ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by assuming that, until the digital age, writing and oral modes of communication were the privileged forms in the discipline and profession of Social Work. It argues that visual communication was never included within the repertoire of valid forms of human communicating because the visual as a knowledge and a way of expressing being was already excluded from the professions. The chapter explores the visual as a type of knowledge, and attempts to excavate the reasons for its absence from the professional ontologies, and hence Social Work. Visual practice requires that we pay attention to all the ways that social work and social work research is involved in the production, circulation, and reception of visual images. Social Work operates in a messy, ambiguously contradictory, embodied everyday world that is in constant flux. The written and oral words were given supremacy in modernity, to express the abstracted meanings the epoch sought.
