ABSTRACT
The visual has always been there: an (in)visible history of continuity in psychology? Psychology has a long-standing concern with the visual and with technologies of visualisation. This goes way beyond the specialised subdiscipline of the psychology of perception; it is instead part of the conceptual roots of the discipline as a whole. The emerging visual technology of photography was after all a central part of how the nascent discipline of psychology established its scientific credibility in the late nineteenth century – through the visual recording of scientific observation. For example, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin made comparisons across photographs and illustrations of children and animals as the evidential base for his theory of universal emotional expressions. This approach greatly influenced the growth of Comparative Psychology in the late nineteenth century (Richards, 2002). Moreover, photographs and minute observations of his son William Erasmus Darwin, which Darwin and his wife collected as a ‘developmental diary’ from his birth, are arguably the template from which Developmental Psychology established itself (Fitzpatrick and Bringmann, 1997).
