Words adorning toilet cubicles is something that becomes as predictable as the lack of toilet paper you will find within them. It is rare, however that you see counterarguments to a piece of graffiti, especially a well thought out one.
My final image from the series I captured at IVSA 2013 comes not from the photo walk, but from a moment of clarity during a coffee break. Sitting on the lawn, I gazed towards the giant mirrored windows of the academic buildings and starting back at me was an image of myself, surrounded by people. Sometimes we focus in so closely on the nuts and bolts of academia that we miss the wider picture. The fact that it is the people that exist in the social that are inherently interesting and not the tools we use to capture them. Appropriate then that this image was the product of a mere iPhone and not the more complex set up that normally typists my best images.
Several of the presentations in the morning panels I attended at the IVSA conference focused on the issues surrounding visibility of the researcher to the participants in their research or photographs and the ethics surrounding that. There were also discussions of the partiality of representation of subjects by the way the lens frames them. This image seemed to draw together both of these concerns through the partial representation (and anonymity) of the subjects of the photo and their relation to the shadows of myself and two other photographers.
Ok, I’ll admit, the title to this post is plagiarised from part of a talk by Les Back on ‘What is Digital Sociology?’ at the recent BSA Digital Sociology event of the same name. I am, however, pulling it into a wider context because I think it is also the answer to what is Visual Sociology? And what is public sociology? My three main areas of exploration at the moment.
At the recent IVSA conference, Michael Guggenheim stated that he felt the goal of Visual Sociology should be to eradicate the discipline and personally, I think this should be the goal of all three of these areas as in each case I think that they are all central to the discipline. I will address the visual and the digital first and then turn to the issue of Public Sociology.
Both Visual Sociology and Digital Sociology are seen as relatively young disciplines within the field of Sociology, moving the boundaries of traditional interview, survey or ethnographic based approaches and introducing new way of representation and analysis to the field. As such, it is right that they are considered as disciplines to enable academics with interest in innovate developments within new ways of imagining and understanding the social. What these disciplines should not become, however, is silos which are viewed as the only legitimate place for the visual or the digital respectively. As Noortje Marres eluded to in her talk, in the modern world the digital is the social. In a world of social networks are social worlds are intrinsically linked with our digital lives. I would also argue that it is the same for the visual, in a world of camera phones, digital photography and visual culture that pervades every moment of our lives, the visual is also a central element to the social. From this perspective, to truly understand any social issue, attention needs to be paid to the visual and the digital.
How Public Sociology fits into this discussion may at first seem questionable but I would argue they are all linked in many ways. Firstly because I feel that all Sociology should be accessible to much wider publics than it currently is but more than that, I think using digital and visual methods is one way to capture the sociological imaginations of those publics. As academics, we are used to reading large volumes of text but this is something that would not be considered by the publics that we are trying to reach. The visual, through moving and still images and the digital are ways in which research can be presented in a form that seems less onerous to access and therefore may engage wider publics. If all research engaged those publics, then wouldn’t the answer to ‘What is Sociology?’ Also be ‘it’s Sociology, stupid?’
Acknowledgements
I owe much of the argument in this post to the provocation by Michael Guggenheim at the IVSA conference at Goldsmiths on 9th July 2013 and to Les Back for his paper on Real-time research at the BSA ‘What is Digital Sociology?’ Event on 16th July 2013.
The juxtaposition of these two images is intentional. At first glance they both appear to be of the same thing, some young lads performing a routine and wowing the crowd with their physical agility but if we look deeper into the images, they are about something else, the crowd within the frame. This shifting from the performers being the subject of the photo to the object of the gaze of the crowd is something at I found particularly interesting. The onlookers who saw my camera would have assumed that the flips and turns were what I was focusing on when really it was their reactions that were capturing my imagination and the way they were interacting with the performance.
Goffman talks about presentation of self and the way individuals act in public and private. The Southbank is the prime example of a site of performance and I found that a series of images I captured highlighted the performative nature of human interaction. Some of these are clearly identifiable as performances, some are more hidden in the performance of the everyday practices of living within urban spaces.
As the walk continued along the South bank, we decided to move from the more familiar path onto the beach that is unveiled with the tide. Sitting on the glistening peddles was a badge adorned with the words ‘it’s my birthday’. When I looked up from the trinket that had captured my eye, I noticed a figure on the end of the jetty that was staring into space deep in thought. This made me think of the fleeting moments of celebration and occasions that such objects symbolise and the impact they have upon our thoughts and feelings regarding the passing of time and the ageing process.
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