New Technology in Sociology by Grant Blank James L. McCartney Edward Brent

Author:Grant Blank, James L. McCartney, Edward Brent [Grant Blank, James L. McCartney, Edward Brent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781000678383
Google: Cx7CDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-12-06T04:59:36+00:00

The Phenomenological Mode

In the 1930s, the fine arts photographer Alfred Stieglitz suggested that photographs can express spiritual, or psychological, equivalents. Minor White, one of the most influential fine-arts photographers of the twentieth century, developed this idea in his own work and exhibitions he curated and books he edited. It was Roland Barthes (1981) who applied this idea to social inquiry as he "made himself the measure of photographic knowledge." Barthes asks the question of why and how some photographs move him emotionally, others communicate to him in a rational manner, and some do both and others do neither. He suggests two terms, the Studium and the punctum, to distinguish these properties. The quality of photographs (or elements in photographs) to raise a rational or sociological interest, he calls the Studium; the quality of photographs that prick his consciousness in the manner of an object of art, he calls the punctum. Barthes, in making this distinction, shows that the photograph is more than a record-making device, and this opens, for visual sociologists, the question of how our data may play two roles. Photographs may literally describe but leave us unmoved; other images may inspire our emotions but not be useful (or even lie) sociologically. Some photographs may, however, do the opposite; that is, communicate sociological insights in an artistically stimulating manner.

Phenomenally minded sociologists and artists, following Barthes, have used photographs to explore the nature of their own perception and knowledge. George Psathas, for example (1985), combined slides projected simultaneously from several projectors, a musical soundtrack, and images of repeated words to communicate his subjective interpretation of a public square in Boston. Ronald Silvers (forthcoming) combines photographs, nonlinear written reflections, and meditations on his experience and that of the monks to whom he has journeyed. In both of these instances, we assume that the individual experience teaches us about the general class of events the sociologist observes. It is through the unabashedly subjective potential of photographs that the communication is made.

This phenomenological approach is, in a sense, the elicitation of one's own knowledge through the analysis of photographs that have personal meaning. Larry Sultan (1986) searches through old home movies to construct not only his own childhood memories but also to partially understand what his father, who made the movies, experienced. Nancy Rexroth (1974) finds in the two-dollar Diana camera a soft-focus lens that produces images of past that she believes are the equivalents of childhood dreams. These are perhaps the most experimental areas of visual sociology and the places where sociology most closely approaches art. Indeed, the personal interpretations of experience and meaning may be the beginning rather than the end of sociological analysis.

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