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Visual sociology: Expanding sociological vision

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, State University of New York, 13676, Potsdam, NY

    Douglas Harper (associate professor)

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  1. Douglas Harper
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Additional information

Editor of theVisual Sociology Review the publication of the International Visual Sociology Association and edits the book seriesVisual Studies at Temple University Press. He has published two books that rely in part on photographic methods and has co-directed an ethnographic film on a rural sawyer. He is currently working on a book on visual sociology as well as a study of an agricultural community in Northern New York.

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Harper, D. Visual sociology: Expanding sociological vision. Am Soc 19, 54–70 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02692374

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