Visual Methods in Social Research. Marcus Banks
story to follow: that of Mary and Joe. Initially the research might follow similar lines: use archival resources to trace the postcard, and to establish where and when it might have been sold. Then Army records may be used to try and establish which regiments might have been in that area at that time, and so on to try and locate Joe. (In truth, identifying the individual sadhus is probably easier than trying to identify Joe.) The image could then be used as part of a research project in British social history – together with other images and letters sent by soldiers overseas to family and loved ones – to assess the role of British women and how they lived their lives at home while their menfolk were away. Did new brides and fiancées maintain closer ties than normal to their female affines or affines-to-be, for example (‘Best love to my Sisters when you go up’)?
A third line of enquiry also presents itself. MB bought the postcard at a sale of postcards, cigarette cards, telephone cards and other collectable ephemera in a village hall near his home in Oxford a few years ago. It had travelled half way around the world, passed through many people’s hands, and is now in Australia, where MB sent it as a gift to a friend. The postcard cost £1.50, a price at the lower end of the scale in such sales: a seller said that serious postcard collectors prefer mint condition cards, without writing, stamps or franking. Clearly, we are not the only ones interested in old postcards, such postcard fairs are common – with the cards sorted by geography (the one above was in the ‘Ethnic’ category, but postcards of the British Isles are meticulously subdivided by county and town) or types (‘Animals’, ‘Flowers’, ‘Famous People’). Nor are we the only ones interested in antiquarian images of non-European peoples, although the majority are well beyond our price range: a good early photograph by a named photographer of non-European people, especially Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, or Native Americans, can easily cost £500 and beyond. A set of such images in an elegant album can cost over £10,000. A sociologist, an economist, or an art historian could each construct a research project enquiring into cultural value and market forces in venues ranging from humble village halls to the salerooms of London and New York auction houses.
Figure 1.4 Three images from a C19th album
These different possible research methods apply to individual images but also to collections of images. Consider old-style photo albums (and their contemporary online analogues). All the approaches we have just described could be applied to each individual image in an album. There are also some new questions which apply to the collection as a whole. For example, the location where a photograph was taken may be of interest in itself but it has a different sort of meaning in an ensemble. In one case in point DZ purchased an old album in an antiques shop in east Kent in the 1990s. On the basis of a few names written on the backs of a few prints we infer that this was possibly made by a member of the Gossage family. However, it lacks virtually all means of identifying most of the people depicted, so the location of the commercial photographers who made the prints provides a clue as to the home town of the album’s owner: since 21 of the 57 images were made in Liverpool and its surroundings (in north west England) it seems reasonable to infer that this is the home town of the family whose life is depicted in the album. Among exceptions are holiday locations and some from port towns round the world including Valparaiso in Chile. This suggests that at least one family member was in the merchant marine. Albums or similar collections are curated: someone has chosen which images to include and in which order, whether to add captions and if so of whom? Are servants and pets named as well as the family members? Are there consistent patterns of posing identifiable between images? Although the people who maintain these collections may not think of their activity as one which resembles the activity of professionals managing museums or arranging exhibitions, methodologically we think it is helpful to explore the parallel and to treat the album bearers as curators. Often in European and North American traditions keeping albums and being the family historian are shared tasks and ones undertaken by women: gender issues cannot be ignored. At a later stage early in the twentieth century when family photographs were taken by amateur photographers within their family (but before self timers were common) the one person who may be missing from the images in an album is the father/husband/patriarch: the man behind the lens (see also the discussion of Geffroy’s [1990] work with French family photography in Section 2.4.2).
All of the issues touched upon above, and many more besides, are examined in more detail in the course of this book, following the lines of enquiry produced by ‘found’ images such as the postcard and album opposite, as well as images created by the social researcher. In broad terms social research with pictures involves three sets of questions: (i) what is the image of, what is its content? (ii) who took it or made it, when, how and why? And (iii) how do other people come to have it, how do they read it, what do they do with it? These questions may be asked whether the images are on paper (analogue) or digital. Some of these questions are instantly answerable by the social researcher. If she takes her own photographs of children playing in a schoolyard, for example, in order to study the proxemics of gender interaction, then she already has answers to many of the second two sets of questions. The questions may be worth asking nonetheless: why did I take that particular picture of the boy smiling triumphantly when he had pushed the girl away from the slide? Does it act as visual proof of something I had already hypothesized? How much non-visual context is required to demonstrate its broader validity? And so on. Sometimes – perhaps quite frequently – our initial understandings or readings of visual images are pre-scripted, written in advance, and it is useful to attempt to stand back from them, interrogate them, to acquire a broader perspective.
1.3 Unnatural vision
Seeing is not natural, however much we might think it to be. Like all sensory experience the interpretation of sight is culturally and historically specific (Classen 1993). Equally unnatural are the representations derived from vision – drawings, paintings, films, photographs. While the images that form on the retina and are interpreted by the brain come in a continual flow, the second-order representations that humans make when they paint on canvas or animal skin, or when they click the shutter on a camera, are discrete – the products of specific intentionality. Each has significance by virtue of its singularity, the actual manifestation of one in an infinitude of possible manifestations. Yet in Euro-American society we treat these images casually, as unexceptional presences in the world of material goods and human social relations.
This is partly because for centuries vision – sight – has been a privileged sense in the European repertoire, a point well-established by philosophers, social theorists and other cultural critics. Native speakers of English are quite accustomed to the use of visual metaphor in the language: ‘Look here …’ says one beginning a discussion, or an argument; ‘I see what you mean …’ says their interlocutor conceding defeat. The point is sometimes over-emphasized (Fabian 1983: 105–9): Classen points out that the historical importance of other sensory experiences in Europe tends to be ignored by those anxious to establish the historical dominance of visuality (1993: 6–7 and passim), while other societies have established ocular significance quite independently.3 In Hindu India, for example, the core aspect of much religious devotion before temple idols or pictures of deities is direct eye-to-eye contact between deity and devotee. Diana Eck (1985), Lawrence Babb (1981) and others have shown how darshan (‘seeing [the divine]’, or the mutual exchange of looks) structures much Hindu ritual. Moreover, in Hindu philosophy vision can carry the same implications of understanding as we recognize in contemporary English usage; early Indian society also used the term darshan to refer to schools of thought, ‘points of view’, distinguished by differences in practice or politics (Eck 1985: 11). What distinguishes the Hindu approach to darshan from mere ‘seeing’ in English is that it is an active gaze: Babb cites an example from the famous Bombay Hindi film Jai Santoshi-ma in which the (female) deity’s gaze when angered is like fire, desiccating the unworthy (1981: 393).
Among the Jains – the Indian religious group with which MB has worked – a newly made idol of a tirthankara (one of the religion’s revered founder figures) is considered to come to life, or be animated, only after a ritual is performed in secret and at night during