ABSTRACT
Although the attention given to images in criminology is a recent development, it is important to acknowledge that, across the humanities and social sciences, the visual has become a major feature of quite diverse qualitative research practices. These approaches are pursued from a plethora of disciplinary and theoretical positions, to the extent that there is no single, shared view on how images should be used, or to what ends they might be put. Nevertheless, it is clear that the field of visual methodology is the site of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship, which is a telling indication of the increasingly prominent place images occupy in contemporary life. Indeed, the term “ocularcentralism” was coined to describe a world saturated by visual experiences and the privileging of vision in Western philosophy and social theory (Jay, 1993). Since the mid 1990s, there has been a remarkable growth in scholarship on visual culture. In Britain, this was partly a result of an increasing specialization in cultural studies, where anthropological and sociological approaches have been especially influential, whereas, in the United States, the emerging field has been more indebted to art history, and today it is taught in most corners of the world, from many different perspectives (Mirzoeff, 2009).
