Douglas Harper, Visual Sociology

Abstract

Douglas Harper, Visual Sociology. New York: Routledge, 2012, 294 pp. $43.95 paperback (978-0-415-77896-1). Douglas Harper has spent his career realizing Howard Becker's call to make sociology (p. 1). For more than thirty years he has been an innovator, leader, and promoter of visual sociology. He is the author of four books based on ethnographic studies incorporating visual research: Good Company (Chicago, 1982), Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop (Chicago, 1987), Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture (Chicago, 2001) and, with co-author Patrizia Faccioli, The Italian Way: Food and Social Life (Chicago, 2009). As a founding member of the International Visual Sociology Association and as the first editor of the association's journal, Visual Studies, he has played a central role in establishing the institutional presence of visual research and in mentoring subsequent generations of visual researchers. His eagerly-awaited new book, Visual Sociology, offers a knowledgeable history and up-to-date, critical overview of the field. It also functions as a career retrospective, filled with Harper's photographs and extended examples from his evolving research practice. Visual research is less well known in sociology than it is in anthropology or cultural studies. But visual research approaches are growing in popularity in many social science and human services disciplines, now that digital technology makes it easy to create, store, and disseminate visual material. There are a number of common visual research strategies, which are generally associated with qualitative research. These include the use of photographs or video to generate ethnographic data, photo elicitation interviewing, and collaborative projects in which research participants use cameras to document their lives. Other research strategies analyze visual representations (e.g., archival images) or study visual practices (e.g., family photography). There are presently quite a few books on visual research, with more coming out every year, but none of them is explicitly sociological, and that is the gap Harper intends his book to fill. His goal is to show how photography-based visual methods can contribute to recognizably sociological research in areas that deal with familiar sociological topics such as social and community life, social change, social stratification, and social construction. Not everything social has a visible form or leaves visible traces, but quite a lot does: we lead embodied, emplaced lives, and sociology has been remarkably backward in recognizing the investigative potential of the visual. Exploring social settings using visual methods leads to new discoveries and insights (p. 56). Furthermore, visual approaches can invigorate a discipline that is increasingly abstract and distant from the world it seeks to understand (p. 4). Harper is not just promoting visual sociology as a set of invigorating methodological options. He is also promoting visual sociology as a body of literature and a community of practitioners. He starts with a history of visual ethnography, and follows that with an enthusiastic history of documentary photography and its relationship to sociology. Then he gets into the various visual methods and approaches, which he introduces by way of examples drawn from the work of visual researchers. There are no methodological recipes here, just appreciative--but not uncritical --descriptions of actual projects, along with well-informed discussions of ethical, analytical, and presentational issues related to visual research. …