ABSTRACT
But from early on in the twentieth century until very recently, the visual has been marginalised in sociology. Fyfe and Law (1988) note the antireductionist stance taken by early mainstream sociologists which deleted the body-and thus the eye-from classical social theory; and they also suggest other reasons for sociology’s marginalisation of the visual, which were discussed in Chapter 4. However, Stasz (1979) introduces another dimension. Her researches reveal that thirty-one articles in the early volumes (1896-1916) of the American Journal of Sociology used photographs as illustration and evidence-and that these were associated with an approach which pressed for ‘social amelioration’, since photographs ‘force a confrontation with reality’ (Stasz 1979:134). Bringing the viewer face to face with the struggles and atrocious housing conditions of the poor helped put the case for change. However, Stasz notes that when the positivist sociologist, Albion Small, took over the editorship of the journal in 1914, photographs were banished from its pages in favour of ‘causal analysis, high-level generalisations and statistical reports’ (Stasz 1979:133). For Small believed that the presence of photographs in a sociological text threatened the theoretical status and purpose of sociology itself. He claimed that although photographs might be an invaluable tool in the hands of those who argued for social change, the relationship of such a
project to pure sociology was analogous to the relationship between public hygiene and biology.1 The belief that photographs should be kept out of sociological discourse pervaded the AJS for a long time. Indeed, the extent of this ideological grip is perhaps indicated by the fact that when Shanas reviewed the first fifty years of the AJS (Shanas 1945), she made no reference to the presence of photographs in the journal.2
