Fragments d’images

Visual approaches in the humanities and social sciences have been growing in popularity in recent years: photography, comic books, documentaries, ethnographic films, cartography, drawings, visual archives, not to mention the many possibilities offered by digital technologies. Despite this growing interest, these approaches remain rarely recognized in French-language research. This edited work, which brings together researchers and multidisciplinary artists, explores new avenues of enquiry and research in the visual field. Visual approaches invite us to tell our personal stories in different ways, to loosely quote John Berger. They prolong the power of words, drawing attention to the sensory experience of tiny, fragile, ignored, silent, evanescent lives or those that have turned to ashes.While the proliferation of images and visual creations is characteristic of our digital age, their uses and the reflections they provoke testify to a persistent and stubborn desire to understand the social world, with its upheavals, constraints, and possibilities. The stubborn determination to bear witness, to report, to interpret, to reappropriate and even to blur genres through the visual arts testifies, beyond words, to our salutary ontological fragility: what we know and see is never fully fixed.