ABSTRACT
Visual sociology, after contributing to several studies in the early decades of American sociology, disappeared to reemerge during the 1960s. Although photography and sociology have existed for about the same period of time, visual sociology—the use of photographs, film, and video to study society and the study of visual artifacts of a society—is underdeveloped and largely peripheral to the discipline as a whole. Visual sociology is a collection of approaches in which researchers use photographs to portray, describe, or analyze social phenomena. Visual sociology, however, gradually emerged from and retains a kinship with the documentary tradition in photography, which, in turn, gradually developed from fine arts and portraiture photography. Sociology, in the meantime, found little place for a visual approach. It may be that visual sociology is discredited in the minds of many precisely because everyone can take photographs.
