Visual Sociology: Expanding Sociological Vision

Abstract

This article is an overview of the contributions o f photography to sociology and a discussion of potential uses of photography in sociological research. Visual sociology, after contributing to several studies in the early decades o f American sociology, disappeared to reemerge during the 1960s. In the meantime, the use o f visual methods in ethnographic description, the study of social processes in the laboratory, in studies o f social change, as a key to interviewing grounded in the perspective o f the subject and as a means through which phenomenological sociology may be constructed and communicated. Visual sociology, with increasing organizational success and emerging electronic aids, appears to be on the verge o f greater recognit ion and use wi th in mainstream sociology.