Visual Methods in Social Research

Marcus Banks was Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Having completed a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, with a study of Jain people in England and India, he trained as an ethnographic documentary filmmaker at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield, UK.He was the author Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research (2007) and co-editor of Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997, with Howard Morphy), and Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (2011, with Jay Ruby), as well as publishing numerous papers on visual research.He published on documentary film forms and film practice in colonial India, and was conducting research on image production and use in forensic science practice.David Zeitlyn is Professor is Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He has been working with Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985 on various research topics including traditional religion, sociolinguistics, kinship and history. In 2003/4 he was the Evans-Prichard Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford presenting a series of lectures on the life-history of Diko Madeleine, the first wife of Chief Konaka of Somié village (see http://www.mambila.info/Diko_Web/). In recent years he started to work with Cameroonian photographers. In 2005 this led as part of Africa′05, to an exhibition of two Cameroonian studio photographers at the National Portrait Gallery, London in a display called ′Cameroon-London′. Some images from an earlier showing in Cameroon are online at http://www.mambila.info/Photography/Photo_Show/.  More recently he has worked with the British Library′s ′Endangered Archives Programme′ to create an archive of the contents of the studio of Toussele Jacques, a photographer from Mbouda in Cameroon.  He has long standing interests in multimedia and how internet technologies can be used to illuminate and access museum collections and archives. His work on Mambila spider divination as a ′technology of choice making′ led to some pioneering observational work on how library users choose which books to read.

This continues to be a key text for work with and on the visual. Highly recommended and not to be missed by anybody wanting to understand what images mean, both practically and theoretically.

• READING PICTURESThe trouble with picturesAn introductory exampleUnnatural visionReading narrativesFormal readingsPlanning a research project with visual methodsENCOUNTERING THE VISUALOn TelevisionVisual forms produced I: representations of societyInterpreting Forest of BlissStill and moving imagesVisual forms produced II: representations of knowledgeVisualisationNetworksDiagrams of Nuer lineagesVisual forms encounteredEncountering ′indigenous′ mediaThe image as evidence′Us′ and ′them′?MATERIAL VISIONObject and representationThe materiality of visual formsDisplaying family photographsExchanged goodsMarket exchangeSize mattersTransformations: digitisation and computer-based mediaDigital manipulationDigital pornography: constraining the virtualDigital pornography: exchange and circulationRESEARCH STRATEGIESSilk thread to plastic bagsResearching image use and production in social contextsWatching televisionSoap opera in India and EgyptTelevision as social presenceDoing things with photographs and filmsPhoto-elicitation with archival imagesPhoto-elicitation with contemporary imagesLearning from photo-elicitationFilm-elicitationWorking with archival materialPhotographic archives and picture librariesFilm archivesMAKING IMAGESObservingCreating images for researchDocumentationA ladder climbed then discardedDocumentary explorationDocumentary controlCollaborative projectsIndigenous media collaborationsCollaborative after effectsEthics and visual researchEthical reviewPermissionsReturning imagesPRESENTING RESEARCH RESULTSAudiencesPresenting photographsThe photographic essayPresenting ethnographic and other filmsStudy guides and other contextualisationDatabases and digital imagesCan computer see?Multimedia projectsInteracting with YanomamoCopyrightPERSPECTIVES ON VISUAL RESEARCHThe state of visual researchThe place of visual researchThe nature of visual research