visual sociology
visual sociologyAlthough modern sociology and photography appeared almost simultaneously at the start of the 19th century, their lives have for the most part been quite separate. A few early texts—such as Frederic Thrasher's The Gang (1927)—used photographs to illustrate the research, but in the main sociologists tended to ignore visual images. This was not true of all other social scientists; for example, many anthropologists worked with visual images and film to great effect, as in Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's Balinese Culture (1942), while the documentary film has proved invaluable to social historians.
More recently, however, a branch of sociology known as visual sociology has flourished. Visual sociology usually has one of two major concerns. Much of it uses photography (and increasingly video and film) as a research tool to facilitate the gathering of data. Alternatively, visual images may be used as data in their own...
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