Visual Ethnography

Visual ethnography uses photography, motion pictures, hypermedia, the web, interactive CDs, CD–ROMs, and virtual reality as ways of capturing and expressing perceptions and social realities of people. These varied forms of visual representation provide a means for recording, documenting, and explaining the social worlds and understandings of people. It is important, however, to emphasize that visual ethnography is not purely visual. Rather, the visual ethnographer simply pays particular attention to the visual aspects of culture as part of his or her ethnographic efforts.

Until recently, mainstream social scientists have been steadfast in their belief that the written word is a superior form for representing most types of data. Qualitative researchers use narrative accounts, interviews, fieldnotes, and the like, all of which are textually based. Quantitative researchers depend on the written word in their survey instruments to collect their data; although some researchers generate numeric data directly from observations, this approach remains quite rare in the social sciences overall.

The social sciences do, nonetheless, take the verbal self-report as both true and a primary source; after all, such an account can be reduced to text. Ethnographers pay more attention than most to verbal (as opposed to written) information. But [Page 935]here too the decided preference favors self-reports and words reducible to text. Yet every culture is composed of countless nonverbal images, signs, and symbols; these can be described in words, but one might question whether describing a sunset actually transmits the same aesthetic understandings as when one witnesses a sunset. Approaches to the visual in anthropology and sociology, as each applies itself to questions of culture and meaning, have developed in rather different ways and have evolved using different understandings of the visual.