In a world flooded with images, emerging visual technologies are playing a pivotal role in transforming how images are created, interpreted, and trusted in human vision. This article explores how machine-driven vision fits into a long history of mediated seeing, including drone photography. Drawing on a multimodal social semiotic framework, the study examines two widely circulated case studies: the deepfake of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket and the forged arrest of Donald Trump. Through this approach, the article demonstrates how such images derive from the mobilisation of familiar visual narratives. These synthetic visuals function as culturally resonant signs, blurring the boundaries between realism, satire, and misinformation. In response to these developments, the article suggests that visual culture is transitioning into a post-photographic epoch, characterised by declining reliance on images as direct evidence and their replacement by computer-generated representations. As AI-generated images circulate as seemingly real records, they challenge public trust in visual perception and highlight the need for enhanced visual, digital and algorithmic literacy. These literacies enable viewers to critically understand synthetic images and navigate complex visual environments where authenticity cannot be taken for granted.

This study addresses the urgent need to preserve endangered indigenous narratives by examining how mixed-media stop-motion animation can serve as a culturally situated research and artistic method. Focusing on Rukai birth rituals and the symbolic use of medicinal herbs, this study addresses the underrepresentation of indigenous ecological knowledge and embodied ritual practices within digital and visual arts research. Focusing on Rukai birth rituals and the symbolic use of medicinal herbs, this study adopts a qualitative, ethnographic, and practice-based approach that integrates cultural fieldwork, participant observation, and material experimentation. Through the combination of organic materials and digital techniques, oral histories and ritual knowledge are translated into visual narratives. Audience responses indicate strong cultural resonance and positive engagement with the animated work, supporting its effectiveness as both a creative outcome and research medium. The findings demonstrate that mixed-media animation not only enhances audience engagement and cultural understanding but also provides a viable and scalable methodological framework for translating embodied indigenous knowledge into accessible and emotionally resonant visual forms. This study contributes to visual studies and cultural preservation by offering a practice-based model that expands possibilities for sustaining and reinterpreting indigenous cultural knowledge in contemporary media contexts.

Drawing on a multi-sited, sensory, and experimental ethnographic approach to cruise aquamobilities through diverse port cities, this paper reflects on the practice of curating photography in social sciences research. The epistemological potentials of experimenting with visual materials in sociological research are highlighted, discussing their use not only as data/analytic devices but also as research outputs in themselves. The use of researcher-generated images, which go beyond documentary photography, is analysed, in dialogue with the challenges of doing fieldwork in urban contexts, and in articulation with other methods (like walking). With the aim of contributing to further discussion on photographs as research tools and alternative ways of knowing, this article provides empirical examples of experimental, expressive, and critical images, while thinking through the roles that these have played across diverse research stages.

This article examines how racialised visual repertoires are historically consolidated within satirical media, focusing on Punch magazine’s concentrated production of anti-Chinese cartoons in 1857. Rather than treating cartoons as isolated expressions of prejudice or ideology, the study approaches them as components of a visual system whose meanings are stabilised through repetition within a compressed temporal frame. Drawing on a close analysis of eighteen anti-Chinese cartoons published during the Second Opium War; the article argues that Punch did more than intensify existing orientalist caricatures. In 1857, the magazine reorganised disparate visual motifs – such as the Chinese braid, the figure of ‘John Chinaman,’ and the Sinicisation of Western politicians – into a durable visual grammar capable of being reactivated across later national and political contexts. By shifting analytical attention from individual acts of caricature to processes of visual consolidation, this study reframes the relationship between satire, empire, and racial representation. It demonstrates how humour functioned not simply as commentary on imperial conflict, but as a mechanism through which racialised ways of seeing were normalised, stabilised, and rendered politically transferable. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates in visual studies concerning how visual culture participates in the historical production of ideological common sense.

This paper will examine how the illustration of ‘Champion Angels (Şampiyon Melekler),’ created to commemorate the high school volleyball team from Northern Cyprus that lost their lives in the earthquakes in Turkey in 2023, first transformed into a logo for an association and then into a symbol of societal trauma. This transformation is accompanied by the visual prepared by Alireza Pakdel, which officially became the logo. This logo embodies the commemoration, expression, and visibility of the Champion Angels.

Visual methods have attracted considerable attention as a way of exploring animals’ ways of being in the world. This paper investigates the benefits of visual methodologies for researching human-animal relations and, in particular, understanding dogs’ therapeutic work. The discussion is situated in the context of Shukin’s argument that this work is made possible by dogs’ feeling power and that dogs are subjects of governmentality. In a small study of therapy dogs’ visits to a university where they worked with students, we experimented with different visual methods, producing a range of still and moving images. We argue that these images work in different ways to help us understand the micropolitics of therapy dog visits; how feeling power is generated through animal touch; and the work dogs undertake to shape both the form and effectiveness of feeling power. We conclude that visual methods expand our understanding of what it is that therapy dogs do when they are working, showing how the dogs both accommodate to and resist subjectification, but that the conditions of production of different types of image and the form they take shape the knowledges they make possible.

In the age of social media, we are accustomed to hearing about the uncontrollable visual ‘flood’ unleashed by new technologies. Metaphors such as ‘flood’, ‘wave’, or ‘ocean’ of images convey not only a sense of visual infinity but also of chaotic, unfiltered production. However, if we look more closely, we find that within this vast universe, visual forms tend to repeat themselves. This homogenisation is not neutral. The hypothesis we will defend in this work is that the repetition of images by social media users produces habits of visual consumption and production, ensuring that their attention is captured by the platforms. Drawing on the concept of Bildakt and the classical notion of habit – since habit is constituted through the repetition of acts – I propose the notion of iconic habits to explain this phenomenon. In the digital world, images have agency over us by generating certain habits through their repetition. This phenomenon is closely linked to the design of platforms informed by behavioural science models (Fogg, Eyal). Understanding how iconic habits operate enables us to analyse how users’ attention is captured and how they are transformed into visual machines.

This article offers a self-reflexive commentary on a methodology developed in the making of Hopa lide (2023), a feature-length ethnographic documentary produced by the author in collaboration with Romani musicians in Slovakia. The article reflects on how movement functioned as a methodological, aesthetic, and epistemological principle within this specific project, and argues that, despite its centrality to ethnographic filmmaking, movement remains surprisingly under-theorised in visual anthropology. The article is structured as a sequence of three analytical movements. First, it sketches a selective overview of how movement has been approached in the history, theory, and practice of documentary and ethnographic cinema, from early debates around camera mobility to its contemporary technological normalisation. Second, it explains why movement was key to engaging the film’s topic and protagonists, focusing on Romani music-making as a fluid, improvisational, and relational practice. Third, and most importantly, it reflects on how movement shaped the making of the film itself: through camera practices, improvisational modes of collaboration, narrative organisation, and forms of proximity between filmmaker and participants. Addressed primarily to visual anthropologists, documentary filmmakers, and other scholars working with moving images, the article invites readers to consider movement not merely as a technical feature of filming, but as a productive lens for thinking about how ethnographic knowledge is generated, mediated, and shared. The analysis is closely tied to the film itself, which is publicly available online; while the article can be read independently, engaging with the film enhances the discussion.

This article defines the notion of political imagery of 70s Chile by examining the Portuguese Armindo Cardoso’s photographs made in Chile between 1969 and 1973. Through the lens of civil-contract ethics, immigrant duality, and text – image interplay, the study shows how placards, banners and captions work not as ancillary context but as rhetorical agents that mobilise viewers. A curated corpus of eleven images, selected by provenance, display, and reuse history (urban rallies, Mapuche assemblies and agrarian reform scenes) is analysed in relation to Chile’s visual field of the period, highlighting how Cardoso’s exilic viewpoint negotiates attachment and distance to stage collective agency while respecting ethical exposure. The article also reconstructs the buried archive’s material itinerary (1973–2013), clarifying issues of provenance, access and mediation. By situating these visual practices within broader debates on memory politics and post-documentary aesthetics, the article offers visual studies a transferable analytic for understanding how photographic images create civic publics and politicise their own afterlives.

Drawing on a research project conducted within the occupied cinema La Clef in Paris, this article examines the methodological and epistemological stakes of a sociology of imaginaries, mobilising filmic resources in the service of a co-constructed and emancipatory approach. It revisits a central debate that has traversed the humanities since the mid-twentieth century: how can one objectify a subject without reproducing the very relations of domination that sociology seeks to reveal and contest? The article details how this interrogation has fostered the emergence of co-constructed and reflexive methodologies that foreground participants’ agency. It specifically demonstrates the relevance of visual sociology – and filmic sociology in particular – to this ambition. This overview of the state of the art on co-construction in the social sciences leads us back to our field site, where we assess the contribution of filmic sociology at each stage of the research, from participant observation to the first forms of restitution, notably through film elicitation. These reflections ultimately invite us to consider how the reflexive dimension of the moving image can transcend the traditional relation between objectifying subject and objectified subject.