Gary Bratchford – författare

This book brings together diverse perspectives from a range of geographic settings and feature contributions from some of the key thinkers in the field. It explores various facets of the relationship between verticality and visibility, offering insights that deepen the understanding of this dynamic dyad.

This volume brings the sky and air into the view of visual sociology and argues that there is more to the sky than phenomenological and geopolitical dimensions. The chapters use the common thread of aerial visibilities to emphasise the need to rethink the aerial in terms of complex relations between humans, technological artefacts and devices, vertical superstructures, and non-human others. This rethinking helps unsettle notions of aerial biopolitics. The chapters in this book foreground the visual to ask to what end the image of – or efforts to create images through – vertical registers shapes our understanding of the vertical world, the communities, and users this vertical world engages or impacts upon.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of visual sociology, geography, urban studies, media studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as those exploring the intersection of technology, politics, and spatial theory.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Visual Studies.

This book brings together diverse perspectives from a range of geographic settings and feature contributions from some of the key thinkers in the field. It explores various facets of the relationship between verticality and visibility, offering insights that deepen the understanding of this dynamic dyad.

This volume brings the sky and air into the view of visual sociology and argues that there is more to the sky than phenomenological and geopolitical dimensions. The chapters use the common thread of aerial visibilities to emphasise the need to rethink the aerial in terms of complex relations between humans, technological artefacts and devices, vertical superstructures, and non-human others. This rethinking helps unsettle notions of aerial biopolitics. The chapters in this book foreground the visual to ask to what end the image of – or efforts to create images through – vertical registers shapes our understanding of the vertical world, the communities, and users this vertical world engages or impacts upon.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of visual sociology, geography, urban studies, media studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as those exploring the intersection of technology, politics, and spatial theory.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Visual Studies.

This book provides a user-friendly guide to the expanding scope of visual sociology, through a discussion of a broad range of visual material, and reflections on how such material can be studied sociologically. The chapters draw on specific case-study examples that examine the complexity of the hyper-visual social world we live in, exploring three domains of the ‘relational image’: the urban, social media, and the aerial.

Zuev and Bratchford tackle issues such as visual politics and surveillance, practices of visual production and visibility, analysing the changing nature of the visual. They review a range of methods which can be used by researchers in the social sciences, utilising new media and their visual interfaces, while also assessing the changing nature of visuality. 

This concise overview will be of use to students and researchers aiming to adopt visual methods and theories in their own subject areas such as sociology, visual culture and related courses in photography, new-media and visual studies.    

This rich and accessible volume maps current debates within the expanded field of image-based, vertical analysis. With contributions from astronauts, artists, architects, sociologists, urbanists, visual culture theorists, geographers, anthropologists and more the book signals new moves in inter and multidisciplinary research on visual-vertical thinking and related practices within the social sciences, humanities and across the arts.

Grounded in socio-visual thinking, Vision and Verticality addresses the emerging shift in the way social scientists move from a sociology of or through images towards a sociology with images. In doing so, this volume illustrates how the sky and atmosphere remain a surprisingly underexplored domain within visual sociology, beyond the framework of drone-related research. Finally, this volume asserts how vertical and atmospherically framed socio-visual analysis is beginning to shape and inform how we see and experience urban spaces, travel, leisure, politics, and environmental challenges through various prisms, including artistic practices, methodological processes, and user-generated content.