Researching the Visual: Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural Inquiry

Providing a comprehensive introduction to the entire field of visual research, this book reviews the contributions of traditions as diverse as semiotics, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism and material culture studies and demonstrates their potential application for the visual researcher. The first part of the book deals with the more traditional themes in visual research. These center on the use of photographic images in ethnographic enquiry and the cultural interpretation of texts such as advertisements. It then goes on to show how visual research should also embrace the analysis of everyday objects, places and forms of social interactions. Accessibly presented yet methodologically rigorous and theoretically grounded, the relevance of leading theorists such as Foucault, Bordieu, Goffman and Hall are discussed. The book includes numerous exercises which show students how `low-tech, low-budget' visual research can provide methodologically sophisticated ways of testing and developing cultural theory. The book is generously illustrated with images, and diagrams that serve to bring the various theoretical points into focus.