Photographs as narratives in social science research

Abstract

It is only over the last three decades that sociology and social anthropology have taken seriously the photograph, its neglect due in part to methodological issues. In this paper, I look at how these visual narratives are to be viewed, understood and interpreted by the researcher, leading to conundrums of subject position, verisimilitude of an image and indeed, availability of visual material. My reading of photographs has led me to the conclusion that often, rather than confirm so-called conventional wisdom, the photograph can present additional information, and, in fact, in some cases, a counter-narrative. To illustrate my point, I discuss three very diverse universes—photographic representation of the 19th-century plague epidemic in India, a visual iteration of the civil war in Sri Lanka and the third, the domestic space of the matrimonial photograph and of changing marriage practices in India. I conclude that a reading of photographs can be infinitely significant for a researcher, even if sometimes these result in another, quite tangential—if not contrary—line of argument.