Society and people have always fascinated me, this was also reason why I became sociologist. I wanted to explore and get deeper insights into society. Sociology helps us to understand the social rules and processes that bind and separate people In other words sociology concerns itself with the way we live, interact, adapt, and play our roles in every day life. It is a 
wonderful science, because it is so human.
One of fields that I became very involved with is the visual sociology, that is dealing with the visual description of the social world.
Visual sociology is the way of decoding the fragmented social reality. It documents the everyday social life. The pictures are the data used for the analysis and understanding the people and they can reveal a lot of aspects of people's life. Just look at the cave paintings from Lascaux that tell us a lot about the ancient culture.
There are three approaches to the visual sociology
- data collection with camera or other recording technology
- studying visual data produced by other cultures
- the use of visual media to communicate sociological understandings to audiences, and the use of visual media within sociological research itself.
Visual sociology gives very valuable insights into everyday life and allows us to better understand the surrounding world. This discipline is very important in the communication field, as it allows researchers to go beyond the verbal declarations. Why it is so important to look beyond the words, you may think. It is simple, as we, people generally don't think with words, but with pictures. In fact we can't rely purely on respondents declarations. Photography or video allows us to read the hidden emotions, needs, behavior, that we would never could access by using only spoken language.
We are living in the visual culture where linear thinking was replaced by the hyperlinks. The world has changed and is still changing but our methods for understanding people haven't. Most of thoughts and feelings that influence our behavior occur in the unconscious mind. 95% of thinking takes place in the unconscious mind, so in fact most of what we know we don't know we know. Moreover 80% of human communication is nonverbal. Apart from words, we use touch, vocal intonation, gesture, body posture, eye contact, pupil dilation, facial expression in our communication. We don't think in linear way as the speech is constructed. We employ the metaphors, which stimulate the working of the mind, help us perceive the world and are the engines of imaginations . We use ca. 6 metaphors per minute of spoken language. Metaphors are simple to use and understand. They are the "primal thought", when we communicate verbally, we simply describe the metaphors occurring in our mind. Metaphors are pictures.
Marketing and advertising are about people, not words or declarations. And here I can see a huge role for the visual sociology. You can collect the material by going outside of your office and photographing people in their everyday natural environment or you can simply equip your respondents with disposable cameras and ask them to photograph their everyday life and support the visual material with interviews. The opportunities are limitless, all you have to do is open your mind and be ready to try something new.
Myself, I am a passionate photographer as well, so I've decided to join two of my passions and have started the new project - the world seen through the camera eye. I will try to go beyond the verbal world and show the "unsaid" aspects of humans' life. I want to show how people live, interact and act in everyday life through the eye of my camera.
Remember: Picture is worth thousand words.
References: J. Zaltman, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
Pictures are taken by me, Daria :-)
Tags: Sociology, Photography, Visual Sociology, Society, Research
