Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials.

Abstract

Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Third edition. London: Sage, 2012. 386 pp. $51.00 paperback (978-0-85702-888-4) I begin with the suggestion that Rose's book addresses slightly different topics than it claims to. Rather than an overview per se, the book consists primarily eight essays that analyze how some topics have been studied visually, and in some instances, how have been constructed to do so. Discussion topic and method are generally paired. For example interpretation is applied to fine arts paintings and films (and video games, less convincingly); content is applied to the study National Geographic magazine photographs; semiology (semiotics) is almost entirely devoted to the study advertising; psychoanalysis to the study sexual difference in film. The pairing continues with I, which combines documentary or historical images with other forms data, but it breaks down II, which is a study institutionalization visuality rather than the study per se. Rose's chapter on studies and beyond reviews the long tradition television audience studies before turning to new studies, including ethnographies family photo worlds, mass media viewing, and other forms viewing in society. Finally, her chapter on visual research methods attempts to review all research in which researchers make rather than find images in thirty brief pages. The schema is presented as a table on page 45, and is easier to grasp in that form. From this perspective the book is an interesting inquiry into ways seeing, with commentary on what work for each topic, rather than a text on methods. For example, at the end her chapter on Discourse Analysis II she writes, there are no methodologically explicit deployments discourse II that I know of (p. 259). Liberating the book from an attempt to place all chapters under the umbrella would, in my view, allow for a fuller appreciation what the book does accomplish. This is especially the case since she moves through ethnography and other field with such alarming alacrity. Some especially noteworthy general themes include the idea that images should not and cannot be reduced to their causes or even constituent parts. There is always something greater; something in the gestalt seeing that defies definition. The chapter on content raises the interesting issue how to code images, and the overview semiotics questions assumptions that photos contain deep structures and messages. By using social semiotics to study the social landscapes new Apple stores, Rose shows that semiotics may survive its disappearing subject matter print advertising. In fact her attempt to analyze a recent ad for an Alfa Romeo automobile (p. 125) using the traditional Barthes-inspired approach, seems forced rather than illuminating. The book draws upon a huge intellectual landscape, including Freud (scopophilia), Lacan, Foucault, Sekula, and Haraway, among others. Often the chapters are deconstructions and recontextualizations the arguments these giants, although the spirits some them might appear bemused to find themselves treated as visual methodologists. Rose defines criteria for a critical analysis which are applied to each approach. These include an admonition to look carefully at images, to understand the social basis their making, and to include an element reflexivity, here defined as a dialogue on how the process making data are part those data themselves. Interestingly enough, most the approaches or covered do to not measure up to these criteria. For example, compositional looks carefully at images but does not address social practices and reflexivity; content also looks carefully at images but does not study the social practices production and has nothing to do with reflexivity. …