ABSTRACT
Psychology has a long-standing concern with the visual and with technologies of visualisation. This stretches beyond the specialised subdiscipline of the psychology of perception; it is instead part of the conceptual roots of the discipline as a whole. Social psychology has throughout its history used film and photography as a means of documenting research and shoring up the ‘face validity’ of its pronouncements. To summarise, a historical analysis of the role of the visual within psychology can reveal its instrumental effects in providing the context for ‘the psychological’ to become observable and, therefore, measurable and more ‘scientific’. This chapter presents examples from visual research in psychology to illuminate the contextual and situated nature of meaning making and lived experience and how experience might be more fully captured in all of its rich embodied and spatial texture. Visual research in psychology can bring to the fore the spaces through which people experience themselves.
