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PurposeTo explore the use of fictitious vignettes representing older people and the extent to which they serve as an effective resource in developing service provision and transforming health and social care.Design/methodology/approachBased on a critical review of research and academic discourse.FindingsFictitious vignettes or case studies of older adults, such as “Mrs Smith”, may be a useful means to promote communication with and between health and social care colleagues about current services and transforming or re-organising service provision. However, we argue that while there may be a role for vignettes, care should be taken in their use. The potential to “homogenise” older people into the “typical” patient personified by Mrs Smith may do very little to challenge age- based stereotypes and assumptions. Moreover, vignettes cannot match the potential value and importance of older men and women directly participating in the evaluation and development of services.Practical implicationsThis article argues that changing the way services are organised and delivered must be underpinned by critical reflection of the assumptions which underpin attitudes towards old age, including our tendency to define older people by chronological age and to homogenise “the elderly” into a single group. The value of participatory methods which meaningfully involve older citizens in both evaluating and planning services could contribute significantly to innovation in service development.Social implicationsThis paper highlights the critical importance of challenging age-based stereotypes and ageist policy and practice. Recognising old age as being characterised by diversity and difference could challenge the tendency to see old age, especially advanced old age, as an inevitable problem.Originality/valueThis article offers a critical perspective on the use of vignettes.

Like many authors of the long nineteenth-century period, Henry James was both fascinated and troubled by photography's capacity to extend social relations across distance and time. As this article will show, in The Awkward Age (1899) and 'Crapy Cornelia' (1909) he represents photography as enabling new forms of virtual flirtation.The Awkward Age projects its protagonist, an adolescent girl named Nanda, into a network of photographic exchange. This leads to serious problems when her mother seeks to win Nanda a suitor. The text not only depicts photographs as modes of flirtation; it also shares with photography a concern for deixical signification. The book presents the identity of its individual characters through a blank writing style that is both flirtatious and photographic in its pleasurable deferral of meaning. By the time he wrote 'Crapy Cornelia', James had adjusted to the new instantaneous and portable photography. As a result, this later story portrays obsolete carte-de-visite photography in nostalgic terms: as a form that enabled affective (and effective) networks of connection, even between the living and the dead.

Since the turn of the century, photographic studies has undergone a dramatic shift\ud in perspective. The modernist art historical narrative that emphasised the innovations\ud of individual photographer-artists has receded, while recent research has\ud participated in what some have referred to as photography’s ‘ethnographic turn’.1\ud In order to recognise and celebrate contemporary scholarship, we organised a\ud conference entitled ‘Rethinking Early Photography’ at the University of Lincoln,\ud UK in June 2015.2 The topic of networks emerged as the conference discussion\ud proceeded, eventually becoming the basis for this special issue. Thinking about\ud networks, in their various forms, is one important way in which photographic\ud studies has moved away from the privileging of avant-garde uniqueness, certainty,\ud and individual authorship that marked scholarship in the twentieth century

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