Visual Sociology: Expanding Sociological Vision

This article is an overview of the contributions of 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 of American sociology, disappeared to reemerge during the 1960s. In the meantime, the use of visual methods in ethnographic description, the study of social processes in the laboratory, in studies of social change, as a key to interviewing grounded in the perspective of 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 of greater recognition and use within mainstream sociology.