Masters thesis 1:2

SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION

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Preface

Visual sociology emerged as a specialized subfield more than 30 years ago

and is founded on the observation that meaning making processes in

everyday life are saturated by visual experience. Underwriting this

observation is the claim that a majority of sociologists have been blind to

the visual dimensions of social life, hence the relevance of visual

sociologists. In this thesis I question the validity of such claims and ask

why visual sociologists have had such difficulty connecting to mainstream

sociological discourse. More precisely I argue that the inability of visual

sociologists to advance from their current position can be found in their

lack of attention to the many and significant inquiries that sociology,

cultural studies, new art history, and visual art have made into vision and

visuality. In contrast to these visually and theoretically diverse means of

soliciting new knowledge about the social, visual sociologists rely on a

very limited and empirical oriented understanding of what the visual has

to offer. Not only is this narrowly scripted outlook a major impediment to

visual sociology, it is also a key to understanding many of the problems

that plague the field. The aim of this thesis is to pinpoint these problems

and to seek solutions elsewhere so that a stronger and more diverse

conceptualization of visual sociology can be brought to fruition.

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INTRODUCTION 3

I: THE CONFIGURATION, LEGITIMATION, AND STATUS OF A NASCENT FIELD 8

QUERYING THE ORIGINS OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 8

THE EARLY USE AND DISAPPEARANCE OF IMAGES IN THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 13

READING THE CONTEXT/GAINING PERSPECTIVE 18

THE NORTH AMERICAN ORIGINS OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 19

FRAMING THE COMMON GROUND OF DISSENT 20

CANCELING VICE WITH VIRTUE: A BALANCING OF VOCATIONS? 21

CONTEXTUAL DIFFERENCE: ARGUING THE CASE OF VISUAL FIELDWORK 22

II: PURIFICATION AND DISORDER – CONFLICTING LOYALTIES 26

INSTITUTIONAL ILLEGITIMACY AND THE ENCULTURATION OF A FIELD 26

THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE OF HOWARD S. BECKER 28

LABELING REVISITED, THEORY OR PRAXIS? 29

DEVIANCE AND DISSENT, A COMMUNITY IN THE MAKING 30

PURIFICATION IN VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 31

Q & A 33

DOES THE ORTHODOX MAINSTREAM OPINION REALLY MATTER? 37

III: LOCATING THE FIELD 46

THE ANALYTIC DIVIDE 47

CONTINENTAL EUROPEAN SOCIOLOGY (THE LOGO-CENTRIC TRADITION) 48

NORTH AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY (THE HANDS-ON & LOGO-CENTRIC APPROACH) 49

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES 50

THE TURN TO DIVERSIFICATION 51

IV: VISUAL CULTURE – FINDING COMMON GROUND 54

THE SOCIOLOGICAL RELEVANCE OF VISUAL CULTURE 55

REFLEXIVITY AS A SITE OF DISCOVERY AND EPISTEMIC QUESTIONING 58

THE VISUAL GESTALT: AN ELEMENTARY PROTOTYPE OF HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF THE WORLD 60

EPISTEMIC QUESTIONING AND PERCEPTUAL SHIFTS 61

V: FOUR ONTOLOGIES OF SIGHT - REFLECTIONS ON THE USE OF HISTORY 64

VI: SIGHT AND INSIGHT – FROM PLATO TO BAUDRILLARD 67

VISION IN ANTIQUITY (GREEK) THE AMBIGUOUS SENSE 67

THE BODILY DIVIDE OF SIGHT AND INSIGHT 68

VISION IN RENAISSANCE - THE INSTALLMENT OF THE EYE (I) IN ART AND SCIENCE 71

MODERNITY AND THE ECLIPSE OF VISION: SIGHT AS CULTURAL INSIGHT 75

THE DIALECTICAL IMAGE OF THE CITY AS AESTHETIC FRAGMENTATION 78

THE VISUAL CULTURE OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY – MANAGING SENSE PERCEPTION 79

MODERNITY AND AWAKENING 82

MODERNITY AND WALTER BENJAMIN 83

MASS MEDIA 86

POSTMODERNITY & THE NEW SELF-AWARENESS OF INTELLECTUALS 94

VISUAL CULTURE AND THE CASE OF HISTORICAL AMNESIA 98

VII: CONCLUDING REMARKS 106

BIBLIOGRAPHY 110

APPENDIX: E-MAIL CORRESPONDANCE WITH BECKER, GRADY, HARPER AND WAGNER 112


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Introduction

There exist several accounts of the visual within the field of sociology. These typically

fall into one or two categories, either framing the visual as the subject of analysis or as a

method of sociological inquiry. The first approach is typically conceived as the most

prevalent and legitimate means of addressing the visual. It gains its legitimacy from

researchers who refrain from the process, labors and hazards of creating imagery that

expresses, contains, illustrates or otherwise addresses the subject matter under

investigation.1 More specifically this tradition produces a visually detached and logo-

centric account of visual culture.2

In contrast, practitioners of the second, less prevalent hands-on approach

produce their own image material.3 A common observation is that followers of this

approach, i.e. visual sociologists, do not enjoy the same status as their visually detached

companions.4 Several attempts seeking to account for the lesser status of the hands-on

approach to visual inquiry have been made, and for various reasons it has been argued

that the lesser status of the field is related to the almost exclusive use of photography by

hands-on practitioners. Emmison and Smith (2000), for example attribute the lack of

legitimacy and marginalization of visual sociologists to their “inability to see beyond the

use of photography”; a fact they go as far as to advocate as being, “a major impediment

to the development of a vibrant tradition in visual research.”5

Somewhat similarly,

Cheatwood & Stasz argue that it is not until visual sociology emerges as a field in the

1970s, that the need to legitimize itself through its long lost ‘parent’, photography, arises;

1 E.g. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). Erving Goffman,

Gender Advertisements, Communications and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1979)., Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The

Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Paul

Virilio, A Landscape of Events (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 2 There are many different versions of logo-centrism, each involves a search for "presence"- for the most true, real,

valuable, or appropriate. 3 E.g. J. Prosser, Image-Based Research : A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers (London ; Bristol, PA: Falmer

Press, 1998). Michael Emmison and Philip Smith, Researching the Visual : Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions

in Social and Cultural Inquiry, Introducing Qualitative Methods (London: SAGE, 2000)., Howard S. Becker,

"Photography and Sociology," Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1, no. 1 (1974). 4 In most literature the term visual sociologist typically confers a hands-on approach rather than a logo-centric

approach. The hands-on approach, in other words, is given considerable more emphasis than the logo-centric. However,

one is not less or more than the other. They simply covey two different ways of practicing visual sociology. Neither of

which, in principle, are mutually exclusive. The International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) is the primary

forum for hands-on practitioners, constisting of more than 300 members. The majority of IVSA’s members are actively

engaged in promoting visual sociology and contribute regularly to its listserve which provides instant access to an

otherwise geographically isolated community. The IVSA has been in existence since 1983 and publishes the bi-annual

journal Visual Studies (SAGE Press), previously named Visual Sociology. Other organizations such as the British

Visual Sociology Study Group have since formed and are more or less modeled on the same framework as the IVSA

with annual meetings, newsletters, etc,. see also www.visualsociology.org and www.visualsociology.co.uk. 5 Emmison and Smith, Researching the Visual : Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural

Inquiry, 2.

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hence, the monopoly of the camera is seen as a historically contingent construct. This

contingency is framed in an even broader epistemological perspective by Fyfe & Law

(1988) who note that: “Sociology does not have and has never possessed a generally

agreed set of methods for identifying, discriminating and counting what it takes to be

significant objects of study, and it may be that the meaning and lack of significance

assigned to the visual reflect paradigmatic struggle within the discipline.”6

Shy of intimating that the illegitimate status of the field is due to visual research

being historically defined by a handful of successful and narrowly scripted attempts to

establish an operative paradigm through photography, due credit to denigration should

also be given to those who have seen the status of their field threatened by hands-on

practitioners. Here, the admittedly common and superficially attractive observation is that

the legitimacy of the field is weakened by orthodox editors who argue that the costs of

publishing visual based research, especially the reproduction of image material, are too

high. Suggesting this is a myth, Howard S. Becker (1986) recalls how his prejudice that

the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) refused to publish any other image material

than portraits of deceased members of the University of Chicago Sociology Department

proved wrong when he was given the opportunity to publish an article in AJS that

contained controversial imagery, with no questions asked.7 Despite the occasional

testimonial anomaly such as Becker’s, an increasing amount of literature in the field

supports the observation that visual sociology is experiencing a paradigmatic crisis in

which it cannot be satisfied with the critique of an obviously limited methodological

praxis on the one hand and concomitantly be so paralyzed on the other by its illegitimate

status that it is incapable of exploring new methodological terrain.

Building on these observations the thesis is divided into two parts: the first part

(Chapters I and II) deconstructs the history, marginalization and internal dynamics of

visual sociology as well as its ongoing fixation with documentary photography, while the

second (Chapters III through VI) reconstructs by introducing European logo-centric

perspectives that have either been ignored or overlooked by hands-on practitioners and

which situate visual inquiry as a predominantly reflexive endeavor.

6 Gordon Fyfe and John Law, Picturing Power : Visual Depiction and Social Relations, Sociological Review

Monograph (London ; New York: Routledge, 1988), 4. 7 Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists : How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article, Chicago

Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 106, Howard S. Becker,

Doing Things Together : Selected Papers (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1986).


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Chapter I begins with a historical contextualization of how visual sociologists see

themselves defined and by whom. Here the anchoring of their collective vocational

identity as synonymous with documentary photography is scrutinized through an in-depth

inquiry into how hands-on practitioners have sought to historicize the field. Besides

bringing the most commonly canonized figures of visual sociology (re: documentary

photographers) to the fore, special attention is given to Clarice Stasz’ (1979) essay “The

Early History of Visual Sociology.” Stasz’ essay is important in the sense in that it deals

exclusively with the origins of photography in sociology. Like the majority of those who

sought inspiration in Howard S. Becker’s seminal article “Photography and Society”

(1974), her essay marks a significant contribution toward framing the narrative of visual

sociology within a very limited conception of the overall visual and theoretical

perspectives available. As I suggest, this limited outlook has less to do with what Becker

was trying to say than it does with the fact that visual sociology was born out of a

specifically and relatively isolated North American sociological context, hence the

gaping absence of European traditions of visual inquiry and of visual art.

Chapter II focuses on the marginalization and internal dynamics of visual

sociology. Here I address the observation that hands-on practitioners often portray

mainstream sociologists as the root cause of their marginalization, even though there is

no evidence to support this view. As I show in Chapter II, a possible explanation for

these unsubstantiated allegations can be found in a close reading of Howard S. Becker’s

(1974) article in which he inadvertently can be said to have encouraged an influx of

persons who were more interested in trying to make sense of themselves rather than

pursue a creative vision of what they as individuals believed the visual could bring to

sociology. Hence, it is fair to assume that the claims to denigration that hands-on

practitioners use to label themselves as illegitimate and marginalized, in equal measure

function as a collective defense against painful experiences that they as individuals have

gained prior to entering the field. More fundamentally I suggest that both the limited

methodological perspective and the pre-emptive response of the field to a criticism that

does not exist are native to the way contemporary visual sociologists have come to define

themselves, and that they, as such, point to underlying concerns that are internal to the

field and its group dynamics.

Apart from this, the claims that have led hands-on practitioners to label

themselves illegitimate and marginalized suggest the presence of a much less accessible

and disquieting kind of denigration, namely the kind that goes on behind closed doors. In

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the last half of Chapter II, I explore whether this is the case by asking the four most

prolific authors (Howard S. Becker, Douglas Harper, John Grady and Jon Wagner) what

they make of the fact that there is no evidence to support these claims. Acknowledging

this lack of evidence, they share their experiences by providing inside accounts of how

image-based research has been ostracized by the mainstream community. While the

insights offered by these authors mark a significant contribution to understanding the

marginal status of visual sociologists, they are by no means equal to a eulogy of the

analysis that hands-on practitioners subscribe to a purified self-image. Contrarily, and as

I show in this thesis, the illegitimate status of visual sociology can only be understood

through an interpellation of problems that are at once internal and external to the field.

Above all it should be noted that the aim of Part I is to bring these problems into the open

and ask why hands-on practitioners have been so stubbornly reluctant to explore anything

other than still photography.

Part II addresses the longstanding neglect of hands-on practitioners to incorporate

European traditions of visual inquiry into their research. Contextualizing this neglect is a

brief comparison in Chapter III of North American with Continental European sociology

and British Cultural Studies. Contrary to visual sociology, these latter traditions rely on

hermeneutic analysis (as opposed to the quasi-scientific collection of ‘data’) to illuminate

the visual dimensions of social life. In addition to having yielded a considerable body of

knowledge on how the visual permeates social relations and meaning making processes,

many of the authors associated with European traditions of visual inquiry have also either

influenced and/or been influenced by the field of visual art. The guiding thread under

which the import of these traditions takes place is the concept of visual culture. Visual

culture is here broadly understood as an alignment of sociological and artistic concerns

that capture an visually and theoretically diverse conceptualization of knowledge.

Besides pointing to the fact that vision and visuality are embedded in systems of

representation, the concept of visual culture also suggests that changes in these systems

(typically issued by societal transformations such as urbanization or technological

breakthroughs) are linked to changes in sense perception and vice versa. Aided by Gestalt

psychology and Thomas S. Kuhn’s philosophy of science, chapter IV examines how

societal and perceptual change link to situations in which a shift within the knower and

the known take place. As argued, these shifts solicit a template for epistemic questioning

that entail both logo-centric and visual practices. The examples provided by Gestalt

psychology, however, are only idealizations, not substitutes, of how epistemic


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questioning unfolds in realworld events - which is what we set out to explore in chapters

V & VI.

Chapters V & VI introduce highlights from four historical periods of visual

culture as means of contextualizing seeing and thinking as fundamentally interrelated

concepts of sociological thought. My reason for bringing these highlights into the

discussion is twofold: firstly they address the fact that a historical understanding of the

events and developments that go before the establishment of sociology as a discipline and

which lie beyond the scope of photography are either often absent or easily glossed over

by hands-on practitioners of visual sociology; secondly they make clear that visual

culture is under constant transformation and therefore not subject to one mode of

investigation only. Because visual sociology defines itself by the privilege it assigns to

vision and visual investigation, it is important these omissions be addressed. Hence, the

aim of Part II is to introduce visual sociologists to other fields and practices that have the

visual as their focus so that they can better legitimate their efforts as ones that relate to

present concerns. Briefly stated, these concerns are: a) to explore how the visible exerts a

powerful presence in everyday life and how our understanding and actions are coerced by

this presence and b) to posit this visual presence as a means whereby hands-on

practitioners can connect to both classical and contemporary social theory and to visual

art. In short, in this thesis I argue that the future plight of visual sociology rests with the

abilty of its practitioners to reorient their focus to a much more diversified and complex

understaning of what the visual has to offer.

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Part I: Deconstructing Visual Sociology

I: The Configuration, Legitimation, and Status of a Nascent Field

Querying the Origins of Visual Sociology

Many have had their say on the origins of visual sociology (Becker (1974), Chaplin

(1996), Harper (1989, 1994, 1998), Lapenta (2005), Prosser (1998), Wagner (1979)).

However, one of the few bodies of research that deals exclusively with this theme is

Clarice Stasz’ (1979) essay, “The Early History of Visual Sociology.” In this seminal

essay, Stasz provides an outline and survey of the origins, use, and not least, the

disappearance and re-appearance of photography in sociology. Besides the now almost

standard reference to visual anthropology and especially to Bateson & Mead’s historic

monograph, Balinese Character (1942), Stasz remarks that the most common visual

denominator highlighting the origin of the field is documentary photography. This

approach, she writes, is exemplified by Curry and Clarke’s introduction where the

photographic work of Jacob A. Riis, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange is

singled out as consummate to the way the field seeks to define itself.8 A particularly

poignant feature, as laid out by Curry and Clarke, is the intent of this tradition to bring

about reform by mobilizing a politicized vision of so-called ‘objective’ visual criteria.

While all of these early social documentary photographers can be classified under

the rubric of social reformers, a shift appears from the early years of Riis and Hine to

those of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers (1935-44) and again

from the FSA to the visual sociologists of the 1970’s. This shift is characterized, among

other things, as a move away from the shocking, and often staged, imagery of Riis and

Hine to the more subtle but no less hard hitting social commentary of the FSA

photographers, to the much more subtle, ethnographic and somewhat academically

entrenched meanderings of visual sociologists from the 1970’s onward. Nonetheless, the

first and perhaps most memorable use of the camera in the tradition that would later come

to be known under the heading of social reform is Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890).

8 See also T. J. Curry and A. C. Clarke, Introducing Visual Sociology (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1977), 15.


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In this groundbreaking work, Riis turned his camera to the appalling slum

conditions of New York City tenants and became highly influential in bringing about the

first building codes and apartment regulations - even though “he opposed, to the end of

his life, such anodyne propositions as public housing and municipal land ownership.”9

Much along the same line of inquiry and equally driven by personal outrage over the

squalid conditions of the poor is Lewis Hine. Hine had already established himself as an

accomplished photographer, appearing regularly in Charities and Commons, a New York

weekly dedicated to social reform, and commissioning work from World’s Work,

Everybody’s and the Russell Sage Foundation when the National Child Labor Committee

(NCLC) hired him in 1907. With his work for the NCLC, Hine became influential in

passing the first child labor laws by capturing on film the harsh realities of child labor in

the New South’s industrial complex.10

There exists, however, an earlier example of

photographs of child workers and sweatshops in the American Journal of Sociology by

Annie Marion MacLean, The Sweatshop Summer p.289-309 (1903. Nov. Vol. IX. No.3),

which documents both the hardship and elaborates on the attempts by trade organizations

to end this debilitating praxis. It therefore seems odd that it is Hine alone who is credited

for bringing about change when in fact he published his photographs 6 years later in

1909.11

For some commentators such as Susan Sontag and John Tagg, the work of Riis

(who worked as a NYPD reporter) shares an affinity with the infamous Arthur Fellig

(1899-1968) a.k.a. Weegee, who was a contemporary of Riis and whose images can be

viewed as pioneering the tradition of journalistic muckraking. However, it should be

noted that the images of both Riis and Hine represent a much more ‘socially conscious’

and impassioned kind of muckraking than that which is typically assigned to the brazen

imagery of Weegee.12

In contrast the images of Riis and Hines conjure humanist ideals as

a means of skillfully appropriating a socially indignant reality.

9 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, ed. Luc Sante, Penguin Classics

(New York: Penguin Books, 1997). http://site.ebrary.com/lib/royallibrary/Doc?id=5004931&page=11. Note: Actually

Riis was far from an accomplished photographer, he once set a building on fire with his flash, which is probably why

he hired photographers to do much of his camera work. The radical novelty of Riis was that he acknowledged and used

photography as evidence in showing to his middle class audience the appaling conditions of the poor. 10

Lewis Wickes Hine and John R. Kemp, Lewis Hine: Photographs of Child Labor in the New South (Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 1986). 11

Note: MacLean’s images were taken from the Chicago Tribune but faulted by Stasz as being both frivolous and banal

because they according to Stasz did not “provide much flavor of the work setting.” Stasz, C. p.124 12

Weegee worked as a freelance crime scene photographer in NYC and was famous, among other things, for staging

outlandish photo-ops. Weegee’s images inspired the aesthetics and mood of what would later be known as Film Noir

e.g., The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and Touch of Evil (1957).

10

Nevertheless, and as Susan Sontag rightly points out, despite its high moral

ground, this strand of documentary photography is imperious in the sense that “no reality

is exempt from appropriation, neither one that is scandalous (and should be corrected)

nor one that is merely beautiful (or could be made so by the camera).”13

Ideally speaking,

the aim of this tradition is also its Achilles heel since it seeks “to make these two realities

cognate, as illustrated by the title of an interview with Hine in 1920, ‘Treating Labor

Artistically’”;14

thus intimating that the problem with beautification of social injustice is

that it fosters an imbalance of priorities. Not only does it elevate the producer to the

pinnacle of cultural production, it also facilitates an objectification and removal of the

subject from the collective conscious.15

Allen Sekula voices a similar critique in his essay

“On the Invention of Photographic Meaning”, when he compares the work of Hine with

Stieglitz, a critique Sekula forcefully expands to embody the media of photography

itself.16

Representing a much more subtle but no less problematic body of work are

Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange who worked in the tradition of social reform that

became synonymous with the FSA. To an unmatched degree, it is the work of the FSA

that is seen as part and parcel of the tradition of documentary photography with which

many visual sociologists identify.

The FSA was initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt (b.1882-1945) and created in the

US Department of Agriculture (1935-1943) as a New Deal program designed to assist

poor farmers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt was

well aware of the efficacy of photography in pursuing a political agenda (i.e. his cousin

Theodore Roosevelt (b.1858-1919), who had befriended Riis when he was commissioner

of NYC (1895-96), helped push new building legislation on the backdrop of Riis’

images.) During the eight-year existence of the FSA and before the unit moved to the

Office of War Information, the special photographic section of the FSA created 270.000

documentary still photographs under the stewardship of Roy Emerson Stryker (a former

student of Hines’). From a government office in Washington, Stryker and his team

supplied pictures to New Dealers in various departments, to reports and exhibits, to

newspapers and the flourishing photographically illustrated magazines. However, what is

13

Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 56-64. 14

Ibid. 15

Which ultimately lends explanation to the present day phenomena of compassion fatique. 16

Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973-1983 (Press of the Nova Scotia

College of Art and Design, 1984).


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less known or conveniently silenced by visual sociologists, is that Stryker, “whose

original conception it was to go beyond his narrow brief and begin to accumulate ‘a

pictorial encyclopedia of American agriculture,’ issued regular and detailed shooting

scripts to his photographers. Stryker was the first to see these contact sheets; he

categorized, filed and selected the work the photographers sent in and is said to have

‘killed’, by punching holes in the negatives, 100.000 of the 270.000 pictures taken at a

cost of nearly a million dollars in the eight years of the Department’s existence. The total

world view of the FSA file was, therefore, predominantly Stryker’s.”17

Compounding this shaky position even further is the fact that when the FSA came

under Congressional fire in 1941 following Pearl Harbor, Stryker began calling for:

“Pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the US.

Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint the US as an old person’s

home and that just about everyone is too old to work and malnourished to care much

what happens…We particularly need young men and women who work in our

factories… More contented-looking old couples – woman sewing, man reading.” (Ibid).

In other words there ought to be a great deal of concern when visual sociologists model

their self-image on the work of an unabashedly propagandistic institution such as the

FSA. To be fair, and unlike Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans left the FSA after only 2

years in 1937, unable to identify with the ethos of the organization and Stryker’s way of

running it.18

Given the conditions under which photographers were made to work and

given that images were uncritically disseminated to fit the whims of the political agenda

on Capitol Hill, I think it safe to say that it would be much more ethically concerting if

visual sociologists identified with photographers such as Evans, rather than with Stryker

and the FSA.19

In this respect, Clarice Stasz provides a refreshing take on the early

history of visual sociology. I will now turn to provide an in-depth discussion of her

contribution and how it ties to the self-image of field. It should be noted that the reason I

engage in a discussion of Stasz’ contribution in the first place is because it is one that is

increasingly cited.

17

John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis, Minn.: University

of Minnesota Press, 1988), 169-70. See also Sontag, On Photography, 62. for similar line of argument. 18

Evans was greatly inspired by the uncompromising literary realism of Flaubert. In 1941 he and James Agee

published an acclaimed account of their journey through rural Appalachia during the Great Depression called Let Us

Now Praise Famous Men. 19

For an “uncritical” and somewhat disconcerting account of Strykers’s use of shooting scripts see Grady’s reference

to Suchar (1997:36) in J. Grady, "Becoming a Visual Sociologist," Sociological imagination 38, no. 1-2 (2001): 96.

12

Fig. 1 Series of “killed” FSA images, Roy Emerson Stryker. Library of Congress. (1935-43)

Fig. 2 John Baldessari (1984-88) 20

20

Baldessari (1931-) is a California based conceptual artist who pioneered bringing images from mass media and B-

films into an art context. The circles painted on the still images question the trival meanings of popular culture and the

gaze of the viewer by taking the form of an openended cliché. While the similarities between Stryker’s ‘killed’ images


13

The Early Use and Disappearance of Images in the American Journal of Sociology

Stasz, whose errand is another than a casual rehashing of the already well known and

iconic, sidesteps Riis, Hine, Bateson & Mead, and even the FSA and focuses on the much

earlier use and subsequent disappearance of photography in the American Journal of

Sociology. As she writes: “What most have missed is that sociology itself had a brief

encounter with photography, long before the FSA and the Bateson-Mead collaboration.

Pull a turn-of-the-century volume of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) off the

library shelf, blow off the dust, and open it up. You will find something virtually unseen

in sociology journals in recent decades – photographs. Between 1897 and 1916 (volumes

2 through 21 of AJS) thirty-one articles used 244 photographs as illustration and evidence

in their discussions.”21

This said, “articles where a photograph is used to illustrate a

mechanical object under discussion, such as Chapin’s (1950) tinkertoy model of

sociometric structure, as well as pictures of prominent, usually deceased sociologists,”

have been omitted.22

Fig. 3 F.S. Chapin, American Journal of Sociology Vol 56, No.3. (Nov. 1950)

While this limits her study in clearly defined terms to conventions of documentary

photography, it also petitions a critical inspection of what this means for the historical

consciousness of the field. It is certainly not unreasonable to argue that the unintended

and Baldessari’s conceptual puns are coincidental, they also convey strikingly similar features from which one could

spin interesting observations. 21

Cheatwood & Stasz, "The Early History of Visual Sociology," in Images of Information : Still Photography in the

Social Sciences, ed. Jon Wagner, Sage Focus Editions (Sage, 1979), 119-20. 22

Ibid.

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consequence of denigrating original attempts at visualization, such as Chapin’s

sociometric ‘tinker-toy’ model, to the ranks of obituaries of prominent sociologists, has

been instrumental in positing her historical case study as one of the most important pieces

of writing yet to anchor the mainstream visual doxa of documentary photography. Under

any circumstance it would be a hard-pressed act to argue that Stasz pursues a visually

diverse and inclusive sociology when, in fact, she excludes or finds other means of

visualization indifferent to the cause of legitimating a very narrowly defined historic

framework of documentary conventions. Nonetheless, it is this framework that outlines

the bulk of visual sociology and it is this framework around which Stasz builds her

historical scaffolding.

Because Stasz suggests that scientifically questionable ideals such as

methodological monism and nomothetic abstraction are legitimate, her essay is not

entirely unproblematic. Support for these ideals becomes particularly clear in her

reference to the most commonly preferred approach by visual sociologists, an approach

Heider has dubbed “ethnographicness” and which, according to Stasz, defines the field

and its “scientific value” according to a certain set of qualities. “Among these qualities

are: images informed by ethnography and integrated with printed materials and produced

with minimal distortions of behavior as a result of camera presence, basic technical

competence, and most important, the framing of activities within a definable context. The

latter point means that images include as much as possible whole bodies within the full

frame of activity for a particular situation. Thus, these images retain their scientific value

today.” From this, it is fairly easy to deduct that the scientific value assigned to images

by Stasz are based on the ability of the visual sociologist to emulate objective criteria that

we normally associate with natural science. It is from this position she concludes “that

the basis for a visual sociology was present at the time.”23

Stasz, however, undermines

her own conclusion when she concomitantly highlights that two thirds of the thirty-one

articles printed in AJS between 1896-1916 “employed photographs in a way that

contemporary visual sociologists would question. Crassly manipulated prints,

iconographic poses, inconsistent before-and-after pictures, portraits out of context, and

images based on clumsy techniques are among the styles of shooting and presentation

considered today to be inappropriate in careful research reporting. They would be good

23

Ibid, p.131.


15

illustrations for that as yet unwritten book every social science student would be required

to read before graduation, How to Lie with Photographs.”24

While I agree with Elizabeth Chaplin that “some photographs – in conjunction

with captions and text – do give a less fictitious and more empirically informative

account than others,”25

I also contend that Stasz fails to recognize that the vocabulary of

photography, like any human utterance, is permeated by being at once true and false, fact

and fiction, real and imaginary.26

Let us be frank. Photographs always lie and people who

think otherwise can surely be expected to be the one’s lying about photographs.

Photography is therefore better understood as a construct open to a wide range of

interpretation, to gestures of contextual understanding and subjective misgivings, rather

than a generalized and repetitive means of conjuring dated notions of ‘objective’ truth. It

therefore strikes me as puzzling when Stasz, amid all her talk about technical adept ways

of framing an image to fit a narrowly defined set of ‘research standards’, fails to

recognize that she concomitantly opens the backdoor to the same quasi-positivistic

concepts of ‘scientific’ truth that were instrumental in debunking visual based inquiry to

begin. Stasz therefore inadvertently winds-up subscribing to a double standard by

offering the same kind of answers that she faults others for having. While Stasz’ aesthetic

and epistemological preferences leave little or no room for alternative visual practices,

her exploration and analysis of early social documentary photography in AJS marks a

significant contribution to understanding the mainstream conception of the field and its

problematic status.

To begin, Stasz identifies what she calls a curious gap in the distribution of visual

articles between 1905 and 1909 in the AJS. “Twenty articles appear between 1896 and

1904; none between 1905 and 1909; and ten more between 1910 and 1915. All but one of

the last group are from the Chicago housing series.”27

As Stasz notes this gap correlates

with a marked change in the editorial policy of the AJS. More particularly the change,

which affected both the physical format and the tone of the AJS, was brought about by

editor Albion Small. Reminiscing over his prior experience of the field in 1905, Small

contends that sociology is “nothing more that wistful advertisement of a hiatus in

knowledge … a science without a problem, a method and a message.”28

The solution

24

Ibid.128 25

Elizabeth Chaplin, Sociology and Visual Representation (London ; New York: Routledge, 1994), 204. 26

The image, in other words, is the object that bridges the gap between science fiction and science fact. 27

Stasz, "The Early History of Visual Sociology," 139. 28

Ibid.132 see also A. W. Small, "A Decade of Sociology," The American Journal of Sociology 11, no. 1 (1905): 2.

16

according to Small is to correct this problem by insisting that sociology is “a pure

science” and that the “attitude of sociologists toward their problem is precisely that of the

chemist, of physicist, or of physiologist toward his.”29

In Small’s opinion, it is an

absolute necessity that sociology move “out of amateurishness, not to say quackery, and

advance toward responsible scientific procedure.”30

Moreover in a review of the first fifty

years of the AJS, Shana notes that Small defines ‘responsible’ and ‘scientific’ by

excluding papers devoted to social reform while multiplying the amount “space devoted

to statistical studies of population and methodology, as well as theoretical discussions of

social psychology.”31

From this, Stasz concludes that “part of the disappearance of the

visual may be linked to the victory of the pure over applied sociologists in control over

the discipline, for most illustrated articles dealt with amelioration directly or by

implication.”32

Another important factor to be considered is that early visual sociologists varied

from their logo-centric peers in terms of gender. Stasz has identified that “while in the

first twenty-one volumes of the AJS an average of 12% of the authors were women, this

was true for fully 50% of the visually oriented group.”33

Thus, from gender studies and

feminist theory that deal explicitly with how gender relates to technology, and here I am

especially thinking about the writings of Donna Haraway (1991), Judith Wajcman

(1991), Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod (1993), we are able to infer that the

association of females and photography could indeed be viewed as having been

instrumental in debunking the visual as an inferior and frivolous mode of inquiry.

Similarly, Stasz, suggest that the disappearance of images follow “the cultural tendency

in Western society to ignore innovations made by women until powerful men take them

up.”34

From this, she infers that “none of the men associated with visual sociology at the

time had the status in the discipline to buck those pressing for causal analysis, high-level

generalizations, and statistical reports.”35

Besides pointing to a causal relationship

between the subordination of women and the denigration of images, Stasz provides other

29

Ibid. see also Ibid.: 4. 30

Ibid. see also ———, "Points of Agreement among Sociologists," The American Journal of Sociology 12, no. 5

(1907): 637. 31


See both Chaplin, Sociology and Visual Representation, 199. and Stasz, "The Early History of Visual Sociology,"

132. 33


Ibid.133 35

Ibid.


17

equally intriguing insights into mechanisms that contributed to the devaluation and

subsequent disappearance of visual inquiry in AJS.

One such mechanism is the ongoing power struggle to set a particular discursive

policy in academia. In admittedly simple terms, it refers to establishing a set of restrictive

discursive policies through which institutions provide individuals access to speak in a

jargon that separates institutionally legitimate forms from non-institutional and

illegitimate forms of academic inquiry. As Kuhn (1970), Bourdieu , and Rorty (1994 in

Seidman) have pointed out, this gatekeeper function is fraught with both ideological and

epistemological disputes that, when seen in a greater perspective, represent an ongoing

struggle for power and privilege in delimiting what can and what cannot be said in the

name of science. In this regard, it is interesting, as Stasz notes, that early visual

sociologists departed markedly from their peers in terms of “academic affiliation.”

During the first decade of publication, half of the AJS’ authors did not hold an

academic degree, while only one third held non-academic positions after the shift in

editorial policy in 1905. Furthermore, less than a third of the visual authors held regular

sociology department affiliations and forty percent were in non-academic jobs. Like

nonacademic sociologists today, many were employed in research for government bodies

such as the census bureau and as administrators in various NGO organizations. Hence,

the editorial policy of Small not only reflected the disappearance of visual material from

AJS it also mirrored an academic environment from which women and certain modes of

knowledge would find themselves excluded.

What is left is the brief 1909-1916 resurgence of visual articles in AJS. Shedding

light on this resurgence, Stasz makes the interesting observation that all of the visual

contributors of this period are affiliated with the University of Chicago School of Civics

and Philanthropy, a forerunner of the Social Work School; she also notes that all but one

of these articles belong to the Chicago housing series. However, both of these

observations only become pertinent when tied to another equally significant fact, namely

the fact that the AJS was also housed at the University of Chicago. In this respect, Stasz

suggests that the strong institutional ties between the journal and its contributors provide

an important clue as to why Small decided to print this series at all. Another important

element that probably swayed Small to stray from his editorial policy was that the series

was sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, whose director, Edith Abbott, was a

18

prominent and influential intellectual figure in the city and the university at the time.36

Besides the undoubtedly massive influence that these institutional ties yielded, Stasz

points out that Small could hardly have had difficulty in accepting the reports of the

housing project, “which were filled with the tables and maps he thought essential to

respectable research.”37

Under any circumstance, if we accept that the trajectory and

decline of visually assisted inquiry in AJS is indicative of a greater non-visually oriented

logo-centric trend, then Stasz provides a firsthand account of the conditions and events

that underpin this trend. As such, she brings to future generations of visual sociologists

an insight into some of the problems that they as a specialized subfield are bound to face

in one way or the other.

Reading the Context/Gaining Perspective

Stasz’ essay is part of a larger compilation of texts by US based authors devoted to

exploring the use of still photography in visual sociology.38

In the pending discussion it is

important to keep in mind that the work of Stasz as well as the majority of authors who

contributed to this body of text was greatly inspired by Howard S. Becker’s lead article,

Photography and Sociology, which was the first to define visual sociology within the

accepted conventions of sociology. As such, it is no coincidence that Becker who

published his article five years prior in volume 1, number 1 (1974) of Studies in the

Anthropology of Visual Communication – the first journal in either sociology or

anthropology devoted to the study of visual communication – figures prominently on the

front cover of the compilation as the author of the preface. Nor is it a coincidence when

Stasz writes, that the idea for her essay germinated during a discussion with Becker, who

along with Derral Cheatwood and Richard Quinney provided helpful comments and

suggestions.39

In many ways this lead position is indicative of the authority assigned to

Becker by others in the field as its founding father. Attributing to this consensus are Jon

Prosser (1998), Gold (1997), Emmison and Smith (2000), Harper (1989, 1998), Wagner

(1979, 2004), and Lapenta (2005) to name a few. We can therefore say that Becker is for

36

Ibid. 133-134 37

Ibid. 38

Jon Wagner, Images of Information : Still Photography in the Social Sciences, Sage Focus Editions (Beverly Hills:

Sage Publications, 1979). 39

Stasz, C. in Ibid., 119 authors note.


19

visual sociology what Bateson & Mead (1948) are for visual anthropology.40

Although

Becker, as well as Bateson & Mead can be viewed as authorative and traditional figures

in their parent disciplines who made substantive and pioneering bids to advance image-

based research, neither succeeded in creating an upsurge of interest from their logo-

centric peers. They did however leave a legacy of ideas that have since guided and

underpinned both the visual and theoretical trajectory of visual sociology.

Becker’s lead article provides an important key to understanding both the

problems and potentials facing visual sociology in its present day form. In the following I

discuss how Becker’s article came to influence and limit the subject matter and

methodology of visual sociology. Central to this discussion is the analysis of Becker’s

intellectual heritage in North American sociology and the extent to which the reception of

this heritage came to permeate the self-image of visual sociologists. Besides giving a

comprehensive understanding of the formation of the ethos of the field it is also means of

showing how this self-image is rooted in a very different intellectual tradition than that

typically associated with logo-centric European visual inquiry.41

The North American Origins of Visual Sociology

As already noted, Becker’s contribution as well as the bulk of literature in the field is

grounded in North American sociology - meaning that North America is the place that

has proven most sympathetic to the dissemination of a hands-on approach to image-based

research in social science. To this, Jon Prosser, suggests, “it is probable, that North

American researchers who use images are more able than others around the globe to

create and maintain their own academic community which is sufficiently robust to

40

Anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were the first to base a large scale research project on still

photography. Not only are they are considered to be the founders of visual anthropology, their famous and much

celebrated 1942 study, Balinese Character, remains, to a certain extent, a model for photographic analysis. Balinese

Character, in brief, is comprised of a lengthy introduction followed by 100 ‘plates’ which are individual pages

containing from five to twelve photographs each. On pages facing the photographs are ethnographic analysis of the

photographs. The subject matter ranges from an overview of a typical village, to subjects such as the ‘integration and

disintegration of the body’, the social definitions of bodily orifices and their products, and relations between siblings,

parents, and children, and childhood development. With somewhere between 800 and 1000 photographs organized

around specific ethnographic themes and developed in accompanying statements, their book became a monument to

photographic analysis. However, it has also been noted that they failed to achieve the move from visual anthropology

as a mode of representation by the anthropologist to visual anthropology as a study of people’s own visual worlds,

including the role of representations within cultural process. Their insight was that the latter would be better achieved

by using a full range of representational systems – sound, film, objects themselves, as well as writing – but they failed

to carry the project through. A fact that is often omitted by those who reference their work. See also F. Hughes-

Freeland, in Rethinking Visual Anthropology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 120-39. 41

The European tradition of visual inquiry is, in contrast to its American counterpart, strictly logo-centric and heavily

influenced by semiotics, philosophy, Freud, Marxist theory, and the analysis of cinema, architecture and visual art.

20

support journals and special interest groups within esteemed research associations. In

addition to ‘cushioning’ the influence of limited status, this provides for a comparably

rich intellectual climate relative to other image-based researchers around the world.”42

In

support of this view, we find that the principal journals for the publication of visual-based

research – Visual Sociology Review, Visual Anthropology, Visual Communication, Visual

Sociology and the International Journal of Visual Sociology – all originated in the US.

Therefore, and as a result of this geographical centering, it can be argued that the self-

image of visual sociology was forged to accommodate the intellectual heritage of its

parent discipline as it evolved in the US. In very general terms this heritage has been

prone to define itself in terms of its methods and has paid little consideration to

theoretical conceptions of vision and visuality. Or as Emmison and Smith point out it is

no coincidence that photographs, and visual data, have largely been debated as an issue

of methodological adequacy in the US whereas in the predominantly logo-centric

European tradition of visual inquiry these are seen to belong to the realm of interpretation

and decoding.43

Framing the Common Ground of Dissent

The theme of methodological adequacy runs like an undercurrent throughout Becker’s

(1974) article. And although he does make suggestions, he wisely refrains from providing

any finite guidelines on how to proceed as a hands-on practitioner. Instead he engages in

commentary about the occupational ideologies of photography and sociology and what

the two groups might learn from each other. To begin he notes that photography and

sociology have approximately the same birthdate, the former with Daguerres (1839)

announcement of his method for fixing an image on a metal plate and the latter with

Comte’s (1838) publication which gave the field of sociology its proper name. This said,

Becker expressedly makes clear his intent is not to make photographers of social

scientists. Nor is he bent on imposing social science imperialism on photographers.

Instead, and much more importantly, what he has to say is “directly addressed to those

social scientists and photographers who are sufficiently dissatisfied with what they are

doing to want to try something new, who find difficulties in their present procedures and

42

Prosser, "The Status of Image-Based Research," 99. 43

Emmison and Smith, Researching the Visual : Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural

Inquiry, 24.


21

are interested in seeing whether people in other fields know something that might help.”44

While this initially leaves open the combination of fields that can be explored and cross

fertilized, Becker's choice is narrowly limited to documentary photography and the ways

in which its practitioners share common ground with sociology. Not only is this pre-

occupation with documentary photography a re-occurring theme in Becker (1974; 1981;

1986; 1998) it is part and parcel of mainstream visual sociology.45

Canceling Vice with Virtue: A Balancing of Vocations?

Becker's limited field of vision is motivated by his belief that the vices and virtues of the

two vocations are mutually redeemable for the better. Thus, the sociologist who has

extensive knowledge of the social is able to compensate for the lacking role of theory in

documentary photography while the technical and visual competence of the photographer

offsets the absence of photographic evidence of the social in sociology. This merging of

‘vocations’ can either take the form of a collaboration (e.g. Euan Duff and Dennis

Marsden (1975)) or find expression in an individual. Most notably it is the role of the

latter that occupies Becker and hand-on practitioners. For Becker, then, the merging of

vocations is a matter of sociologists being prepared to apply visual materials of their own

making in their research. This entails, among other things, that visual sociologists must

set out to become more sophisticated in the appropriation of their photographic evidence

so as to improve on the theoretically underdeveloped work of documentary

photographers. Or as Becker writes: “Close study of the work of social documentary

photography provokes a double reaction. At first, you find that they call attention to a

wealth of detail from which an interested sociologist could develop useful ideas about

whose meaning he could spin interesting speculations…. Greater familiarity leads to a

scaling down of admiration. While photographers do have these virtues, they also tend to

restrict themselves to a few reiterated simple statements. Rhetorically important as a

strategy of proof, the repetition leads to work that is intellectually and analytically

thin.”46

Similarly, Becker is not shy to point out that when documentary photographers do

produce work with “a satisfyingly complex understanding of a subject, it is because they

44

Becker, "Seminal Article for Visual Sociology," 6. 45

See also Howard S. Becker, "Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It’s (Almost) All a

Matter of Context’," Visual Sociology 10, no. 1-2 (1995). 46

Becker, "Seminal Article for Visual Sociology," 11.

22

have acquired a sufficiently elaborate theory to alert them to the visual manifestations of

that complexity.”47

From this he concludes that “the way to change and improve images

lies less in technical considerations than in improving your comprehension of what you

are photographing, your theory.”48

Notwithstanding that technical and aesthetic

competence provide an enormous control over the image making process, Becker insists,

insofar one’s aim is to produce intellectually dense work, that a premium be put on

conceptual complexity rather than mastery of formal aesthetic conventions. Oppositely,

the acquisition of social science theory does not necessarily guarantee that the social

science content of ones photographs will improve. Or put otherwise, “knowledge does

not automatically shape what you do, but works only when it is deliberately put to work,

when it is consciously brought into play.”49

This correlates with Ruby’s (1972) &

Edwards (1997) observation, that most hands-on practitioners tend to take pictures that

are equivalent to vacation pictures.50

Meaning that their pictures are no different than the

pictures they take on vacation or that ordinary vacationers take, hence, their focus tends

to be directed at the spectacle of the immediately exotic and wry i.e., the eye-popping

‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ rather than the ‘mundane’ and ‘subtle’ practices of everyday

life. In this sense sociological thinking does nothing to improve the semantic transfer of

concepts and information through images while photographic sophistication does.

Contextual Difference: Arguing the Case of Visual Fieldwork

To counter this naïve use of imagery Becker suggests an “important way in which the

photographic exploration of social life can be made more sophisticated (sociologically) is

for the researcher to avoid the accumulation of isolated images and seek instead to

photograph ’sequences of action’ which try to capture something of the dynamic aspects

of social organization or the patterns of cause and effect.”51

While this may lead to all

sorts of formats and conceptual approaches, the one Becker has in mind is practical and

points to a procedure in which the visual sociologist must learn to record images in a

47

Ibid. 11 48

Ibid. 12 49

Ibid. 16 50

Elizabeth Edwards, "Beyond the Boundary: A Consideration of the Expressive in Photography and Anthropology,"

in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. M. Banks and H. Morphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 53-80,

Jay Ruby, "Up the Zambesi with Notebook and Camera or Being an Anthropologist without Doing Anthropology . . .

With Pictures," in Paper presented at the 71st Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (Toronto:

1972). 51



23

manner that is analogous to the process of data collection in fieldwork. Citing Lofland

(1971), Schatzman and Strauss (1973) Becker reminds us that the essential procedure of

fieldwork is to make use of what one has learnt one day in ones data-gathering the next

day. In this sense fieldwork for Becker, as Emmison and Smith point out, “involves a

continual ‘grounded-theory’ style of testing tentative hypotheses in the context of a series

of repeated observations.”52

Hence, the analysis of data is conceived as “continuous and

contemporaneous with the data-gathering” process.53

In practical terms this means that

the analysis of one’s photographs in the field is simultaneously a way of directing one’s

theory-building so that one’s pictures and ideas, practice and theory, gradually become

approximations of one another.54

From this vantage point a central theme in visual sociology emerges, namely, that

the comprehensive context of fieldwork proposed by Becker is poised to counter the

assumption that images in social science research lack the validity associated with other

social scientific data. Addressing this assumption, Becker starts with the assertion that all

images are social and technical constructs that reflect the views, biases, and knowledge,

or lack of knowledge of the photographer, researcher, or artist. In this sense images

merely “make obvious the difficulties we have with every variety of data.”55

To say that

images are unacceptable as social scientific data is thus to ignore that “every scientific

method has easily observed technical flaws and is based on not very well hidden

philosophical fallacies.”56

Regardless of the applied methodology, what counts in the

final analysis, is that “the results they produce are good enough for the community of

scientific peers that use them.”57

Like other social scientific data, images are subject to

the partiality of the research community. Whether this means looking through a

viewfinder, crunching numbers, concocting questionnaires or being on a hermeneutic

hunt for theoretical answers, is beside the point, as long as there exists a scientific

community strong enough to agree that the virtues of the mode of inquiry outweigh its

vices. From this Becker concludes, “not only is inconsistency unavoidable, it is the basis

of everyday scientific practice.”58

52

Emmison and Smith, Researching the Visual : Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural

Inquiry, 25-6. 53

Becker, "Seminal Article for Visual Sociology," 13. 54

Ibid. 55

Howard S. Becker, "Preface," in Images of Information: Still Photography in the Social Sciences, ed. Jon Wagner

(Beverly Hills/London: Sage Publications, 1979), 7. 56

———, "Theory: The Necessary Evil " in Theory and Concepts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives from the

Field, ed. David J. Flinders and Geoffrey E. Mills (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 226. 57

Ibid. p.223 58

Ibid. p.219

24

While the North American tradition of visual sociology by-and-large has been

guided by an instrumental and pragmatic relationship to imagery, the European tradition

of visual inquiry in sociology has consistently been logo-centric, theory driven and dealt

with the semantics of images, their ideological and institutional basis, and the power they

yield in everyday life.59

Being a representative of the former Becker pursues a pragmatic

relationship to imagery when he explores the context of how sociologists and

photographers differ in their reading of images and how visual sociologists might use and

learn something from photographers who, as he states, have an innate understanding of

the visual grammar that goes into composing images as opposed to the simple and purely

descriptive laymen readings that most sociologists apply to visual representations.

However, this line of inquiry tends to limit itself to a set of quasi-mystical qualities

Becker identifies on the basis of grand generalizations. Or as he writes:

“Sociologists tend to deal in large, abstract ideas and move from them (if they do)

to specific phenomena that can be seen as embodiments, indicators, or indices of

those ideas. Photographers, conversely, work with specific images and move from

them (if they do) to somewhat larger ideas. Both movements involve the same

operation of connecting an idea with something observable, but where you start

makes a difference. Granting, and even insisting as I already have, on the

conceptual element in photographs, it is still quite different to start with something

immediately observed and try to bend ideas to fit it than to start with an idea and

try to find or create something observable that embodies it. Sociologists have

something to learn from photographers’ inextricable connection with specific

imagery.”60

Becker thus argues that visual sociologists need to accept and spend more time

acquainting themselves with the semantics of imagery if the quality of their visual work

is to be on par with what is expected of their writing. Or put more simply, visual

sociologists, according to Becker, need to understand (and experiment with) what it

means to work in both directions.

There is something intuitively correct about Becker’s observation, but it is only in

his later writings that he provides a more in-depth commentary on the unruly quality of

59

I.e., George Simmel, Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Giséle Freund, Herbert Marcuse,

Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, to name a few. 60



25

images and their reception.61

In Aesthetics and Truth (1986), for example, Becker brings

a polysemic understanding of the image to the table when he writes “every question we

ask a photograph can be put, and therefore answered in more than one way.”62

The

‘truthfulness’ of a photograph is thus measured by the credibility of the answer(s) we

receive. For Becker this means, “that there is no general answer to the question of

whether a photograph is true.”63

Instead we must recognize that aesthetic and stylistic

choices pitch not only certain moods, but also certain answers. It is therefore all the more

necessary that visual sociologists become acquainted with how these formal elements of

a visual vocabulary are put together. For without this knowledge, as Becker so rightly

remarks, even those who want to make photographs scientifically or objectively will do it

in an unintentional and uncontrolled manner and therefore fail, except by accident, to

articulate visually the questions they want to pose or answer. The same of course applies

equally to logo-centric visual sociologists who use the images of others, for they are, by

default, no less implicated in making aesthetic and stylistic choices. In contrast, artists are

trained, through their education, to bring intentionality and control to their visual

expression. Artists, however, as Becker remarks “ought to devote more time and attention

than is customary to learning about the social phenomenon” they use to legitimize their

work as more than aesthetic objects.64

Meaning visual sociologists and artists also have a

great deal to learn from one another.

Under any circumstance we can assert that it is the genealogy of documentary

photography and North American sociology that informs Becker’s take on imagery, and

consequently also his audience. Among other things, it is this take that is mirrored

throughout in the writing of those (meaning the bulk of visual sociologists) who have

later found inspiration in Becker’s lead article (Stasz, Wagner, Fyfe & Law, Harper, etc).

Whatever the case, it is also a due reminder that photographic images have always been

susceptible to the idiosyncrasies of their creators, or as in this instance the North

American paradigm of visual sociology. However, what we must not forget is that

photographic images also are ambiguous constructs. They lend an uneasy quality to the

perception of reality by being at once real and imaginary. Compounding this uneasy

quality even further are the idiosyncrasies that audiences (critics, curators, researchers

61

Howard S. Becker, "Aesthetics and Truth," in Doing Things Together: Selected Papers ed. Howard S. Becker

(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1981), 293-301. 62

Ibid. 294 63

Ibid. 64

Ibid. 301

26

and the public) bring to the reading of images. Becker captures this tension, between

polysemic and essentialists readings of imagery, when he notes that the validity of a

photograph lies in “distinguishing between the statement that X is true about something

and the statement that X is all that is true about something.”65

The tension between

polysemic and essentialist readings also captures the struggle for legitimacy in visual

sociology. As we have seen it is here that the remedy for gaining acceptance from an

orthodox mainstream research community is commonly promoted as a collective effort

for finding an organized, systemic and coherent approach to working with images. Stasz’

essay, while making important observations on the disappearance and reappearance of

images in sociology, inscribes itself firmly into the foundation of such essentialist efforts.

And while these can be said to mimic a realist, objectivist fantasy, they are, as we will

now see, only part of the problem.

II: Purification and Disorder – Conflicting Loyalties

Institutional Illegitimacy and the Enculturation of a Field

Though it might be plausible, it strikes me as somewhat construed to read, time and

again, how mainstream social scientists supposedly denigrate the use of images when in

fact the use of images has never even amounted to be of the slightest concern to

mainstream social science. Perhaps the most vivid evidence that this discussion is a

pseudo-discussion can be found in the fact that there is no record or reference of those

who supposedly keep pointing a disapproving finger at visual sociologists. Instead it

would be more correct to perceive these discussions as exclusively belonging to the field

of visual sociology. Or put more precisely: discussions that denigrate the use of imagery

in the name of mainstream social science are discussions that are internal to the field.

Although an admittedly simplified divide, two things characterize the discourse

surrounding these discussions: a tangible objective, and a collective reasoning that

underlies and motivates the pursuit of this objective. The tangible objective is directed at

securing the legitimacy of the field by pre-empting a mainstream social science critique.

On the surface, this objective is overt and clearly defined while the motives that lead to

the pursuit of this objective remain illusive, covert and tacit. If we take for granted that

the latter lacks expression because the practitioners of visual sociology fit the bill of

65

Becker, Doing Things Together : Selected Papers, 252.


27

persons that are sufficiently dissatisfied with how things are executed in mainstream

social science, then we can also be sure that dissatisfaction is what endorses their motives

and the pursuit of their objective to legitimate the field, and hence also themselves. The

reasons for dissatisfaction are as many and varied as there are practitioners, but in the

final analysis these painful experiences find united expression in a defense against the

doxa of a scientific institution to which they want to belong, but do not feel accepted.

Yet, the pre-empting of a mainstream social science critique is not only a measure for the

level and type of dissatisfaction that many practitioners have had with mainstream

practices, it may also be perceived as a collection of utterances that, broadly speaking,

have been conceived in a spirit of revenge for the cursory attention paid to visual

sociology by mainstream sociology. Whatever motive lay behind, it is by no means

commensurate with the notion that visual inquiry is an illegitimate means of inquiry, but

rather an indication that the collective pursuit of legitimacy is a collective sublimation

and venting of unpleasant experiences and frustrations that have been gathered

elsewhere.

Becker is sufficiently foresighted to provide an outlet from which these

frustrations can be given new purpose and direction. At the cornerstone of this foresight,

is Becker’s use of the Kuhninan66

notion of “science” as a construct of scientific

communities to address the frustrations of those who have internalized dissatisfaction

with mainstream social science practices. Or as Becker writes: “Sociologists’ choice of

theories, methods, and topics of research usually reflect the interests and constraints of

the intellectual and occupational communities to which they are allied and attached. They

often choose research methods, for instance, that appear to have paid off for the natural

sciences. They frequently choose research topics which are public concerns of the

moment, especially as those are reflected in the allocation of research funds: poverty,

drugs, immigration, campus or ghetto disorder, and so on. These faddish tendencies are

balanced by a continuing attention to, and respect for, traditional topics and styles of

work.”67

Rather than being a radical call for total disengagement with mainstream social

science the above should be viewed as a discursive means of enticing the disgruntled

back into the fold of legitimate scientific practice. Hence, the arguments put forth by

Becker, i.e., the rigorous and time consuming process of conducting fieldwork as a means

66

To this we should probably also add Bruno Latour’s concept of science, which it can be argued is a derivative of

Kuhn’s – Latour is a good friend of Beckers. 67


28

to better approximate the truthfulness of what can be said with images are, thereby, not

only an attempt to both appease and break with the business as usual attitude of orthodox

social science they are, by the same account, also, an attempt to weave into its fabric an

image of the visual as a viable and legitimate means of scientific inquiry.

Thus it is fairly easy to see why the dual promise of legitimacy and rebellion

appeals to an audience that is at once inherently traditionalist, yet rebellious enough to

attempt to create a position of their own making within mainstream sociology.

The Intellectual Heritage of Howard S. Becker

The legitimacy of scientific inquiry that Becker, so to speak, guides his disgruntled reader

towards, and which he is acknowledged as being a lead representative of, is the Chicago

School tradition of symbolic interactionism. First coined in an article written by Herbert

Blumer in 1937, symbolic interactionism is built on Mead and Cooley, as well as on W.I.

Thomas, John Dewey and others.68

According to Collins, symbolic interactionism turned

into a full-fledged dynamic sociology, as well as it being a militant intellectual movement

critical of the opposing (and then dominant) approaches in North American sociology

(i.e. functionalism, behaviorism, and ethnology). More particularly, the utilitarian model

of the rational actor came under fire from Dewey, who was quick to point out that means

and ends are not really separated in the real world. For in ordinary situations, one merely

acts habitually, finding ends as one moves along at the same time as one finds means to

reach them. Hence, in symbolic interactionism, the actions and interactions of individuals

are seen as a fluid process characterized by an ongoing negotiation of the outcome of the

meanings that individuals attach to things and to social action, including themselves.

From this, symbolic interactionists infer that the meaning of a subject matter for a person

grows out of the ways in which other persons act toward the person with regard to the

subject matter. In other words, it is the interaction and actions of the other(s) that operate

to define the subject matter for the person. Hence, it is no surprise that the preferred

methods of symbolic interactionists include participant observation and intensive

interviews, as opposed to conventional social surveys that use fixed choice questionnaires

and standardized variables.

68

Randall Collins and Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions : Selected Readings (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1994), 304.


29

Although symbolic interactionists reject nomothetic approaches that seek

deterministic universal laws or the discovery of overarching structural-functional

regularities, they do allow for generalizations to be made.69

This move from the particular

to the general, rather than from the general to the particular is given by the premium that

symbolic interactionists place on analytical induction and grounded theory as guiding

principles of social research. Symbolic interactionists therefore have more in common

with the creative workflow of ethnographers, documentary photographers and the

romantic/expressive strains of visual artists than they do with those who are committed to

survey designs and grand theory. As Coser writes: “Since the social world is constructed

from interpretative processes arising from transactions between individuals, it is only

amenable to careful description aided by sensitizing, as opposed to theoretically

grounded, concepts. Only by taking the role of others and inserting oneself imaginatively

in the flux of social interexchanges between actors can the sociological researcher make

sense out of data.”70

Hence the micro-sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism is

characterized by an idiographic approach that, rather than pledge allegiance to the fallacy

of constructing enduring, objective, theoretical structures, calls for social science to be

“attentive to the subjective interpretations, the definitions of the situations, and emergent

meanings that arise in human interaction, and be content with that.”71

As such it does not

take much to follow the fine line of reason that leads Becker to take up photographic

fieldwork as a viable approach to conducting image based research.

Labeling revisited, Theory or Praxis?

While Becker can be rightly characterized as belonging to the Chicago tradition of Mead,

Thomas, and Blumer he also developed and coined what has later come to be know as

labeling theory.72

Although applicable in many settings labeling theory is concerned only

with the study of deviance. Coser neatly sums up the concepts underlying labeling theory

when he writes:

69

Note: conceptual abstractions and generalizations are allowed only if they have a sensitizing function. See also Lewis

A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought; Ideas in Historical and Social Context (New York,: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1971), 575. 70

Ibid. 71

Ibid. 72

Labeling theory was coined by Becker in Howard S. Becker, Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New

York: Free Press, 1973).

30

“While most theories of deviance prior to the emergence of labeling theory were

mainly concerned with the study of the causes and consequences of various forms

of deviance, labeling theory attempted to shift the major focus of attention from

those engaging in deviant behavior to those who make the rules that design certain

men and women as deviants in the first place. Labeling theory, very much in line

with the Chicago tradition, stressed that one cannot understand deviant acts in

terms of the behavior of deviants alone but that such acts lend themselves to full

sociological analysis only if and when it is realized that, just like all other social

acts, they involve interactive relationships.”73

Coser goes on to note that critics such as Gibbs (1966) have pointed out that labeling

theorists often focus exclusively on the moral entrepreneurs who label and stigmatize

deviant behavior and therefore bypass the objective circumstances that foster these acts.74

Which leads to the absurd conclusion that “behavior contrary to a norm is not deviant

unless it is discovered.”75

Under any circumstance it is somewhat ironic to think that

Becker’s intellectual roots, and particularly his call for those who are sufficiently

dissatisfied with what they do to try a visual approach, has given impetus to the labeling

of visual sociology as an illegitimate and deviant sub-disciple. While I do not believe this

stigmatization to be premeditated by Becker in any which way or form, it is arguably

important to acknowledge that his (1974) article was instrumental in mobilizing persons

who were ready and willing to facilitate their collective vocational interest as illegitimate

and stigmatized interest.

Deviance and Dissent, a Community in the Making

Because the peculiar self-stigmatization exhibited by visual sociologists have worked to

form a set of common interests, indeed a paradigm, it is imperative that its psychological

makeup be further explored if an understanding of where the field is headed is to emerge.

This will be done by reading the field into Richard Sennett’s analysis of urban life - The

Uses of Disorder.

73

Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought; Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 575. 74

See also Coser p.578 75

Ibid.


31

Drawing on Tocqueville, Weber, Parsons, and Znaniecki, Richard Sennett remarks that

communities based on dissent grow out of a desire to define a common bulwark against

disorder.76

To be drawn into a sub-field like visual sociology thus equals an active

attempt to restore the disorder that one experiences when one no longer identifies with

the doxa of ones mother discipline. In its most banal form the restitution of identity

signals a process whereby individual growth is measured by the ability to weed out and

displace disorder with a purified and meaningful identity. Because identity and meaning

are assigned and projected by the relationships and interactions that we, as individuals,

have with others, we can say that attempts to displace disorder are, by and large,

collective attempts. When we enter into a process of purification we therefore engage in a

collective evading of experiences that are perceived as being either threatening,

dislocating or painful. Hence, if sameness is the condition of a threatened dignity, then

the struggle to attain dignity is a collective struggle against oneself. Because the lure of

sameness is seen as an effective means to sublimate men’s fears of the power within

themselves they are typically represented as self-destructive acts used to repress human

strengths, such as curiosity and the desire to explore new territory. While not universally

applicable as a means of describing the underlying dynamics of paradigm formation it

does bring a certain clarity to the case of visual sociology and the way Becker’s article

was received.

Purification in Visual Sociology

It is only a literal reading of Becker that leads to a myopic concept of the visual (and

theoretical) in visual sociology. Interpreted through Sennett it signals a struggle in which

the fear of ones own otherness is funneled into efforts to produce a homogenous

collective.77

If we take for granted that Becker represents that otherness and that

reception of this otherness is misrepresented by the community who canonize him then

this community exhibits the same purifying traits as counterfeit communities (see also

Stein, Riesman, Vidich and Znaniecki in Sennett p.39). The sense of counterfeit

community and the struggle for a purified identity is manifest in two ways. First through

the mounting of a pervasive defense against what is collectively agreed to be the origin of

the trauma (the collective projection of individualized and concealed traumas that have

76

Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life (Knopf, 1970), 34. 77

Ibid., 39.

32

amassed from unsuccessful engagement with mainstream sociology) e.g. the many

references that are made to the illegitimacy of the field are apparitions that conceal the

real problems of its practitioners as there are no records that indicate mainstream

sociologists have denigrated the field. The second indication of a purified identity lies

with the discursive and practical establishment of a common reference point, e.g. in this

case the reference point is given by the unproportionate methodological dominance that

documentary photography holds in visual sociology. In other words, both indicate

purification is an integral part of what it means to be a visual sociologist.

The question, as Sennett writes, is whether “the elect must give up complex or

conflicting loyalties, and that they want to do this, want to become slaves to each other,

in order to avoid the strengths in themselves that would make them explorers beyond

comfortable limits.”78

The myth of community purity therefore signals “a collapsing of

the experiential frame, a condensing of all the messy experiences in social life, in order to

create a vision of a unified community.”79

This said, I believe a more contemporary

reading of Becker would find that he also frames this struggle in a much more potent and

humane form by coupling it to a liberation of these repressed strengths. And he does this

not by addressing an audience that is exclusively dissatisfied but by addressing an

audience that first and foremost is adventurous and willing to engage in experimentation.

In my opinion this makes for an altogether better pitch because it empowers and permits

a freedom of deviation, which, in the final analysis, translates into a caring about the

unknown and the other in social contracts. This of course is an ideal reading of Becker

with little consequence on the way his article came to be received. So much, indeed, is

the discrepancy, that it would not be wrong to infer that the immediate outcome of his

article was that it spawned a community of self-proclaimed academic ‘misfits,’ who

although highly uncomfortable about not belonging to mainstream discourse found

consolation in collectively labeling themselves as such.

This said, it should be noted, that, the increasing popularity of visually oriented

research has prompted contemporary (mostly European) commentators such as Marcus

Banks (2001) to proclaim this self-serving deviant role as incommensurable with current

realities.80

The fact that ‘misfits’ have become mainstream (as if they ever aspired toward

anything else) surely indicates that a turn of priorities is taking place within the

78

Ibid., 44. 79

Ibid., 36. 80

See Marcus Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research (London: SAGE, 2001).


33

contemporary visual research community.81

Today we bear witness to the emergence of

an academic community that on all fronts has become much more diverse and skilled in

its analysis of visual culture. With this development, we find that hands-on practitioners

more often than not are being given free reign to adopt a more reflexive and playful

approach to using visual imagery. This is not to say that documentary photography is no

longer dominant or that other means of visualization have become common. What it does

mean, is that the field of visual sociology is undergoing a transformation as calls for the

emergence of an expanded field of inquiry become more numerous. Under any

circumstance, and before I risk getting ahead of myself, I want to return to the discussion

of Becker’s influence on the discursive formation of visual sociology and how the field

came to be framed as an illegitimate scientific endeavor by its practitioners.

Q & A

Visual sociologists have often voiced complaints about their illegitimate status. Typically

these insinuate a denigration by the mainstream orthodox research community. Again,

what is truly baffling is that visual sociologists provide no examples that elaborate or

confirm this belittlement, just as criticism is nowhere to be found in mainstream orthodox

literature. Naturally one of the reasons for this could be that giving testimony to academic

deprecation is not exactly conductive to advancing ones career opportunities, particularly

if this is something that happens in faculty meetings and in everyday academic life, rather

than in publications. The question therefore is how do we find out if this is really the

case? Certainly not by asking visual sociologists who are at the beginning of their career

or without tenure. In fact if any disclosure of this sensitive subject is to be made at all,

our questions must be directed at the very top of the academic food chain. Following the

logic that the latter are more experienced and not as susceptible or vulnerable to

retribution and ridicule as the former I wrote a letter, explaining my predicament, to the

four most prolific and important contributors of visual sociology; Howard S. Becker,

Douglas Harper, John Grady and Jon Wagner.82

With slight variation and depending to

81

Mainstream aspirations are, as Prosser reminds us, given by the fact that “the one unifying theme of Image-based

Research is the belief that research should be more visual.” 82

Howard S. Becker the founding father of visual sociology, is often associated with the sociology of art and with

labeling theory and the sociology of deviance in particular; Douglas Harper, a major voice in the field, has been

instrumental in facillitating a transformation of the IVSA newsletter to peer-reviewed journal; John Grady is

documentary film maker and longtime contributor to visual sociology; Jon Wagner is the editor of the influencial book

‘Images of Information’ (1979) and a pioneer of image based research in educational studies.

34

whom it was addressed the letter read as follows:

Dear, Howard

I've been researching the origin and discursive formation of visual sociology in

North America and have some questions that I thought you might be able to help

clarify.

My current predicament is that I've already plowed through most of the available

literature, but have yet to figure out why visual sociologists portray their

mainstream colleagues as 'those who label' and stigmatize the visual as an

illegitimate and unsubstantiated means of scientific inquiry. To claim that ones

mainstream colleagues are at the root of this stigmatization strikes me as a

somewhat peculiar approach since there is no evidence to suggest this is actually

the case! As far as I recall the closest attempt to actually provide such evidence

has been made by Stasz who attributes the dissolution of visual in early 20th

century North American sociology to behaviorist and then editor of the AJS,

Albion Small. However, Stasz study is not entirely unproblematic, in that she

makes use of the old trick of backward causation to legitimate a very limited

canon of the visual in visual sociology, i.e. the canon of documentary

photography. Somewhere along the line I believe this limited visual canon along

with the collective self-stigmatization (i.e. the unsubstantiated accusations used

by visual sociologists to label themselves illegitimate) are instances, that have

been used to mobilize a pervasive and collective defense against the disorder that

visual sociologists have experienced prior to entering the field.

Of course one could forcefully argue that collective self-stigmatization, because

it anchors and brings identity to an otherwise disordered conception of the self, is

a common and reoccurring theme in the paradigm formation process described

by Kuhn. Albeit in a somewhat different context, I believe Sennett makes a

similar point when he argues that 'communities based on dissent grow out of a

desire to define a common bulwark against disorder.' Still, this leaves us with the

problem that there is no evidence to suggest that visual sociology has been

deemed illegitimate by anybody else than visual sociologists themselves. Granted

this experience of disorder is collectively manifest as an internalized


35

dissatisfaction with mainstream social scientific practices, and granted that some

no doubt seek consolation in the visual as means of purifying this unpleasant

state of affairs, I wonder whether your original call for 'those who are sufficiently

dissatisfied to try something new' has left you with the feeling that diversity and

experimentation (which I admirably believe is what you advocate in your

writings) have yielded to a conservative and very limited conception of the visual

in visual sociology?

In other words (and please do correct me if I’m wrong) I have this innate feeling

that the potential of what you were trying to say in Photography and Sociology,

was superseded by an influx of persons who were more interested in trying to

make sense of themselves, rather than pursue a creative vision of what they as

individuals believed the visual could bring to sociology. If this is the case it

surely would establish a motive for the discursive and practical establishment of

documentary photography as the common and un-proportionately dominating

reference point of the field. In this context I can't help but think that many visual

artists and curators have worked (now more than ever) on problems that are

directly related to sociology (e.g. Hans Haake (liked your piece on him), Allan

Sekula, Trin Minh-Ha, Superflex, Charles Esche, Mary Kelly, etc.), and that

many European sociologists have studied or used concepts from visual art in

their own work (e.g. Walter Benjamin, Gisele Freund, Elizabeth Chaplin, and

Latours recent exhibit at ZKM Karlsruhe). I guess what I'm trying to ask is

whether you're just as baffled as I that so few have ventured beyond documentary

photography and whether this limited field of vision could have been effected by

a misreading of your 1974 article?

Curiously yours,

André

36

In the following I present and analyze the highlights of this correspondence and note in

passing that it can be found in its entirety in the appendix.83

In response to my findings, that there is no evidence pointing to a mainstream

stigmatization of visual sociology, Becker notes “there’s no doubt that people who use

visual materials in the US feel oppressed by their more conventional colleagues. But I

don’t think that it’s all imagined and they in fact are really not treated as though what

they are doing is legitimate. It may be that relying on published materials has led you to

this conclusion.” In his response to the same predicament Harper strikes a fresh and

provocative point when he writes “perhaps we are ‘pre-stigmatization,’ that is, not taken

seriously enough to stigmatize,” i.e., in mainstream publications. Grady suggests a

solution to the lack of material documenting the oppression of visual sociologists when

he writes, “You could do the field a real service, … by interviewing the “founders” of

visual sociology and writing about this phase of its history. You’ve got some of them

with Howie and Doug. … I would also really do open ended interviews and make it as

experiential as possible. If your hypothesis has any merit, it will need biographical,

anecdotal data, to confirm it.” This lack of experiential data confirms not only my

bafflement but also Wagner’s when he writes, “I share your views, at least in part, about

the peculiar “anti-mainstream” ethos that has characterized some discussions among

visual sociologists and visual anthropologists. I found this peculiar myself when in

contrast to the way these issues are approached in the field of education – where visual

studies have been “mainstreamed” in several different ways.”

Becker, Harper and Grady all provided experiential data. The following is a

summary account of their experiences. Becker writes: “I have heard the question of

whether a work of “visual sociology” is really sociology at all – in faculty meetings, in

discussion of who to hire, in discussions of what students may be allowed to do and use

as evidence in a dissertation, etc. Negative academic judgments of visual materials are

very common and are made unashamedly. I have often heard people say that photographs

should only be used to ‘sweeten’ textbooks for undergraduates. None of this gets into the

printed record that is available to you but you can believe me that it is real.” Harper

confirms Becker’s observations: ”For example, I have applied to two positions in the past

83

Having sent the above letter, I began to worry whether what I had written was too provocative, totally off the court

and without merit. I mean really had I not just put my head on the block? Under any circumstance I reasoned that

whatever the outcome it was better to have asked. So when replies began popping up in my inbox I was truly amazed to

find my inquiry had received a warm and comprehensive response from all four.


37

5 years at Ph.D. departments and not gotten to the interview stage (at least according to

what I was told) because visual sociology was simply too marginal. I made ‘long short

lists,’ but that is where it ended. The people who eventually did get these jobs (I checked)

had fewer publications than I did, and in lesser venues but they were in traditional areas

with traditional methods. Ok, I’ve had a good career and a lot of fun precisely because

I’ve followed my interest, but I’ve also been treated with joking distain because of my

interests. Christ, a month ago in a conflictual meeting, a colleague from another

department said, “Oh yes, and YOU take photographs …” such an insult! One would

never say: “Oh, and YOU do variable analysis!” Grady recalls a similar demeaning

attitude towards image based research: “I found colleagues at Wheaton thought that what

I did was cool – and very useful for making rhetorically compelling arguments about

poverty and inequality – but it wasn’t, strictly speaking, sociology; ‘Boutique’ courses

was one term that was used. Years later, some of these same sociologists tore down a

poster from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies that I had on my door because

their feminist sensibilities were offended by the photograph of a portly Elvis

impersonator. Another of my colleagues told me that the Salt photographs weren’t

genuine because real people don’t look like that.” In this regard Harper brings an

interesting angle to this discussion: “the simple fact is that it is easy to dismiss visual

sociology even by people who end up using it. I have had that experience over and over.

My grad assistant reports to me that her previous supervisor in the department actively

mocked visual sociology (and my research) yet ironically he just finished telling me how

he has constructed his new course on the sociology of sport around visual themes and

methods! And, he would likely not see a contradiction here.” Speaking from personal

experience and from an European context, the most concrete barrier for those who work

visually is the fact that one does not receive credit for visual work, a point Becker also

makes in his response: “It is very evident in the life of academic sociology in the US that

one does not ‘get credit’ (which is the usual expression) in the ordinary way for visual

work.” One can only begin to wonder what would be left of sociology if variable

analysis, fixed questionnaires and qualitative fieldwork were given similar treatment?

Does the Orthodox Mainstream Opinion Really Matter?

Although these answers and anecdotes are a testimony to the fact that the work of visual

sociologists are denigrated by their mainstream colleagues it is by no means

38

commensurate with discarding our analysis of how the practitioners of the field have

subsumed a collective identity of being marginalized. Meaning that the experiential

affirmation of mainstream denigration does not annul the fact that visual sociology

remains a marginal sub-discipline and that this marginal position brings with it a certain

‘deviant’ occupational identity. As Wagner writes “In terms of ahistorical analysis, I tend

to see the visual sociology and visual anthropology, communities as having many of the

characteristics of ‘deviant’ subcultures. I don’t think its difficult to understand how the

deviant status can be created – around issues of methods or substance – as that happens

with lots of other sub-specialties as well. But … that’s only part of the picture.” What

significantly alters the picture then, and to return to a Sennett inspired analysis, is that the

response of Becker, Grady, Harper and Wagner suggests that whatever interpersonal pain

and disorder they have experienced as a result of following their interests, they accept

these as an inevitable part of working in an emerging field. Clearly as this is the first time

that testimony of these painful experiences have been documented it points to the

possibility that the field is outgrowing its purified identity, i.e., that visual sociologists are

coming into character by way of sifting through experience, rather than through willful

assimilation of what they are not.84

This coming into character is exemplified by Harper, the most outspoken of the

four, when he takes care to reminisce that he has “… had a good career and lots of fun

precisely because I’ve followed my interests, … ” just as he asserts his position when he

writes “I speak as a person who is mostly a visual ethnographer with unabashed ties to

documentary practice.” Nonetheless, we are still left with what Wagner in a paper he

gave at the IVSA (International Visual Sociology Association) conference in 2001 calls –

the ‘mainstreaming dilemma.’ Quoting an earlier observation by Becker that “mainstream

respect for visual sociology will depend on demonstrating that image-based research can

make substantive contributions to mainstream areas of inquiry” Wagner summons the

paradox that “the legitimacy of this kind of ‘mainstreaming’ challenges the notion that

image based research is a province in its own right.” In concrete terms this leaves visual

sociologists with a difficult choice, as Wagner writes: “Achieve mainstream legitimacy

through pragmatic, unromantic and systematic use of visual imagery to examine

substantive issues of mainstream domains of social research – OR – explore personal, at

times romantic, and less systematic uses of visual imagery, or the aesthetic and structure

84

See also Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life. 125.


39

of visual imagery itself, and forego mainstream social science legitimacy.” This dilemma

is personified by Grady who recalls: “I came to visual sociology as someone who had

made documentary films (with Richard Broadman) and felt that these products needed to

be seen as both art and analysis. This was an uncomfortable argument to make, unless

one cast oneself as an subjectivist, interpretivist type uninterested in developing

cumulative knowledge of a real world firmly lodged in the out there.”

Confronted with this mainstreaming dilemma, Grady unpacks the direction taken

by visual sociologists, here quoted at length:

“… I was struck by the clubbiness of the International Visual Sociology

Association (IVSA) when I first joined it. It was a cross between a kind of

photography club with an unexamined devotion to black and white photography

that has only started to diminish with the digital camera. Doug always used to talk

about the IVSA as a geminschaft-like milieu and he seriously resisted

professionalizing the organization, with the exception of what he did for the journal

(re: Visual Studies). What the early visual sociologists – apart from Becker –

celebrated was that it humanized sociology. They saw the field mostly as an

extension of the new ethnography. They had all been devoted photographers for

some time, but, to this day, they seem to separate their aesthetic sides from their

social scientific sides. … I think what I’m saying is this: the sociological narrative

has always excluded the aesthetic. Those aesthetes who were visual artists but who

had professionally committed themselves to sociology, justified their work as a

form of working with data, came out of the closet partly and celebrated their

identity as ‘qualitative sociologists who have interesting materials and tools,’ but

never came out of the closet as people whose professional work was a form of

narrative art as well as social science.”

With this Grady suggests that the identity of hands-on practitioners follows a path from

which their subjectivist and more passionate sensibilities are subsumed by an objectivist

aspiration to legitimacy. This move toward objectivation is confirmed by Wagner when

he writes “… a love of photography or video tape or movies – or text or numbers for that

matter – can be a liability for people who want their use of these elements to be taken

seriously by other researchers. Indeed, none of the researchers I’ve described … write

lovingly about the kinds of images they used as research data. This is not to say that these

researchers are blind to the aesthetic appeal or emotional content of particular images.

40

However, whatever special feeling they might have for images per se has been set aside

in preparing research reports about the focal phenomena they set out to study.”

Again we find a purified economy in the workings of hands-on practitioners, an

economy in which we are confronted with the restriction rather than the release of the

sociological imagination, an economy in which freedom to experiment with different

modes of inquiry is denigrated by collective mechanisms of self-limitation, an economy

that keeps hands-on practitioner from avoiding the strengths within themselves, strengths

that risk, as Sennett suggests, making them explorers beyond comfortable limits. The

question is therefore what exactly do visual sociologists hope to accomplish by appeasing

dated notions of mainstream social science? Why do they continue to act as if they are

incapable of holding their own, if what they do is so full of potential? Why are they

afraid of being ridiculed in print and ostracized by a community that cares so little about

what they do or say anyway? What exactly do they think is at the end of this mainstream

rainbow – tenure, security, confirmation, self-esteem and legitimacy – and at what

personal cost? Do the cost not undermine any hope of being taken seriously? And is the

treasure at the end of this rainbow not just an apparition that conceals the fact that the

identity of the hands-on practitioner is an incommensurate hybrid, that he is neither artist

or social scientist in the strict sense of these terms; that what he does is unwarranted,

plagued by inconsistencies and therefore also shunned by those he yearns to be on equal

footing? One thing is sure, whatever limitations are encountered are by and large self-

imposed limitations.

In his infamous retort to North American functionalism and to Parsons in

particular C. Wright Mills vehemently countered such self-limiting tendencies by

researchers. The following quotes by Mills give vivid emphasis to his resistance and is a

reminder to image-based researchers that the pursuit of mainstream legitimacy may not

serve their best interests: “To limit, in the name of natural science, the problems upon

which we shall work seems to me a curious timidity. Of course if semi-skilled researchers

wish to confine themselves to such problems, that may be a wise self restraint; beyond

that, such limitation is without significant basis.”85

In another passage he goes on to

write: “The ultimate problem of freedom is the problem of the cheerful robot, and it

arises today in this form because today it has become evident that all men do not

naturally want to be free; that all men are not willing and able to, as the case may be, to

85

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York,: Oxford University Press, 1959), 120.


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assert themselves to acquire the reason that freedom requires. Under what conditions do

men want to be free and capable of acting freely? Under what conditions are they willing

and able to bear the burdens freedom impose and to see these less as burdens than as

gladly undertaken self-transformations?”86

Exemplifying this self-transformation is Paul

Gauguin’s (1899) response to the published criticism of André Fontainas on his painting

Whence do we come? What are we? Where are we going?: “At my exhibition at Durand

Ruel’s [1893] a young man who didn’t understand my pictures asked Degas to

explain them to him. Smiling he recited a fable by La Fontaine. ‘You see’, he said,

‘Gauguin is the thin wolf without the collar’ [that is, he prefers liberty with starvation

to servitude with abundance – John Rewald].”87

Since servitude with abundance is not

exactly on the agenda of visual sociologists, they have everything to gain both

personally and professionally by renouncing this path to legitimacy. As suggested by

recent commentators, such as Chaplin (1994), Edwards (1997), MacDougall (1997),

Emmison & Smith (2001), a much more viable and interesting approach is for image-

based researchers to embrace a freedom to experiment visually and conceptually.

While purifying traits remain stubbornly persistent, visual sociologists are with

the confluence of postmodern theories and new forms of visual culture beginning to

acknowledge the failure of their objectivists approach to ‘mainstreaming’ visual

sociology. It is exactly this realization of the failure of purification through self-limitation

that brings with it an ethics of responsibility, a self-doubt that makes capable the

acceptance that there is not one but several ways of working as a visual sociologist. In

short, visual sociologists are only now beginning to realize the untapped potential of what

it means to be free to execute and experiment reflexively with ones work, and that new

modes of inquiry can be pursued regardless of what dated notion of legitimacy one might

think are imposed by ones mainstream colleagues.

However, pretense to harvest the fruits of liberated inquiry have not been quick to

catch on, as Barbara Harrison notes, “… despite our recent concerns with the way our

knowledge is constituted by the text and the strategic work of their production (see, for

example, Atkinson 1990; Clifford and Marcus 1986), we seem unable to consider the

epistemological relevance of visual construction as routes to knowledge, even given the

eclectic opportunities of post-modernism.”88

David MacDougall (1997:292), makes a

86

Ibid., 175. 87

Paul Gauguin, Art in Theory (1900-1990) p.24 88

B. Harrison, "Every Picture Tells a Story’: Uses of the Visual in Sociological Research," in Methodological

Imaginations, ed. E. Stina Lyon and Joan Busfield (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1996).

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similar observation when he remarks that many hands-on practitioners, “still feel caught

between the possibility of conceptual advances” and “the more conservative paradigms of

a positivists scientific tradition.”89

That this uncertainty of future potentials and past

limitations is not yet settled signals that the field of visual sociology is in the midst of a

transition.

If the outcome of this transition is such that a successful break with the limiting

aspects of objectivist mainstreaming is effected, then we are left with a diversified

community that draws inspiration from a great variety of fields and traditions. When such

a community is read into the analysis of Jon Prosser (a prominent contemporary visual

sociologist) we encounter the problem of fragmentation.90

In fact Prosser claims that

fragmentation is the root cause of the limited status of the field today because it leaves

practitioners with an insufficient voice to have an impact on orthodox qualitative

research.91

However, and in my opinion, a much more important question to ask is

whether this caring about what the orthodox community thinks about visual sociology

has any merit or potential for the future prospects of the field? Of course one can easily

declare that the fragmentation and diversification of visual sociology is a disaster in the

making and stubbornly go on where one went before and where one’s ancestors wanted

to go. There is nothing stopping one from doing just that. What is certain, however, is

that such a pursuit has a momentum and dynamics that are subject to its own internal

logic only. In other words, those who tread down this beaten path are sure to produce not

what they are capable of producing, but only what they misleadingly believe is required

or asked of them.

This is why appeals for a purified practice aimed at appeasing a non-visually

oriented and highly disinterested orthodox research community seem bizarre to say the

least. To put this in perspective we need only remind ourselves that the interdisciplinary

nature of sociology, and its ever-present ambivalence (between the demands of past

traditions and contemporary ambitions) is in itself an expression of a constant tension

between the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the field. Historically speaking this

tension is manifest “in a continual budding-off process resulting in a plethora of sub-

disciplines which can always pose a threat to the coherence of the centre.”(Morphy &

89

D. MacDougall, "The Visual in Anthropology," in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. Marcus Banks and Howard

Morphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 292. Note: this ambivalence mimics the disagreement between

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson on the use of imagery. While Mead suscribed to imagery as an extension of the

eye, Bateson saw it as an extention of the mind (e.g. sight as insight). 90

Prosser, "The Status of Image-Based Research," 109. 91

Ibid.


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Banks, 1997:1)92

Hence, when visual sociologists, from their no doubt marginal position,

refer back to this center as a site of legitimation, that is, to the orthodox mainstream, they

elicit a hostile response because they threaten the integrity of its coherent or purified self-

image.93

As such it does not take much to conclude that visual sociologists on average are

far better off following Becker’s original idea that much can be gained from a mutual

exchange of knowledge with practitioners in other disciplines who also have a vested

interest exploring the visual.94

By moving outside the confines of a non-visually oriented

mainstream community, visual sociologists can engage those who share their visual

concerns and simultaneously introduce their own i.e., the visual pursuit of sociological

knowledge.95

Consequently, when boundaries become porous, and the area of ones

relevance is expanded it becomes harder for others to push what one does into a corner.96

A porous structure therefore signals the presence of an occupational autonomy and

freedom of inquiry that many academics, and for good reasons, both fear and admire.

This suggests that fragmentation can be seen as a means of leveraging not only the

influence of sociological concerns to a broader audience, but also a strategy that visual

sociologists can employ to gain legitimacy by becoming an autonomous subfield of free

agents in and by their own right. The simple matter is that for this to be effected visual

sociologists must rid themselves of their anxiety and learn to live with the painful fact

that gratuitous remarks from the orthodox research community will probably be around

for some time yet.

It would be disingenuous to deny that many orthodox researchers are open-

minded and curious about visualization, particularly when it helps them represent and

think more clearly about the complex subject matters on which they work.97

However,

such visualizations are often highly abstract, conceptual and schematic and therefore

contrast greatly (although not ideologically or ontologically) with the documentary

92

M. Banks and H. Morphy, "Introduction: Rethinking Visual Anthropology," Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997):

1. 93

To this we could add that acceptance, particularly when sought on non-self-genuine grounds, is rarely ever

something that is sucessfully forced upon the Other. 94

E.g. visual anthropology and contemporary visual art are two fields that are increasingly mentioned by hands-on

practitioners of visual sociology. 95

In the final analysis it is the sociological focus of visual sociologists that differentiates what they do from what other

visual researches do. 96

I.e., photographic realism with all its ideological luggage is certainly not the kind of space one wants to limit oneself

to. 97

Edward Tufte who taught statistical evidence, analytical design, and political economy at

Yale is not your regular orthodox social scientist. Tufte has complied several books all of which contain an eclectic

assemblage of visual information design. When comparing the variety and volume of visualization techniques

presented in Tufte’s work to that of visual sociologists, it is the latter who seem hopelessly orthodox.

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realism of visual sociologists. Hence, for dialogue to begin, it seems reasonable to ask

that visual sociologists take advantage of their current position to diversify and refine

their work to include other modes of visualization, rather than single-handedly rely on the

WYSIWYG98

realism of documentary photography. Here a guiding thread for further

inquiry and inspiration can be found in the social and political engagement of

contemporary visual artists such as Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Susan Hiller, and

Suzanne Lacy, to name a few.99

Besides bringing a sociological and theoretically

informed perspective to their praxis they are also important in that they emerged

alongside (1970s) many of the documentary photographers with whom visual

sociologists have found inspiration. In hindsight it therefore seems a small wonder that

the work of these prolific and highly profiled artists have been overlooked (or ignored)

by the visual sociology community. For not only do they offer a freedom in their mode of

working that visual sociologists can only hope to aspire, they also, and more importantly,

have cultivated an audience and importance that lies beyond the confines of their field.

Another way of expressing this missed ‘opportunity’ is given by Barbara Harrison

(1996) who attributes the resurgence of images in social science in the 70’s to the limited

return to photographic documents in policy issues as well as to a reassertion of the

importance of subjectivity in forms of representation and sociological discourse.100

Like

many of her contemporaries Harrison addresses the problem of an objectivist visual

discourse and she does this by reiterating the collective bafflement that the objectivist

paradigm should have such long term negative consequences for image based research

when the visual, now more than ever, is a central dimension of social life. Or as she

writes: “We should cease to be paralyzed by a heritage of claims about ‘realism’ in visual

data and accept the challenge they offer for sociological investigation into ways our

social world is constituted, reproduced and experienced, in which seeing is as important

as saying and doing, and visual depiction performs social work.”101

From Harrison’s

realization that images not only reflect the world but also actively participate in its

construction we find an entirely different path for legitimation of image-based research.

While there is much talk about the potentials of postmodern theory among contemporary

visual sociologists there is little evidence that this knowledge has migrated into how the

98

Popular abbreviation of w(hat) y(ou) s(ee) i(s) w(hat) y(ou) g(et). 99

Many visual art’isms (Dadaist, Surrealist, Futurists, Situationists, etc.,) were socially and politically engage before

Allan Sekula, Martha Rossler, Susan Hiller and Susanne Lacy. 100

Harrison, "Every Picture Tells a Story’: Uses of the Visual in Sociological Research," 78-79. 101

Ibid., 91.


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visual is used in praxis. My suspicion is that this lack of transfer may be due to the fact

that the visual practices of the field are still predominantly documentary rather than

conceptual and reflexive, thereby suggesting that the field of contemporary art is still a

field to be discovered by visual sociologists. Nonetheless, and however attractive

Harrison’s perspective seems, it lingers on shaky ground for she fails to note that the

resurgence of images is tied to a specific group dynamic that seeks to legitimate its

existence negatively by negotiating a very limited conception of the visual. While

Harrison reminds us that the ontological core around which this limited conception is

wrapped is one that pursues its value in objectivists terms, she reasons this is because the

photographic process is 1) a mechanical and instantaneous depiction of the subject and 2)

that cameras produce a mirror image of how things appear. (1996:88) Such observations

are fine by me but make little headway when it comes to figuring out why the use of

documentary photography is so stubbornly persistent in the field. This said, I do admit

that the reassertion of subjectivity in sociological discourse, and in ‘postmodern’ thinking

especially, plays an ever more important role in transgressing the limited visual narrative

of the field. As we now will see it is herein that a hope for a more inclusive definition of

visual sociology lies.

Part II: Reconstructing Visual Sociology

Up until now our focus has been directed at the history and the complex internal

dynamics of visual sociology. In doing so we have discovered a purified economy that

defines the field in terms that have proved highly limiting to the advancement and

legitimation of image based research. Moreover we have explored how this purified

economy has migrated into a very narrow conception of how the visual is put to use.

Because these self-constraining features corroborate numerous attempts to adjust visual

based research to the intellectual climate of North American sociology they are also

highly codependent, that is, they co-actively inform why visual sociologists have bundled

and internalized self-constraints as part and parcel of what they do. Since the bulk of

these problems are particular to the North American origins of the field, the remainder of

this thesis is devoted to exploring what other geographies and traditions have to offer.

Masters thesis 1:2

Documents

Transcript of Masters thesis 1:2