Images and knowledge: Epistemological challenges of visual sociology

Abstract

Nowadays a clear contradiction exists between a social world in which images are everywhere and a sociology that scarcely considers any kind of visual representations. This «blind sociology» takes into account neither the visual construction of the social, nor the social construction of the visual. In addition, this «blind sociology» does not use image to carry out social research. Most sociologists think that words and numbers are appropriate modes of representation to produce social knowledge but that images are not. This article is an epistemological reflection on the possibility and necessity of incorporating images into the processes by which the social sciences produce knowledge. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of Meaning and John Berger’s theory about the coherence of the images show that images not only can, but also must be incorporated into the processes of knowledge production. The dual nature of photographic images permits us to use them in two different ways. Photographic images can be incorporated into social research as indexes, given the existential or empirical connections that link the different parts of the image with real objects. But we can also incorporate photographs as icons, given the homology between the situation represented by the image and real facts.