Ethnographie et visual studies

Abstract

This article presents some of the contributions of image theory to the practice of observation in sociology. Interpreting images through their forms is first of all an opportunity to recall that observation is always dependent on “visual concepts” and the social forms they enable us to identify in the visible. By evoking Barthes' distinction between studium and punctum, we make the transition to a sign-based approach to the image, and propose a method of “thick description” that is properly semiotic: beneath the symbolic form, the meaning of an image unfolds in the infra-symbolic regimes of the index and the icon. Below a general, common-sense apprehension (thirdness), the experience of the image is irreducibly indexical, contextual (secondness) and produces intimate interpreters (firstness). The considerable density of descriptions that can be made of a trivial photograph provides an opportunity to think of images as “saturated phenomena” whose qualitative interpretation requires a certain duration, and the possibility of revisiting and reinterpreting them. It is to this question of temporality and interpretive effort that the final part of the article is devoted, addressing the process of (trans)forming the ethnographer's gaze and the role played by abduction and sociological imagination.

Keywords

• Genard
• ethnography
• semiotics
• observation
• image
• visual sociology