2 - The Visual in Social Science

Summary

Introduction

Visual criminology did not emerge solely from the critical and cultural criminologies described in the previous chapter. Rather, its development represents criminology adopting and adapting certain tendencies already at play in other areas. While its influences are as vast and diverse as its iterations— there are, it seems, as many visual epistemologies as there are visual criminologists— we can nevertheless locate and note them. This chapter begins by doing just that: by considering and describing the ways that scholarly attention is paid to the optical, mechanical, processual, political, and material forces that shape and condition the social world through the image. From there, I offer some loose and flexible definitions of some key concepts, as well as some efforts to operationalize some of those concepts so that their role in informing my own analysis can (hopefully and helpfully) be clear.

This is not, though, meant to be an account of these developments that is anywhere near comprehensive. For one, such an account would immediately exceed the remit and scope of this book. Moreover, though, the broad interdisciplinarity of ‘visual studies’ (a formation discussed thoroughly later in this chapter) in which we can more or less place the trends and developments discussed here almost necessarily leads to reiteration; while the refinements made by visual sociologists of course differ from those made by visual anthropologists, to describe each development exhaustively and to tease out the (important, but often minor) distinctions between orientations, thinkers, methods, and so on would be to lose sight of our topic— visual criminology— which, while growing up at the knee of these other disciplinary formations, has quickly come into its own.

Visual sociology

Of the various disciplinary antecedents of visual criminology, its most obvious roots are probably in visual sociology. From the earliest days of the discipline, sociology— and anthropology, too, discussed in the next section— both regularly utilized the visual, particularly in the routine administrative documentation of research. For sociologists, the photographic image was a way to illustrate and communicate some of the optically observable traits of subjects and sites of study, a practice that was closely tied to the spirit of social reform and progress that occupied early sociologists (Carrabine 2015: 105– 6).