (Consultório na Rua); Photography
This study consists of a research-intervention conducted with two Street Clinic (Consultório na Rua) teams in Natal/RN, Brazil, exploring the experience of photography within the daily collective work in the territory. It aims to problematize how photography can operate within a Permanent Health Education (EPS) space as a device for mediating lived experience in a context characterized by precarity and violence. The study is grounded in the premise that photography can foster powerful encounters capable of mobilizing shifts in interprofessional practices and contributing to the construction of a logic of care for the self and the other. Consequently, the research focused on the relational and micropolitical field, using the act of photographing as a methodological device to access and elaborate upon aspects that often remain silenced in EPS discussion circles. The experience made it possible to access, on one hand, to the hostile territorial scenarios that impact both the homeless population and health workers; on the other, it demonstrated that the aesthetic experience of photography and the collective problematization of images within a EPS space facilitate the construction of ethico-political movements among the workers. These are expressed through practices guided by harm reduction, applied not only to user care but also as a relational ethic within the teams