Task 5a (April 27th)

Critical Essay: Summarize the key points and focus on the idea of Cultural Critique.

Visual research methods use images produced by society and of society to better comprehend the social situation. Since the 1860s, anthropologists have used photography to supply visual information about their subjects. Historically, photography was regarded to be a recording tool for surface data, as opposed to qualitative data, which needed to be discovered by other approaches (Dunlop 2010: 210). Anthropologists still use photos as a recording tool, but some have moved beyond this to investigate it as method itself (Mitchell 2002: 167).

Visual data was used as a form of cultural critique in the 1920s. A demonstration of this was exemplified by photographers such as Alexander Rodchenko and El lissitzky who sought to inform understanding of social revolution in the early days of the Soviet Union using a photomontage approach. In addition photojournalists such as Erich Salomon and Alfred Eisenstaedt used photo-reportage to communicate social situations (Gibal 1973). As a result from work published from Picture Post England and Time, Life and Fortune in the United States a sociologist Howard Becker (1974) identified that both sociology and photography emerged around the same time and both explored society. Becker (1974) believed that photography had come to be perceived like an art form, and that sociology was acknowledged as a science. Becker purposed that both the terms should be reunited to work together in order to discover different aspects of social life.  Some sociologists investigated this and visual research methods were increasingly used in a variety of sociological studies (Becker 1978: 5).

Within the past thirty years,  an increasing amount of social researchers within the United Kingdom have acknowledged that the visual is a growth point in cultural studies and social sciences, linking together researchers from a wide range of fields such as: anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, photography, photojournalism, media studies. Visual sociology and anthropology overlap in many aspects and usually are indistinguishable from one another. Sarah Pink (2007) has provided a descriptive account of the development of visual ethnographic research within sociology and anthropology (Mitchell 2002: 168).

Photography originally played an important role in early anthropology it subsequently declined in importance as a tool for gathering data. Harper suggests that is a tradition which persists to offer a model for contemporary sociologists focus on the visualization of social life in the field work research. In the notion of cultural critique there are three areas of critique within social scientific discourse, such as methodological critique linked with new ethnography and in particular the differences in systems of classification (Prosser 1998: 38).

According to Harper the notion of the visual sociologist as a cultural critique and the methods adopted by particular sociologists allow the viewer to see social phenomena in new and provocative ways. Leo Frankenberger’s (1991) photomontages from documentary photographs, of neighbourhood and its residents soon to be demolished. From these photographs, Harper claims, work through a metaphor and are empathetic, suggestive and descriptive in their nature. Harper concludes that “Images allow us to make statements which cannot be made by words, and the world we see is saturated with sociological meaning” (Prosser 1998: 38).

References

Dunlop, S., Richter, P. (2010) "Visual methods." Religion and youth. Farnham: Ashgate

Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002) ‘Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture.' Journal of Visual Culture 1, (2) 165-181

Becker, Howard S. (1974) "Photography and sociology." Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1, (1) 3-26

Prosser, J. (1998) Image-based research: a sourcebook for qualitative researchers. London: Falmer Press