Fourteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Visual sociologists and street photographers share the fascination with the everyday. Looking and making pictures as a way to interrogate the complexities of contemporary life forms clearly surpasses disciplinary boundaries. Street photographers try to trade in the ‘real’ by presenting it in unseen and unexpected, sometimes absurd and surreal or magic-realist forms, leaving the spectator with much to think about. Street Photography in many ways epitomizes the core of photography: its unique relation to time and space, its unsurpassed capacity to serendipitously capture fleeting aspects of urban life. In this paper I first introduce ‘street photography’ as distinct set of practices and as a ‘genre’ up for debate. The term ‘street photography’ leans towards the documentary tradition but seems to celebrate the unplanned, the random encounter, and the absence of explicit themes and intentions. Following these introductory observation I consider street photography both as a particular sociological source of ‘found’ data and as a potential research strategy. In what specific ways do street photographs provide sociologists with useful data on urban society? Could the street photography approach also be used by the researcher in a more active way to ‘opportunistically’ sample life in the city and produce both mimetic and expressive records of society? How can the results of such approach be used as visual data in a scholarly article or as part of a visual essay?