The use of visual evidence in social and cultural research is an exciting and stimulating area of growing interest bridging the social sciences and humanities. The burgeoning use of the Internet has given a massive boost to the use of, and interest in, varieties of visual information for research purposes. At the same time, these visual technologies themselves raise all sorts of methodological questions.
This collection brings together the contributions of key writers within both the symbolic and empirical research traditions, presenting the most influential statements on visual research methods and the central debates about visual culture in a diversity of fields. These range from art history, to history of photography, film studies, and aesthetics to media and communications studies, sociology and cultural studies, and social anthropology, social psychology and educational research.
Part I: Classical Historical Statements
Part II: The Objectivity of the Visual
Part III: Visual Technologies
Part IV: The Visual as Method
Introduction - Peter Hamilton
Panopticon; Or the Inspection-House - Jeremy Bentham
Containing the Idea of a New Principle Of Construction
Personal Identification and Description - Francis Galton
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin
First Principles of Documentary - John Grierson
Icon, Index and Symbol - C S Peirce
Studies in Iconology - Erwin Panofsky
Art as Evidence - Jules Prown
The Objectivity of Artistic Values - Raymond Boudon
Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography and Photojournalism - Howard S Becker
It's (Almost) All a Matter of Context
The Identification of the Criminal Classes by the Anthropometrical Method - A Bertillon
On the Authority of the Image - Doug Harper
Visual Sociology at the Crossroads
Tracing the Criminal - Neil Davie
EnCoding and Decoding - Stuart Hall
The Family of Man - Roland Barthes
The centrality of the Eye in Western Culture - Chris Jenks
Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag
The Burden of Representation - John Tagg
Pour en Finir avec la Profondeur de Champ - André Bazin
Reading an Archive - Allan Sekula
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - Laura Mulvey
Stored Virtue - Tony Bennett
Memory, the Body and the Evolutionary Museum
The Medium Is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan
An Inventory of Effects
The Decisive Moment - Henri Cartier-Bresson
On the Museum's Ruins - Douglas Crimp
Three-Dimensional Visual Data - Emmison and Smith
Visualizing Ethnography - Sarah Pink
Transforming the Anthropological Vision
Visual Anthropology is Not Ethnographic Film - Marcus Banks
The Visual as Material Culture
Photography and Anthropology - Elizabeth Edwards
Balinese Character - Bateson and Mead
A Photographic Analysis
Photography and Sociology - Howard Becker
Visual Anthropology - John Collier
The Self In the Other - Jay Ruby
Ethnographic Film, Surrealism, Politics
Working Knowledge - Douglas Harper
A Seventh Man - John Berger and Jean Mohr
Visual Anthropology - Jay Ruby
Technologies of Realism? Ethnographic Uses of Photography and Film - G W H Smith and M S Ball
`A Poetry of the Streets?' Documenting Frenchness in an Era of Reconstruction - Humanist Photography 1935-1960 - Peter Hamilton
Photography and the Performance of Histories - Elizabeth Edwards
Photographs in Social Research - Elizabeth Chaplin
The Residents of Gordondale Road
What Constitutes an Image-based Methodology? - Jon Prosser
Visual Sociology and its Relationship to Meaning, Representation and Information - Jon Wagner
Deceptive Images - Pierre Sorlin
Social Science and the Puzzle of the Moving Picture
The Uses of Documentary - Stuart Franklin
Photography, Evidence and Research
Photography - Nigel Warburton
Evidence and Imagination
The Evidentiary Problematic of Home Media - Richard Chalfen
Text, Practice, Numinosity - Gillian Rose
Methodologies for and against Visual Images
Photographs within the Sociological Research Process - J Prosser with D Schwartz
To Tell the Truth - Dona Schwartz
Codes of Objectivity in Photojournalism
Gender Advertisements - Erving Goffman
Snapshots Sub-Species - Georg Simmel
Snap-Shots of Live Theatre - Robin Riley and Elizabeth Manias
The Use of Photography to Research Governance in Operating Room Nursing
Picturing Labour - Eric Margolis
A Visual Ethnography of the Coal Mine Labour Process
Grounding Visual Sociology Research in Shooting Scripts - Chuck Suchar
Telling Stories about Photography - Darren Newbury
The Language and Imagery of Class in the Work of Humphrey Spender and Paul Reas
Documentary and the Aesthetics of Reference - John Corner
Cold Eye (Review of Pierre Bourdieu on Photography) - Julian Stallabras
Review of `Photography: A Middle Brow Art' - E Neiva
Documentary Expression and Thirties America - William Stott
Representing Representations - Veronica Miriam Davidov
The Ethics of Filming at Ground Zero
