Masters thesis 2:2

46
III: Locating the Field
By suggesting the visual has come to inhabit a central position in understanding
contemporary social phenomena we also infer that sociology, as a discipline, cannot be
without a concept of the visual. Although this position has been voiced time and again by
hands-on practitioners, visual sociology, or so the argument goes, remains a marginal
sub-discipline. Typically this marginal position is taken to reflect the neglect of
mainstream sociologists to address the ocular conventions of culture and social relations.
For some, such as Chris Jenks, the sad and subsequent result of this longstanding neglect
is that sociologists “have become inarticulate in relation to the visual dimensions of
social life.”102
Although this may be true in some respects, it is also much too broad and
presumptuous a statement.
First of all, the notion of longstanding neglect is and cannot be anything other
than relative to the shared expectations of those who routinely propose the urgency of
facilitating a rehabilitation of the visual in the social sciences. Secondly, there is a vital
distinction to be made between how hands-on and logo-centric practitioners deal with the
concept of the visual. The notion of longstanding neglect is not, in other words, a precise
and developed critique of the field but rather a symptom that reflects the lack of
(inter)relations between hands-on and logo-centric practitioners. Emmison and Smith
(2000) conjure a similar point when they write: “There have been notable problems in
connecting up with visual sociology as a subfield to the central theoretical traditions and
debates of social science. A symptom of these shortcomings is the widespread tendency
to use visual materials (photographs) in a purely illustrative, archival or documentary
way rather than giving them a more analytical treatment. One result is that most other
sociological researchers aren’t interested in what visual sociologists have to say.”103
That
is to say, the problem of acceptance that visual sociologists face in social science is
genealogical because it lies with the acknowledgement that the level of ones success (and
acceptance) is proportionate to the level whereby one acknowledges and incorporates into
ones work the simple insight that the primary function of central theoretical traditions is
to enable communication between scientists (see also Thomas Kuhn (1996) and Jeffery
102
Chris Jenks, The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction. In Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks
(London: Routledge, 1995), 1-25.
103
Emmison and Smith, Researching the Visual : Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural
Inquiry, ix.

SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
47
Alexander (2002)).104
Hence, the wanting acceptance of the work of visual sociologists
and their inability to produce visual representations that go beyond illustration are
symptoms of their failure to connect to the theoretical traditions of sociology. This
symptom is not without a cure; on the contrary, it beckons its own alleviation by unifying
superficially disparate yet commensurate practices of hands-on and logo-centric
traditions.
The Analytic Divide
As already noted, there is a significant difference in how the visual is conceptualized and
perceived by hands-on and logo-centric oriented practitioners of the field. In the broadest
sense of the term we find the claim that hands-on oriented practitioners tend to operate in
a limited field of vision, while theoretical oriented logo-centric practitioners tend to
operate in an expanded field of vision. In more concrete terms and according to Emmison
and Smith (2002), Douglas Harper (1998), and Elizabeth Chaplin (1994) to name a few,
this divide pits hands-on practitioners’ somewhat narrow fixation on documentary
photography against those who adhere to a theory driven and logo-centric practice – a
practice that more broadly conceptualizes vision and its many modes of representation as
sites of culture and knowledge production.
However, as indicated earlier this divide is also geographical in its origin. It
conjures the fact that the hands-on approach to visual sociology is an inherently North
American invention that began in the mid 70s while the logo-centric tradition of visual
inquiry has its roots in continental European sociology (Simmel, Adorno, Benjamin,
Freund, Marcuse and Foucault) and more recently in British cultural studies (Stuart Hall,
Dick Hebdige, Terry Eagleton, Sarat Maharaj, W.J.T. Mitchell and Raymond Williams).
Generally speaking, the hands-on approach to visual sociology is driven by an
ethnographic, grounded theory mode of inquiry most notably associated with the Chicago
school of sociology and Howard S. Becker (the founding father of visual sociology) in
particular.1
With its inductive approach to generating contextually sensitized concepts
and theories the theoretical allegiance of hands-on practitioners lies with the ethos of
symbolic interactionism and is reflected in the redundancy of theoretical abstraction, as
well as the lack of conceptual generalization. Hence, when set in contrast to their logo-
104
J. Alexander and P. Smith, The Strong Program of Cultural Theory – Elements of a Structural Hermenutics ed.
Jonathan H. Turner, Handbook of Sociological Theory (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002), 135-
50.

48
centric continental European and British Cultural Studies counterparts, hands-on
practitioners tend to exhibit a scarce interest in conceptualizing ambiguous and abstract
theories of power and conflict.
In hopes that a contextual understanding of visual inquiry will come to fruition, a
brief and somewhat annotated linking of the three traditions (Continental European
Sociology, North American Sociology and British Cultural Studies), will be presented by
tracing the theoretical heritage of each. However neither of these traditions are as easily
or neatly partitioned, as their headings would have them be. In fact many of the persons
that we are able to link to different approaches are also linked to one another, either
through mutual interests and common struggles, as student/teacher, or as a source of
inspiration, etc. Hence, the divide is instructive and practical as a conceptual organization
of knowledge rather than definitive and absolute. The overall guide to contextualizing
these are thus granted by the observation that the intentionality of the producer defines
the nature and therefore also the allegiance of one’s knowing.
Continental European Sociology (the logo-centric tradition)
When we comb through the annals of sociological thought, we find that logo-centric
visual inquiry was first made explicit at the turn of the 20th
century by George Simmel.
Not only did Simmel, who lived and worked in Berlin, write in a vivid and stylish prose,
he also published an important essay on the human senses in which vision was given
primacy in matters of human interaction. This keen sense of vision is powerfully
reverberated throughout his work and is perhaps most vividly represented in his essays on
style, fashion and adornment.105
Simmel’s influence was to be thoroughly felt in
continental European sociology and particularly in what would later come to be known as
the Frankfurt School. It was through his student Siegfried Krackauer, who was Theodore
Adorno’s tutor and a close friend of Walter Benjamin that Simmel’s ideas would
disseminate and find their most fertile ground.106
Although scarcely represented in the
work of hands-on practitioners, the Frankfurt School constitutes the quintessential logo-
105
Georg Simmel, Sociology of the Senses in Simmel ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, Simmel on Culture :
Selected Writings (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997).
106
E.g. in what would have been Benjamin’s Magnus Opum The Archcades Project the only sociologist quoted is
Simmel! See also David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity : Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer,
and Benjamin, 1st MIT Press ed., Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1986).

49
centric progenitors of visual inquiry.107
What is not readily known about the Frankfurt
School, and to which I will return in detail later, is that many of the concepts and ideas of
its most illuminating writer, Walter Benjamin, are heavily indebted to his encounter with
key figures of the Surrealist movement during his exile in Paris in the 1930s. In recent
times, two of the most prominent continental European figures linked to the legacy of the
Frankfurt School are Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. Although both have written
extensively about other topics, they have also consistently engaged the visual dimensions
of contemporary life.108
North American Sociology (the hands-on & logo-centric approach)
In North America, Robert E. Park, a founding member of the Chicago School, was a key
figure in bringing the ideas of German sociology to Chicago. While this import had no
immediate effect in terms of exploring visual phenomena, it sparked a renewed interest in
the ethnographic and interpretative approach. Or as David Lee and Howard Newby write,
“it was not Weber but George Simmel, Weber’s enigmatic contemporary with whom
Park had studied and who remained the major influence on Park when he returned to the
USA.” (1994: 319).109
This influence was to be felt in Park and his contemporary, W.I.
Thomas, whose inquiry into new forms of sociation and social change were seen as part
of a larger question of what made society possible.110
In simple terms, this kind of
inquiry, which would come to be the hallmark of mainstream interactionist thought,
reflected Simmel’s quest to construct models of different forms social relations, or
“sociation,” which he believed characterized particular social groups or whole societies.
Or as Simmel also wrote, “Society, is merely the name for a number of individuals,
connected by interaction.”111
Hence, it is with some irony that Jon Prosser recalls how
Park, who was also “a ‘concerned’ journalist by profession interested in social change did
not foresee the potential of photojournalism in the newly evolving qualitative
107
The most notable contemporary visual sociologist to engage the Frankfurt School is Elizabeth Chaplin.
108
See also J. Habermas, Modernity - an Incomplete Project, 1st ed., The Anti-Aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern
Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983) and Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983).
109
D. Lee and H. Newby, The Problem of Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994), 319.
110
For an in-depth account of the Interactionst legacy see Berenice M. Fisher and Anselm L. Strauss, Interactionism,
ed. T. B. Bottomore and Robert A. Nisbet, A History of Sociological Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
111
Simmel in T. B. Bottomore and R. A. Nisbet, "Structuralism," in A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. T. B.
Bottomore and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 589. Simmel in Georg Simmel, "The Sociology of
George Simmel. Glencoe, Illinois," (The Free Press, 1950), 10.

50
tradition.”112
This missed opportunity, however, was remedied by Chicago School
prodigies Howard S. Becker (1974) and Erwin Goffman’s (1976) use of images. While
Goffman ‘only’ used the images of others (see Gender Advertisements (1976), Becker, as
I have shown, was the first to connect the dots and applaud the sociologist’s eye as a
legitimate producer of images.113
British Cultural Studies
Like its continental European counterpart, British Cultural studies is strongly
interdisciplinary in its orientation. The brainchild of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies ((CCCS), 1964-2002), also known as the Birmingham School, which
was one of the first research traditions to apply French nouvelle vague theorizing (e.g.
Lévi-Strauss, Barthes & the early Foucault) outside the hothouse Parisian environment,
melds the Neo-Marxists understanding established by Gramsci about the role played by
cultural hegemony in maintaining cultural relations with ideas about cultural texts.114
It is
therefore only natural that major figures of critical theory, such as Lukacs, Benjamin,
Krakauer, Adorno and Marcuse, who developed the idea that art reflects social
organization and the class structure that produces it, also feature prominently in the work
of cultural studies practitioners. Although many of the early texts by practitioners of
Cultural Studies centered on traditional sociological themes such as work, the state, crime
or deviance, its ongoing destabilization of disciplinary boundaries, as well as its
commitment to confronting existing social inequalities patterned around race, class,
sexual orientation and gender through visual themes has pushed the orientation of the
field toward the arts. This push is not coincidental, but occurs simultaneously with the
emergence of what has been dubbed New Art History.
112
J. Prosser, "The Status of Image-Based Research," in Image-Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative
Researchers (London ; Bristol, PA: Falmer Press, 1998), 104-5.
113
In Gender Advertisements (1976) Goffman forcefully argued that advertisements subscribe to gendered
idealizations of conduct. Among other things it is in this remarkable work that Goffman introduced the concept of
“licensed withdrawal,” i.e. the tendency to depict women in ways that suggests they are away or not consciouly
connected to context in which they are depicted. Note: Gisele Freund (1908-2000) who studied under Karl Manheim
and Norbert Elias is not only the first, but also the most accomplished sociologist to use a camera. Freund was a
founding member of Magnum Photo Agency. Her 1936 dissertation Photographie en France au dix-neuvieme siecle
was pubished in 1968 under the title Photographie und bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Eine kunstsoziologische Studie and
later as Photography and Society (1974).
114
See also D. Harper, "An Argument for Visual Sociology," in Image Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative
Researchers, ed. Jon Prosser (London: Falmer Press, 1998)., Alexander and Smith, The Strong Program of Cultural
Theory – Elements of a Structural Hermenutics

51
New Art History came into existence during the late 1970s and 1980s and posed a
serious challenge to an otherwise notoriously conservative field - a field whose sole
concerns until then had been with ‘style, authenticity, dating, rarity, reconstruction, the
detection of forgery, the rediscovery of forgotten artists and the meaning of pictures.’ In
contrast, New Art History and changing art practices embraced a sociological
perspective, and so instead of beginning with art and working its way outwards, the new
form reversed the procedure by looking from the social fabric to the art it produced. Here,
the social aspect of art and the strong emphasis on theory are what dominate cultural
practice, hence the snug cultural studies fit.115
In terms of theoretical influence, it is worth
noting the wide-ranging confluence (and import) of theoretical interest that New Art
History has with Cultural Studies, i.e. Marxian perspectives such as feminist theory,
queer theory, race theory, critical theory and quintessentially all things psychoanalytic
and post-(modern/structural/colonial/etc.). Cultural studies has since drifted further into
the terrain of art, and it no longer makes sense to distinguish the work of its practitioners
from those of New Art History, as their interests basically are the one and same.116
The Turn to Diversification
While American cultural sociology is characterized by its poorly developed links to other
disciplines (Smith 1998), hands-on practitioners have looked to visual anthropology and
documentary photography as an important source of inspiration. Its outlook, however,
has also been marked by some of the same forces that shaped an emergent American
cultural sociology, hence the discourse of its followers remain very strongly tied to
disciplinary themes and debates, with the primary audience consisting of a peer group of
scholars within the same sub-area of the same discipline; a feature that no doubt lends
explanation, as perceived by its practitioners, to the marginal status of the field. While
much of the development of visual sociology can be seen to run parallel to American
cultural sociology, recent events such as the renaming and moving of the main journal
Visual Studies from the US to England in 2001 along with the increased popularity of
115
See A. Pryce, "Visual Imagery and the Iconography of the Social World: Some Considerations of History, Art and
Problems for Sociological Research," Methodological Imaginations. London: MacMillan (1996): 99. J. Harris, The
New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001).
116
This turn of events and the drifting of cultural studies into art is perhaps best exemplified by the curators of
Documenta XI. Every four years Documenta is held in Kassel, Germany. It is a massive event and is for visual art what
the Olympics are for athletes. Hence the fact that prominent cultural studies professors organized and curated the show
indicate the degree to which cultural studies is embeddedness in the field.

52
visual sociology at universities throughout Europe signals that the theoretical influence of
the field may now be shifting toward European traditions of sociological inquiry.117
In contrast it is interesting to note that the continental European model of
sociological inquiry has always demanded an interdisciplinary and occasionally mass
audience. Here, the task of exerting the widest possible influence on intellectual life by
engaging multiple spheres of public debate and even, in some cases, various media of
cultural production (e.g. novels, drama, visual art as well as academic texts) are what
define academic prestige.118
Nevertheless, it is in academic texts that the contrasting
expectations and audiences of the three traditions become apparent. For example, in the
works of continental European sociologists such as Adorno, Habermas, Foucault or
Bourdieu, frequent references are made to philosophy, linguistics and aesthetics. While
American cultural sociologists might “draw upon these fields in developing theory,”
Smith notes that, “few would feel motivated or qualified to develop a sustained critique
of a Noam Chomsky or a Susan Sontag or a Sigmund Freud,” just as “the American
cultural sociologist is also less likely to produce work as an ‘intervention’ in ongoing
political and social movement struggles.”119
In more general terms, Smith reminds us that
academic work in North American sociology is “narrower in its scope, more limited in its
ambitions, more cautious in its claims, and more precise in its formulations, if less
visionary in its diagnosis.”120
Hence, the common observation that North American
sociologists are less engaged in abstract theoretical issues and public debate than they are
discussing key issues within their academic subfield. These ‘insular’ traits are manifest in
the primacy given to methodological discussions in the hands-on approach, just as they
are reflected in the ethnographically dense and theoretically thin discourse of its
practitioners.
After the cultural vacuum left by Parsons and functionalism, American
sociologists once again began to embrace culture. Untainted by vice of association with
functionalism, European structuralist and poststructuralist thought provided new and
exciting models of culture. Smith notes, “This new knowledge was ‘pure’ rather than
‘polluted’ and allowed theorists to conduct cultural research without fear of stigma. Yet
117
Visual Sociology, 1991-2001 (US) → Visual Studies, 2002- (UK). See also, D. Harper, "What's New Visually?," in
The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (London: Sage Publications Inc,
2005), 748.
118
E.g. both Jean-Francois Lyotard and Bruno Latour have curated major art exhibits.
119
Philip Smith, The New American Cultural Sociology, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies (Cambridge [England]:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6. Re: the debacle with Small and the visually oriented social reformers are an
early sign of the tendency to denigrate interventionist practices.
120
Ibid.

53
although foreign ideas about culture were taken up with the greatest enthusiasm, they
were reworked in a distinct, American style.”121
This style arose from the organization
and culture of the North American sociological field and is above all characterized by its
“preference for empirically grounded, middle-range research.”122
Nonetheless, one can
only speculate whether it is the lack of theoretical anchoring that made early visual
sociologists blind to the structuralist and poststructuralist waves from abroad. Under any
circumstance, it would not be wrong to assume that the preference of North American
sociologists for empirically grounded, middle range research provides us with a clue to
the ethnographic character of early visual sociology, its proclivity for photographic field
studies and its disinterest in theoretical cannons. However, it is equally plausible to
assume that the pioneers of visual sociology were so preoccupied with trying to adjust
their endeavors to the mainstream doxa of North American sociology that they missed
out on the visual orientation of their European counterparts (e.g. the Critical Theorists
and the CCCS in Birmingham).123
Consequently, instead of thinking the visual in
philosophical or political interventionist terms, they thought of it as an ethnographic tool
for gathering information; hence the frequent quasi-positivistic references made to visual
imagery as ‘data’ and the marginal status of the field.
The problem, therefore, lays not so much with the fact that hands-on practitioners
of visual sociology are without a concept of the visual but rather with the fact that their
knowledge of vision and visuality is characterized by being narrowly defined and
unreflexive. The attempt to compile a history of visual culture within the context of a
hands-on approach to visual sociology is therefore primarily an effort to broaden how
vision and visuality are put to use, so that we may arrive at a point where visualization is
no longer exclusively bound to documentary modes of photographic representation but
instead to much more playful, free-spirited and reflexive modes of visual investigation.
This said, the intent of this thesis is not to render documentary and other forms of
naturalistic inquiry invalid, but rather to present some of the key historical and theoretical
concepts of vision and visuality so that these can be used to contextualize and make
possible a fusion of hands-on and logo-centric approaches.
121
Ibid. 5-6
122
Ibid. 10
123
For a detailed account of the differences and import of European theory into North American cultural sociology see
Smith, The New American Cultural Sociology.

54
IV: Visual Culture – Finding Common Ground
There exists an abundance of texts written by or on contemporary visual artists that
establish sociology as part and parcel of much of what they do. Under normal
circumstances one would be compelled to draw-up comparisons between visual art and
visual sociology either on the basis of examples or through grand hermeneutical readings
that establish the former as a social and critically engaged discipline. Neither are
particularly well suited for what I have in mind. Primarily because it severely limits of
the kinds of arguments that can be made, i.e. examples of how the work of this or that
visual artist is informed by sociological knowledge does not amount to establishing
contingency between the two disciplines, it only illustrates that visual artists (with
varying degrees of success) are capable of incorporating sociological knowledge in their
work. Secondly, because the topics and means whereby visual artists incorporate
sociological content into their projects is too overwhelming and diverse to categorize or
interpret as a meaningful whole.
Luckily, there exist an other more viable path for establishing contingency
between the two disciplines; a path from which visual sociology has the potential to
emerge as a theoretically vibrant and visually diverse discipline. To begin, the logo-
centric traditions of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies along with various strains of
postmodern thought draw a great deal of inspiration from the field of visual art, just as
contemporary visual artists, critics, curators and art historians (e.g. New Art History)
draw a great deal of inspiration from sociological theory. Secondly and expressed in
equally generalizing terms the connection between the disciplines of these two modes of
investigation condense in and around notions of visual culture; a guiding concept, that
broadly speaking illuminates how contemporary societal concerns and social phenomena
are figurations of historical and contextually specific visual regimes and cultures. Last
but not least practitioners in both fields are acutely aware that new technology is an
important vehicle for bringing about social change, just as they are aware that the impact
and use of such technology is paramount for staging interpretations of such change. For
example, the proliferation of images made possible by the advent of photography,
exacerbated by the invention of film, and distributed on an previously unimaginable scale
by their digitization, can be seen as a key characteristic of contemporary social
organization, because it facilitates the lifting out of social relations from local contexts

55
and the reorganization of these across vast tracts of space and time.124
The point being,
that our understanding of visual culture as a means of addressing society and social
phenomena is characterized by an alignment of sociological and artistic concerns.
The Sociological Relevance of Visual Culture
Visual culture implies the existence of particular structures for the gaze, for seeing and
for the excitement, desire, voyeurism or fear of looking. It also captures a physical and
psychical space for the individual to inhabit as a bearer and producer of meaning. As
such it is not uncommon to find that the study of visual culture involves a semiotic
exploration of the codes and conventions of non-linguistic symbol systems and the ways
they work to bring meaning to fruition in everyday life (e.g. Pierce and Barthes).
However, there are also less schematic ways of going about. For example one might as
Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault set out to explore sociologically how subjects
occupying particular social, cultural and temporal positions, are constituted through and
are actively engaged (or disengaged) in the production of meaning. Bourdieu for example
has spent a great deal of his intellectual life studying how the field of visual art, or as he
dubbed it, the field of restricted cultural production, (re)produces cultural legitimacy by
keeping those at bay ‘who cannot apply any other code to works of scholarly culture
other than that which enables them to apprehend as meaningful object of their everyday
environment.’125
For Foucault, on the other hand, contemporary life is characterized by
an ever-increasing capillarization of disciplinary power, which he sees exercised through
anonymous modes surveillance and control. In this sense it is somewhat ironic to note
that the work of Foucault has acquired an almost omnipresent status among theoreticians,
urban planners and artists who seek to unveil the mechanisms that underwrite
contemporary power relations.126
Yet another equally common way of conceptualizing
visual culture is through the use of psychoanalytic concepts of misrecognition to conjure
124
Naturally these technologies would not be possible or have a mass impact if it weren’t for the invention and
presence of other ‘non-visual’ technologies. For examples of how visual artists and theoretical practitioners have
conceptualized new technology see Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, Ctrl Space Rhetorics of
Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Karlsruhe: ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), 2002).
125
Pierre Bourdieu and Randal Johnson, The Field of Cultural Production : Essays on Art and Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), 217-18. see also A. Amtoft, "Freedom Ready-Made: A Critique of Contemporary
Visual Art " (Copenhagen: Dept. of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, 2004).
126
In 1973 architect and urban planner Oscar Newman published a widely influential book titled ‘Defensible Space –
Crime Prevention through Urban Design’ which changed the way architects and urban planners worked. This
exceptional book was published 4 years before Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – the birth of the prison. With its
prescriptive techniques for planned surveillance it makes an excellent accompaniment to the penetrating critique of
Foucault.

56
how the subject’s relation to significant others and the external world is founded. Here
the visual takes on an unconscious dimension as it is situated in an economy of pleasure
and power, desire, domination and submission – thus bringing a psychoanalytic
awakening of the optical unconscious as a site of social critique and understanding of
‘self’ to the fore.127
Along with semiotics this mode of conceptualizing visual culture
figures prominently in both feminist and post-colonial discourse.128
An important contemporary figure who addresses the notion of visual culture by
incorporating and mixing semiotic, sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives is
W.J.T. Mitchell. Unlike many others Mitchell has made a career out of reminding
scholars that there is a whole world of vision that lies beyond the realm of fine art; a
world that undoubtedly is much more important for our understanding of the human
condition because it poses the simple question of how people see the world, how they
mediate the world through various forms of representation and how images come into
being and circulate. From this perspective, Thomas Edison’s invention of the
incandescent light bulb is seen to be just as important (if not immensely more so) than the
art it illuminates.
The comprehensive perspective outlined by Mitchell is not just a matter of adding
to images the technology that sets their staging, but also how we as humans interact with
and create meaning through seeing. In this sense visual culture is equally conceptualized
as a matter of spectatorship, and as spectators we look at many things that are not images:
for instance, architecture, landscapes, fireworks, other people, food, traffic lights, clouds,
watches, texts, passports, money, speedometers and ‘occasionally’ our selves. Indeed
everyday practices of looking are as much about finding similarity, identification,
eroticism and wonderment as they are about discerning difference, particularity, prowess
and discrimination. Hence, an inevitable topic of visual culture is to explore how the gaze
corroborates discourse that stereotype and caricature roles of gender, race, sexual
orientation, class, religious or cultural identity. Equally important, at least by
contemporary and historical standards, is the fact that vision and visualization have
attained, with the help of technology, a high degree of abstraction. Except for the most
remote and isolated indigenous peoples, the field of vision is no longer bound to
127
E.g. typically this strategy is exemplified by the Surrealist movement.
128
For examples see Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall [Post-Colonial theory]. Laura Mulvey and Jacqueline Rose
[Feminist theory] all in Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, Visual Culture : The Reader (London ; Thousand Oaks: SAGE
Publications in association with the Open University, 1999). See also the anthropologist and visual artist Trinh Minh-
Ha for a compilation of these perspectives.

57
experiencing our immediate surroundings.129
Rather it is increasingly besieged by images
of phenomena and of distant events and places that are either hidden from view or
entirely artificial.130
Hence, visual culture and the process of visualization is as much a
matter of making visible that, which cannot be seen as it is about rendering copies and
instances of that which can. This suggests that the visual process, i.e. the process of
visual observation, interpretation, and visualization is as crucial to cultural production as
it is to understanding.131
Striking a more radical vein we find postmodern theorists such a Jean Baudrillard
who conceptualize visual culture in terms of seduction, simulation and hyper-reality. For
Baudrillard the postmodern condition is characterized by an increasingly fast paced
bombardment of seductive forms of communication (e.g. globalized mass media).
According to Baudrillard these forms have steadily morphed into a hyper-reality where
the real is effaced by the signs of its existence as simulacra. Meaning and meaning
production are thereby displaced to a wholly artificial realm in which the emptying out of
real-world content of its notions of true and false, right and wrong, fact and fiction,
brings with it an interpretive vertigo whose effect reveals the illusion of ontological truth.
For Baudrillard, then, power lies not with the ideological but with the seductive economy
of simulacra and its ability to reinscribe ad infinitum an image of itself onto reality as
reality.132
The hyper-reality thus conjured is not unlike the dystopic science fiction film
The Matrix (1999) whose narrative plots a future (present) in which the real has become
virtual and man ‘lives’ in a dreamworld created by machines he does not control. While
Baudrillard’s eccentric style and provocative ideas have made him a controversial figure,
129
Because of the global flux of peoples and products, and as anthropologists have argued for some time, the isolation
of indigenous peoples from ‘outside’ exposure have become a rarity.
130
E.g. optical instruments like microscopes, telescopes, and specialized cameras enable images to be made of things
that are too small, too far away, too slow moving, or too fast moving to be seen or noticed with the naked eye. While
such images can be said to be prototypes for one widely recognized mode of scientific visualization, they do not
exhaust the field. Some figures, like the drawings of duck-rabbits and reversible cubes in perceptual psychology texts,
act as templates for elucidating perceptual effects. Hence, a reversible cube is not just a line drawing of a three-
dimensional figure, it is a textual artifact with which the viewer interacts to produce a visible effect. An other less
exotic example, and therefore also more abstract, is the telescoping of vision into television, ‘live’ real-time and
otherworldly! Also computer games are entirely artificial constructs. The pun “Out of sight, out of mind” has become
contentious to say the least.
131
See also W. J. Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? : The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005). and Mitchell, W. J. Thomas in Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture : The Study of the Visual
after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). Dick Hebdige, Subculture, the Meaning of Style
(London: Methuen, 1979).
132
M. G. Durham and D. Kellner, "Introduction Part V," in Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, ed. M. G. Durham
and D. Kellner (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 513-21. and Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of
Simulacra," in Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner (Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).

58
it is safe to say that his highly original work continues to be a rich source of inspiration
for those engaged in the discourse (and practice) of visual culture.133
The above are but a few and admittedly very brief examples on how visual culture
has and can be conceptualized. What is important to latch on to, however, is that
whatever strategy or combination of strategies are applied, the notion of visual culture
always comes back to the ways in which vision and visuality are embedded in systems of
representation and how different representational forms (advertisement, architecture,
communication and surveillance technologies, mass media, documentary photography,
religious icons, movies, fashion, graphic design, visual art, scientific data, etc.,) are used
to set meaning in motion. The crucial link here being how these forms and systems enter
into a complex set of relations with the cultural practices of looking and interpretation,
practices that are at the other end of the meaning chain and which situate, as Stuart Hall
notes, “the subjective capacity of the viewer to make images signify.”134
However, one
thing is to ascribe meaning to the world in which we live, another is to engage in this
process reflexively and self-consciously.
Reflexivity as a Site of Discovery and Epistemic Questioning
There is a significant body of knowledge that suggests that changes in how we make
sense of the world, are directly linked to changes in sense perception and vice versa. Here
the common and singularly profound observation is that technology (esp. visual
prosthetics, i.e., devices that apprehend our sense of sight) plays an integral role in the
making and shaping of the observer and the observed.135
For when the object of our
knowledge is constituted through what we see and do, then a reconfiguration of how we
see and do things is also a reconfiguration of our knowledge of that thing. Or put
differently, when new ways of seeing and doing things are discovered (as is often the
case in scientific revolutions) we find ourselves responding to a different world. In the
natural sciences, which rely a great deal on visual prosthetics, we find an abundance of
133
For examples see also Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, www.ctheory.net; Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of
Signs and Space (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994). [Theory]. Dan Perjovschi, Jon Kessler, Thomas
Hirschhorn [Visual Art]. Utopie (1967-78); James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere : The Rise and
Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). [Architecture & Urban Planning].
134
S. Hall, "Introduction Part 2," in Visual Culture : The Reader, ed. J. Evans and S. Hall (London: SAGE
Publications, 1999), 310.
135
I.e. technology shapes both our physical surroundings and our knowledge of the world in which we live.

59
discoveries that have changed how we make sense of the world.136
Such moments of
discovery are fittingly described as moments of eureka! To a varying degree the same can
be said to apply to sociology and visual art. Nevertheless, the difference between how
natural scientists as opposed to sociologists and visual artists acquire knowledge of the
world is given by the difference of their object of study. For when the object of sociology
(and visual art) is that of society and social phenomena, one cannot claim that the
knowledge or methodologies extracted from such an inconsistent realm possess the same
kind of homogeneity as found in classical natural science.137
While this difference does not exempt sociologists from acquiring new
knowledge through use of technology (e.g. camera’s, computers, GPS, etc.,) it does
exempt natural scientists from acquiring the same kind of knowledge that sociologists
gather because the object of the former subscribes to an innate homogeneity that is
constituted independently of sense perception.138
What is suggested then is that when the
object of sociology changes so does the sense perception of the sociologists or visual
artist. Societal transformations, for example, tend to bring changes in sense perception, as
was the case of nineteenth century urbanization and industrialization processes when
people had to readjust their senses to metropolitan life, and as is the case of the current
situation where people increasingly have to transition their outlook from analogue life to
a life infused with digital communication technology. From this perspective social
transformations not only reconfigure social relations they also entail new ways of seeing
and doing things.139
The ability to understand and pinpoint how these new ways of seeing
and doing things affect us is essential to the task of being able to meaningfully interpret
what social transformations entail.
To this, the diverse body of knowledge of how vision and visuality have been
configured throughout history provide ample opportunity for hands-on practitioners to
explore how seeing by other means can be gainfully (and consciously) employed for
interpreting society and social phenomena in new and exciting ways. Thus, intimating
that somewhere in this body of knowledge lies a eureka moment awaiting to be
discovered by a hands-on practitioner, a decisive moment that will lead him or her to see
136
See for example Thomas S. Kuhn, "Revolutions as Changes of World View," in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
137
See also Theodor W. Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976), 77.
138
It is precisely because of the features of its object that natural science is near impossible to imagine without visual
prosthetics whereas sociologists and to a lesser degree visual artists can easily do without prosthetic aids.
139
In this sense it could be worth speculating whether the attractiveness of ubiquitous computing and free for all Wi-
Max lies with the fact that the mobility it offers is also one that offsets our sense of being ‘chained’ to a screen.

60
and do things differently. As I will now briefly show Gestalt psychology provides us with
an elementary prototype of how and why this switching occurs.
The Visual Gestalt: An Elementary Prototype of How We Make Sense of the World
In Gestalt psychology ambiguous visual pictures such as Joseph Jarrow’s (1899) duck-
rabbit and Louis Albert Necker’s (1832) cube are classical prototypes of how fluctuations
in visual perception influence how we make sense of the world and ourselves. They also
suggest how changes in our surroundings (because social life is dynamic and unstable)
solicit new ways of seeing/knowing things. It is precisely because these images entice us
to reflect on what vision and visualization are, that they are able to infer the notion that
epistemic questioning entails not just a logo-centric but also a visual set of practices.
fig. 4 Duck-rabbit and Necker cube as pictured by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations
(1953)
In a fairly straightforward manner the duck-rabbit and the Necker cube are about how
difference and similitude, the shifting of names, identities and perspective occur in the
field of vision. The duck-rabbit with one image concealed inside another displays signs
of visual nesting. Either we see a duck (a beak) or a rabbit (ears), but we never see both at
the same time. Similarly by staring at the Necker cube we notice that the cube flips, that a
corner of the cube that was in front now suddenly is behind, and vice versa. We can
therefore say that the cube (whether seen from above or below), like the duck-rabbit
(duck or rabbit), represents two equally valid interpretations. In either case both are
examples of ambiguous multi-stable images in which vision picks an interpretation that

61
makes the whole consistent within the frame of one of several possibilities.140
In principle
and because pictures have always been more than lines shapes and colors on flat surfaces,
it can be said that ambiguous images such as the duck-rabbit and the cube allude to the
fact that pictures (like language) are bearers of multiple meanings. Ambiguous multi-
stable images are therefore as much an instrument for understanding pictures, as they are
a means of calling into question the self-understanding of the observer. We can therefore
say that the transformation from one perceptual gestalt to an other solicits a situation in
which a shift within the knower and the known take place.141
Epistemic Questioning and Perceptual Shifts
When it comes to epistemic questioning visual and logo-centric practices are not
mutually exclusive phenomena, but rather configured so that one exists within, and is an
effect of, the other. Meaning that ambiguous images reflect how paradigms change
because they show that “what were ducks in the scientists world before the revolution are
rabbits afterwards.”142
There is of course a certain disjunction between the perceptual
shifts of ambiguous multi-stable images and those we find in science. For while
perception in the former tend to toggle back and forth with relative ease it usually is seen
as a more gradual and irreversible process in the latter. A concrete way of illustrating this
process is to examine the relationship between student and teacher.
Before a student becomes a student of a teacher, the student and teacher can be
said to inhabit different worlds. By repeated exposure to the teachers ways of viewing the
world the student comes to inhabit that world, seeing what the teacher sees and
responding as the teacher does. We can therefore say that once the student has acquired
(and accepted) the knowledge passed on by the teacher he or she lives in a different
world. While the world thus entered may not be fixed once and for all, it is in large
determined by the environment and scientific doxa that is passed down. However since it
is the goal of any ambitious student or scientist to question the scientific paradigm of
140
A parallel observation can be made to the nineteenth century where the onrushing impressions of urban life are said
to have given rise to a perceptual transformation that allowed for multiple and simultaneous realities to be
acknowledged, flipping through the channels on the television gives a similar sense of multiple and simultaneous
realities (esp. with live transmission).
141
When first confronted with the Necker cube people often have difficulty switching from one gestalt to another.
However frustrating this may be, the situation mirrors the struggle that scientists have when new knowledge compels
them to change not only what they do but also how they perceive the world. On a more ordinary note, juxtaposing this
shift within the knower and known with the gaze of the tourist could certainly yield interesting similarities.
142
Kuhn, "Revolutions as Changes of World View." 111.

62
their field we can be certain that it too eventually, or even better, unavoidably is bound to
undergo change. Therefore, when the paradigm of a field changes “the scientist’s
perception of his environment must be re-educated – in some familiar situation he must
learn to see a new gestalt.”143
Once the re-education process has run its course awareness of the conditions and
struggles that led to the transformation fade. The reason for this loss of awareness is
given by the fact that scientists normally do not need to provide authentic information
about the way in which transformations are recognized and embraced in order to fulfill
their function as scientists.144
As Kuhn notes this is because “scientists and laymen take
much of their image of creative scientific activity from an authoritative source that
systematically disguises – partly for important functional reasons – the existence of and
significance of scientific revolutions.”145
The most obvious venue in which a systematic disguise of scientific
transformations can be found is in textbooks. Since the most important function of
textbooks is to perpetuate the scientific doxa of a field they have to be rewritten every
time a scientific revolution or as is the case in sociology, every time a sub-discipline
comes into prominence, that is, after it gains legitimacy and/or mainstream recognition. It
is not that textbooks omit presenting a historical understanding of the field but rather that
their histories are geared toward making professionals and students feel like participants
in a long-standing tradition. While it is safe to assume that new knowledge and subfields
are continually being generated, their entry into the history of the discipline require not
only that textbooks be airbrushed but that they be airbrushed so that scientists of previous
generations are implicitly made out as having worked on the same set of problems.
Textbooks therefore not only tend to impose a cumulative and leveling effect on the
complex issues they seek to convey, they also inadvertently conceal what goes on in
times of crisis and uncertainty, that is, in times when paradigms change and subfields
emerge. To the extent that visual sociology remains a discipline in the making, it is
nowhere to be found in general introductory textbooks. In this sense we can say that we
are witness not only to the struggles and becoming of a field of knowledge, but to the
gradual emergence of a new gestalt.
143
Ibid. 112
144
Ibid. 137
145
Ibid. 136 italics added

63
Because knowledge of what happens during scientific transformations is of
utmost relevance to anyone seeking to generate and disseminate new ideas, it is important
to know what these are and why they occur. For example when a small segment of a
scientific community have a growing sense that “the existing paradigm has ceased to
function adequately in the exploration of a set of problems on which that paradigm itself
had previously led the way” we not only have a crisis in the making but also the
prerequisite condition for such a transformation to occur.146
So when visual sociology as
we have seen conjure a group of persons who are sufficiently dissatisfied with that they
do to want to try something new it is safe to assume that at least this condition, the
condition of communal dissent, has been met.
However one thing is to rebel, another is to get ones peer community (those who
do not feel the urge to do things differently) to recognize the legitimacy in doing so.
Hence, when recognition fails to transpire it can be that too little has been done to
communicate why one thinks the prevailing paradigm has proved inadequate and why
what one offers in its place should be recognized as a legitimate path of inquiry.
Similarly failure to find recognition when and where one wants can equally and
realistically be due to the fact that the claims being made (regardless of whether they
have merit) are vehemently rebutted (or ignored) by a mainstream who see their status
(quo) threatened. Complicating matters even further are situations where the yearning for
legitimacy becomes so overpowering that the once so visionary and rebellious willingly
compromise their most valuable asset by adopting imaginary demands that limit their
ability to seek-out and fully explore the potentials of their newfound terrain. Lack of
legitimacy could of course also be due to the fact that the academic environment is able
to harbor self-sustained sub-fields whose communities neither need nor want mainstream
recognition. More often than not the budding off of expert knowledge into new subfields
along with their re-embedding back into mainstream science solicits a combination of the
above. When the process stops short of its goal, that is when calls for change and
legitimacy stand confronted with a blurred gestalt, it can be helpful to study what
scientific transformations entail in order to figure out how to make the contours of ones
discipline appear more readily to others.
Since the gestalt of visual sociology is affected in one way or the other by all of
the above mentioned problems it makes perfect sense to pose the ‘original’ question once
146
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 92.

64
again and ask how vision and visualization can bring original and stimulating knowledge
to the field of sociology. In doing so we are reminded not only of the North American
origins of visual sociology but also of its relative isolation from European cultural theory.
Significantly, then, a great deal of highly relevant sociological knowledge remains to be
incorporated and discovered. Certainly the relevance of European cultural theory to
visual sociology is not confined to a logo-centric inquiry into vision and visuality, for if
many European cultural theorist have drawn inspiration from visual artists, it is certain
that an even greater number of visual artists have drawn inspiration from them. In this
sense there exists a longstanding tradition in which logo-centric and hands-on practices
connect. As argued the guiding theme under which these practices show the strongest
affinity is the concept of visual culture. Within this concept there exists an incredible
amount of literature, lengthy historical testimony and a myriad of artifacts that show how
vision and visuality have played a central if not defining role in how we make sense of
the world.
The sheer diversity of logo-centric and hands-on practices that fill the pallet of
visual culture looms large, indeed at times nonsensically or even magically large. By
these standards visual culture harbors innumerable and insightful ways of
conceptualizing how transformations in vision and visuality have brought new ways of
thinking and being to the fore. Having thus come full circle a parallel emerges whereby
the perceptual transformations of the duck-rabbit and the Necker cube render themselves
relevant not only as metaphors for discovery but also as metaphors for how
transformations in vision and visuality entail new ways of making sense of the world.
That said, ambiguous visual gestalts can only ever be metaphors for how we experience
such transformations, not their substitute. Why I now turn to explore more in depth how
visual culture, with its many and significant transformations, merits a reconfiguration of
visual sociology.
V: Four Ontologies of Sight - Reflections on The Use of History
With the intent of keeping this pervasive subject matter as simple as possible the
historical contextualization of visual culture will here be limited to include an admittedly
shorthanded rendering of insights from four semantically different yet contingent epochs
of Western culture. In very broad terms these are: Antiquity (Greek), Renaissance,
Modernity and Post-modernity. Each has been conceptualized, as significant periods in

65
Western ocular culture by scholars such as Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, Michael Levin,
and Hal Foster to name a few. However, since the task here is to provide context rather
than detail I will omit passing judgment on whether one is more important than the other,
just as I bypass the politics of determining the duration and origin of each period. What
will be presented is a selection of historical highlights and discourses that contextualize
vision in Western culture and which are essential to conceptualizing seeing and thinking
as fundamentally interrelated concepts of sociological thought.
My core concern for bringing this discussion to the fore is that a historical
overview provides a sense of transformation by showing us the many and different ways
that vision and visuality have been conceptualized over time. Thereby intimating that
documentary photography is not necessarily the only (or best) way to conduct image
based research. Again, and so not to be misunderstood, my errand is not to abandon
ethnographic and documentary models of inquiry, but rather to ‘soften’ their focus so that
an access to ‘seeing by other means’ can be gained.
In what follows this ‘seeing by other means’ is exemplified by how vision and
visuality is historically linked to epistemic questioning. Therefore much of what I have to
say challenges prominent visual sociologists Gordon Fyfe & John Law who argue that
seeing and abstract thought do not sit very well with one another, hence the limited status
of image based research. Or as they write: “The center of gravity of sociology, lying
close, as it does, to the expression and articulation of general philosophical differences,
neither lends itself well, nor allocates much priority to differences that might be resolved
by recourse to visual depictions of its subject matter.”147
While I hope to resolve (or at
least bring a qualified challenge to) this atrophied point of view I also believe that the
position expressed by Fyfe and Law can be seen as a critique of the fact that the few
sociologists who actually took the time and effort to engage themselves in image based
research at the time of their writing, typically resorted to conceptualizing the visual as
‘evidence’ and ‘data.’148
For the most part these ethnographic ‘portraits’ or studies were
characterized by being at once idiographic and quasi-scientistic. Consequently and
because of this very basic and somewhat naïve one-to-one approach to imagery, hands-on
visual sociologists have, at least historically speaking, been blind to the most important
philosophical inquiries that have been made into vision.
147
Fyfe and Law, Picturing Power : Visual Depiction and Social Relations. (1988), 6.
148
This critique is reverberated in a central argument of Fyfe & Law in which they argue “that there can be no such
thing as a sociology of visualization” but rather a mulitiplicity of sociologies that engage the visual in varying ways.
See also Fyfe & Law (1988:6-7)

66
Nevertheless, much progress has been made in the field since it migrated into a
European sociological context, just as the onslaught of postmodern theory, media and
cultural studies, new art history, psychoanalysis and semiotics, to name a few, stand to
significantly affect the outlook and discourse of its practitioners. Today visual
sociologists like their colleagues in adjoining fields are confronted with the ubiquity of
inexpensive imaging equipment, the explosive dissemination and circulation of imagery
on the world wide web, an increasingly frenzied and mediatized obfuscation of ‘reality’,
as well as the now seemingly omnipresent post-9-11 surveillance of public and private
spheres. While this signals that visual sociologists are increasingly becoming aware of
the many ways of seeing and the plethora of discourse surrounding the visual, the field
still suffers from a general philosophical and theoretical lag just as documentary and
ethnographic modes of visualization remain stubbornly persistent elements of the field.
Since the declared purpose of this thesis is to secure legitimacy through diversity
rather than unity, that is, to follow a logic of ‘and’ rather than ‘or’ I will summon the
notion, as suggested by contemporary visual sociologist Douglas Harper (2003) and
anthropologist Marcus Banks (2001), that knowing through seeing is a old as the history
of recorded thought itself.149
The focus of this brief historical inquiry into visual culture is to show how the
visible exerts a powerful presence in everyday life and how both our actions and
understandings are coerced and structured by this presence. However like many other
things, the history of vision is also one of revision, or as Walter Benjamin once remarked,
each epoch dreams the next, and in doing so revises the one before it. In doing so the
practice of each epoch extends beyond its own historical formation only to be reified in a
present of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.150
The four periods presented here
are thus characterized by their overlapping and embeddedness in a complex and
nonsynchronous historical understanding of the present. This nonsynchronous
understanding has the salient feature that it captures the paradoxical fact that the framing
of historical periods depends on our position in the present and that our position in this
present is defined through their framing. Therefore the purpose of historical
contextualization is not to prove that one moment is modern, the next postmodern, as
149
See also D. Harper, "Reimagining Visual Methods: Galileo to Neuromancer," in Handbook of Qualitative Research,
ed. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,, 2000). and Banks, Visual Methods in Social
Research.
150
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1996). 206-209

67
such events do not develop evenly or break cleanly, but rather to capture the deferred
action, the double movement through which they present themselves to us in the
present.151
In simple conceptual terms, the visual correlate of the above assertion, is this
…
André Amtoft (2007)
The heading under which each visual regime resides must therefore not be taken too
literally since they reflect how our knowledge of these regimes are emphasized and
related to the concerns presented in this thesis. These concerns, to reiterate, are: a) to
explore how the visible exerts a powerful presence in everyday life and how our
understanding and actions are coerced by this presence and b) to posit this visual
presence as a means whereby hands-on practitioners can connect to both classical and
contemporary social theory and to visual art.
VI: Sight and Insight – From Plato to Baudrillard
Vision in Antiquity (Greek) The Ambiguous Sense
There is one mode of sensory perception that rises above the rest and that is the sense of
vision. Since vision has preoccupied and puzzled the minds of Western scholars more
than any other sense, it is only natural that it occupy a fundamental place in our
knowledge of the world. Or as Aristotle once said: “Nothing is in the intellect which is
not first in the senses.”152
History has shown that humans have always been compelled
151
Ibid p.209
152
Aristotle footnote 27 “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.” in Jay, Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

68
and drawn to vision in numerous and often opposing ways. In Homeric Greece, for
example, vision was celebrated and championed in geometry, philosophy and worship.153
Moreover, the celebration of vision was also a vivid part of life in the polis where “the
political space of democracy was established by the participatory, collective audience of
citizen spectators.”154
This celebration of participatory collective spectatorship was
nowhere more evident that in the theatron, the theater, or “place for viewing,” as Simon
Godhill writes. The ancient theater functioned as a place for displaying one’s social status
and for viewing the projection and promotion of the power of the polis of Athens.155
Oppositely an unease of vision’s malevolent power is vividly expressed in early mythic
figures such as Odysseus, Medusa, Tiresias156
and Narcissus, just as it often came to
fruition in the use of apotropaic amulets to disarm ‘the evil eye’.
While this unease suggests a wariness towards vision, most commentators agree
that the celebration and power of vision, even in its negative guises, has been
instrumental in elevating the status of the visual to the pinnacle of Western culture.157
Under this dialectic vision assumes a kind of quasi-permanence, for whenever a
celebratory concept of vision is absent it is because its other more unsettling aspects have
taken its place and vice versa. Vision is therefore never neutral, but always subject to the
eye of the beholder and the context, which grants it, it’s meaning.
The Bodily Divide of Sight and Insight
Vision was initially conceptualized as a means of experiencing the outside world within.
Plato, for example, believed the height of intellectual abstraction went through ‘the eye of
the mind’.158
Being much less cautious about the dangers of vision, Aristotle defended
the power of sight to discriminate among more pieces of information than any other
sense, just as it was he who linked vision to language, or as he claimed in his Poetics, to
153
geometry (Thales, Pythagoras, Euclid), philosophy (Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle) and worship (iconic displays of
the Gods)
154
Simon Goldhill, "Refracting Classical Vision," in Vision in Context : Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on
Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (1996)., 19. “Theoria, the word from which “theory” comes, implies, as has
often been noted in contemporary criticism, a form of visual regard; what is less often noted is that theoria is the normal
Greek for official participatory attendance as a spectator in the political and religious rites of the state.”, 17.
155
For a detailed account linking citizenship and the visual see Ibid., 17-28
156
Tiresias is known as the blind prophet of Thebes. There exists several anecdotes about Tiresias blindness, the most
common of which is that he was blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets before being given the gift of foresight
by Zeus.
157
E.g. Jay, Levin, Prosser, Virilio, Emmison & Smith, etc,.
158
For an illuminating account of Plato’s relation to vision see Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought., 25-27.

69
produce a good metaphor is to see a likeness.159
From this emerges the insight that vision,
first and foremost, is characterized by its relationship to the body. Here the body is
conceived as the analytical divide from which vision is either posited within or without.
The latter, in admittedly coarse and oversimplified terms, can be found in the
modern ideal of natural science and subscribes to an objective understanding of truth in
which vision is conceived as a linear, static and ever present illumination of the world in
which we live. In this understanding vision is best perceived as a passive registering of
ones material surroundings, or put differently, it entails a ‘value neutral’ cataloguing of
the content that appears before us in the field of vision. The former notion of vision is a
bodily notion that finds expression through the formation of mental images. It equates
sight with insight and subscribes to a subjective and discursively oriented understanding
of vision, i.e. here vision is inscribed in a myriad of symbolic and culturally embedded
constructs. Expressed in more contemporary terms we might say this subjective,
fragmented and highly individualized concept of vision has its correlate in an ephemeral
post-modern glance rather than in a fixed analytical gaze.
According to historian Martin Jay these ambiguous features of vision correlate
with the way light came to be conceptualized in Western thought. Or as he writes:
“…light could be understood according to the model of geometric rays that Greek
optics had privileged, those straight lines studied by catoptrics (the science of
reflection) or dioptrics (the science of refraction). Here perfect linear form was
seen as the essence of illumination, and it existed whether perceived by the
human eye or not. Light in this sense came to be known as lumen. An alternative
version of light, known as lux, emphasized instead the actual experience of human
sight. Here color, shadow, and movement was accounted as important as form and
outline, if not more so.”
In short, the correlation between how vision and light were perceived captures a
prominent feature of Western culture’s relation to sight by calling attention to the
159
Aristotle, Poetics trans. Butcher, S.H. 1999 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/poetc10.txt XXII “… to make
good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” see also Aristotle, Poetics trans. Bywater, Ingram 10th
ed. 1962
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/poeti10.txt XXII “… a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the
similarity in dissimilars.” and in Aristotle: Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Volume 23 trans. Fyfe, W.H. 1932 Harvard
University Press (1459a) “… by far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token
of genius. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.” http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-
bin/ptext?lookup=Aristot.+Poet.+1459a

70
alternating traditions of speculation with the eye of the mind and observation with the
two eyes of the body.
Speculation and observation allow for both rational and irrational modes of
seeing, which multiplies the variants of sight and their characteristics. Exemplifying this
multiplicity, “observation can be understood as the unmediated assimilation of stimuli
from without, the collapse of perception into pure sensation. Or it can be constructed as a
more complicated interaction of sensations and the shaping or judging capacity of the
mind, which provided the Gestalt-like structures that make observation more than a
purely passive phenomenon. And within these broad categories, many different variants
could proliferate.”160
The point being as Jay writes is that “in all of them … something
called sight is accorded a fundamental place in our knowledge of the world.”161
According to Jay, Plato also contends that the human eye is able to perceive light
because it shares a like quality with the source of light, the sun. Or as he writes: “If Plato
argued that the eye and the sun are composed of like substances, and the Greeks believed
that the eye transmitted as well as received light rays (the theory of extramission), then
there was a certain participatory dimension in the visual process, a potential intertwining
of the viewer and the viewed.”162
In this sense, the eye is also configured as the carrier of
the gaze, a medium of nonverbal communication, that plays a constitutive role in the
formation of social groups. Astrid Schmidt-Buckhardt gives lucid expression to this
relationship when she notes that George Simmel, “inspired by the psychology of
perception, inserted an ‘Appendix of the Senses,’ in his main work Soziologie in which,
reflecting on the difference in performance of the sensory organs, he emphasized the
unique psychosociability of the eye in socialization.”163
The dialogic glance created by
individuals when looking at one another thus conscribes, according to Simmel, the most
direct and purest form of interaction between two human beings because it establishes a
fundamental (if not initial) point of social contact. From this simple analogy we find that
vision, from Plato to Simmel, and beyond, weaves a tight knit and longstanding
preoccupation with thinking. Hence, it is no wonder that “from the very outset,” as Hanna
Arent writes, “thinking has been thought of in terms of seeing.” (Hannah Arent quoted in
160
Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. 30
161
Ibid
162
Ibid.
163
A. Schmidt-Buckhardt, "The All-Seer," in Ctrl Space Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. T.
Levin, U. Frohne, and P. Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), 2002). 18.

71
Levin 1993:2).164
A relationship that, as we now will see, sets the measure of progress in
the Renaissance.
Vision in Renaissance - The Installment of the Eye (I) in Art and Science
Traditionally the Renaissance (or late medieval period) represents a reconnection of the
West with classical antiquity just as it signals the onslaught of an era that witnessed an
explosive dissemination of knowledge brought on by printing and the creation of new
techniques in the fields of art, science and architecture. The result of this
uncompromising intellectual activity was not only that it revitalized European culture in
new and unforeseen ways it also signaled, the advent of modernity, so much indeed, that
many contemporary historians prefer using the term ‘early modern’ rather than
Renaissance.165
But more than anything else, the Renaissance brought an intensification
of the eye as the locus of intellectual and artistic achievement.
One of the most important Renaissance achievements was the invention of linear
perspective, i.e., the technique for rendering three-dimensional space on the two
dimensions of a flat canvas (fig.2). Filippo Brunelleschi is traditionally given the honor
of being its practical inventor, while Leon Battista Alberti is almost universally
acknowledged as its first theoretical interpreter.166
The basic idea of perspective is to
approximate a representation of reality, as the eye of the viewer perceives it. This is done
by representing the light that passes from a scene, through an imaginary window (canvas
of the painting), to the viewer’s eye.
164
It should be noted that the theoretical importance of vision and the emphasis given to it within sociology is typically
assigned to the work of logo-centric European practitioners.
165
See also Wikipedia.org for a brief explanation of the Renaissance and the problems concerning its use.
166
Perspective is not an invention of the Renaissance but linear perspective, with its uniform guidelines for
representation of space, is. Etymologically: The Latin word perspectiva (from perspicere, to see clearly, to examine, to
ascertain, to see through.) Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. 53.

72
fig. 5 http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_perspective
In this scaled down representation of reality the eye of the viewer is aligned in a system
of symmetrical visual pyramids or cones with one of their apexes the receding vanishing
or centric point in the painting. From this we are presented a point of view, that not only
becomes “autonomous, but also a function of a central vanishing point,” a mark in the
image, “to which the viewer’s gaze is attached.”167
As we will now see it is precisely this
attachment that marks the point in which the immediacy of the gaze becomes aligned
with the all-at-once condition of the image and its pure simultaneity as ontological truth.
With the differentiation of the aesthetic from the religious, an outgrowth of the
Reformation, perspective was free to follow its own course and become the naturalized
visual culture of an emerging secular order. Linear perspective thus marks a decisive
moment in history because, as John Berger has remarked, it is the first time “the visible
world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for
God.”168
While this newfound aesthetic autonomy brought a denarrativization of the
image, i.e., a loosening of its ties to the church and the unlettered masses, perspective
remained a predominantly technical feat, for it was the first to allow artists to reproduce
nature ad infinitum. It produced not only a new kind of audience but also a new breed of
artists that culminate in the impeccably urban social type that Charles Baudelaire
famously described as the disinterested observer. The disinterested observer is reflected
in renaissance perspective because perspective was “…in league with a scientific world
view that no longer hermeneutically read the world as divine text, but rather saw it as
situated in a mathematically regular spatio-temporal order filled with natural objects that
167
T. Conley, "The Wit of the Letter," in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. T.
Brennan and M. Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996). 48.
168
Berger, J. in Jay, M Downcast Eyes p.54 re: note the parallel discussion of lux/lumen in Antiquity

73
could only be observed from without by the dispassionate eye of the neutral
researcher.”169
The ordering of the gaze by perspective, thus anticipated the scientific
ocular conventions of modernity and its commitment to an ontological truth relieved
from metaphysical speculation.170
It is no coincidence that the progression of the above outlined events was mirrored
by the founding father of modern sociology, August Comte when he wrote: “The greatest
fundamental law … is this: - that each of our leading conceptions – each branch of our
knowledge – passes through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or
fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive. … The first is the
necessary point of departure of human understanding, and the third is the fixed and
definitive state. The second is merely a transition.”171
More recently, visual sociologist,
Eric Margolis has made the observation that the social type of the disinterested observer,
e.g., the modern attitude of the Flâneur, is not only a forewarning of street photographers
like Eugène Atget or Helen Levitt, but also of camera lugging visual sociologists.
Modeled on the uniformity and consistency of eye, the disinterested observer underpins,
as Margolis notes, “much of sociology in general and visual sociology in particular, ” to
be sure, visual sociologists “often present photos of subjects as if they occurred sui
generis and the observer was not there.”172
There exists, in other words, an infallible
connection between the documentary/ethnographic approach to imagery by visual
sociologists and the positivism that since has been widely critiqued by a great majority of
theoretical and qualitative oriented sociologists.
However, no epistemology of Renaissance (or Modern) vision would be complete
without recourse to René Descartes (b.1596-1650) who posited vision as the noblest of
the senses. Like the pivotal importance assigned to the eye in social relations in Simmel‘s
Soziologie, Descartes in La Dioptrique (1637), examines the intellect as that which
inspects entities modeled on retinal images. In fact it would not be entirely wrong to
claim, as many commentators have, that Descartes is the founding father of the modern
visualist paradigm; a paradigm that not only provides “philosophical justification for the
169
Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press & Dia Art
Foundation., 1988). 9.
170
Arnold Hauser make a similar point when he notes, that “uniformity and consistency were in fact the highest
criteria for truth during the whole of this period.” in Hauser, The Social History of Art. Vol. 2 Renaissance, Mannerism,
Baroque. Vintage Books, New York, 1985:77
171
Comte, A. in John P. McKay, Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler, A History of Western Society, 5th ed. (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1995), 822.
172
Eric Margolis, "Blind Spots: Thoughts for Visual Sociology Upon Reading Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought," (Arizona State University, 2004), 2-4.
http://courses.ed.asu.edu/margolis/review.html

74
modern epistemological habit of ‘seeing’ ideas” and representations of things “in the
mind,” but also for “the speculative tradition of identitarian reflexivity, in which the
subject is certain only of its mirror image.”173
Descartes employs much of his insight into
vision using the camera obscura as a metaphor and measure of its many intrinsic and
extrinsic qualities. Or as Rosalind Krauss writes: “The eye that surveys the inner space of
experience, analyzing it into its rationally differentiated parts, is a eye born of … the
camera obscura. Beaming light through a pinhole into a darkened room and focusing that
light on the wall opposite, the camera obscura allowed the observer – whether it was
Newton for his Optics or Descartes for his Dioptrique – to view the plane as something
independent of his own powers of synthesis, something that he, as a detached subject,
could therefore observe.”174
fig. 6 Camera Obscura, Athanasius Kircher (1646)
With Descartes, the division between an interiorized subject and the exterior
world is a pre-given condition for acquiring knowledge about the latter. In this sense the
camera obscura, and thereby also vision and visualization, act not only as a metaphor, but
as the quintessential classical subject of knowledge. As Richard Rorty notes, “the
conception of the human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and
distinct ideas passed in review before an Inner Eye” is characterized by “the novelty of
the notion of a single space in which the bodily and perceptual sensations” become “the
173
Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, 70.
174
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, October Books (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 128.

75
object of quasi-observation.”175
This newfound autonomy marks a significant shift in the
knowledge of man, because it signals the emergence of an observer fundamentally
different from anything in Greek and medieval thought. For with a single and orderly
placed opening, the camera obscura flooded the mind of the observer by light of reason
and so brought mankind one-step closer to the era of Enlightenment. Vision thereby
acquiring secular prominence in Western culture plays an indispensable role in giving
voice to the complexities of man; complexities that as we now will see spillover and are
multiplied in modernity.
fig. 7 Cattelan, M. La Nona Ora. Pope John Paul II hit by meteor, mixed media. (1999)
Modernity and The Eclipse of Vision: Sight as Cultural Insight
The Renaissance discovery and proliferation of a new kind of imagery and not least a
new kind of observer in which vision and visualization find prominence through secular
knowledge, is often seen to anticipate modern rationality. It is a solid, permanent and
piercing kind of vision, a vision that penetrates and makes the irrational, mythic and
cultic occlusion of previous eras superfluous by establishing in its place an order of
transparency.176
However, with modernity there are also, as intimated, other elements of
social life that inscribe themselves onto the field of vision, elements that sometimes work
175
Rorty, R. Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979: 49-50) quoted in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the
Observer : On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 43. and in
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 128.
176
It is no coincidence that a similarly cold and observing kind of gaze is said to be cast by literary realists such as
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880).

76
in the opposite direction yet are equally significant and novel in terms of how we
experience and acquire knowledge of the world. Simmel and Benjamin are among the
most acute observers when it comes to bringing these discrete elements of modernity into
focus. Generally speaking their observations capture the fact that with modernity, and
hence also urbanization, comes a whole new set of demands to incorporate into vision a
heretofore unimaginable intensity of visual impressions. In particular, they note how the
physiognomy of the crowd and the hustle and bustle of traffic fascinate nineteenth
century commentators, since it is here, as the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-
1867) remarks, that man emerges as “a kaleidoscope with a consciousness.”177
With the rise of the modern metropolis comes a historically specific mode of
seeing (i.e., the luring displays of commodities, the diversity of characters, the
unexpected onrushing of impressions, and their shock like effects on the human psyche)
that not only necessitates anonymity but also the need to stand out. Or as James Donald
writes, the “metropolitan man, as characterized by Simmel, has two main aspects to his
character. One is defensive: the blasé, intellectualizing self that provides protection
against the shock of exorbitant stimuli. The other aspect is more expressive, but again in
a specifically modern way: it identifies a form of conduct, or an exercise of liberty, that
manifests itself in an aesthetics of self-expression.”178
To be sure, this psychological
piecing together of metropolitan man’s constant oscillation between voyeuristic and
exhibitionistic tendencies, marks the decisive moment in which vision, for the first time
and on a mass scale, is established not on the basis of permanence of an unblinking gaze,
but rather on the fleeting, ephemeral moment of a glance.
Within this turn of events, that is, within this process of urbanization,
industrialization, and secularization the consciousness of modernity is configured as a
visual fragmentation and splintering of the experiential frame. It is this multiplication of
perspectives that make possible an acknowledging of the independence and simultaneous
existence of realities outside ones own. Here the unfamiliar and uncanny becomes part
and parcel of metropolitan man, a visual appendix to everyday life’s encounter with
uncertainty and wonder. What makes vision in modernity substantially different from
previous eras, then, is that the sheer mass and intensity of impressions that lay themselves
to rest on the eyes are of such a magnitude and diversity, that they abstract and warp the
177
Baudelaire, C. in Frisby, Fragments of Modernity : Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and
Benjamin, 252.
178
J. Donald, "The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces," in Visual Culture, ed. C. Jenks (New York: Routledge, 1995),
81.

77
ideals of transparency into a collective dreamworld, a world of boundless consumption, a
world in which the highest aspiration is to see the memories, associations and desires of
today replaced (and preferably as quickly as possible) by those of tomorrow (i.e.
Nietzsche and the eternal return of the new). The aesthetization and snapshot quality of
life in the modern metropolis is bound to the realm of commodities and masses just as it
is tied to the all to often taken-for-granted environments in which the ebb and flow of
these impressions come into being. Architects and urban planners of this period were
instrumental in changing the lived environment in ways that decisively accommodated
both the influx of masses and the transformation of perception. Like many of their
contemporaries they were, in the most literal sense of the term, enlightened visionaries,
who felt an urgency to render the increasingly complex metropolitan space more
transparent.
Universally acknowledged as the nexus from which these tendencies first emerge
is Paris; birthplace of the modern republic and Enlightenment rationality. In this
metropolitan icon of spectacle and light the most influential figure in the transformation
of its landscape is Baron George-Eugène Hausmann who initiated a massive rebuilding
of the capital in 1865. Hausmann’s unabashed propensity for a rational and transparent
planning set about a destruction of much of the medieval quarters (then a tangle of slums
and thieves dens). As a result of the Baron’s efforts emerged a city with safer streets,
better housing, more sanitary and shopper-friendly communities, a better traffic flow and
not least technological amenities such as gas and kerosene street lamps that allowed
virtually everyone to transcend the natural rhythms of night and day.179
The effect of this
transformation can be summarized in the effect that the latter had on life in the city.
While street lighting made life in the city safer it also brought a rationalization of time
that made possible a regularization of working hours just as it ushered in new
entertainment and leisure opportunities. Nonetheless and despite tremendous efforts to
render metropolitan life transparent with its uniform streets and its endless rows of
buildings and courtyards, the rationalization of the city also had, to a certain degree, the
179
Louis XIV, the Apollonian Sun King who reportedly had 24.000 wax candles lit at the gardens of Versaille every
evening as a spectacle testifying to his power also used the spectacle of light as a means of enforcing his reign by
having thousands of lanterns installed by public decree in the streets of Paris. Here they hung like small suns strung out
by cables in the middle of the street, bringing security to the public while reminding them of the power of their ‘all
seeing’ ruler. He was thus the first to illuminate the city. However, it was not until the 1890s with Thomas Edison’s
invention of electric lighting that the city truly became The Great City of Light.
Also it should be noted that Haumann’s rationalization of Paris has been linked to the militarization of its
environment and particularly population/mob controll (e.g. the 12 grand avenues radiating out from the Arc de
Triomphe were not only purposely built broad so barricades were hard to built, they also linked to the main train
stations so that army troops from the provinces could be made operative in a short amount of time.)

78
opposite effect, for what had indeed been created was an architectural equivalent of a
labyrinth where one could easily loose ones bearing. To traverse this labyrinth, as David
Frisby writes “is to become aware not merely of the dream world of the nineteenth
century but of the changes in perception and experience that were their counterpart.”180
The Dialectical Image of the City as Aesthetic Fragmentation
An important area in which these changes in sense perception spill over and become
materialized is in the field of visual art. Given that the dialectical image of the modern
metropolis is infused with instances of both transparency and opacity and given that the
oscillation of eye between these instances (re)produce the phantasmagoria of the city as
an interior landscape – a bewildering and shock-like panorama of visual impressions in
which life is played out – metropolitan artists conjure up works of art that look entirely
unlike those of previous eras.181
Here the change in visual perception is manifest in an
aesthetically fragmented and highly idiosyncratic artistic sensibility that rather than being
severed from the praxis of everyday life (as was the case of ritual images) became its
product.
Faced with the task of rendering the discontinuity of the metropolitan glance in a
single image meant that that the image of the artist had to be multiperspectival. Cubists,
such as Picasso, Braque and Delaunay, exploded the illusions of spatial homogeneity and
depth by incorporating different views of a building at the same time and by rendering
buildings from different districts simultaneously within the same frame. A central means
of capturing the onrushing impressions of the metropolis was thus to bring elements of
temporality into the image, as these animated not only the sense of newness and
accelerated rhythm of life in the city, but also the experiencing of a condensation and
intensification of time and space. Whatever remnants of Renaissance perspective remain
are thus thoroughly abstracted and fragmented by the widespread use of the techniques of
montage and collage; techniques that allow the spectator to revisit the inherently modern
experience of being simultaneously, here and there, an experience that, as we now will
see, is part and parcel of the sensibilities attributed to photography and film.
180
Frisby, D. on “Walter Benjamin – The Prehistory of Modernity” in Frisby, Fragments of Modernity : Theories of
Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin, 237.
181
Donald, "The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces," 83.

79
fig. 8 Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower (1910-1911)
The Visual Culture of Modern Technology – Managing Sense Perception
Photography and film coincide with the emergence of the modern state and define the
visual culture of this era as a unique and historically new means of making sense of the
world.182
Both were quick to capture the imaginations of the masses and both were quick
to bring substantively new modes of seeing to the fore. Indeed so great was their impact
that they changed not only the means and ways in which imagery came to be engaged,
produced and disseminated, but also the conception of everyday life itself. Although
rarely mentioned by hands-on practitioners, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is the first,
and in retrospect most influential sociologist to have identified and theoretically explored
the modern qualities of photography and film.
In his widely celebrated essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (1936) Benjamin identifies photography and film as that which
transformed the visual culture of modernity into something substantively different from
182
The most revolutionizing feature of modernity arrived with Nicéphore Niépce’s (1826) invention of photography
and Louis Daguerre’s (1839) improvement of the same – for it signaled the first time in history that a mirror image of
‘reality’ could be fixed and reproduced mechanically on end without intervention of the hand. The French government,
with the foresight and supervision of scientist Arago, immediately bought the patent from Daguerre in 1839 and made
it public domain. Its inventor Niépce who had died of a stroke in 1833 and in povery thus never lived to see the fruit of
his own invention.

80
previous eras. To illustrate this transformation he juxtaposed the status and intrinsic
qualities of film and photographic images to the traditional art object. Benjamin thereby
produced a vast set of binary oppositions in which the exhibition value of the former was
seen to replace the cultic value of the latter, a process he famously described as the
decline of the aura of the authentic work of art and which is said to capture the essence of
the modern spirit.183
While it is safe to say that Benjamin was not so much interested in the fetishized
art object as he was in the emergence of a visual culture that significantly altered our
perceptual schemes and how we make sense of the world, he remains heavily indebted to
the Surrealist movement.184
In fact what most people do not know is that much if not all
of Benjamin’s writing on the redemptive and revolutionary value of the image, its
reproducibility and subsequent loss of aura, can be assigned to his 1930 encounter with
Parisian bookseller and publisher of avant-garde literature, Adrienne Monier.185
As it happens, Monier, “who was in close contact with important French avant-
garde writers (e.g. Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean
Paul Satre, and Paul Valery, ed.)186
, had contradicted Benjamin’s vehement old prejudice
against photographs of paintings.”187
Also illustrated in the following excerpt from
Benjamin’s ‘Paris Diary.’188
“When I went on to call such a way of dealing with art miserable and
irritating, she became obstinate. ‘The great creations’ she said, ‘cannot be
seen as the works of individuals. They are collective objects, so powerful
that appreciating them is almost necessarily connected with reducing their
size. Mechanical methods of reproduction are basically techniques for
reducing things in size. They help people to achieve that degree of
183
Def. loss of aura signals the decline of the image as an object that is embedded in tradition and has a unique
existence
184
See S. Buck-Morss, "Dream World of Mass Culture – Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of
Seeing," in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. D. Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 309-
38. and Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
185
Gisèle Freund (founding member of Magnum Photo Agency) who studied under Norbert Elias and Karl Manheim
had written her doctoral thesis Photography and Society in 1936 at Sorbonne was preoccupied with photography at the
same time as Benjamin (whom encouraged her). Significantly speaking it was Freund who introduced Benjamin to the
famous bookseller and publisher Adrienne Monier, an introduction that radically changed Benjamin’s attitude towards
photography.
186
For a comprehensive insight into the then cultural and literary Parisian elite to be, see Gisèle Freund, Gisèle Freund,
Photographer Foreword by Christian Caujolle Translated from the French by John Shepley (New York: Abrams,
1985).
187
See Benjamin in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, Studies
in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 203-10.
188
Note Monier’s surrealist displacement of convention, i.e. size matters!

81
command of the work without which they cannot appreciate it.’ And so I
exchanged a photo of the Wise Virgin of Strasburg, which she had promised
me at the beginning of our meeting, for a theory of reproduction which is
perhaps of greater value to me.”189
Benjamin, as we know, went on to incorporate Monier’s Surrealist insights into his
essays ‘Small History of Photography’ and ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’.190
The point being, that if Benjamin’s thinking could be so profoundly
influenced by an artistic conception of images why then should visual sociologists, of all
persons, refrain from gaining similar insights from the arts!191
According to Benjamin, art elicits its aura from its location in tradition, its
material singularity, and its spatial and temporal specificity, meaning that it can only be
appreciated in situ and through its proximity to ritual and cultic tradition (e.g. in Fresco’s
and the ornamentation of cathedrals). In contrast, photography and film drain the work or
art of its aura, its location in tradition and its cultic value, because the images of these
media, like the products of an assembly line, are easily reproducible, highly mobile and
bereft of ritual significance. However, the loss of aura and the reorganization of sense
perception through photography and film, i.e. through mechanical reproduction, was not
achieved in isolation nor was it achieved through these means alone. Photography,
interesting enough, only truly came into circulation via other graphic and technical
processes and predominantly alongside the meanings of the printed word.192
Or as John
Tagg writes: “With the introduction of the half-tone plate in 1880’s, the entire economy
of image production was recast … half-tone plates at last enabled the economical and
limitless reproduction of photographs in books, magazines and advertisements, and
especially newspapers. The problem of printing images immediately alongside words and
in response to daily changing events was solved … the era of throwaway images had
189
Ibid.
190
Here exemplified in an exert from Small History of Photography. “Everyone will have noticed how much easier it is
to get hold of painting, more particularly a sculpture, and especially architecture, in a photograph than in reality. It is all
to tempting to blame this squarely on the decline in artistic appreciation, on a failure of the contemporary sensibility.
But one is brought up short by the way of understanding that of great works was transformed at about the same time the
techniques of reproduction were being developed. Such works can no longer be regarded as the products of individuals;
they have become a collective creation, a corpus so vast it can be assimilated only through miniaturization. In the final
analysis, mechanical reproduction is a technique of diminution that helps people achieve control over works of art – a
control without whose aid they could no longer be used.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1927-1934, ed. M. W.
Jennings, 4 vols., vol. 2 part 2, Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 523.
191
It has also frequently been remarked that Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project with its principle of montage
mimics the classical Surrealists convention of discarding clarity for the sake of an abrupt unconscious awakening.
192
To this should be added that photography as an activity of the masses coincides with the emergence of the nuclear
family, the structure of work and the ideology of leisure.

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