Visual Methodologies

By : Maria Aleem

Visual research is a qualitative research methodology that relies on the use of artistic mediums to "produce and represent knowledge." These artistic mediums include, but are not limited to : film, photography, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. The artistic mediums provide a rich source of information that has the ability of capturing reality. They also reveal information about what the medium captures, but the artist or the creator behind the medium. Using photography as an example, the photographs taken illustrate reality and give information about the photographer through the angle, focus of the image, and the moment in which the photograph was taken.

These images are never transparent windows on to the world. They interpret the world; they display it in very particular ways. Thus a distinction is sometimes made between vision and visuality. Vision is what the human eye is physiologically capable of seeing. Visuality, on the other hand, refers to way in which vision is constructed in various ways: `how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing and the unseeing therein' For some writers, the visual is the most fundamental of all senses. According to researchers `depiction, picturing and seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them', and John Berger (1972: 7) suggests that this is because `seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak'

it is important not to forget that knowledge is conveyed through all sorts of different media, including senses other than the visual, and that visual images very often work in conjunction with other kinds of representations. It is very unusual, for example, to encounter a visual image unaccompanied by any text at all, whether spoken or written. Even the most abstract painting in a gallery will have a written label on the wall giving certain information about its making, and in certain sorts of galleries there'll be a sheet of paper giving a price too, and these make a difference to how spectators will see that painting. So it’s certainly correct that visual modes of conveying meanings are not the same as written modes. However, visual images are always embedded into a range of other texts, some of which will be visual and some of which will be written and all of which intersect with each other. But visual images can be powerful and seductive in their own right.

Subjects including

Visual Methodology

Art History

Natural Sciences

Geography

Social Sciences

Visual Culture/cultur

al turn

Cross border traffic

Visual

Culture

Culture is a complex concept, culture but, in very broad terms, the result of its deployment has been that social scientists are now very often interested in the ways in which social life is constructed through the ideas that people have about it, and the practices that flow from those ideas.

But more recently, many writers addressing these issues argued that the visual is central to the cultural construction of social life in contemporary Western societies. We are, of course, surrounded by different sorts of visual technologies -photography, film, video, digital graphics, television, acrylics, for example -and the images they show us -TV programmes, advertisements, snapshots, public sculpture, movies, surveillance video footage, newspaper pictures, paintings. All these different sorts of technologies and images offer views of the world; they render the world in visual terms.

`visual culture' is its concern for the way in which images visualize (or render invisible) social difference. As Fyfe and Law (1988: 1) say, `a depiction is never just an illustration . . . it is the site for the construction and depiction of social difference'. One of the central aims of `the cultural turn' in the social sciences is to argue that social categories are not natural but instead are constructed. These constructions can take visual form. This point has been made most forcefully by feminist and postcolonial writers who have studied the ways femininity and blackness have been visualized.

The poster shows a young black man in a suit, with `LABOUR SAYS HE'S BLACK. TORIES SAY HE'S BRITISH' as its headline text. Gilroy's discussion is detailed but his main point is that the poster offers a choice between being black and being. British, not only in its text but also in its image. The fact that the black man is pictured wearing a suit suggests to Gilroy that `blacks are being invited to forsake all that marks them out as culturally distinct before real Britishness can be guaranteed' (Gilroy, 1987: 59). Gilroy is thus suggesting that this poster asks its viewers not to see blackness. However, he also points out that the poster depends on other stereotyped images (which it does not show) of young black men, particularly as muggers, to make its point about the acceptability of this be suited man. This poster thus plays in complex ways with both visible and invisible signs of racial difference. Hence Fyfe and Law's general prescription for a critical approach to the ways images can picture social power relations.

Ways of seeing

`we never look just at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves' (Berger, 1972: 9). His best known example is that of the genre of female nude painting in Western art. He reproduces many examples of that genre (see Figure 1.2), pointing out as he does so the particular ways they represent women: as unclothed, as vain, as passive, as sexually alluring, as a spectacle to be assessed.

In the average European oil painting of the nude, the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the painting and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. Thus for Berger, understanding this particular genre of painting means understanding not only its representation of femininity, but its construction of masculinity too. And these representations are in their turn understood as part of a wider cultural construction of gendered difference.

To quote Berger again:

One might simplify this by saying:men act and women appear. Men look

at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines

not only most relations between women and men but also the relation of

women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the

surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object ± and most

particularly an object of vision: a sight. (Berger, 1972: 47)

Compositional Interpretation

Semiology Discourse IDiscourse II

There are three methods for interpreting visual imagery.

Compositional interpretation is a method that offers a way of looking very carefully at the content and form of images. Composition refers to the structure of an image: how all its elements combine together (which might or might not make a whole)

Procedure

There is the content of an image. What exactly is it showing? Then there are the colours of an image. The colours can be described in terms of their hue, saturation and value. How these colours work together? Are they harmonious or not? What is highlighted by the use of what colours? Are connections made between certain parts of an image by the repeated use of one colour? Do certain colours mean something? And so on… Internal organization Above mewntioned qs merge into another set of questions Does it have background? What movement or rhythm is there in the image between its volumes? Is there a depth indicated by some kind of perspective or flatness? This internal organization offers a particular viewing position to its spectater. Limitations This is very useful as a first stage of getting to grips with an image but it has various shortcomings. Its greatest limitation is it resolute descriptiveness. It focuses almost entirely on the image itself and therefore highly formalist in its approach.

Semiology Semiology means the study of signs. Semiology has an elaborate analytical vocabulary for describing how signs make sense. Sign is the basic unit of language. It consists of two parts. Signified: An idea or object Signifier: the word, the sound image A very young human unable to walk or talk. (signified) Baby. (signifier)

The photographs of many adverts depend on signs of humans which symbolize particular qualities to their audience. It is an advert for the Halifax Building Society which offers Mortgages for house purchase.

The ring . . . stand[s] for marriage, and in [the] picture the strong male hand stands for `Promise, Confidence, and Security'. The pictures are cliché Âd illustrations of three words. But the point of the ad is to undermine the `Confidence and Security' offered by the man...The cliché Â of masculine security and promise is exposed, to show the need for the Halifax. Yet simultaneously, the image of the ad, the hand and the ring, etc., undermined in its literal sense of marriage-as-security, is used in all its cliche Âdness to represent the promise, security and confidence offered in reparation by the Halifax ...Ino ther words, Security,signified by the hand, becomes a signifier, in its possible absence, of the need for Halifax; it is then returned to its original status of signified through the conduit of the product.

Iconic: in iconic signs the signifier represents the signified by apparently having a likeness to it. Thus a photograph of a baby is an iconic sign of that baby.Indexical: They have an inherent relationship between the signified and signifier. It is often culturally specific e.g a baby soother is often used to denote a room in public places where there are baby changing facilities.Symbolic: they have a conventialised but clearly arbitrary relation between signifier and signified. Thus pictures of babies are often used to represent notions of ‘the future’

Iconic Indexical

Symbolic

DiscourseDiscourse has a quite specific meaning. It refers to groups of statements which structure the way a thing is thought, and the way we act on the basis of that thinking. In other words, discourse is a particular knowledge about the world which shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it. It is “A particular form of language with its own rules and conventions and the institutions within which the discourse is produced and circulated” as medical discourse which refers to the specific vocabulary of medicine. Same as Art that can also be understood as a discourse as a specialized form of knowledge.

Discourse Analysis IThe first type of discourse analysis is centrally concerned with language. It can also be used to explore how images construct specific views of the social world. This type of discourse analysis therefore pays special attention to images themselves. Since discourse s are seen as socially produced rather than created by individuals, this type of discourse analysis is specially concerned with how specific views or accounts are constructed as real or truthful.Intertextuality: to collect a wide range of texts that are relevant in some way to the research question in hand. Theses texts are then read carefully, repeatedly to find out the truth.A statement coming from a source endowed with an authority is likely to be more productive than one coming from a marginalized social position.

Discourse Analysis II

This form of discourse analysis tends to pay more attention to the practices of institutions than it does to the visual images and verbal texts. Its methodology is usually left implicit. It tends to be more explicitly concerned with issues of power, regimes of truth, institutions and technologies.

Thank You