ABSTRACT
The last few years have seen a remarkable visual turn in criminology; and the radical claim, made by cultural criminologists, is that a 'decisive moment' has now been reached – where it is no longer possible to divorce crime and control from how they are visually represented; they urge an end to the distinction made between 'real' crime and the 'unreal' image. One of the best examples of visual criminology is the collaboration between anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer Jeff Schonberg in their ethnography of homelessness and drug addiction in San Francisco. A new edited collection by Brown and Carrabine gives a sense of the wide range of approaches in visual criminology, and this diversity characterizes both the kind of visual materials they work with and the analytical procedures to which that material is subjected. A key distinction can be made between a detailed interpretation of an aspect of visual culture and the use of visual methods in social research.
