Goffman and visual studies

Abstract

Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements is a landmark work in visual sociology and has come to be regarded as a classic in the field. In the book, Goffman does three things: sketches a theory of how photographs enter into social life, develops and applies a method of analysing gender representations in advertising images, and suggests how these representations contribute to the reproduction of gender. These contributions have inspired numerous works in visual sociology, visual anthropology, media studies, gender studies, and related fields. The proposed chapter will begin by explicating Goffman’s theory of photography, explaining how it usefully complicates our thinking about the nature of photographs as objects, about photographing as a social activity, and about how photographs matter for the reproduction of social structure. The chapter will then review Goffman’s method of image analysis, a method he calls ‘pictorial pattern analysis’. Finally, the chapter will examine Goffman’s legacy in visual studies. This section will review key studies that have used Goffman’s ideas and method and will also consider how future work in visual studies can build on and further develop Goffman’s thinking about images and social life.