Visual Research Methods

Image, Society, and Representation

Gregory C. Stanczak

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412939546
• eBook ISBN: 9781483389387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Visual Research Methods: Image, Society, and Representation addresses the growing question in social research of how to critically incorporate visual data and visual methodologies in ways that expand and enhance the researcher?s repertoire for understanding and teaching about the social world. Editor Gregory C. Stanczak crisscrosses disciplines in ways that highlight the multiple manifestations of this newer interdisciplinary trend. Beyond methodological interests, the rich diversity of subject matter provides this volume?s pedagogical punch.

Key Features

• Provides a valuable framework for classroom use and comparative analysis: Organized around three themes in visual research—methodology, epistemological reflection, and theoretical contribution of images
• Addresses a wide range of topics: Original and reprinted works by leading qualitative researchers from various fields, including Sociology, Education, Political Science, Religion, History, and Gender Studies
• Offers a roadmap to common issues and topics: Reader?s guide connects different chapters to different conceptual themes and methodological approaches
• Presents vivid visual data: Methodologies go beyond photography alone and include video and virtual research

Intended Audience: This is an excellent text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in social research across disciplines such as Sociology, Education, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, American Studies, Communications, Gender Studies, and Political Science.Vi

1

Introduction

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Images, Methodologies, and Generating Social Knowledge

Gregory C. Stanczak

Images convey. This simple and perhaps unequivocal statement becomes much more complex with the addition of a few short words. How do images convey? What do images convey? To whom? In answering these questions, what was originally a simple declarative statement becomes a position; a stance concerning the ways to think about and think with images.

Consider a brief series of images. While on a research trip to Tanzania, I made two visits to a growing, urban Pentecostal church. After one service, I walked out and crouched down to take several photographs of the relatively new church façade. Taking two shots in quick succession as people milled about the entrance, I barely realized that a child had wandered into the bottom of the frame and posed, unsmiling. As I pulled the camera back, the boy approached and smiled broadly, striking different poses in what I took to be anticipation of a few more shots. The camera instantly allowed an easy although limited rapport, and I dutifully took another shot of the boy from closer range, showing him the feedback display seconds after the digital “shutter” clicked. I had not intended these photographs to be part of my data for a project on faith-based nongovernmental organizations in East Africa, but this series of three unexpected photographs pricked my curiosity about the role of images in research and their function as communication in general.¹

I returned to the images often and asked myself what they conveyed. Did the image of a child posed in front of the church building differ from the image of the structure alone? In other words, what was conveyed in the photograph of the façade alone and what was conveyed with the addition of this boy? What types of relationships might be inferred or imagined between the church and the boy? Was the child’s stance fearful? Authoritative? Protective? I realized that based only on the photographs, there is no clear answer to these questions; all the images provide is the most basic empirical description of the physical objects captured by a digital chip at the moment I depressed the button: “a church” and “a boy.” Of course, from my work with this community, I knew more about this particular church and this particular boy, information I could bring into my reading and interpretation of these images. But without such ethnographic data, others would bring alternative positions, experiences, and educated assumptions to their reading. A missionary might perceive the saving grace of the church; a historian might point out the persistence, opportunities, and oppressions of colonial Christianity; a sociologist might look at the institutional influence of religion as a powerful socialization agent in the child’s development—and all of these views raise interesting speculative questions to pursue.

Beyond the “situatedness” of the reader and his or her assumptions, I wanted to know if these perspectives were in some way internal to the composition of the images. Even if they were not, my composition certainly allowed for internal references to trigger various interpretations of the photograph. For example, when I turned to the third shot of the boy playfully posing for his close-up, I had to ask again what difference resided in this image? My composition changed. I could no longer determine that the structure behind the boy was a church, had I not been the one to take the shot or had it not been sequenced along with the other two photographs. What if this smiling face was similarly composed against the wider profile of the church and framed with the white cross gleaming overhead? What different message might that image convey? If these three photographs—taken within three minutes and three feet of each other—have the potential to tell—at the very least—three different stories, then what purpose could photography serve as an empirical or even descriptive tool? When extracted from this one example, these are the questions that provide the impetus of this book. The following chapters ask: How is it that visual representations convey, and how might we appropriate this in ways that construct knowledge and meaning in the social and academic world?

To a certain degree, visual representation is already a staple of the behavioral sciences. Professional journals publish diagrams condensing research into pie charts and line graphs, which we interpret, for example, as indicators of socioeconomic demographics, gender achievement in standardized testing, or the intersection of age, race, and religious participation in civic life. We have come to accept and even expect such visual representations as signifiers of complex calculations, backed by a methodological rigor that is offered (perhaps more often required) as a staple within most social scientific curricula. We are trained to decipher particular kinds of visual representations in order to be scholars in our respective fields.

On the other hand, until recently, what we most often think of as visual imagery—photographs and more recently video and virtual images—functioned as illustration. I use the past tense confidently, if not somewhat optimistically, given the changes in the status of the image in academic fields over the past decade. Admittedly, anthropology has carried the mantle of visual analysis throughout its disciplinary tenure; however, the chapters presented in this book indicate that visual or image-based research is reemerging with significant untapped potential and vigor across a broader scope of disciplines. It is in this spirit that the current collection was compiled. Each of the chapters incorporates the image in slightly different ways and across remarkably different issues. Yet, what remains consistent is that images are not merely appendages to the research but rather inseparable components to learning about our social worlds. The selected chapters in this book strike vivid and highly accessible connections between the everyday world that we take in through our eyes and the cognitive, analytic framework that we apply through our scholarship and pass along in our teaching.

In this opening chapter, I will lay out the guiding structure of this collection and offer some different ways to access the text. My hope is that readers will find one or more of these pieces resonating with their own projects in some way, either methodologically or substantively. More than that, I hope these chapters as a whole spark conversations concerning the “hows” and the “whys” of incorporating images into various research agendas and, in doing so, prompt us to rethink what images tell us about the image maker, the viewer, the way in which images are shared and talked about, and the entire academic process of generating credible social knowledge.

Guiding Themes

Although this is a book about methods and each chapter provides clear examples and concise explications of methodological approaches, this is not a conventional methodological handbook. There are few step-by-step guidelines. Methodologies are highly contingent on epistemological positions, populations, researcher interests, rapport, and confidentiality, among a host of other concerns. Each chapter discusses in detail its author’s uniquely tailored methodology, but extending these methodologies to other projects requires each reader/researcher to hone his or her own craft accordingly. With this in mind, each author instead describes and reflects on the situated way he or she uses images for particular purposes and notes the potentials and pitfalls that images provide in building or extending research questions. Connecting these differences are three main themes or threads that run through each chapter: epistemological concerns, methodology, and theoretical or substantive contributions. Each of these three terms can seem overly abstract, and admittedly, they are often used in very circuitous ways. For this collection, I use these three themes as practical points to engage, question, and reflect on the visual research process within and across chapters.

Epistemology

Instead of a “how to” compilation of visual methods or an exploration of substantive findings alone, this text is an interactive epistemological odyssey engaging the authors, the readers, and various disciplines. Epistemology, for our purposes, asks several broad questions. How is it that we come to know what we know, and what are the underlying assumptions of this pursuit? In other words, what is our process of inquiry? What are our disciplinary, sub-disciplinary, and personal expectations about what information is valid for what purposes? Moving the image both figuratively and literally into social scientific research has epistemological implications that raise widely applicable questions of validity, subjectivity, and rapport. Questions such as these are not new; they have a long intellectual history of prodding researchers and image makers since the advent of photography. That history is examined more deeply elsewhere, but let me spend some time to trace a sketch that loosely contextualizes the contours of the subsequent chapters.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, the camera and positivism emerged together (Berger & Mohr, 1982). Both photographic technology and philosophical framework stem from the aligned notions that the truth can be discerned empirically from objective facts observed in the world and that systematic documentation of these facts can lead to the harnessing of certain social processes and outcomes. The camera held promise as a valued tool for the strict empirical construction of knowledge in Western science, a promise that was embraced for medical, philanthropic, and legal advances and claims (Tagg, 1993). For example, in the United States, the camera served quite well for those hoping to reveal emergent social patterns during the shifts toward urbanization and industrialization. Paging through Jacob Riis’s (1890) How the Other Half Lives over a century after its publication confirms this early role of photography as an influential vehicle for social critique. Riis’s images of orphans and of alcohol dens illustrate the advances and applications of new technology (including rudimentary flash photography) as well as the social conscience with which the camera could be used.

In a similar social vein, Lewis Hine was a pioneer of visual social science who earned a graduate degree in sociology from Columbia University while freelancing for the National Child Labor Committee. Hine focused his developing sociological lens on the social and economic disparities of the industrial city (as well as multiple other projects, such as child labor and immigration), using Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as one particular case study. Sociologically informed, Hine’s aim was to promote a rational, public dialogue about these inequities that would encourage social change. However, even given Hine’s integration of sociological perspectives, the empirical promise of photography was relatively short-lived for the social sciences. With the exception of visual anthropology, the epistemological direction of the social sciences by mid-century became unhooked from the use of visual tools as valid modes of analytic inquiry.

Within 20th-century social sciences, epistemological assumptions regarding what constitutes valid research agendas fell along two main divisions or avenues of inquiry: qualitative and quantitative. Although the two are by no means mutually exclusive, qualitative approaches were and are based on the assumption that close, often intimate connections to the lived experiences of a particular phenomenon—gender socialization in junior high school or the effects of global technology on national identity in rural India, for example—produce the clearest and most informed understanding of the topic, whereas quantitative approaches fundamentally assume that the most reliable indicator of a phenomenon is represented through systematic analysis of large representative samples of a population about whom one is curious. Visual data receded as quantitative methodologies refined surveys and questionnaires that tracked the demographic and social shifts of the 20th century and as Robert Park’s qualitatively oriented Chicago School perfected a notably text-based or verbal approach to exploring lived experiences through sociology (Platt, 1996).

Broader changes in the social location of photography may have also contributed to this shift away from mainstream social science epistemologies. By mid-century, photographs increasingly were held under the auspices of the state and within the walls of the museum. The special photographic division of Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), headed by Roy Stryker, became one of the most influential and enduring legacies of the New Deal. The images from this program exist in our collective memories as the face of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression; they simultaneously conjure the desperation and resilience of the everyday American experience. We might forget, however, that from its inception, the photography of the FSA was critiqued as a politically motivated campaign to sustain support for New Deal policies by conjuring just such responses. This critique persisted—although motivated by different political agendas—when the division was transferred over to the Office of War Information in 1942, at which time it patriotically and unabashedly documented the country’s mobilization for war.

Years later during the boom following World War II, the anthropological role of photographs merged with mainstream culture in the Museum of Modern Art’s The Family of Man exhibit. Edward Steichen (1955), a champion of the aesthetic and artistic designation of photography, conceived of the exhibit as one that would present the “gamut of human relations,” ultimately revealing our universal connections. It proved to be the most heavily attended exhibit of photography of its time, drawing capacity crowds throughout the United States before moving on to 69 venues in 37 other countries (Sandeen, 1995).

Since then, there has been a steady stream of social commentary within the walls of the museum. Suspicious of co-optation by governmental programs or the editorial constraints of photojournalism, the Riises and Hines of the second half of the 20th century voiced their critiques through stunning content and equally stunning aesthetics in galleries, coffee-table books, and now websites. Over the same period that documentary photographers were weaving compelling narratives laden with social institutional implications about the family, poverty, unemployment, urban problems, drug abuse, or religion, photographs in art galleries were losing much of their policy punch and nearly all of their utility within the social sciences (Becker, 1974). The ideological malleability of images by the state and the sentimentality of images such as in The Family of Man—not to mention ubiquitous family photo albums—were at odds with the modern march of social scientific rigor in the academy at mid-century, and an epistemological wariness still challenges the validity of images as data today.

Still later in the 20th century, critical documentary image-work in photography and increasingly video moved forward again as television and image-based technologies proliferated. Media studies reemerged from its Frankfurt School roots as the analytic arena for understanding the impact of images on society, producing a vibrant yet bounded discourse. This disciplinary shift toward media studies moved the focus onto institutional carriers and producers of images and audience responses. Findings were aimed as much at the industry as at the academy—a changed agenda from using images as data or as methodologies for exploring the social world. Yet, the critical connection between image and society enabled and continues to spark productive collaborations within certain pockets of the social sciences. By the late 20th century, photographic criticism, epistemological debate, and sociological implications (broadly used) emerged in the work of authors as varied as Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard.

The social and academic position of photography sheds some light on the disciplinary shifts with regard to images. At the core of these relationships are epistemological assumptions about subjectivity versus objective empiricism. For both conventional and image-based projects, this continuum poses perennial challenges for the social sciences and requires us to stake out a position for or within qualitative, quantitative, or combined approaches to research. When considering images, the line between subjectivist and objectivist-realist assumptions—that images capture something “real” and that images are constructions—is continually moving. Indeed, images often ask us to hold both positions simultaneously to greater or lesser degrees. Roland Barthes (1981), for example, championed the deeply personal, emotional intimacies with which we relate to certain photographs while simultaneously asserting what he believed was the unquestionable realist basis of photography; photographs demand that we accept that “this has been.” The connection between subjectivity and realism is instructive for social scientific analysis. Rather than demanding only an objective reading, images also elicit various subjectivities from our participants that—instead of being bracketed away—can be probed and analyzed.

Just as subjectivity and realism interact in the space between the image and the viewer, the same occurs between the producer of the image and the subject or content. We may select in time and space what we want to capture, but the mechanical operation of the camera will document all that is before it in that moment. In other words, the camera is susceptible to the selectivity of the operator, but it is not selective once the shutter is opened (Collier & Collier, 1986).

As images reemerge as data within the social sciences, we must acknowledge the empirical components of the image while embracing the compelling challenges and opportunities of subjectivity and the potential emotional impact of making and reading images. Yes, cameras crop, adjust for lighting, and create moods in their captured environments; increasingly, they zoom and pan. And yes, questions regarding the selection of content within t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction: Images, Methodologies, and Generating Social Knowledge
• 2. Observing Culture and Social Life: Documentary Photography, Fieldwork, and Social Research
• 3. All Photos Lie: Images as Data
• 4. Capturing the Visual Traces of Historical Change: The Internet Mission Photography Archive
• 5. The Failure of “The President’s Choice”
• 6. Using Photography in Studies of Immigrant Communities: Reflecting Across Projects and Populations
• 7. Inner-City Children in Sharper Focus: Sociology of Childhood and Photo Elicitation Interviews
• 8. When Words Are Not Enough: Eliciting Children’s Experiences of Buddhist Monastic Life Through Photographs
• 9. Signs of Resistance: Marking Public Space Through a Renewed Cultural Activism
• 10. Performances, Confessions, and Identities: Using Video Diaries to Research Sexualities
• 11. The Symbolism of Video: Exploring Migrant Mothers’ Experiences
• 12. Website Design: The Precarious Blend of Narrative, Aesthetics, and Social Theory
• Index
• About the Contributors