ABSTRACT
The photojournalsts' model of ethics is inappropriate because their way of working is quite different from that of visual sociologists. While photography has been used to explore society since the medium's invention, and social scientists have used cameras in their work since the turn of the century, it has only been in the last decade that interest in visual sociology has really taken off. Sociologists using visual techniques for collecting and presenting data can hide neither the identity of research subjects nor the locations where the data were collected because the physical properties of visual data make deletion of identifying characteristics almost impossible. While the promotion of negative stereotypes is a possible outcome of all sociological research, it is exceedingly difficult to exclude potentially harmful information when using visual data. At first glance, the work of visual sociologists shares several commonalities with that of photojournalists.
