Visual Sociology: Practices and Politics in Contested Spaces 9783030545093, 9783030545109

Citation preview

Visual Sociology Practices and Politics in Contested Spaces

Dennis Zuev Gary Bratchford

Visual Sociology

Dennis Zuev • Gary Bratchford

Visual Sociology Practices and Politics in Contested Spaces

Dennis Zuev City University of Macau Macau, China

Gary Bratchford University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-54509-3    ISBN 978-3-030-54510-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to our colleagues and students who participated in our lectures and seminars at the Siberian Federal University, Russia, in 2005–2009; the University of Graz, Austria, 2010; and the University of Central Lancashire, 2016–present. We would also like to thank those who listened to our presentations at the various workshops, conferences and congresses of the ISA and IVSA, notably the visual workshop at the University of Central Lancashire (2017) and our presentation at the ISA Congress of Sociology in Toronto (2018) which was the catalyst for this book. We are greatly indebted to our colleagues in the field of visual sociology. Some of them introduced us to the field and others, we have had the pleasure to work alongside and learn from. These include, Douglas Harper, Charles Suchar and Patrizia Faccioli, Regev Nathansohn, EJ Milne, Valentina Anzoise, Luc Pauwels, Jerry Krase, Timothy Shortell, Scott Lizama and Carolina Cambre. We also thank our colleagues and friends who provided us with useful and valuable comments and feedback to this book: Helen Monagle, Joachim Otto Habeck, Firouz Gaini, Luc Pauwels and three anonymous referees – you have all helped to shape the tone and rigour of our small project. We also wish to thank our colleagues and friends at the ISA Visual Sociology Research Committee (the RC 57).

v

vi 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Visual sociology is nothing without images. We are immensely grateful to those who provided us with their images and support us to better see the world around us. We extend our gratitude to Beat Streuli, Rob Battersby, Hagit Keysar and Gilles Sabrié for their kindness and their images. Other visual materials which appear in the book are used under the principle of fair use and we have made every effort to acquire all necessary permissions and refer to the original source. If someone feels that their copyright has not been duly acknowledged, they should contact the authors so that these acknowledgements can be rectified in future editions. Finally, a huge THANK YOU to our families for their endless support and encouragement.

Contents

1 Introduction: Visual Sociology and the Relational Image  1 2 Methodologies of Visual Sociology 23 3 Untangling the City Visually 53 4 Social Media and the Visual 83 5 Seeing Like a Drone119 6 CODA: Towards a Visual Sociology 3.0141 Glossary153 Index155

vii

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Screen capture of CCTV live footage using the face and vehicles recognition system Face ++. The AI system coupled with the CCTV camera allows for basic descriptions of individuals and vehicles. (Gilles Sabrié 2018. Copyright: Gilles Sabrié) 7 Visualizing the Antarctic journey through the sounds of the whale. A photo of a whale is a significant ‘trophy’ in terms of recording not only an iconic mammal but also relating to the trip to Antarctica as a magical multisensorial experience. (Photo: Wilko Onken) 30 A photo from the workshops showing image analysis and photo-­elicitation with a participant. The images were taken during the initial disposable camera project. We categorized them into ‘themes’ based on the content. Many of the shots were taken in the dark evenings to highlight the remoteness and isolation of the area, or from inside their houses looking out onto the dark landscape. (Photo: Gary Bratchford) 39 Screen grab from Human Rights Organization WITNESS demonstrating how YouTube has adopted their face blurring functionality on their video-­sharing platform in 2016 41 Photographer unknown. Image originally located in the now defunct Manchester Metropolitan University Visual Resource Centre60 Tram Stops—Castellon—40 transparent digital prints (Citizens 2013). (Copyright Beat Streuli) 62

ix

x 

List of Figures

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7

Fig. 3.8

Fig. 3.9

Fig. 3.10 Fig. 3.11 Fig. 3.12 Fig. 3.13

Sint-Pieters Station, Gent, 2010—LED Light Boxes (La Voie publique 2010). (Copyright Beat Streuli) 63 A composite set of photos taken during an ‘instant ethnography’ field exercise as part of Douglas Harper’s workshop at the IVSA meeting in Montreal, Canada, 2017. (Photo: Gary Bratchford) 67 Screen grab from Google Street View from the corner of Rue Mackay and Overdale, Montreal, Canada, 2014, prior to the IVSA workshop 68 Screen grab from Google Street View from the corner of Rue Mackay and Overdale, Montreal, Canada, 2016 69 The high-rise sleek modernity in Pudong, Shanghai, and in many other Chinese cities creates a distant backstage to the actual groundwork done by e-bike and variety of its users from commuters to businessmen, unwilling to waste time in a traffic jam. (Shanghai, 2014. Photo: Dennis Zuev) 72 Claiming the space: urban flow in Shanghai. E-bikes and bicycles are occupying space in the continuous front row, blocking the cars and bursting out from a narrow lane that they are ascribed to. (Shanghai, 2015. Photo: Dennis Zuev) 73 Heiche—‘black riders’, informal e-bike taxi providers at the road junction in Shekou. While in most of the city of Shenzhen e-bike use was banned several times, it was quite common in Shekou district as they served local residents and tourists. Such informal provision is illegal but was tolerated by police even during the day. (Shenzhen, 2016. Photo: Dennis Zuev)74 Food delivery worker resting with his smartphone on an e-bike in Beijing, 2017. (Photo: Dennis Zuev) 75 Knitting on an e-bike in Chengdu, Central China. (Photo: Dennis Zuev) 76 Occupying interstitial space between two lanes in Shenzhen, South China, 2016. (Photo: Dennis Zuev) 77 Helmets are a cool fashion for teenagers rather than a practical or obligatory safety equipment for small children and those giving them rides on e-bikes. E-bikes are also a significant part of youth mobility in China. (Shanghai, 2014. Photo: Dennis Zuev)78

  List of Figures 

Figs. 3.14 and 3.15

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

xi

E-bike is not a shiny piece of technology, nor it is an aesthetically pleasing object for the owner. It is a stitched together ragged companion that does its job. The nonattachment narrative is attached to it with several layers of sticky tape. Another representation of the ecology of repairs is the DIY cardboard fender attached and conveying the transitiveness of the object. Multiple repairs reflect the value of the object in its rudimentary convenience and help to care against thieves, more attracted by shinier and more expensive machines. (Shenzhen, 2016. Photos: Dennis Zuev) 79 Visual in Tinder, a smartphone-­based dating application. The user’s main profile photo depicts an image of the Portuguese carnation, a symbol of revolution. Is this a self-presentation for a dating app or a political blog? 86 ‘The Dolly Parton Challenge’ a viral meme published online from Dolly Parton’s official Instagram feed in January 2020. https://www.instagram.com/dollyparton/?hl=en90 Screenshot from a video made with GoPro Hero with a characteristic extreme fish-eye (wide angle) perspective. The hands of the operator are busy, but head-mounted camera records a stream of action and photos can be later singled out as photos. This logic of producing a constant video stream is similar to practice of droneviewing: a video is made first, and then if necessary, screenshots can be made as single photos. Cape Espichel, Portugal, 2015. (Author: Dennis Zuev) 100 Rooftopping part-body selfie. CC Copyright: ‘Shoe 1’ by sev52 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 102 Composite collage of screenshots of various videoblogs in Russian YouTube. Collage on canvas: Dennis Zuev 107 Solidarity march in Sheikh Jarrah. Photo made with DIY balloon-rigged cameras. July 2011. (Author: Hagit Keysar) 128 Composite collage using screenshots of the start and the finish of the video made by Taliban with the use of the drone to film a suicide bomb attack on army compound in Helmand province, Afghanistan, 2017. (Collage of screenshots: Dennis Zuev. Credits: Al-Emara, Afghanistan) 131 DIY rig made with a plastic bottle and a cheap digital camera. The rig can be attached to a balloon or a kite for grassroots spatial mapping. The bottle rig has the camera pointed vertically to the ground and a simple knot on a string pressed against the shutter button keeps it taking images while in the air. (Author: Gary Bratchford) 135

xii 

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3

Drone conveying the continuous emptiness of the cityscape in Wuhan, China, 2020. Screenshot of the video Extended Drone Footage Shows Wuhan During Coronavirus Quarantine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1050&v=X OVUB3hFrdQ&feature=emb_logo142 Hagit Keysar’s visual Installation Restricted Zone: Temple Mount, co-­created with Barak Brinker as part of Visual Rights, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, 2020. (Photo: Rob Battersby) 144 Composite Instagram screen grab of the self-performance of glamorous living 146

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Visual Sociology and the Relational Image

The stories emanating from different news channels and platforms constantly remind us that we are living in an ever-increasingly digital hypervisual world often awash with antagonistic ideologies and ideological movements. These movements are laden with images, image events, and politically charged symbols and emblems that contribute to the gradual ‘symbolic thickening’ (Kotwas and Kubik 2019) of public culture through the intensification of national and religious visual displays and social performance. As we write this introduction, we are witnessing recurring outbursts of socio-political frictions in Hong Kong, Venezuela and Sudan, intercommunal conflicts and displacement in Myanmar as well as throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. States of military occupation persist, most notably in the ongoing Israel-Palestine and Russo-Ukrainian conflicts. The optics and the ways in which these events are witnessed and presented to us are multiple and contested. As well as the traditional forms of communication, these events, such as those noted above, are condensed to memes (Ibrahim 2018) or mimetic signifiers when applied to social media profiles (Gerbaudo 2015: 927) that visually attest to one’s social, cultural or political position. These signifiers come in many forms. One such recent example is the adoption of ‘pic badges’ and ‘profile ribbons’ that can be applied to one’s social media profile photo. This includes a virtual poppy in the UK or the ribbon of St George in Russia, used to memorialize those lost in past wars. In other contexts, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Zuev, G. Bratchford, Visual Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_1

1

2 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

social media users adopt the rainbow flag insignia or rainbow filters in support of LGBTQ+ communities. When applied across social media platforms as replacement of profile photos, these visual signifiers should be understood, not as a self-standing activity, but often as part of an action embedded in one’s wider socio-political and cultural engagement with a prospective audience and, importantly, as a visual performance. Focusing on the visual as a performance, as something that moves across platforms, that can be adopted and co-opted, edited or appropriated into text, slogans or even a meme, call attention to the potential role and production of the visual as a means of establishing possibilities for political responses, however flippant or short-lived, are worthy of study (Bratchford et al. 2018). These new objects and actions are, we suggest, important to note from a social and political performance perspective, particularly when we look back at how the use and function of images has changed in recent years. In the last 20 years, the world and the way we see it has changed rapidly. With the rise of visual methods and the emergence of visual culture studies, the exponential growth of network-assisted visibility and the ways that images are created, used, stored, shared and deployed have changed dramatically. To examine politics, practice and contested spaces within this timeframe requires us to think about images as both relational and performative. The ephemerality of digital culture can be understood in a wider context of image production and visual performativity. The 9/11 terror attack on the World Trade Center, New York, is perhaps one of the most visceral examples of this. Indeed, 9/11 is a seminal visual event (Stubblefield 2005). Due to the monumental devastation and destruction, the attack was arguably the first global event of this magnitude to be seen both on and offline, played out repeatedly on TV across the globe with different audience reactions. The 9/11 World Trade Center attacks in 2001, along with the train bombings in Madrid 2004 and the 2005 London transport bombings, marked a determination to make the means of circulation itself both a target and a weapon against the prevailing order of Western society. None were designed to achieve a specific goal—or likely to produce a favourable outcome, yet the attacks weaponized visibility. It is, in part, this realm of (in)visibility that we are interested in. The same can be said for the performative capacity of more recent technologies such as the military drone and its relationship to (in)visibility. As James Bridle notes, the ‘drone stands in for part of the network’ (2012).1  See James Bridle’s personal website, accessible: http://booktwo.org/notebook/droneshadows/ [accessed 25 November 2019]. 1

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

3

An invisible network that produces, enables and engenders sight and vision from a distance. This network of visibility, one which extends primary vision, or the act of first-hand experiential witnessing can now be immediately entwined with a secondary visibility. Bystanders, as well as those participating in an event, are able to broadcast live with ease, sharing footage across their own network via cellphones (Bratchford 2020) or GoPros (Stein 2017) that attest to the viral visibility and the performative nature of images online. From the televised spectacle of the 9/11 terror attack on the World Trade Center, New  York, to the most recent images of the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was live-­ streamed on Facebook, images and their presumed context have now broken out of whatever boundaries had been established for their control (Mitchell 2015: 55). Images now have a kind of uncontrollable vitality, an ability to migrate across borders, screens, audiences and sometimes below the threshold of official registers, such as news agencies and broadcasters; instead, events like 9/11 or the Christchurch terrorist attack are live-­streamed, peer to peer, often to unassuming audiences who just happen to ‘pass by’. The post-9/11 era can be argued as having gone from performance to performative affect—it became stuck in a cycle of visual, viral violence—from grand spectacle to endless car bombs and martyr videos uploaded to YouTube and the contested nature of drone-assisted ‘vision’ and real-life, real-time broadcastable shooting sprees. To this end, the boundaries through which images are to be understood and researched must also change. It is against this backdrop that we as visual sociologists must learn to engage with the image, but now, more so than ever, work to understand its relationality to the means of production, consumption and its affective quality. Visual sociology is the study of the visual2 and the way it interacts with society, people and the spaces they inhabit, yet historically, the use of images in sociology has been marginalized, with text and figures taking precedent in the discipline. At best, images have for the most part functioned as mostly illustrative as well as largely untrusted items (Holliday 2000). This assertion is commonly presented in the introductions to many visual sociology texts but is done so as a way to reaffirm the fledgling status of our relatively new para-discipline (see Pauwels 2010; Cambre forthcoming) as well as a measure of how far it has come in such a short time. While traditionally the emphasis has been largely focused on photography, other visual practices have come to the fore. From the use of GoPros  This includes images and image production including, but limited to, still or moving, digital or analogy, paint or pencil, professional or amateur. 2

4 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

to inform digital ethnographies (Pink et al. 2017) or the analysis of digital mapping practices (Lin 2020) have sought to expand the scope of material through which analysis is formed and information elicited (Pauwels and Mannay 2019). Thus, we must learn to look with images, as well as at them. We must come to understand not only how they come into being, but where and how they move. The twofold aim of this book and the future book series, Social Visualities, is to unpick some of the pre-existing imaginaries and boundaries that still dominate a major discipline like sociology, in particular when it comes to engaging with images, their production and use in specific spaces and contexts. The ways in which images are shaped, used and deployed are prisms or lens through which we explore the cultures and spaces, which images occupy or contest. Firstly, in an effort to offer a sense of what visual sociology can do (whilst also acknowledging where it has come from), the focus of the book is on contemporaneous examples of image production and methodological approaches in environments and practices that have until now received less attention sociologically. These include lesser analysed global urban settings, post-industrial landscapes and the consideration of photo-artists to widen the photographic canon of sociological research (Chap. 3), social media spaces, platforms and performativity (Chap. 4), and the vertical and aerial realm (Chap. 5).3 These chapters, supported by smaller case studies and vignettes, are furnished by methodological examples and processes that reflect how the discipline of sociology can be further enhanced by new and innovative visual approaches. In doing so, the book also signposts the reader to where visual sociology, complemented by other practices, might be moving as a more technoscientific, collaborative and participatory discipline. Secondly, the book discusses the nature of images as mobile, performative and relational. Relationality, as a part of a diverse process-based action, exceeds the ‘visual’ of visual sociology; that which is visible and routinely ‘examinable’. In this regard, the focus is not solely on the image itself or its reading. Rather, it is on the assemblage of relations and networks, both on and offline, that bring images into being and what they, the images, stand for. The practices and politics of this allow us to see not only the emerging regimes of visibility but also the relationship between the images 3  These three domains are not intended as a rigid three-dimensional framework, but rather as three aspects that help us to take further the understanding of the changes in the practices and politics of the visual.

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

5

(visual) and movement (mobility)—the new regimes of mobility of images. Thus, the relational image is no simple object, but a mobile social-­ aesthetic-­data currency, which is produced, networked, modified, shared and projected publicly to different user interfaces and networks. To this end, the substantive focus of the book are three empirical Chapters (3, 4 and 5) that speak to the nature of the relational image across three different spaces—urban space, cyberspace and the atmospheric space. On the one hand, our rationale is guided by the evolution of human-technical visual interfaces, as we move from close contact and vision to an increasingly distanced process of visibility and a form of contact that ‘resembles closeness’, proximity and presentness. This quality is manifested in our relationship to images, environments and their politics. On the other hand, we provide three illustrations of the changing nature and social impacts of the visual as a social texture, images as social agents and finally how both visuals and images are a form of mobile data. This tripartite look at the visual should be of specific interest to sociology and related fields in the humanities and social sciences. The image, and its presence within our visual field, is a battleground. It can be strategically deployed, reveal and omit, punish and liberate. Images also engage, engender and perform how we feel, so too do they become relational. The relational image refers to the system through which the image exists and operates in this new hyper-visual age. We are not surrounded by images like we once were; rather, we are surrounded by ‘human-machine’ interfaces. In his seminal text Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger argued that images jostle for our attention. On walls, in magazines and on television screens, the image was for the most part tangible; the image was present. Even broadcast material was on celluloid or tape. Today, in the hyper-visual digital world, images live and relive in greater volume online than offline. Moreover, images are modified and corrupted, repurposed over and over. We snap, produce, edit, post, circulate, stitch, tint, filter and upload to multiple streams traversing the image-data-­ mediated sphere. In addition to what we can do, technologies, beyond our everyday reach, build archives of image-data, contributing to instant, constant and intensifying visual flows, the mechanisms of which are far less visible (and sometimes intentionally left out of the scene). The early 2018 data capitalism4 scandal, linked to Facebook-Cambridge Analytica’s 4  Data capitalism is marked by an increasing number of scandals regarding the storage, sharing and leakage of data, starting with WikiLeaks to Huawei scandal and Amazon versus Microsoft.

6 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

involvement with US President Donald Trump’s social media presidential campaign of 2016, is one such example whereby Facebook users had their ‘data lifted and systematically engineered to be invisible’ (Gadwalladr 2019) in order to target swing voters in key US states. The outcome was targeted marketing with personalized advertisements in the form of memes and political posters that aimed to influence the decision making of the electorate. While images are presented back to us, mirroring our emotional and political register, Beijing-based photographer Gilles Sabrié has spotlighted how the Chinese State employs a range of techniques and technologies aimed at capturing our image for a host of alternate purposes (Simonite 2019). By visualizing the invisible, Sabrié’s 2018 project The Surveillance State reveals the hidden and asymmetric system that operates at a regional and national scale. Sabrié’s project demonstrates the emergence of the relational image through the documentation of SenseTime technology.5 This includes crowd motioning systems that measure crowd density as well as identifying ‘abnormal behaviour’, in addition to CCTV apparatus systems linked to facial recognition cameras (displaying, in real time, at the side of crossroads, jaywalkers along with their name and ID number). What we are presented with is a fragment of the image-data stream—a new type of visual information that makes up one aspect of a wider narrative of a new panopticism that aims to shape a ‘high-quality and a trustworthy citizen’ (see Fig. 1.1). The relational image refers to and does not centre on itself as a self-­ sufficient microcosm. The logic of presenting and viewing the photos is mediated and determined by software and platform interfaces that leave ‘visual signatures’ (Hochman and Manovich 2013). The relational image is the result of operative software logics, which are driven to create a collective visual experience. Relationality connects the ways images are organized via a system of associative behaviours and nodes of relationality between one user/person and another through place, action or identity within the same coordinate system (ibid.). We are now engaged in new forms of image-based performances (following, watching, editing, posting, sharing and posing). Indeed, the mystery of the photograph and pictorial surface is dissolving, despite ongoing exhibitions and photobook publishing, the function and purpose of images in general are increasingly informatic and less aesthetic. As James Bridle (2013) notes, ‘obscurity is a 5

 SenseTime is a Chinese artificial intelligence software as a service (SaaS) company.

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

7

Fig. 1.1  Screen capture of CCTV live footage using the face and vehicles recognition system Face ++. The AI system coupled with the CCTV camera allows for basic descriptions of individuals and vehicles. (Gilles Sabrié 2018. Copyright: Gilles Sabrié)

classic tool of power, but it’s now married to another one: ignorance’. Actions carried out in plain sight are hidden not from sight, but from understanding, cloaked in the aura of technology. Yet, the works of Gilles Sabrié and others featured in this book are exemplars of how artists (and sociological thinking) employ and present these ideas in technoscientific visual ways in order to reinvigorate understanding—a new visual literacy for an age of image-data and the relationality. As visual sociologists, we must begin to think these questions through. Do images offer more emancipation than before the digital age? Are we getting more visually dependent? And if so, what is the nature of these visual dependencies? More broadly, who is seen, how, where and when? How we can deploy or apply visual tools, methods and techniques in an effort to see and understand better the world around us? Images and the platforms they operate from provide an illusion of connection and closeness as well as an incredible sense of distancing. As visual sociologists, we

8 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

shall continue to build on the work of those who helped establish the field (see Chap. 2) whilst learning and borrowing from other disciplines. From primary to secondary visibility (Goldsmith 2010; Bratchford 2020) to the relational image, visual sociologists are beginning to work beyond the lens of the camera, and the frame of the picture. Methodologically, their work is more social, more collaborative and engaged and, significantly, ‘technosocial’ (Lyon 2003) giving way to what Knowles and Sweetman noted over a decade before as a rise in the ‘subtle shading of the intellectual micro-climate in which social [visual] research is produced’ (2004: 1). The purpose of this book is to attend to these questions while at the same time providing a user-friendly, case-study-oriented guide to visual sociology that pivots around these themes through analysis, debate and examples. Hesitant sociologists should be enthused and encouraged to experiment with visual data, to include it in their own analysis and fieldwork complementary to their own traditional data-analysis and collection techniques. Whilst those for whom sociology is not their major discipline, those in the arts, media and culture studies, as well as urban studies, geography, conflict studies and more, can better see how their own work can be deployed in a sociological context. The shift to visually focused sociological research is built on strong foundations. The International Visual Sociological Association (IVSA), founded in 1981, is now complemented by the International Sociological Association (ISA) Visual Sociology Research Committee, which has grown fast from an ‘Ad Hoc’ group (2008) and then as ‘Thematic Group’ (2010) to a full Research Committee in just 10  years (with more than 100 paid members, globally). In addition to these international platforms, national groups, such as the British Sociological Association (BSA), now have a visually focused forum. Many established scholars, early career researchers and practitioners [now] see visual sociology as a nexus between their arts-­based background and their curiosity for the world we inhabit. In addition to official groups, the subject is presently part of a taught curriculum, within sociological and arts-based disciplines or as fully fledged degree. The MA in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths, London, is perhaps the most notable. In this regard, the book speaks to the interdisciplinarity of the subject and the varied constituency of scholarship and visual practice. To this end, this is not a visual sociologist’s manual or a comprehensive review of visual-based methodologies (we will show later that there are other more comprehensive volumes on this); rather, this is a study of the nascent visual dependencies and visual utility emerging in contested spaces (defined

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

9

below). This book examines how divergent visibilities emerge from tensions and relations between the seer and the seen, the dynamic complexity between the structure and the agency of the visible and invisible. Our main intention is to sharpen the depth of the field for visual sociologists, connecting instances that have thus far eluded the qualitative visual sociological eye. We will argue that visual social scientists need to get focused on specific instances of user practice to render their environment more intelligible. We will examine existing and common visual practices as well as setting pathways for new agendas. This includes making the case for drone-afforded visualities, or the role of such objects (and their networks) in shaping an emerging visual grammar and aesthetic codes for spaces, communities, volume and politics in newly relatable ways. Allowing for the analysis of people and things, spaces and actions, places and events, mediations, representations and performances, both of the subject within the frame and of the frame itself, visual research techniques offer a set of strategies for understanding numerous socio-political settings and interactions. As Knowles and Sweetman note, visual techniques ‘offer an analytically charged set of methodologies which incline researchers towards the tracing of connections between things of quite different [social] scope and scale’ (2004: 8). Historically, few sociologists have done more than Howard Becker, John Grady and Douglas Harper to advance and reclaim the importance of the visual and specifically photographic practice within sociology. Becker’s 1974 essay ‘Photography and Sociology’ underscores how photography as a practice and the resulting images can be useful sites of social and cultural exploration. While a persisting cornerstone of visual sociology, there is a need to move beyond the centrality of the photograph, both as a site of critical enquiry and a space of knowledge production or methodological insight. In this book we build on this logic and reflect on the changing nature of the image through examination of practices and politics in contested spaces whilst seeking to advance visual sociology as a scholarly field. In an effort to do so, we propose, in addition to signposting new techniques and remits of complementary visual practice that might be co-creative and co-authored, it is also necessary to think about a progressive step away from a sociology of or through images (Goffman 1976; Harper 2002; Heng 2017; Krase 2012a) towards a sociology with images (see Traue et al. 2019). It is here that we move away from the image per se and think more intensively about visibility, the process of becoming visible and relationality (Bratchford 2020; Nathansohn and Zuev 2013; Zuev 2016) that points at visual sociology’s post-disciplinary futures (Cambre forthcoming).

10 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Practices in Contested Spaces The world is dominated by contestation, both large and small, national and regional, international and local, micro and macro and how we see it or the ways it is presented to us vary. While we use the definition of practice referring to communication practices mentioned by Kress and Leeuwen (1996), we also theorize them in the light of social practice theory as nexus of ‘doings and sayings’ (Schatzki 2002). We address the criticism of social practice theories—the apparent lack of attention to the power relations by showing the politics behind the practices and the practices behind the politics—how practices may be subverted, resisted or followed. The practices of visual communication are performed within regimes of visibility. Visibility as a phenomenon is inherently ambiguous, highly dependent upon contexts of production and receiverships, and operates between complex social, political and technological arrangements. In doing so, we will look at the various conditions and modes of visibility as a series of ‘regimes’ (Brighenti 2010: 3) that are stratified across a number of narratives. Visibility, we argue, can be defined as an element of social structuring and bound by number of co-dependencies that are adhered to, challenged or subverted. To this, the practices/politics nexus will be the binding theoretical thread of the book, as we identify this relationship in three distinct domains and related socio-material assemblages. The contested spaces in our book are a variety of contexts and settings, where the relational image ‘grows’ and is mapped across the following three distinct domains of this visual sphere—the ground-level domain, virtual domain6 and aerial domain. While there is already a long tradition of scholarship on each of these domains, theoretically and methodologically, few works have addressed the relationship of these three domains, sociologically, in relation to the co-existence and emergence of the visual within each one of them. As noted by Zuev and Krase (2017), it has been real people and places that have long seemed the most appealing subjects for visual sociologists, who wished to observe and record for themselves the near and distant, static and changing, social realities. However, as we have observed, the ever-expanding contemporary galaxy of images available on social 6  By virtual, we mean online or social media domain and do not imply that it is less ‘real’ than offline domain.

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

11

networking sites invites and demands sociological investigation of large collections of visual data, generated by multiple individuals, publics, communities and channels. The rapid development of information technology is paralleled by a tremendous increase in the use of visual forms of communication. The digital storage and transmission of images, the availability of video technology and its digital accessibility, the dissemination of visual surveillance technologies and the transformation from textual to visual forms of communication turn visualizations into an integral part of contemporary culture and everyday life (Knoblauch et al. 2008). Visual social scientists must learn how to observe the evolution of the practices of self-presentation and visualization and (re)invent tools for analysis of images produced and circulated by mobile devices, shared via different applications and platforms. The agenda of visual sociology is not limited to the analysis of 2D images or even the proliferating new ways of disseminating images in cyberspace. Throughout this text, we review the use of social practice and performance theories appropriate to the ways in which we now see the world—sociologically and politically. Additionally, we sketch out a framework for the analysis of visual production practices in two separate, but interlinked ways. Principally, and most importantly, in relation to our contemporary, multi-visual environment and the capacity for images (ours and others) to have a ‘performative capacity’ and, secondly, in terms of visual production practices and pertinent technologies, embedded in these practices. Combined, the notion of performance and practice can be understood through the transformative ways in which we consider what an image is and how we consume images, but also in the ways that we now use and deploy imagery to work for, with us or against us.

The Range of Visual Sociology Much of what we come to learn is based upon what we see and sense. In an intensely hyper-visual age, images and visual artefacts shape our understanding of the world and influence how we interact, present and perform within it. Images surround everything we do, and it is no coincidence that the analysis of and the ways in which we receive and respond to images has become a field of intense enquiry for a host of disciplines, including sociology. Visual sociology is part of a wider scholarly and pedagogic ‘visual turn’ within the social sciences which is now complemented by the emergent field of visual global politics and international relations (Bleiker 2018;

12 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Callahan 2020; Chouliaraki et al. 2019) and visual criminology (Brown and Carrabine 2019; Carrabine 2012). It can be argued that each visual iteration is, in part, the result of three interconnecting processes. Firstly, there is a revival of visual methods (Rose 2010; Pink 2007; Knowles and Sweetman 2004; Prosser 1998) within the social sciences. Secondly, there is now a greater awareness of visual culture scholarship as an established intellectual field (Mirzoeff 1999; Sturken and Cartwright 2018), one that borrows from cultural theory whilst placing the power of the image and ‘ways of seeing’ at the centre of its analysis. Finally, we are witnessing a growing admittance of the visual as a crucial element of global politics and an important method of resisting linear teleological narratives, even in such conservative disciplines as international relations (Callahan 2020). In part, our book seeks to build on these foundations, working at the intersection between visually orientated political practices and the sociological sphere. Images now saturate the technologically enabled contemporary world. Literal images surround us on walls, screens and portable devices. Figurative images fill our mental landscapes. As new methods and collaborative approaches unfold against the backdrop of an ever-widening chasm between those who have the right to be seen and to see and those who don’t, now more than ever, we need to move away from the entrenched reliance on linguistically based approaches, such as the image as text, and develop systematic ways to approach images on their own terms (Gill 2020) as well as acknowledging the networks in which they now reside and function. Visual sociology has engaged with a great variety of topics. Perhaps, it is Erving Goffman who played a pivotal role in establishing early visual sociological foundations and directing its analytical agenda through conceptualization of encounters, rituals, modes of social and public interactions as well as the examination of gender displays. His work on gender advertisements was fundamental for analysis of visual media (advertising), but also of social performance embedded in a particular social situation (Goffman 1976). Without a doubt some of the key theoretical and inspirational ideas that supported this drive for the visual analysis of social interaction and performance came from cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall and his contempories at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hall et al. 1992), in addition to photography theorists and critics including Roland Barthes (1981) and Susan Sontag (1979). Critically and methodologically, sociologists in

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

13

general have used visual thinking and visual methods to address key sociological issues such as urban transformations (Krase and Shortell 2011; Bratchford 2020), work environment and labour relations (Pauwels 2015; Messier 2019), indigenous rights (Corrigall-Brown and Wilkes 2012), tourist experience and mobility (Haldrup and Larsen 2003; Zuev 2006), ethnic identity and inequality (Heck and Schlag 2013; Mannay et al. 2018; Vergani and Zuev 2011) and class distinctions (Bourdieu 1990; Tyler 2019). While others have focused on particular subjects such as global cities (Krase 2012b), all the nominally ‘urban’ disciplines do use visual approaches more or less explicitly whether through mapping, architectural rendering, photographic surveys, or land use and building surveys (Zuev and Krase 2017). Throughout this book we will further elaborate the argument that visual sociology deals with more than just an image-based world. The oft-­ mentioned methodological caveat in image-based studies is that visual research goes well when other methods are used alongside it. But images and representations, collected, produced or co-produced, need to be analysed within regimes of visibility (Brighenti 2010) and invisibilities (Sindelar 2019) as much as they can be read through a host of other ‘lenses’ or frames including, but not limited to, the shifting practices of the gaze, as gendered (Goffman 1976; Mulvey 1975) or material (Bousquet 2018) contexts. In this text we question the status of the image and we use it as a door to access ‘bigger social landscapes’, social issues and relationships, hence the relational image. As we use the image as an access point, it is paramount to reflect on its workings in different contexts and settings, and this has a particular methodological valence. Moving through the book we shift the focus from the more familiar and well-documented domain of urban landscapes to a less familiar one—that of visual social media—and further still to the domain by visual sociologists and indeed social theorists—that of aerial visibilities and the multiplicity of social-­political, economic and artistic moves within this emerging arena. The movement from one domain to another is methodologically intentional to reflect on the new kind of image or visual that is emerging. In doing so, we suggest that the ‘relational image’ is now much more significant than in the 1990s, when many social researchers initially noticed and focused on the visual (Knowles and Sweetman 2004). These reflections, empirical findings and observations all contribute to an ever-increasing analysis of the

14 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

hyper-visual world while also being aware of the ‘fleeting’ nature of the visual; we concord that the visual can be potentially less ambiguous or misleading than other forms of qualitative data. Our case studies deal with people and places, connecting local social issues with global image politics. Notwithstanding the book’s title Visual Sociology (which reflects our rootedness in sociological methodology and approach to visual data from theoretical perspectives of social practice theory and visual culture), we try to avoid any scholarly bias (anthropological, geographical or media studies) and argue for a cross-disciplinary conceptual exchange that puts the visual and its relationality at the centre of investigation.

The Structure of the Book Following this introduction, Chap. 2 outlines and reviews existing literature within the field of visual sociology with an emphasis on seminal works as well as texts specifically pertinent to the themes addressed in this book. Additionally, the chapter will foreground works on a small selection of methods, visual analysis and the emerging literature on participatory visual methods. We review some fruitful approaches that can be used by students and instructors in social sciences with application to new media and their visual interfaces. The chapter is concluded with a vignette on dealing with big visual data. Throughout the chapter we draw cautious tones about some of the pitfalls of working with vast image-datasets, which at times produce reductionist outcomes. The vignette in the chapter presents a more optimistic case. Focusing on an inter- and transdisciplinary collective, named The Visual Social Media Lab, the vignette unpacks how a multi-method approach, working at macro and micro levels of image analysis and interpretation of a specific image and case (in this case, the 2015 iconic image of Alan Kurdi washed up on the shore of a Turkish beach), can tell us about the affective power and the often hidden life cycle of one image that is repeatedly shared by millions of users. Chapter 3 introduces our first domain of analysis: the ground domain— the city and its streetscapes. At ground level, society and its effects are at its most tangible and visible. At street level, in cities, suburbs or neighbourhoods, the space of encounter opens up dialogue between researcher and participant, collaborator or camera. The texture of these environments, spatial systems of movement, places of local understanding and sites of contestation, flux or engagement are all the more sensorially

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

15

apparent and visible when we ‘listen with our eyes’ (Back 2007: 100) or ‘see with the feet’ as suggested by Von Wissel (2013). The street, in the city or otherwise, is discussed from the perspective of researcher as he or she feels and sees through the act of walking, identifying liminal spaces and boundaries of formality and informality, potential knots of conflict and contention. Here, relating the image to the actual urban divides and social relationships, we discuss the potential for visual methods as a tool for examining change as well as working with others to help us better ‘see’ change (Bratchford et al. 2018). We use the visual as a way of exposing environmental and social injustice and inequalities and focus on a range of mixed methods, from photo walks and Google Street View to artisticdriven approaches, to better understanding cities and the ways in which they can be used, experienced and interrupted (Jordan and Linder 2016). Walking is central to understanding cities (Shortell and Brown 2014). Walking streetscapes is a mobile method that is also touched upon in Chap. 2 and which lets us unpack the ‘pseudoscience of city planning’ (Jacobs 1992: 13), or simply help to better understand one another, allowing for embodied knowledge, experience and memories to be shared (O’Neill and Hubbard 2010). In doing so, walking research offers the sociologist the possibility to see and sense their environment as well as understand the rhythms of the city (Edensor 2010). Chapter 3 also takes into account the ways in which urban spaces are sites of transition, transaction, transgression, thresholds of visibility and resilient presence—as will be shown in one of its vignettes. The first vignette takes to the streets of Montreal, Canada, to explore urban change over a prolonged period of time. Blending offline, physical fieldwork with Google Street View-assisted mapping, the notion of indexicality becomes significant to how we read and understand how a location changes over time. The final vignette of Chap. 3 examines the practices of urban mobility in China and specifically theorizes e-bikes as an object central to this urban fabric. Chapter 4 focuses on visual social media interfaces, audience experience and user performativity. As our second domain of analysis, we venture into the virtual, online domain of user-generated and user-focused platforms, like Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, to unpack practices of producing and circulation of images, sharing, self-presenting and visualizing. In this chapter, we are less concerned with the general status of the image and more so with its potential use to which it can be put. As strategic and targeted as well as peripatetic or nomadic (Belting 2011), images travel through and to events and spaces and, more so than ever, handsets such as

16 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

phones and tablets. We start from the position that the image is not reducible to the medium, but instead works actively to engage with its very own space of appearance. In this instance, images for the Internet have their own inherent visual syntax and can be specifically devised and framed for their host environment as well as for specific audiences. The online realm of image exchange and engagement is ripe for instigating or maintaining contestation between different groups and ideologies. In this chapter, we provide two vignettes related to the analysis of YouTube videoblogging as a practice of alternative news making and a means of exercising power to render events, people and social processes visible. In the second vignette, we show how a fake video circulated via social media can undermine our trust in visual evidence. With these two vignettes, we sketch out the multiplicity of image-driven performativity and the reciprocity of image performances as conversation. In this regard, the sociology of the image is not just an analytical task or a matter of looking harder or more closely but is an examination of what actively shapes the frames of our seeing (Traue et al. 2019). These frames, the spaces of constructed visibility and provocations to see are always bound by or in response to a system of power, however subtly. Thus, visibility is not strictly a simple practice of presentation and representation, but an aspect and element of social and cultural orders. Our final domain is that of the machine-aided aerial vision—a vision which defines the perspective and production of image and video. Such visions and processes play an instrumental role in the definition and design of society into groups and/or units of data. In Chap. 5 we analyse the present and future of drone-facilitated aerial and vertical vision and potentialities of drones and new aerial imagery for visual sociology and social science. Taking the position that such practices and processes shape a new politicization of the aerial space, as the space of enhanced visibility and thus either empowerment or control, machine-aided vision and the space it operates within is both increasingly democratized and subjugating. In this chapter we explore the politics of drone video production and aerial photography at large. Despite the growing literature on the use of drones as technological devices, the visual production side of the drone has been largely ignored. We explore two distinct communities of practice and scopic regimes: military (militant) and activist (civil). We draw on case studies from the Middle East and the use of drone imagery by activist and state media in Syria as well as in Israel and Palestine, paying particular

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

17

attention to bottom up, grassroots approaches to aerial photography as a tool of collaborative participation and as a means of challenging the asymmetric nature of aerial vision in and over contested spaces. In this chapter we argue that the emerging dronetopia is a qualitatively different space of aerial visual data in contrast to the space of the cameras on the ground and an emerging space of visibility, where military, technological, legal, visual and research perspectives on the use and implications for user communities conflict and converge (Zuev and Bratchford 2020). The chapter finishes by reiterating the underlying power relations and visual grammar in two different drone-aided scopic regimes. In conclusion, the aim of this book and the subsequent chapters is to advance the trajectory of the discipline and signpost to new areas of visual sociological research and surveying specific themes and spaces to guide future moves in the field. Our aim is to also show that the three domains of analysis, the urban, the social and the aerial interrelated but not exhaustive. Our three domains work in concert and in some ways are co-­ dependent upon one another. We see the city (Chap. 3) through selfies, dashcams and GoPro cameras (Chap. 4) in the same way we see urban landscapes (Chap. 3) via drones (Chap. 5) and so these domains offer a hybridity of analysis, yet we recognize that other scholars might choose different domains or ‘lenses’ to see through. The selection is not exclusive nor is it absolute. By way of assistance, the vignettes within each chapter are there to offer more extensive and tangible case study like examples that also ease the transition from chapter to chapter. Our conclusion, Chap. 6, Coda: Towards Visual Sociology 3.0, works to bring all of this thinking together while furnishing the chapter with topical discussion points that may set an agenda for future work. These include the analysis of droneviewing over China as the outbreak of the coronavirus COVID-19 renders vast public spaces empty as well as artistactivist-researcher projects of contested spaces reformulated for public consumption in art galleries. In the following chapter, we address some of the methodological issues within our shifting field. For those interested in the history of our subject, we spotlight some of the classic works within our field as well as glimpse over the threshold of our disciplinary boundary and look at new approaches, emerging practices and new trends in visual research methods and approaches.

18 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

References Back, L. (2007). The Art of Listening. London: Bloomsbury. Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida. London: Hill & Wang. Becker, H. S. (1974). Photography and Sociology. Studies in Visual Communication, 1(1), 3–26. Belting, H. (2011). An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Bleiker, R. (Ed.). (2018). Visual Global Politics. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1990). Photography, a Middle-Brow Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bousquet, A. (2018). The Eye of War Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bratchford, G. (2019). Visualising the Invisible: A Guided Walk Around the Pendleton Housing Estate, Salford, UK. Visual Studies, 33(4), 395–339. Bratchford, G., & Zuev, D. (2020). Aerial Visibilities: Towards a Visual Sociology of the Sky. Introduction to the Special Issue. Visual Studies, 35(6) (in print). Bratchford, G., Giotaki, G., & Wewiora, L. (2018). Socially Engaged Photography and Wellbeing: A Case study in the Northwest of England, UK. The Journal of London Primary Care, 10(4), 82–88. Bridle, J. (2012, October 12). Under the Shadow of the Drone. Retrieved from http://booktwo.org/notebook/drone-shadows/ Bridle, J. (2013, May 14). James Bridle—Meet He Artist. Retrieved from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Lza-ZC7UCPk Brighenti, A. (2010). Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, M., & Carrabine, E. (2019). The Critical Foundations of Visual Criminology: The State, Crisis, and the Sensory. Critical Criminology, 27(1), 191–205. Callahan, W.  A. (2020). Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Cambre, C. (forthcoming). Visual Sociology. Palgrave Handbook of Images. London: Palgrave. Carrabine, E. (2012). Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 52(3), 463–489. Chouliaraki, L., Orwicz, M., & Greeley, R. (2019). Special Issue: The Visual Politics of the Human. Visual Communication, 18(3), 301–309. Corrigall-Brown, C., & Wilkes, R. (2012). Picturing Protest: The Visual Framing of Collective Action by First Nations in Canada. American Behavioral Scientist, 56(2), 223–243.

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

19

Edensor, T. (2010). Walking in Rhythms: Place, Regulation, Style and the Flow of Experience. Visual Studies, 25(1), 69–79. Gadwalladr, C. (2019). The Great Hack: The Film That Goes Behind the Scenes of the Facebook Data Scandal. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ uk-news/2019/jul/20/the-great-hack-cambridge-analytica-scandal-facebook-netflix. Accessed 23 July 2019. Gerbaudo, P. (2015). Protest Avatars as Memetic Signifiers: Political Profile Pictures and the Construction of Collective Identity on Social Media in the 2011 Protest Wave. Information, Communication & Society, 18, 916–929. Gill, S. (2020). Review of Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics. Visual Studies, 35(2–3), 302–303. Goffmann, E. (1976). Gender Advertisements. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldsmith, A. J. (2010). Policing’s New Visibility. British Journal of Criminology, 50, 914–934. Haldrup, M., & Larsen, J. (2003). The Family Gaze. Tourist Studies, 3(1), 23–46. Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (1976). Resistance Through Rituals, Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Harper Collins Academic. Hall, S., Held, D., & McGrew, A. (Eds.). (1992). Modernity and Its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harper, D. (2002). Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation. Visual Studies, 17(1), 13–26. Heck, A., & Schlag, G. (2013). Securitizing Images: The Female Body and the War in Afghanistan. European Journal of International Relations, 19(4), 891–913. Heng, T. (2017). Visual Methods in the Field: Photography for the Social Sciences. London: Routledge. Hochman, N., & Manovich, L. (2013). Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the Local Through Social Media. First Monday, 18(7). https://firstmonday. org/article/view/4711/3698. Accessed 12 February 2020. Holliday, R. (2000). We’ve Been Framed: Visualising Methodology. The Sociological Review, 48(4), 503–521. Ibrahim, Y. (2018). The Unsacred and the Spectacularized: Alan Kurdi and the Migrant Body. Social Media + Society, 4(4), 1–9. Jacobs, J. (1992). Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. New York: Random House. Jordan, S., & Linder, C. (Eds.). (2016). Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space. London: Bloomsbury. Knoblauch, H., Baer, A., Laurier, E., Petschke, S., & Schnettler, B. (2008). Visual Analysis: New Developments in the Interpretative Analysis of Video and Photography. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9(3): Art. 14. Available at www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1170/2587. Accessed 7 June 2018

20 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Knowles, C., & Sweetman, P. (Eds.). (2004). Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination. London: Routledge. Kotwas, M., & Kubik, J. (2019). Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Poland. East European Politics and Societies, 33(2), 435–471. Krase, J. (2012a). An Argument for Seeing in Urban Social Science. Urbanities, 2(1), 18–29. Krase, J. (2012b). Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class. Aldershot: Ashgate. Krase, J., & Shortell, T. (2011). On the Spatial Semiotics of Vernacular Landscapes in Global Cities. Visual Communication, 10(3), 367–400. Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Lin, W. (2020). Participatory Geographic Information Systems in Visual Research. In L.  Pauwels & D.  Mannay (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods (2nd ed., pp. 173–185). Los Angeles: Sage. Lyon, D. (2003). Surveillance After September 1. UK: Cambridge Polity. Mannay, D., et al. (2018). Negotiating Closed Doors and Constraining Deadlines: The Potential of Visual Ethnography to Effectively Explore Private and Public Spaces of Motherhood and Parenting. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 47(6), 758–781. Messier, P. (2019). Cameras at Work: Dusty Lenses and Processed Videos in the Quarries of Hyderabad. Visual Anthropology, 32(3–4), 287–308. Mirzoeff, N. (1999). The Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, W.  J. T. (2015). Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Nathansohn, R., & Zuev, D. (Eds.). (2013). Sociology of the Visual Sphere. New York: Routledge. O’Neill, M., & Hubbard, P. (2010). Walking, Sensing, Belonging: Ethno-Mimesis as Performative Praxis. Visual Studies, 25(1), 46–58. Pauwels, L. (2010). Visual Sociology Reframed: An Analytical Synthesis and Discussion of Visual Methods in Social and Cultural Research. Sociological Methods and Research May, 38, 545–581. Pauwels, L. (2015). Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pauwels, L., & Mannay, D. (2019). The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods. London: Sage. Pink, S. (2007). Walking with Video. Visual Studies, 22(3), 240–252. Pink, S., Sumartojo, S., Lupton, D., & LaBond, C.  H. (2017). Empathetic Technologies: Digital Materiality and Video Ethnography. Visual Studies, 32(4), 371–381.

1  INTRODUCTION: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGE 

21

Prosser, J. (1998). Image-Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers. London: Routledge. Rose, G. (2010). Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. London: Sage. Schatzki, T. (2002). The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Shortell, T., & Brown, E. (Eds.). (2014). Walking in the European city: Quotidian Mobility and Urban Ethnography. London: Routledge. Simonite, T. (2019). Behind the Rise of China’s Facial-Recognition Giants. https://www.wired.com/story/behind-rise-chinas-facial-recognition-giants/. Accessed 11 Apr 2019. Sindelar, M. J. (2019). When Workers Toil Unseen, Artists Intervene: On the In/ visibility of Labor in the Arabian Gulf States. Visual Anthropology, 32(3–4), 265–286. Sontag, S. (1979). On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stein, R.  L. (2017). GoPro Occupation: Networked Cameras, Israeli Military Rule, and the Digital Promise. Current Anthropology, 58(15), 56–S64. Stubblefield, T. (2005). 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2018). Practices of Looking. An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Traue, B., Blanc, M., & Cambre, C. (2019). Visibilities and Visual Discourses: Rethinking the Social with the Image. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(4), 327–337. Tyler, I. (2019). Stigma Machines. London: Zed Book. Vergani, M., & Zuev, D. (2011). Analysis of YouTube Videos Used by Activists in the Uyghur Nationalist Movement: Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Methods. Journal of Contemporary China, 20(69), 205–229. Wissel, C. (2013). Operations of Recognition: Seeing Urbanizing Landscapes with the Feet. In R.  Nathansohn & D.  Zuev (Eds.), Sociology of the Visual Sphere. New York: Routledge. Zuev, D. (2006). Reconstructing the Meanings of Traveling Among Young People in Modern Russia: The Use of the Photo Interview. European Spatial Research and Policy, 13(1), 113–131. Zuev, D. (2016). Visual Methods in Event Studies. In T. Pernecky (Ed.), Approaches and Methods in Event Studies (pp. 96–119). London, UK: Routledge. Zuev, D., & Bratchford, G. (2020). The Citizen Drone: Protest, Sousveillance and Droneviewing. Visual Studies, 35(6) (in print). Zuev, D., & Krase, J. (2017). Visual Sociology. Sociopedia.Isa. http://www.sagepub.net/isa/admin/viewPDF.aspx?&art=VisualSociology.pdf

CHAPTER 2

Methodologies of Visual Sociology

The aim of this chapter is to engage with some of the key ideas in visual sociology and outline the areas of its methodological engagement. We propose three essential areas for the holistic understanding of the ‘visual sphere’ as a subject of visual sociology (Nathansohn and Zuev 2013). Firstly, the interpretation of the image and visual communication; secondly, understanding materiality of the image and processes related to the circulation of the visual and identities related to them; and, finally, understanding the visual beyond pictures (Rogowski 2013)—such as the politics and practices of ‘gaze’, including visual production, framing and editing. Considering these three areas is essential as we set the questions that relate and traverse them. Our key point here is that negotiating the multiple domains of the visual sphere, one cannot assume or expect a neat order and easily prioritized encounters. In this book we deal with, and refer to, diverse methods and techniques ourselves and argue that visual sociology, as a multi-model discipline, requires a range of mixed methods of dealing with the visual in order to successfully see the world we engage with and the ways in which images engage us. For example, the realm of big visual data is one such instance where researchers will encounter a ‘messiness’ of entangled digital (software-determined) material and social frames of analysis. Such approaches come up against a constantly reformulated relationality—that can be grasped only by the in-depth thick descriptive (Geertz 1973) and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Zuev, G. Bratchford, Visual Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_2

23

24 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

multisensorial contextualization and interpretation where the issues beyond quantification can be mapped and taken into consideration. Another example of dealing with the constantly evolving visual sphere relates to the practice of vernacular photography. A practice that that has been gradually moving centre stage (Spence and Holland 1991) due in part to the paradigmatic shift from analogue to digital photography, and a number of related changes in vernacular photographic practice aligned to family photography, tourism and street photography that have benefited from an ease in distribution because of the Internet and social media platforms (Larsen and Sandbye 2014).

Interpreting Images Howard Becker in an often-cited essay ‘Photography and Sociology’ (1974) suggests that sociologists need to learn to see photographically and photographers need to learn to see sociologically. This is perhaps one of the crucial and persisting challenges in binding sociological thinking with visual methods. This necessity is a guiding principle in our work as sociologists. With this, we must welcome collaboration and continue to integrate different methods, techniques and ideas from other scholarly practices and traditions. Perhaps the most urgent challenge within our field is the ability to deal with the growing amount of visual material online. The idea of the image and the format of its appearance are changing. Sites of analysis will always be relevant, be it advertising hoardings in the city (Pauwels 2012; Bratchford 2020), signs and insignia in protest scenarios (McGarry et al. 2019; Zuev 2010) or in print format, like the classic work of anthropologists, Catharine Lutz and Jane Collin’s content analysis of 30 years of National Geographic magazine photo covers (1993). Yet, the volume of images produced and shared online, peer to peer, as tools or aids in conversation and most principally two way rather than producer to consumer, is a rich field of social analysis. The advent of digital technology has triggered new uses for photography including Gomez, Cruz and Meyer’s (2012) examination of the way particular social practices shape and are shaped by emergent technologies, such as the iPhone, which in turn trigger different visual regimes including the need for the analysis of emojis and hashtags (Highfield 2018). So too is there scope for the analysis of user-led practices on Instagram and Twitter to demonstrate how platforms both support and restrict vernaculars and discursive creativity within their everyday social media practices.

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

25

Such examples present new ways of seeing, reproducing, presenting and researching, specifically with an emphasis on the platform or technology that they are formed or mediated through. It should be noted that traditional forms of photography, which included film and digital print, are still hugely important, specifically as a tool within collaborative and participatory research. The notion of the image as a unit of information and a mobile entity is less fixed. Images online are a combination of traditional photographs, but also involve hybridity. This includes layering images atop of one another, collages, captioned pictures indicating an action or as part of a visual conversation, phone screenshots and photos of text messages, advertisements, memes and gifs. As social researchers, we must learn to work with these as well as recognize their form as png, jpeg, jpg, tiff, svg, gif or HEIC/ HEIG. The latter, earmarked as the ‘new’ format for the online age, supports multi-frame images with multi-frame compression, essential for multi-focus and multi-view images and is supported by Apple iOS and macOS1—the company and software behind the iPhone. Thus, it is telling that when we examine image-sharing sites such as Flickr, that also collate the metadata of the image uploaded, including which camera is most routinely used by Flickr’s members, the most popular ‘camera’ is an iPhone camera. Canon and Nikon, which would be considered ‘proper cameras’, sit in second and third, with Samsung’s range of Galaxy phones (the next best placed camera phone on the list) in eighth place.2 In 2009, Media and Communications theorist Nick Couldry wrote that ‘the digitalisation of media contents and the normalisation [emphasis added] in many societies of fast internet access, whether from fixed points or via mobile devices, means that, in principle, every point in space is connected through mediated communication, to every other point’ (2009: 438). Couldry was correct, and 11 years since that statement, the world is largely connected in a peer-to-peer capacity, taking, sharing or moving through images, in the most part, via smartphone. Similarly, Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet trend report states that, for the first time, more than half (51 per cent) the global population were identified as ‘internet users’ and an increasing number of people also using images to communicate [emphasis added]. The report added that ‘more than 50 percent of all 1  https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/best-image-format-for-web-in-2019jpeg-webp-heic-avif-41ba0c1b2789/ 2  https://www.flickr.com/cameras

26 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

tweets, for example, now include images’ (Meeker 2019). As people take more pictures than ever before, social media platforms (Chap. 4 in this book) as well as online image archives are amplifying new forms of community and communication. Over the course of the book, we will illustrate how interdisciplinary approaches to image analysis as well as multi-model techniques, such as those outlined in our concluding vignette, address the strengths and weaknesses of image analysis, including an exemplar of big data analysis produced by the Visual Social Media Lab (VSML) in 2015. The truth, however, that we would like to relate (repeating scholars before us) is that the ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of an image is what makes it valuable. We only have to look at the simple, but effective notion of Roland Barthes studium and punctum in the photo (Barthes 1981) to recognize that we can have both a thin and thick reading of an image. Such a take also speaks to the relationality of the image, interpreting that which is beyond what is seen and beyond its formal composition. While some photographers observe both punctum and studium simultaneously (this is exemplified by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ability to capture the ‘decisive moment’ in everyday life (1952)), this dialectic (rather than binary opposition) is often recognized afterwards, when selecting images for maximum impact as a single photo or as a part of a narrative. While we do not intend to trace the genealogy of long-standing and recognized practices in visual methodology (they have been covered elsewhere: see the comprehensive SAGE handbook of visual research by Margolis and Pauwels 2011; Pauwels and Mannay 2019). Our aim is to signpost to them while also offering complementary examples to further strengthen our field whilst working within the parameters of the Pivot format that foregrounds impact and immediacy over depth. With this in mind, we move to address several important recent method-oriented studies in the next section. The chapter concludes with a vignette that reflects on some of the themes and ideas unpacked in this chapter.

Visual Methodologies Luc Pauwels in his book Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology (2015) develops a cumulative meta-­ perspective, suggesting the need for a ‘systematic methodology for the collection, production, analysis and communication of visual data and insights trying to make sense of the multimodality of images’ (Pauwels

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

27

2015: 4). It is the ‘in-between’ decisions of a visual researcher that matter for Pauwels, specifically, the role or status of the visual materials throughout these four processes of collection, production, analysis and communication of visual data. Indeed, the origin and nature of the visuals are one of the key themes in the meta-perspective. These can be found or pre-­ existing visual materials, researcher-produced visual data and respondent-­ generated visual data, which can also be co-produced visual data. Essentially, Pauwels urges visual researchers to expand the scope and domain of visual sociology, and to demonstrate its methodological potency in addressing complex social issues beyond using images as illustrations. This turn towards a more systematic meta-perspective suggests a wide welcome and integration of visual methods to deal with the visual as a part of more multimodal texts, such as websites (Pauwels 2012). In these multimodal texts, the visual is but one of the features that, along with auditory and textual features, become crucial in grasping the holistic understanding of visual data and the visual materiality. Like Pauwels, another cornerstone of the discipline is Douglas Harper. Harper’s visual approach is both photographically and sociologically engaging, with Harper being a very proficient photographer, his own photography is often the main focus as a data source, which has often been the criticism of visual researchers who see the power of the image beyond its aesthetic qualities. However, that is the author’s trademark and one needs to acknowledge that Harper’s studies on the use of photographs, photo-­ documentary methods and working alongside other sociologists (see Knowles and Harper 2009) have given boost to an entire generation of young visual sociologists. Harper’s approach can be defined as aestheticizing visual and primarily photographic data, which is giving significance to the quality and impact of the visual material produced by the researcher. A similar system can also be traced in Terence Heng’s approach. For Heng (2017), the key medium at play is the camera and the photographic codes or ‘photographic grammar’, which Terence Heng establishes though his own practice and narrative-based fieldwork. Here the use of photographic practices is called upon to enhance the viewing of the social issues in question. Perhaps sometimes these issues are on the surface or within the scope of the photographer’s own instrumental social and cultural knowledge, through rituals and symbolic interactions with spaces and events that he is already familiar with. For Heng, this is rooted in the analysis of sacred space and religious rituals in Chinese culture.

28 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Becker (1974), Emmison and Smith (2000) and Pauwels (2015) have stated the necessity to connect visual sociology with mainstream social scientific tradition. While Pauwels sees the challenge in the lack of integration and divergent non-communicating specialisms, Emmison and Smith see the problem in the overuse of photography in a purely illustrative, archival and documentary way, instead of treating them in a more analytically thorough fashion. As a counterargument, they suggest giving more valence to other observable and not necessarily recordable entities including objects, buildings and social interactions. Others, such as Heng (2017) and the VSML (2015) (see our vignette below), offer examples of ways and techniques for creating, examining and using visual data as a tripartite process that plays to the ‘in-betweenness’ Pauwels calls for. For each, the image is both the site of analysis and also the tool of engagement with society. For Heng (ibid.), the emphasis is put on the photographer-researcher in the field, who in turn thinks in the moment but also with what one should or could do with an image for the purpose of action research. The VSML takes a similar position, but using found images, observe their potential influence and life within a specific context, producing big data visualizations to map an image’s influence and movement whilst also examining why that image was resonant to begin with. Hence, the key argument among visual sociologists concerns the quality of the visual data: what to consider as data and how to process it. Since photographs are still widely used by visual sociologists and both authors support the use of photographs as visual data, we can be more specific and practical by posing a question: how can photographs or images be analysed? [We will deal with this question later in this chapter]. But before we arrive at the concrete image analysis, one has to consider broader conceptual framework for examining and contextualizing visual data.

Contextualizing the Visual Data: Beyond the Gaze Emmison and Smith in their book Researching the Visual: Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural Inquiry (2010) make a crucial proposal in thinking of visuality of social life as it appears in ‘diverse and counterintuitive forms’. To do so, they suggest the extension of the visual sociological method from the study of the image to the study of the seen and observable, thus focusing on the importance of looking at complex interactions and semiotics, related to objects, buildings, people and

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

29

images. Interestingly, the fact that Emmison and Smith see the image also as a part of this wider visual universe has been often overlooked by critics (Harper 2012: 68). Indeed, the image is one part of the hyper-visual world we now live in, but the changing ways of seeing and looking are no less important. Just to exemplify how visual sociologists examined social interaction and public space, we refer to a photo picturing Bologna on Sunday afternoon by Douglas Harper (2012). Harper depicts people walking the streets and looking at each other or sideways. To observe and comment on these slight social interactions today would be less fruitful because now the mere presence of the smartphone has radically changed the seeing-walking rhythm and the flaneur practice. Rather than exchanging slight glances, individuals are more commonly glued to their screens, even when crossing the street. This is epitomized by a marketing move in the Chinese city of Chongqing which established a dedicated lane for the smartphone users glued to their screens and where pedestrians can avoid bumping into one another or obstacles. While the gaze and mutuality of gaze is evolving along with the way we walk, the different speeds and rhythms of walking determine how people look around and notice their surroundings, strangers and avoid or establish visual contact. The new downward gaze is the characteristic feature of our time. The concept of gaze has been one of the key methodologically relevant concepts in the study of visual experience and is being constantly reused. It is Laura Mulvey (1975) who approached the gendered gaze and John Urry who suggested the metaphor of the ‘tourist gaze’ (1990) as a central perspective to understanding the practices and experiences of tourists as primarily visual consumers of places and events. More recently, visual sociologists and anthropologists have gone beyond the ocularcentricity of spatial experience, while at the same time using the gaze and visual sense as an access point to understanding multisensorial elements of the human experience (Pink 2007). The visual can help to uncover the ‘fleeting’ (Law and Urry 2004) and affective moments that constitute the experience of being in a place, and when words do not easily come to express this experience. For instance, photographs and postcards have been crucial in reconstructing the tourist experience of sublime nature, such as Antarctica. When asked to talk about their experience, emotionally overwhelmed tourists, often with tears in their eyes, did not know what to say, but upon presenting their own photographs (Fig. 2.1), they would speak of sounds, smells and haptic experience during their Antarctic journey (Zuev and

30 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 2.1  Visualizing the Antarctic journey through the sounds of the whale. A photo of a whale is a significant ‘trophy’ in terms of recording not only an iconic mammal but also relating to the trip to Antarctica as a magical multisensorial experience. (Photo: Wilko Onken)

Picard 2015). The image can thus be employed to extract layers of meanings and facilitate reflexivity on other emotions and multiple senses of the lived experience or increase emotional involvement and bonding between researchers and participants in an active, collaborative process of self-­ representation (Nash and Moore 2018). One of the most recent fields of interdisciplinary visual scholarship to foreground this approach is socially engaged practice. This is because such a practice is concerned as much with processes that serve a need of the particular community of participants as with artistic outcomes (Bratchford et al. 2018: 83). With an emphasis on participation, collaboration and co-­ production, socially engaged practices, including, but not limited to, photography, afford participants the space to visualize their own world. A process that can be emancipatory and democratizing, the use of self-­ produced images that do not have to be aesthetically appealing can complement or, at times, exceed verbal communication.

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

31

Preparing the Ground for Visual Analysis Visual content is only truly comprehensible when one takes into account the social world in which it is embedded. What are the key dimensions of such embedding? Gillian Rose, formulating the program of critical visual methodology, suggests three criteria for the visual: cultural significance, social practices and power relations in which it is embedded (Rose 2016). Interpretation needs to take into account the social impacts of the image, the effect that the image can achieve as meaningful, affective and interactive; in our view, this interactivity is relational and performative. We elaborate relationality and performativity of the image by viewing it beyond the visual dimension in terms of (in)visibility, coding and technological affordances to performance of practices. The issue of visibility is surprisingly absent in the critical visual methodology. We aim to affirm that visibility is a key aspect for critical visual sociological inquiry in the same vein that, despite many years of image sharing on social media, there had been surprisingly little published academic research (Serafinelli 2018) that focused on the images themselves and the kind of visibility they provided (Thelwall et al. 2016). To assist in our thinking about visibility, we must also think about how it can be conceptualized. The term scopic regime coined by Christian Metz (1982) has become key in conceptualizing the cultural construction of what we see and how it is seen. This has been key in examining the asymmetric power relations linked to the mediation of sight (Grayson and Mawdsley 2019). Notably, the concept of scopic regimes had been employed to investigate the relationship between visuality and violence, specifically mediated violence inflicted by military technologies, to render visible technological force of single nations over the others (Gregory 2012). Crucially, Maurer in her discussion of drones (2016) speaks of scopic regimes as regimes of framing in relation to the operators of the scopic (seeing) technology and the targets (viewers), making domination hyper-visible and immersive. The consequence of this is the increasing or diminishing empathy and moral attachment to the targets within the extended scopic regime of visibility.

32 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Visibility and Filtering Visibility was proposed by Andrea Brighenti as one of the key sociological concepts, which goes beyond the visual dimension and relates to a complex relationship of perception and power of aesthetics and politics (2007). The property of visibility is that the processes of seeing and being seen are intimately connected. At the same time, the relational aspect of visibility supposes the normalcy of asymmetries and distortions. The asymmetry of the seen and unseen is driven by the dominant logic of neoliberalism, where certain social forms are made invisible or deviant. Visibility serves as a demarcation tool for drawing the boundaries between formal and informal public order. Ultimately, visibility is instrumental in capturing the shifts of the codes—ideological, optical and social, which structure the visual or, as we discussed earlier, ‘scopic’ regimes. Visibility is thus a key lens in understanding the relations of power and tensions between recognition and control. Along with regimes of visibility, we must also recognize that the technologies that support them are the key mediators between our beliefs and actual experiences, particularly in an algorithmic culture, informed by power of technology. According to Jill Walker Rettberg (2014), filters and filtering are key in understanding the power of technology to alter and modify reality. Filters can be both technological and cultural and can be applied to how we understand our social relations within our digital culture practices, where we have to filter the constant and multiple streams of information, not completely removing it, but slowly sifting it. In a narrower sense, filters can be equated to codes (e.g. when applied to optical filtering or enhancement or modification of representation), thus suggesting a specific visual storytelling. Visual filters can be used to enhance diverse thematic narratives and genres of self-documentation—success, radical, spiritual or corporeal change or harmony with the surrounding world. Technology (e.g. platforms with their unique visual interfaces) add to the formatting of visual stories and in doing so enables us to apply our cultural filters, such as rituals and prejudices, and traditions and thus becomes more visible to others and to ourselves. Some of these theoretical caveats are essential in the practical analysis of images or the whole domains in visual sphere (for instance, visual social media domain). The aim is to elevate our awareness of the visual as the product of iterative modification, embedded conventions and technological affordances. At the same time, being conscious of the visual as the

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

33

arena where power relations set the rules for the visibility of certain phenomena and make others less distinguishable. Considering these theoretical and conceptual ideas, we move on to diverse strategies of image analysis. In the next section, we will offer some guidelines that are no more than that, knowing that each setting and environment must be approached in relation to the specifics of its own context.

Different Strategies of Image Analysis: Some Guidelines and Caveats One of the key claims in sociological analysis is the consideration of images as data and evidence, and not merely as an illustration or embellishment of a sociological argument (Zuev and Krase 2017). However, one can also conduct visual sociological analysis without presenting any images—as visual sociological approaches can be used to analyse non-visual data, for example, when interviewing people on how they create, interpret and circulate images. In this section we will review the existing caveats that various researchers developed as a cache of image-based qualitative methodologies. Jon Prosser, posing the question what constitutes a visual methodology, suggests that images should be used not only as a method but an integral part of the research process (1996). That is, the researcher has to be ready to give images the same data status as words and texts. As in any research, a theoretical framework guides the research process, and context is provided to allow for better understanding of the image-data beyond its representation, thus avoiding ambiguity and embedding the image in a time and place. It is becoming more and more essential for researchers to reflect on their research process. Decisions made by researchers about the criteria and procedure for selecting particular images are important; however, little is often cited ‘in the doing’ and as to why those images and, in particular, any reflexivity on the value of the selection post analysis. Accordingly, Prosser (1996) states that the camera’s ability to record details can be instrumental in considering the subtleties of the interactions and observed events. When interpreting images, the quality of the image as evidence is a controversial aspect in image-based research. Luc Pauwels (2015) provides a very reflective summary on how to deal with the quality of the image and eliminate the researcher’s bias. The bias in selecting images is a paramount issue, which can be tackled via randomization of the

34 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

sample of images, thus minimizing bias rooted in recording what is interesting and the way of recording the selected research units. Selection of research units can follow a formal ‘shooting script’ (Suchar 1997) that allows for uniformity of the visual records before the shooting or to employ a ‘photographic survey’ (Krase and Shortell 2011) during the shooting. The aesthetic quality of the image in the second case may be of less importance in its evaluation as data, where systematic photographing is performed ‘without regard to particular content or aesthetics’ (2011: 372). A direct analysis approach (Malcolm Collier 2008) provides a helpful step-by-step process to undertaking image analysis, helping to structure what we do with images, and how to search for both detail and pattern. The steps that Collier suggests also require consideration that any focused examination on predefined points of interest is likely to limit true discovery which is provided by ‘captured moments’ and ‘chaotic details’ (Zuev 2016). Collier’s (2008) plan for the direct analysis of photographs can be summarized as consisting of several important stages or steps: • Conducting an inventory of images, where identifying information is given (location, time, special notes or recording technicalities). • Conducting formal analysis with open immersion and discovery, which supposes holistic observation of visual records, sequence of images, where patterns can be identified and coded. • Conducting structured detailed analysis, details or punctum can be identified and probed at this stage of analysis. • Conducting cross-checking and using photographs via method triangulation, when images are used to interview people who may be participants of the event or not related to it to see the variation of meanings and readings by different viewer groups. • Conducting a search for meaning in detail and in complete visual record, this final procedure being crucial in all qualitative data analysis, where researcher has to go back to original context and review the original thoughts with later acquired insights. With the modern-day possibilities of digital image manipulation and multiple authorship, images are a series of technical, aesthetic and the subjective choices of their authors. Images become ideologically active and may be assigned specific intentionality, which proposes peculiar ways of seeing and makes them exert different impact on particular audiences. To

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

35

this end, we must consider Gillian Rose’s (2016) assertion that as researchers we must approach image analysis with a consideration for the intended audience of the given visual output. According to Rose, images do not provide transparent windows to reality and offer no single destination. We become the subjects of the image by adopting a position from which we make sense of an image. As Rose adds, the meanings of images rest in the site of the audience, and it is the audience that essentially makes the images meaningful. Thus, the performative or interactional force of the images is in calming or inciting to action, mystifying and persuading. The movement from descriptive to analytical or interpretative to interacting with images is a crucial step. A dynamic or interactional approach to image analysis (described below) encourages us to interrogate what images do instead of what they contain, moving from a descriptive approach to a thorough and more analytical engagement (Hook and Glaveanu 2013). Seeing images as pure ‘evidence’ is as limiting as treating images as ‘illustrations’. Images should be regarded as both meaningful (representational) and active (intentional), where the form and content are dynamically related. The interactive approach moves from the fixation on specific elements in an image to considering images as doings or acts and the question of power relations behind a particular image—how it is that images do what they do is put on the centre stage. The images are thus not analysed as contents with ideological and rhetorical efficacy, but as relations between formal (compositional) elements and their impact upon the audiences. For the purpose of analysing the relational image, we complement some of the following questions to those posed by Hook and Glaveanu (2013): • What is the particular function this image has? • What does it want its audience to do? What does the image itself effectively do? • How successful is it in achieving this end? • What is its relation to the audience? (What is the audience?) • Who produced the image and with what purpose? • How does the compositionality of the image relate and contribute to the overall strategic intention of the image? While first reactions to the image are important, they provide clues for deciphering latent messages. As the initial phase of analysis, generating the first associations, speculative assumptions and creative ideas can be

36 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

complemented by the subsequent task of identifying the formal features or ‘compositionality’ (Rose 2016) that might be at work in engendering such effects. Diverse analytic strategies can be applied in combination while content analysis will allow us to categorize image contents, quantifying and grouping visual components, semiotics will help to trace the registers of denotation (what is depicted) and connotation (what is expressed through what is being depicted), thus uncovering multiple layers of meaning within every image. ‘Compositionality’ Compositionality is one of the key aspects of analysing the constitutive elements of the relational image, as it is often through the compositionality and its formal features that the image engages and acts upon the audience: subsequently accruing ideological and rhetorical efficacy, eventually forming and becoming a myth. At the same time, it is only applicable to static images, and not videos or films, where a different logic to dynamic audio-visual narrative would apply. Analysis of any representational form is a constructive process, where meaning is generated in the interaction of the reader and the material. The interactive analysis of still images presupposes that the researcher and image are engaged in a mutual act upon each other. Formal interventions of a researcher will include removing elements from the image (altering the way of seeing), replacing elements (by means of a ‘commutation test’ (displacing various components with others), amplifying or reducing particular elements, and emphasizing or schematizing elements (drawing on the picture, showing up relations of symmetry, etc.) (Hook and Glaveanu 2013). While the context and placement of the image are an obvious consideration in understanding the image, the interrogation of compositional elements within the frame is crucial in dealing with the intended reading or function of the image. For an initial orientation in the still image analysis, the following four groups of elements can be distinguished (ibid.): –– –– –– ––

Sensory elements such as colour, lighting and texture Structural elements, such as axis, perspective and depth Dynamic elements, such as points of tension, gaze or address Emerging elements (focal point and direction of interest)

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

37

Significantly, the dynamic and emerging elements allow us to explore various reading paths for the image and analyse it as a part of a dynamic sequence with a relation to time and appropriate questions of what happened before and will happen next, as well as what is achieved by freezing this moment in time. Collier’s (2008) direct analysis of photographs, coupled with his interactive approach, will no doubt provide a valuable starting point for those researchers who need a clear and practical ‘how-to’ reference for the analysis of static images. On the practical side, we could add that while one single image and its compositionality definitely offer a window into how the image works on its audience, one should, whenever possible, examine a number of images within a series on a similar topic, dedicated to one object or theme, for instance, advertisements of a particular brand or an object in different magazines. Collier’s approach can also be applied as part of a wider, participatory process-based strategy to research, included in participant-led activities like photovoice projects and photo-elicitation workshops. Premised upon giving people cameras to represent their experiences and perspectives on a given topic, such as community strengths and problems, photovoice projects usually culminate with a discussion of the photos and a participant-led output (e.g. book, exhibit). Moreover, the process and outcome, which is typically led by an expert practitioner, can, as Esther Prins suggests, help inform community projects and advocate for their interests (Prins 2010: 427). Photographs, John Radley writes, ‘are not just pictures of the world (as it is) but are also resources for communicating how it might have been and what it could be in the future’ (Radley 2010: 268). By offering individuals or community groups the opportunity to document their own world as they see it provides a wealth of analytical material. Like mathematicians, we should remember to show our working out because there is as much information in the process as there is in the outcome. As we move into a more interdisciplinary realm, where photographers become sociologists and sociologists, photographers, to paraphrase Becker (1974), the scope of methodological thinking (and justification) must also widen. To account for this, specifically as artists and arts-based practitioners engage in sociological research, we must all become more concerned with the way practice-based approaches can lead to new knowledge, both through and with visual material. Two such examples, which have grown within the discipline of visual sociology and have developed this process-based reflexivity, are the photo-elicitation interview and the

38 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

photo walk. In both cases, the justification for the decision and logic of the route or images used must be acknowledged (Bratchford et al. 2018) in addition to the examination of the data produced. Photo-elicitation is a process that is based on the simple idea of inserting a photograph into a research interview. The difference between interviews using images and text and interviews using words alone lies in the ways we respond to these two forms of symbolic representation (Harper 2002: 13). As a process, elicitation is not simply a means of information extraction but also evokes a different kind of information. As Jon Prosser recognizes, ‘images [can] provide researchers with a different order of data and, more importantly, an alternative to the way we have perceived data in the past’ (Prosser 1998: 1). Generally described as ‘the use of photographs during the interview process’ (Lapenta 2011: 201); photo-­ elicitation interviews can be designed as either an open-ended interview variation or a semi-structured interview (Gariglio 2016) with the researcher, the subjects or both being able to produce the images that are used in the interview. This approach is particularly useful as a means of producing ‘thick description’ in research, specifically as a means of introducing new layers of data into the research framework. Participatory visual workshops can be empowering and validating for those that take part in them. Participatory visual methods have a multitude of intersections and can be activity based but often used in situational contexts. Such methodologies are often process-based and used to build rapport with the participants. Often focused around giving participants cameras (though not exclusively), visual themes are set for the participants to explore and can include matters such as visualizing environmental harm (Natali 2019) or barriers within one’s everyday environment (Bratchford et  al. 2018). Broad-reaching themes can then be distilled through the analysis of images and used to elicit information on the choice of shot, why that subject, where and when it was taken, as well as discussing ideas of intentionality and composition that allow the researcher to look ‘behind the pictures’ rather than ‘at’ or ‘through the pictures’ (Wright 2008). The analysis of photographs, like those depicted in Fig. 2.2, can stimulate conversations about narratives and lesser spoken understandings of space. For example, in the photos laid out on the table (as in Fig 2.2), many of the images are taken in darkened settings. This could be due to participants only being able and free to take photos at night due to work commitments. Grouping the photos into themes or ‘anticipated topics’ that function primarily as ‘bins’ to sort and organize themes for further

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

39

Fig. 2.2  A photo from the workshops showing image analysis and photo-­ elicitation with a participant. The images were taken during the initial disposable camera project. We categorized them into ‘themes’ based on the content. Many of the shots were taken in the dark evenings to highlight the remoteness and isolation of the area, or from inside their houses looking out onto the dark landscape. (Photo: Gary Bratchford)

analysis (Maxwell 2005: 97) is a useful post-workshop approach. Reflecting on the photographs, more information, outside the context of the reflective workshop, can be undertaken, including compositional analysis. Importantly, what we also see here is the process of elicitation rather than just a reflection on the outcome itself. As we noted at the top of the section, our scope of methodological thinking and our justification for it must also widen. Arts-based sociological practice offers a new way to detail process-based practice places emphasis in detailing and reflecting upon approaches as well as outcomes. To this end, the images above attest to our appeal that as visual sociologists (and social scientists at large) the journey and process is often more important and enriching than the final outcome, specifically when we take away the emphasis placed upon aesthetics.

40 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Ethics in Visual Sociology: Three Spaces of Consideration The discussion of ethics is inevitably embedded in the practice of visual sociology, and while many scholars have discussed issues related to photography-­based visual methods, including smartphone photography (Blaagaard 2013), there is still a lack of consensus regarding the best ways of using visual social media and meeting the related challenges regarding the data and representational ethics. One of the initial references here could be the British Sociological Association statement of ethical practice regarding the use of digital media. Furthermore, Prosser, Clark and Wiles (2008) have argued that visual research ethics are contested, dynamic and contextual and should be best approached through detailed understanding of the concrete, everyday situations in which they are applied. It is also useful to keep in mind that despite the wish of many researchers to advocate on behalf, though ideally with marginalized social subjects (such as youth, homeless, refugees) in co-creative ways by means of participatory visual methodologies, the responsibility to protect participants in visual research still prevails in much research ethics guidance (Fink and Lomax 2016). While the best practices in any research refer to consent and confidentiality, it is often not possible to return to the casual subjects stumbled upon and captured with visual media, and anonymization is needed as the only available means to protect the research subjects. There is, however, a wide debate regarding anonymization through blurring and pixilating as techniques that obscure the intentions and creativity of the research subjects (Fink and Lomax 2016). Terence Heng (2017) suggests valuable advice on gaining consent and field presence of the camera, suggesting also in-­ camera techniques for ethical visual research, such as framing to conceal, using shutter speed to anonymize and post-processing blurs. These technical features allow to use images later in presenting and disseminating visual research. Heng’s own experience suggests that gaining consent can be very situational and is highly dependent on various factors: the lack of ‘research fatigue’, acceptance of imaging devices and a chance for the group to gain publicity (ibid.). We would add that it is also highly dependent on the acceptance of imaging among different communities or cultures, and a growing tolerance of non-obtrusive devices, such as smartphone. At the same time, when covering large events, the size and type of the camera are crucial in influencing consent, with the professional cameras

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

41

being seen as the sign of a professional eye, and smartphone or a point and shoot camera as an amateur one. Diversity of tools available can be a balancing act, which is also crucial for the researcher’s own safety and comfort. Needless to say, that establishing trust between researcher and research participants is a long-term investment and ongoing process, which will give researcher with a longer exposure the potential to uncover invisible aspects of the community. In recent years, platforms like YouTube have worked to taken into account the ubiquity of the image and ethical significance of the circulatory nature of images, specifically through the video-sharing platform. In 2012, YouTube announced they would launch a video blurring tool to assist human rights organizations by protecting the identity of activists and those at risk of rights abuses. Supported by Human Rights Organization, WITNESS, the face blurring tool was updated in 2015, allowing users to blur selected items in their video, such as faces or other identifying information, as well as delete the original copy of the video hosted on the platform (Fig. 2.3) which WITNESS state is vital for protecting the identities of activists or victims of human rights

Fig. 2.3  Screen grab from Human Rights Organization WITNESS demonstrating how YouTube has adopted their face blurring functionality on their video-­ sharing platform in 2016

42 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

abuse who wish to speak in situations where they may be under threat. These logics have also been built upon by mobile applications such as ObscuraCam amongst others. Finally, in visually based ethnographic fieldwork, ‘situated ethics’ (Peres 2019) can be a relevant way to cope with complexity of ethical codes especially when researching sensitive topics or working with stigmatized, vulnerable, marginalized groups and informal communities. The situated ethics approach is important as it allows one to avoid entrenching stigmatized identities and hierarchical relationships (ibid.).

Ethical Issues in Online Visual Research Moving from the ‘field’ to the office comes with its own ethical considerations. Internet research can be done in an unobtrusive way; however, the Internet is an elusive domain, where not everything can be appropriated without restriction; issues of informed consent, privacy and confidentiality also apply in online visual research. At the same time, obtaining informed consent from online populations can be problematic, as the groups constantly shift and disappear. To this end, the quest by researchers to document unstable material, such as websites, in order to map their aesthetic characteristics, is part of a new field of web archiving (Brügger 2010) that is still methodologically and theoretically underdeveloped. Similarly, web historians, who seek to archive, locate or retrieve digital data in the interest of future research, are operating without a defined toolkit. Lacking an established research infrastructure, which includes rigorous ethical considerations that can keep pace with technological developments and users, is also not without its problems: these include, but are not limited to, storage and future use. Important in this respect is the possibility of anonymization of online images with their further use in research and presentation via creative techniques suggested by Heng (2017); in this respect issues arise as to the rights and/or modification of the image. Our word of encouragement is to not magnify the complexity of ethical issues or of using images produced by others, as authors and artists are often happy to grant copyright permission and appropriate images can be found in creative commons repositories.

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

43

Ethics in Participatory Methodologies: Are You an Insider or Outsider? Lastly, ethical considerations are also central to the locus of participatory and socially engaged approaches.3 Researchers must move beyond the notion of the ‘subject’ and begin to think more collaboratively. Equally, who is the author, where does the notion of ownership lay and how does one disengage from a group or community safely. Researchers, as well as cultural institutions, where much of this work is being exhibited as a space of debate and engagement, must consider their responsibilities and manage expectations. This must be examined in relation to the funding climate. For example, Community Art and Socially Engaged Practice has, at times, been criticized for its need to evidence ‘deliverable’ outcomes, losing sight of its original ethos (Bratchford 2019). In 1973, Harold Baldry, the then chair of the Community Arts Working Panel for the Arts Council UK, noted that: The primary concern [of community artists] is their impact on a community and their relationship with it: by assisting those with whom they make contact to become more aware of their situation and of their own creative powers, and by providing them with facilities they need to make use of their abilities, they hope to widen and deepen the sensibilities of the community in which they work and so to enrich its existence. (Arts Council of Britain, 1974: 3 cited in Jeffers and Moriarty 2017: 14)

While participatory work has a long and rich tradition of scholarly investigation (Freire 1970; Barndt 1980; Luttrell 1988), there is a clear shift towards collaboration and co-creation, and a focus is now increasingly placed on trying to develop or sustain lasting change and project legacy for those who participate, as well as having traditional research aims and objectives. A simple reflection to finish upon is whether the photographer is an insider or outsider, and the implications of this position. Many students undertake ethnographic photography projects each term. The question of ethics can be easily reduced down to what you want to do with the image and ultimately who the benefactor of the image/project. On the one hand, we frequently assume authenticity and truth to be located on the 3  See an interesting set of reflections on being an ambivalent figure of the ‘dereliction tourist’ by Alice Mah (2014) and the ethics of ‘being there’ as a witness in different places and people’s surroundings.

44 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

inside (the truth of the subject), and, at the same time, we routinely (culturally) locate and define objectivity (as in reportage or journalistic practice) in the exteriority of non-complication. We must come back to the function of the image and the role of the photographer and have the capacity to recognize where we stand in relation to the subject. For example, Nan Goldin’s famous work of her relationship to the New York drag scene of the 1980s can be examined in a multitude of ways: from the point of documentary photography, as well as a sociology of culture, performance and space, and as an auto-ethnographic study of herself and her photographic practice. Knowing the subjects and having such a close proximity to them, emotionally, socially, culturally, her work is not exploitative. Rather, we argue, it takes a ‘confessional mode’ of lived experience and privileged access to unique knowledge in which the photographer has a personal stake in the representation of their subjects, sometimes also even appearing in the images herself. Arguably, the same could not be said for Diane Arbus who took an outsider view. Documenting and snapping subjects, who on the surface appear distressed with their environment or vulnerable in their appearance, the allure of her eye is a voyeuristic and potentially exploitative one.4 While Goldin clearly had an intimate relationship with her subjects, how can the photographer control the reception of these images by the viewer once they appear publicly? To this end, we can turn to our third New  Yorker, Martha Rosler. Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–1975) presents what is maybe an alternative to the binarism of inside/out. Rather than representing the ‘other’, in this case drunks along the infamous Bowery in New York, the artist juxtaposes photographs of the doorways (in which the drunk men spend much of their time) and panels of text featuring lists of popular slang for drunks and drunkenness. In this way, the artist works to unpick the complexities of the insider/outsider by presenting spaces that invite enquiry, through their visual redundancy. In the same vain, Rosler also engages in a critique of the limitations of both visual and verbal modes of representation that are so prescient within visual sociology.

4  For a throughly rich and detailed unpacking of this debate, see www.photopedagody.com which is a brilliant resource for supporting the teaching and delivery of photography and photo theory.

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

45

Vignette: Exploring Big Visual Data Data and, in particular, the visual aspects of big data are now a hive of research activity to varying degrees of success and value. An emerging field, the literature is limited, specifically when compared to scholarly work on other text-based forms of social media communication. In what follows we very briefly touch upon two useful and interesting big visual data projects. In his project Selfiecity,5 Lev Manovich and his team worked with large visual data sets of selfies made in different cities. The project approached the visual data in three ways: through applied large-scale image network analysis, working with images at different scales and, finally, via in-depth qualitative analysis of images. The three-way methodological approach identified that three approaches to the same dataset can yield different insights from the same data and function in mutually supportive ways. A data visualization project framed around analysing ‘the style of self-­ portraits’ in various locations across the globe, Selfiecity focused on compositionality and elements of content analysis within the selfie/self-portrait image to determine a range of interpretations and comparative frameworks including gender and age profiling through performative display. While largely quantitative, of particular interest, is the project’s potential to open up new sides of the relational image, providing insights on how interfaces (software) and new media logics may determine an individual’s behaviour. Framed around selfies, the project highlighted new aesthetic codes and practices of self-display akin to Goffmanian ‘gender displays’ for our new, hyper-visual age. Founded in 2014, the Visual Social Media Lab (VSML) is an exemplar of visual social media analysis, which methodologically works across scale, from qualitative to quantitative analysis. Created as a meeting point for researchers from different sectors and disciplines, including media studies, communication studies, visual culture, art history, software studies, information science, computer science and sociology to combat the ‘gaps’ in the methodological processes outlined above in quantitative, qualitative and computational approaches. In 2015 the team investigated the visual impact of the now-iconic image of the drowned Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, who made global headlines when his body was washed ashore on 2 September 2015 after the dinghy carrying him and 11 other Syrian refugees capsized on its way from Turkey to Greece. Photographed by Nilüfer Demir, and originally 5

 See www.selfiecity.net. Accessed 23.10.2019.

46 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

uploaded to the Turkish news agency DHA’s website image gallery, the VSML was able to forensically track the photo of Alan, from the moment it entered the Twitter eco-system at 10:32  am when it was tweeted by Turkish journalist and activist Michelle Demishevich; in 12  hours the image was shared across 20 million Twitter screens. The project pulled data from a range of social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram) via Pulsar,6 which retrieved, analysed and visualized historic data between 1 and 14 September 2015. Pulling in over 2 million results, with the majority from Twitter, using mainly English language search terms as well as the Turkish hashtag, #kiyiyavuraninsanli, which translates as ‘humanity washed ashore’. By breaking the 12-hour journey into 4 subsets of time, each with its own diffusion point, the team produced a series of visualization networks pertaining to the number of tweets sharing the image, refined by the location of the tweet, the number of followers aligned to the tweeter, visibility score and the number of retweets received by each tweet. While the story remained largely regional and shared predominately through a Turkish speaking Twittersphere, Twitter was also the main amplifier of the image (Faulkner et al. 2018: 170). Interestingly, as the scale of the tweet and story increased, what became increasingly apparent was the inconsistency of the representative image. As Faulkner et al. note: While the original press image of Alan dominated the first 48 hours of the diffusion cycle, from 4 September onwards, a highly diverse range of adapted images began to appear including images of him with his brother (alive), cartoons of Alan and also alternate images of him on the beach from the original press selection originally uploaded to the Turkish news agency, DHA. (2018: 172)

Perhaps most significantly, from a visual sociology perspective, was the team’s range of analysis. Beginning with large-scale analysis that not only gave the image a narrative but also afforded compensability, taking into account the social world through which the image appeared and from where it became digitally embedded. The VSML also undertook qualitative analysis to examine specifically ‘why that image’ had the potential to resonate so affectively at a time when such tragic events were unfortunately a routine occurrence. 6

 Pulsar is an advanced audience analysis platform.

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

47

Working with a refined dataset of the top 1000 image-based tweets of Alan’s body from the beach as well as working on the motif of Alan being carried from the beach by the police officer, their qualitative analysis of pictorial recontextualization attested to how this motif was rapidly reframed in relation to very different rhetorical purposes. The VSML determined that ‘the use of the motif of Alan’s body presented a particularly strong example of the “migration” of images that has been a crucial aspect of their cultural function for millennia (Belting 2011), but which has gained an accelerated intensity through social media’ (Faulkner et al. 2018: 173). A further refinement of the 100 most retweeted images added detail to the findings of network analysis and big data visualizations, namely, the circulation of adaptative images after the first 48 hours of the original image being circulated. This qualitative approach offers a good example of how close interpretation of images can attend to the socio-cultural meanings of visual social media that are excluded by quantitative methods employed in the Selfiecity or similar projects. To sum it up, the trick with big visual data is not to analyse what the patterns reveal, but how to interpret them and question whether these are indeed cultural patterns, where the causality is often very tricky. We do not intend to dismiss the sociological importance of big visual data projects, as long as they go beyond data visualization ventures. For instance, the Selfiecity project asserted that people smiled more in selfies in Bangkok than in Moscow. It was not easy to say why, nor did (or could) the researchers explain why this was the case. We could speculate that the answer to this is a result of residents in Bangkok having better weather or that they are generally happier; the data seemed to play into stereotypical tropes. The numbers fail to explain the way people smile or do not smile on selfies, as it fails to take into account the multiple contexts of selfie-taking for different users. Like those working on Selfiecity, visual sociologists sometimes miss the point that quantitative data is providing. The caveat is that we should continue to look beyond our disciplinary boundaries and examine images and their function through a more cross-disciplinary, mixed-method, experimental and conceptual lens.

48 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

References Barndt, D. (1980). Education and Social Change: A Photographic Study of Peru. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co. Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New  York: Hill and Wang. Becker, H. (1974). Photography and Sociology. Studies in Visual Communication, 1(1), 3–26. Belting, H. (2011). An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blaagaard, B.  B. (2013). Post-Human Viewing: A Discussion of the Ethics of Mobile Phone Imagery. Visual Communication, 12(3), 359–374. Bratchford, G. (2019). Visualising the Invisible: A Guided Walk Around the Pendleton Housing Estate, Salford, UK. Visual Studies, 33(4), 395–339. Bratchford, G. (2020, forthcoming). Visualising Gentrification in Ancoats, Manchester: A Multi Method Approach to Mapping Change. In J.  Krase & J.  N. DeSena (Eds.), Gentrification Around the World: Gentrifiers and the Displaced. New York: Routledge. Bratchford, G., Giotaki, G., & Wewiora, L. (2018). Socially Engaged Photography and Wellbeing: A Case Study in the Northwest of England, UK. The Journal of London Primary Care, 10(4), 82–88. Brighenti, A. (2007). Visibility. A Category for the Social Sciences. Current Sociology, 55(3), 323–342. British Sociological Association. Ethics Guidelines and Collated Resources for Digital Research. Statement of Ethical Practice Annexe. https://www.britsoc. co.uk/media/24309/bsa_statement_of_ethical_practice_annexe.pdf Brügger, N. (2010). Web History. London: Peter Lang Publishing. Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952). The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon and Schuster. Collier, M. (2008). Direct Analysis of Photos as Information. Available at http:// online.sfsu.edu/mcollier/visual_research/analysis.html. Accessed 12 Apr 2019. Couldry, N. (2009). Does ‘the Media’ Have a Future? European Journal of Communication, 24(4), 437–449. Emmison, M., & Smith, P.  D. (2000). Researching the Visual: Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural Inquiry. London: Sage. Faulkner, S., Vis, F., & D’Orazio, F. (2018). Analysing Social Media Images. In J. Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media. London: Sage. Fink, J., & Lomax, H. (2016). Sharing Images, Spoiling Meanings? Class, Gender, and Ethics in Visual Research with Girls. Girlhood Studies, 9(3), 20–36. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

49

Gariglio, L. (2016). Photo-Elicitation in Prison Ethnography: Breaking the Ice in the Field and Unpacking Prison Officers’ Use of Force. Crime, Media, Culture, 12(3), 367–379. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gomez Cruz, E., & Meyer, T. (2012). Creation and Control in the Photographic Process: iPhones and the Emerging Fifth Moment of Photography. Photographies, 5(2), 203–221. Grayson, K., & Mawdsley, J. (2019). Scopic Regimes and the Visual Turn in International Relations: Seeing World Politics Through the Drone. European Journal of International Relations, 25(2), 431–457. Gregory, D. (2012). Dis/ordering the Orient: Scopic Regimes and Modern War. In T.  Barkawi & K.  Stanski (Eds.), Orientalism and War (pp.  151–175). London: Hurst Publishers. Harper, D. (2002). Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation. Visual Studies, 17(1), 13–26. Harper, D. (2012). Visual Sociology. London: Routledge. Heng, T. (2017). Visual Methods in the Field Photography for the Social Sciences. Abingdon: Routledge. Highfield, T. (2018). Emoji Hashtags // Hashtag Emoji: Of Platforms, Visual Affect, and Discursive Flexibility. First Monday, 23(9). http://doi. org/10.5210/fm.v23i9.9398. Hook, D., & Glaveanu, V. P. (2013). Image Analysis: An Interactive Approach to Compositional Elements. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 10(4), 355–368. Jeffers, A., & Moriarty, G. (Eds.). (2017). Culture, Democracy, and the Right to Make Art. London: Bloomsbury. Knowles, C., & Harper, D. (2009). Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krase, J., & Shortell, T. (2011). On the Spatial Semiotics of Vernacular Landscapes in Global Cities. Visual Communication, 10(3), 367–400. Lapenta, F. (2011). Some Theoretical and Methodological Views on Photo-­ Elicitation. In E. Margolis & L. Pauwels (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Visual Research (pp. 201–213). Los Angeles: Sage. Larsen, J., & Sandbye, M. (Eds.). (2014). Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography. London: I.B. Tauris. Law, J., & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the Social. Economy and Society, 33(3), 390–410. Luttrell, W. (1988). Claiming What Is Ours: An Economics Experience Workbook. New Market: Highlander Research and Education Center. Lutz, C., & Collins, J.  L. (1993). Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mah, A. (2014). The Dereliction Tourist: Ethical Issues of Conducting Research in Areas of Industrial Ruination. Sociological Research Online, 19(4), 162–175.

50 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Margolis, E., & Pauwels, L. (Eds.). (2011). The Sage Handbook of Visual Research. Los Angeles: Sage. Maurer, K. (2016). Visual Power: The Scopic Regime of Military Drone Operations. Media, War & Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1750635216636137. Maxwell, J. (2005). Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach. London: Sage. McGarry, A., Jenzen, O., Eslen-Ziya, H., Erhart, I., & Korkut, U. (2019). Beyond the Iconic Protest Images: The Performance of ‘Everyday Life’ on Social Media During Gezi Park. Social Movement Studies, 18(3), 284–304. Meeker, M. (2019, June 11). Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends Report: 11 Highlights and Lots of Industry Insights. Retrieved from https://adage.com/ article/digital/mary-meekers-2019-internet-trends-report-11-highlightsand-lots-industry-insight/2177626 Metz, C. (1982). The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Nash, M., & Moore, R. (2018). Exploring Methodological Challenges of Using Participant-Produced Digital Video Diaries in Antarctica. Sociological Research Online, 23(3), 589–605. Natali, L. (2019). Visually Exploring Social Perceptions of Environmental Harm in Global Urban Contexts. Current Sociology, 67(5), 650–668. Nathansohn, R., & Zuev, D. (Eds.). (2013). Sociology of the Visual Sphere. New York: Routledge. Pauwels, L. (2012). A Multimodal Framework for Analyzing Websites as Cultural Expressions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17, 247–265. Pauwels, L. (2015). Reframing Visual Science. Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press. Peres, T. S. (2019). In Support of Situated Ethics: Ways of Building Trust with Stigmatised ‘Waste Pickers’ in Cape Town. Qualitative Research, 19(2), 148–163. Pink, S. (2007). Walking with Video. Visual Studies, 22(3), 240–252. Prins, E. (2010). Participatory Photography: A Tool for Empowerment or Surveillance? Action Research, 8(4), 426–443. Prosser, J. (1996). What Constitutes an Image-Based Qualitative Methodology? Visual Sociology, 11(2), 25–34. Prosser, J. (1998). Image-Based Research. London: Routledge. Prosser, J., & Clarke, W. (2008, November). Realities Working Papers: Visual Research Ethics at the Crossroads. Manchester. Radley, A. (2010). What People Do With Pictures. Visual Studies, 25(3), 61–79. Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing Ourselves Through Technology. How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

2  METHODOLOGIES OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

51

Rogowski, L. (2013). Sociology of Iconoclasm. Distrust of Visuality in the Digital Age. In R.  Nathansohn & D.  Zuev (Eds.), Sociology of the Visual Sphere. New York: Routledge. Rose, G. (2016). Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to Researching with Visual Methods. London: Sage. Serafinelli, E. (2018). Digital Life on Instagram. Bingely: Emerald Publishing Limited. Spence, J., & Holland, P. (1991). Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography. London: Virago. Suchar, C. S. (1997). Grounding Visual Sociology Research in Shooting Scripts. Qualitative Sociology, 20, 33–55. Thelwall, M., Goriunova, O., Burns, A., Faulkner, S., Vis, F., Aulich, J., Mas-­ Bleda, A., Stuart, E., & D’Orazio, F. (2016). Chatting Through Pictures? A Classification of Images Tweeted in One Week in the UK and USA. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(11), 2575–2586. Urry, J. (1990). The Tourist Gaze. Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Wright, T. (2008). Visual Impact:Culture and the Meaning of Images. Oxford: Berg. Zuev, D. (2010). Visual Dimension of Protest: Analysis of Ritual Interactions During the Russian March. Visual Anthropology, 23(3), 221–253. Zuev, D. (2016). Visual Methods in Event Studies. In T. Pernecky (Ed.), Routledge Advances in Event Studies (pp. 96–119). New York: Routledge. Zuev, D., & Krase, J. (2017). Visual Sociology. Sociopedia.Isa. http://www.sagepub.net/isa/admin/viewPDF.aspx?&art=VisualSociology.pdf Zuev, D., & Picard, D. (2015). Reconstructing the Antarctic Tourist Interaction Ritual Chain: Visual Sociological Perspective. Polar Journal, 5(1), 146–169.

CHAPTER 3

Untangling the City Visually

Untangling the City Visually: The Frontstage and the Backstage Cities are the hubs of visual consumption and spectacle, visible and invisible, locales of surveillance, hypermobility and social change. Cities have become symbols of visual culture and iconic brands, representing modernity, progress and quality of life or degradation, decline and violence. Visibility has been central to urban analysis since the beginning of the twentieth century. From Guy Debord’s notion of the ‘spectacle’ (1994) whereby the totality of experience is presented as reality by modern capitalism, enmeshed in a virality of advertising and mass media to emergent studies on verticality (Graham 2016), the city has been a staple of Western urban imaginaries, played out across screen and canvas since the turn of the twentieth century. The aspects of spectacularity and verticality are now increasingly present in cities across the globe as conurbations continue to stretch outward and upward. However, spectacles in and of the city are not simply a collection of images as a group but the social relations among the spectators, mediated by images (Debord 1994). The spectacle of the city is produced from the difference of experience between that which an itinerant tourist encounters in the city as a spectator and that of their usual, everyday home environment. For the tourist, the city experience is itemized, taken out of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Zuev, G. Bratchford, Visual Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_3

53

54 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

context and packaged into products of cultural and visual consumption (Zuev and Krase 2017). It can be argued that some cities compete to become the icons of spectacular urbanism. Those cities which do not overtly marketise their historical significance often foreground their futuristic visual look and appearance for the newcoming viewers (tourists or residents) to enjoy the frontstage of the spectacle—the day and night performances of superlative, slick and iconic architecture—while the backstage of the city—its socio-material assemblages and informality—remain carefully tucked away (as will be shown later in this chapter in vignette on urban space appropriation by the e-bikes). Some of the urban settings (such as Dubai or Singapore) acquire the ‘halo’ of visibility (Brighenti 2007: 332), where the politics of spectacle is dictated by the transformation of the city into an icon and laboratory of visual consumption. Specifically, for the consumption by tourists—the temporary (and sometimes the only) spectators of the city. The spectacle city has created a number of easily recognizable architectural landmarks to make it stand out in the global competition for the acclaimed celebrity-city profile. Cities, Luc Pauwels writes, are a constant ‘work in progress’ made up of ‘different actors with competing agendas’ (Pauwels 2009: 1). To think about the city in this way, as a battleground of micro and macro contestation, is a compelling framework through which to situate a visual analysis. One can look at how those actors move through the streets, how they dress and what that might represent or say about themselves or in response to others. We might also think about the legitimacy of those actors, and how they appear before us, if at all, because how we see and look, where our gaze is directed or, conversely, how our gaze is coaxed to this or that is the result of innumerable factors. Joseph Rykwert writes that the city exists as a result of many conscious and unconscious factors and that the principle document and witness to this process was the physical fabric of the city (2000: 4–5); much of which goes unnoticed. Approached as a dice-and-board game, cities are not given to us in ways that we cannot hope to work with and in, but are instead, spaces of engagement where we become ‘agents as well as patients in the matter of our cities’ (2000: 5). Rykwert and Pauwels both focus on the user as an agent or actor for whom the space of the city or the urban experience is an experience that is often unpredictable, open-ended and competitive. Our agency within the city, Tom Hall writes in response to Rykwert’s approach to the experiential form of the city, is ‘exercised as improvisations on the rule, after each throw of the dice; we have choices to make, about the sorts

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

55

of city in which we want to live’ (Hall 2017: 1). Such agency has, as Rykwert rightly pointed out, come to shape urban planning over the centuries, but the same agency is evident at every level and can be ‘exercised in the course of something as ordinary as a short walk’ (Hall 2017: 2). Adhering, subverting and breaking the rules which define how we walk the city are routinely anchored in discussions of flaneurism. For the Flaneur or Flâneuse (Elkin 2017), as well as the psychogeographer, rule breaking challenges the ‘dynamic results of prior necessities and choices…and revisions’ that Pauwels (2009: 263) addresses when he looks at the formation of the urban experience at ground level. What all three scholars agree upon is that the present-day cityscape inscribes itself on its past, layer after layer. Its surface can be repainted, rewritten and repurposed. Jerome Krase in his book Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class (2012b) also asserts that cities are (and have always been) dynamic social environments for visual and otherwise symbolic competition between the groups who live and work with them. With an emphasis on how we ‘see’ cities, the cultures and the neighbourhoods across the world grow, move, shift and migrate, so too should we think about what we do not see, and why? Working from Krase’s thesis, Bratchford (2020) investigates how the invisible is co-constitutive of the visible; it adds ‘to’ the visible as a quality that is essential to its understanding. Moreover, we are aware of its presence. Although often ‘invisibility’ cannot be seen, it can, at times, be recognized—we can learn to understand who or what is missing and the reason why. At times we even ‘apply it’—we seek to make things, moments, spaces, places invisible, unpresentable and imperceptible. We obscure and reframe, hide and sometimes simply ignore. Tom Hall (2017) applies these ideas to homelessness. Those who reside on the streets are in a liminal space: present and unseen. We recognize their presence such as cardboard boxes used to sit or lay, even if they are not occupying that specific space at that particular time. At times we also make active concessions to not see homelessness for a host of reasons. For Bratchford (2020), similar ideas can be placed upon the ways in which de-industrialized cities, through planning and processes of gentrification, are re-imagined and subsequently begin to be seen to perform entrepreneurial urbanism (Ward 2003). In doing so, specific aspects, cultures and communities are actively ignored or obfuscated. Through a process of (re)arranging of public/private spaces and the need to discursively ‘make’ a location appealing, firstly, for partnership and investment, secondly, to developers, thirdly, to prospective businesses and

56 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

potential residents, fourthly, to ‘outsiders’, such as ‘tourists and place-­ mobile capitalists’, then, lastly, by local citizens (McLeod 2002 in Scott et al. 2018: 2). How these spaces appear, or are ‘seen’, becomes a matter of perceptibility. In Bratchford’s case study (2020), the focus is on Ancoats, a once dilapidated urban ‘fringe’ of Manchester, and through the use of photography and visual methods, such as repeat photography complemented by walking and mapping exercises, we are invited to see spaces in between and the unseen moments that give meaning to locations undergoing rapid economic change. Borrowing from Krase’s visual methodology of spatial and social semiotics (2012b), that is, how we come to see and analyse the interplay of culture and communities at a street level, visual sociologists such as Pauwels (2009, 2015) and Bratchford (2020) are not looking for the ‘decisive moment’. Rather, visual sociologists of urban space, like those noted above, are interested in the everyday photographic narrative. Built up over time, a narrative that must move beyond the specificity of its moment of making, and in doing so, point to the larger significance of that moment recorded. In this respect, we must learn to become aware of a multitude of processes, including planning proposals and government schemes which are often far removed from the physical spaces we point our camera at. As John Berger notes, ‘the true content of a photograph is invisible’ (2013: 19). As sociologists we must learn to look for threshold moments effected by decisions made in the past and actions that are yet to unfold. We must read the landscape for more nuanced signs of upheaval and change. Visual methods and a varied approach to seeing and reading space can, Prosser notes, ‘provide researchers with a different order of data and, more importantly, an alternative to the way we have perceived data in the past’ (Prosser 1998: 1). Images and fieldwork can enhance the understanding of a location. Visual methods can reduce temporalities whilst expanding our understanding of the way in which social organizations and space are constructed. When applied to fieldwork, the adoption of visual methods, such as visual ethnographies, walking methodologies with a camera, especially when repeated over time, enables one to experience and see the taken-for-grantedness of the everyday or the embodied dispositions placed beyond the grasp of consciousness (Bourdieu 2000: 94). This approach can also be seen as performative-based research, where thinking in the space of action can elicit discursive knowledge embodied in the physical act of walking and observing.

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

57

As argued by Krase (2012a), as well as Shortell and Brown (2014), simple walks and assembling visual inventories help excavate the deep urban archaeology of the multiple strata of places and spaces. These can be different architectural styles that are associated with certain political regimes, or they can be decorations and design features, or screens (Verhoeff 2012), slogans or other visible objects which materialize the discursive network of the city and compose its ‘variegated screenscapes’ (ibid.: 129). The city offers a chance to study the micro-interactions of participants and ritualized behaviour in conjunction with contextually activated emotions and dynamics of collective effervescence. While some visual sociologists have regarded city and urban space as the stage of performances and micro-interactions, others have examined the multiplicity of actors that take part in them. In their work on urban migrant life in Hong Kong, Knowles and Harper (2009) combine the visual and textual accounts of Hong Kong’s non-native inhabitants. The photographs in the book are not captioned and one can read them as accompaniment to the interviews, the study thus uniquely combines two registers of visuality and verbality without prioritizing either. Photographs are neither subservient to the text, nor the text is the explanation to the photographs. It is a study of the city and its temporary and permanent residents via a blend of oral-visual fieldwork, where visual is related to the narrative of the interviews with references not only to the actual interviewees but primarily contextualizing the city itself as dwelling and enclosure for their movement. The city is thus depicted via the exposure of relational dynamics of the migrant lives, in their narratives and the narratives of the researchers.

Examining Artists Work Sociologically: An Update While some sociologists focus on the unseen or the city as a space of progress and development, visual sociologists should be encouraged to look outwardly at works produced by artists who also think and look sociologically. Between the omnipresent visibility and the desire of the spectacle, street photography vis-à-vis documentary photography on the ‘street’, has provided social scientists with a compelling lens through which to see and examine society. Howard Becker’s Telling About Society (2007) touches upon this dichotomy by addressing the common sociological problem of organizational contexts and asking, what makes (or distinguishes) photojournalism from photographic documentary practice and visual sociology?

58 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Without context, Becker writes, the viewer of an image will do what they think is the necessary work required of them to read the image as they understand it (2007: 194). In part, the question comes down to aesthetics and visual literacy. Each genre has its own aesthetic conventions. Moreover, how we ‘read’ an image depends on our starting point, or what we might hope (or are encouraged) to espouse from the image presented to us. But as Becker notes, it also comes down to context. Like all cultural objects, photographs as well as paintings, film and sculpture get meanings from their context. Items which seem to exist in isolation, Becker writes, ‘get their meanings from a context made up of what has been written about them, either in the label hanging beside them or elsewhere’ (Becker 2007: 193). Like Becker, John Berger makes similar assertions. In Ways of Seeing, Berger writes that ‘the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled’ (1972: 7). By noting this, he affirmed that this unsettled status was based upon the context in which an object, namely, those subject to the power of the gaze, including the female form and non-white bodies, come into view. Berger asks us to think about the producer, when it was made and where it is seen—all of this is attributed to the contextual reading of the image. Historically, specifically in sociology (and cultural studies) emphasis has often been placed on seminal works that are reflected in Becker’s text. These include Douglas Harper (Good Company: A Tramp Life 2006), New York photojournalist Weegee, documentarian Walker Evans and his work with the Farm Security Association (FSA), nineteenth-­century muckrakers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine and Robert Frank’s seminal photographic travel log The Americans (1959). Much of what Becker explores are for the most part, portraits of, or about people. While these works are cornerstones of social analysis, little work is often framed in the context of the street, the urban space and the city. Here one should also note the significant body of work by female street photographers (and absence of reference to) including Helen Levitt, Vivian Maier and Shirley Baker who are not mentioned in Becker’s text, or rarely elsewhere, and indeed whose contribution has been acknowledged only recently (Maloof 2014). When we ask students what street photography is, to actually describe it, there is often a long pause. To think about what it feels like, to ponder over what the aesthetic is, or even what the aim of is it, often yields mixed interpretations. Frequently the phrase ‘candid’ photography is applied, but there is a skilful art to this candidness. The authors believe that the key is to seek out that decisive moment, one that draws the viewers’ eye to a

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

59

private happening, framed in a public space—a knowing glance, a wry smile or to freeze a ‘moment’ in time. Street photography of this ilk is also about time, chance, speed and light. To see relationships between people, spaces, colours and systems of signification that point to the economic or cultural climate of the era, rendering them as timelessly beautifully moments that are rich in social analysis. The work of New York photographer Joel Meyerowitz during the 1960s and 1970s perhaps best fits this articulation. Here we are thinking of either the black and white shot of the kissing couple outside the picture house with the words ‘Kiss Me Stupid’ on the advertisement hoarding above their heads or the colour frame of the embracing pair on the street corner. In the latter, New Yorkers move around the couple. Businessmen wearing hats and black trench coats, smoking cigars. The frame is interrupted by a young, affluent couple in lighter coloured attire. The man’s suit is more relaxed than the business wear of his fellow men nearby. The woman wears an immaculate beige fur coat as she leans against the corner of a granite grey New York building. Urban street corners were a hunting ground for street photographers. These are places of change and exchange, a hub of accidental and planned social interaction. People meet and leave each other on the corner. We only have to look back at the seminal study of street corner behaviour by William Whyte (1941) to understand the potentially rich setting a corner has for examining social status and social hierarchies. Through visual analysis and the simple practice of looking and observing, Whyte determined that ‘corner boy culture’, those who hang around on street corners in informal gangs, can be better understood by examining how, who and where they stand amongst one another. A social organization analysis of a specific group, Whyte’s analysis and observation is not unlike that of a well-honed street photographer, whereby observations of spatial positions and interactions can be determined against mutual obligations, rules and norms. Whyte, like many street photographers, watched and understood the rhythm of the space. Street spaces have much to offer, and its focus is not always the human subject. Photographers like Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston have taken a different approach. Through the 1970s and 1980s, they worked on the street and in urban spaces, yet, rather than looking for ruptures and interruptions, their work focuses on uniformity, repetitious advertisement signs and symbols; the banality of everyday urban environment that reflected the emergent consumerism of US culture. Vast car

60 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

parks and highways, huge cars and petrol signs and fuelling stations reflected an era of economic national growth. In a less US centric approach, we can also examine how photographic motifs of a specific era were not just the purvey of the white, European man. Take, for example, this slide from the Manchester Metropolitan University resource centre (Fig. 3.1). An old teaching aid from the days before computers and PowerPoint presentations, this uncredited 35 mm colour contact entitled Modern Islam is reminiscent of Stephen Shore’s seminal early photography. Like aspects of Shore’s work, the photo challenges the conventional notion of the frame whilst also being sublimely ordinary and strangely engaging. Much like the images in Shore’s seminal work, Uncommon Places

Fig. 3.1  Photographer unknown. Image originally located in the now defunct Manchester Metropolitan University Visual Resource Centre

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

61

(1982), Modern Islam (Fig. 3.1) is in its most basic form a colourful representation of the banal. Yet it is this banality that makes it so engaging. Rows upon rows of 1970s American import cars; their place in the landscape is disconnected from their origin. While Shore represents American automobiles in small town American car parks, on smooth tarmacked roads and busy intersections that bespeak a form of modernity that is entrenched in the everydayness of routine, Modern Islam represents a sea change in culture. The image lacks the billboards and commercial signs that Shore so neatly packs into his shots, however, maintains the ‘surreal density’ of information so often found in other aspects of his work. To the bottom right of the frame, Arab men in traditional garb examine the cars. Our eyes are drawn to the red cars in the foreground; the lack of colourful cars then stretches out to the background and also out of frame. This is presumably a photo of a car sales site indicated by the A4 sized notes in each side window of each car. The more attractive red cars are kept to the front; those finished in a less striking colour make up the remainder of the stock, evident by the uniformity of the cars as they stretch out of sight. Whoever took the photo positioned him/herself in such a way that the most prestigious cars were given the greatest economy. Spilling out of the frame, the cars slip out of sight, the photographer’s intent is clearly to document the enormity of the stock whilst focusing on the prized assets. In this sense the photograph is also unconventional. While the frame should, as Shore notes, ‘corral the content of the photograph’ (2010) acting with passivity and indicating that this is where the scene ends, the photographer fills it to capacity. Other works, and movements like the New Topographics in the 1970s, are equally valuable. A form of landscape photography, the New Topographics emerged under the auspices of the Düsseldorf School of Photography (DSoP). Led by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, the city of the 1980s was presented as a space of verticality, density and interconnectional flows. Each photographer and their contemporaries, such as the German Michael Wolf, present the city in ways that pricks the sociological imagination. Through their ability to focus on simple forms, the artists invite questions about society and space, living conditions, production, consumption, trade and leisure. An exemplar of this idea is Gursky’s ‘Frankfurt’ (2007). While it is not a cityscape, his epic frame of the departures board in Frankfurt airport is not only aesthetically pleasing due to its scale, but the image conjures up associations with the global connectivity through terminals and hubs as we are invited to see a host of cities, listed en masse like an extensive menu.

62 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

More recent approaches to street photography or photography on the street and urban settings have sought to slow the scene down and invite the spectator to contemplate the singularity of the human experience in urban space as something both unique and universal, global and local in the same way that Gursky does. Rather than snatching at decisive moments, Swiss photographer Beat Streuli’s contemporary social portraits present a heterogeneous mix of people with a specific focus on local urban youth. Focusing on global cities that have a mix of ethnicities, Streuli’s work questions notions of belonging and place. Through tightly framed shots of individuals taken from a distance with a telescopic lens, urban settings are noticeably present yet blurred. Streuli’s works are not about the physical proximity to the subject or even the scene of the street that he focuses upon. Rather, working at distance, Streuli’s work is arguably voyeuristic— the subject unaware of his gaze. The resulting image is that of an urban subject isolated from the flow of their urban experience (see Figs. 3.2 and 3.3). Systematically and methodically building an ongoing archive of contemporary humanity, Streuli’s work is typically presented on street

Fig. 3.2  Tram Stops—Castellon—40 transparent digital prints (Citizens 2013). (Copyright Beat Streuli)

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

63

Fig. 3.3  Sint-Pieters Station, Gent, 2010—LED Light Boxes (La Voie publique 2010). (Copyright Beat Streuli)

hoardings in the form of giant posters, commercial style installations or faux advertisements. As a result, his photography blends inconspicuously back into the urban environment and the singularity of his unknowing subject within the frame is reintroduced back into hurry of the urban environment once again. While the focus of his lens is the individual subject drawn out from the urban street scene, Streuli’s work is perhaps most compelling when viewed as a site-specific collection on his website. Examining his website, Streuli compiles his work by city. When we examine each folder, we are presented with a multitude of individual bodies that reflect the diversity of the space. In Istanbul 16 we are presented with the contemporary binary of religious conservatism and individualistic Western liberalism. We see young women in traditional Muslim dress, heads covered alongside single frames of similarly aged women with tattoos on mobile phones with their shoulders on show. Dubai 15 and Manhattan 09 are presented as multicultural spaces, urban and young. Perhaps most compelling is Bruxelles 05/06 photographed in Belgium, a country with a colonial legacy, and an

64 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

ever-increasing migration (5.4 migrants for every 1000 of the population) with around 23 per cent of the population defined as non-Belgian origin (NPdata.be 2010). Streuli’s images depict an urban space of vast multiculturalism that is also promising and hopeful, as long as one is at ease with its diversity.

Everyone Is a Street Photographer: Omnipresent Visibility Work of photo-artists, like those noted above, invites us to rethink ‘urban space’ by presenting it to us in ways that suppress the documentary tendencies of traditional sociological photography, yet they are not without their issue. It also invites us to rethink the urban space as a space of perpetual performance, constituted of constantly moving and changing urban screens: advertising billboards, art, graffiti walls and other ‘composite dispositifs’ (Verhoeff 2012). These urban screens often occupy and embellish non-spaces—empty walls, ruined buildings, the interiors of bus stops, but are also served for projected illuminated slogans and night-time lighting on high-rise towers. Perhaps, one of the greatest changes in the practices of photography that we are experiencing touches upon the genre of street photography, the genre where the violation of privacy is the art itself (Jurgenson 2019). Since Alfred Stieglitz, who famously mentioned that his favourite occupation was walking among lower classes and studying them carefully, the city has been a safe space for documentation and capturing the instances of urban life and moments passing by. A charge that could rightly be placed against the work of Beat Streuli, whereby the image of the everyday person becomes part of the spectacle of visibility reintroduced back into the city on billboards, in windows and tram stops. Those photographed are made hyper-visible but, by virtue of the rise of the spectacle, are also largely invisible; they become just another face in the crowd, albeit in a different form. As a result of the rise of photography ‘on the street’, such as ad-hoc selfies and group photos, becoming a part of somebody’s photographic practice, is now highly probable, even if by accident. Images of this ilk are commonly shared online in a network of social media platforms that also have the capacity to become additional, relational information for a different gaze and a different use. In an age of surveillance and data capturing, each time you appear, incidentally or otherwise, the potential for the big

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

65

data gaze increases. Here again we can return to Lev Manovich’s project Selfiecity to stress that projects of this kind may become part of an infrastructure of surveillance, aimed at capitalizing on the constant generation of visual data disguised as a new algorithmic solution to learning, knowing or governing something qualitatively better. This transformation of the city into the space of perpetual performance and viewing is marked by developing asymmetrical viewing relations between the object of documentation and surveiller, spectator and the spectacle. Spectators are trapped in a two-way form of viewing within the city that is highly uneven. In the first instance, city dwellers, tourists and passers-by are expected to ‘see’ the city, to register its presence, either culturally and architecturally, as a space of consumption or leisure. At the same time, the same people are expected not ignore or omit many other features of the city, including surveillance technologies and even homelessness (Hall 2017). Some of the cities have become the places where surveillance and asymmetrical viewing relations are a defining feature of the urban life, particularly in China, where between 200 and 626 million CCTV cameras will be in operation by 2020.1 Few cities rival this per capita; however, London with 65 cameras per 1000 residents makes it the most surveyed city outside of China. Not only limited to lens-based approaches, we must think about surveillance by other digital and relational means including, but not limited to, the Internet, identification and credentials terminals as well as GPS systems built into our phones and lifestyle tools such as cycling apps like Strava or Fitbit pedometers. Indeed, as Lyon (2004) argues, surveillance and making the subjects of the gaze visible is increasingly unrelated to biological eyes and becomes more abstract. The infrastructure for rendering people visible and subject to control is becoming a significant part of the urban infrastructure and urban living, but largely remains invisible, hidden and covered. CCTV cameras are but one instance of the surveillance, and become the first target of anti-surveillance protests, as was exemplified by protesters in Hong Kong in 2019, covering CCTV cameras with sticky tape. Singled out CCTV cameras, however, are innocent as their power lies in the swarming effect of the multiple image streams that they help to build and to facilitate the visibility of movement of people, money, objects, not simply their position in one place. 1  The World’s most surveilled cities. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/theworlds-most-surveilled-cities/. Accessed 20.12.2019.

66 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

As we have shown in this chapter, cities are the fast-paced sites of rapid change, both physically and culturally, so too can they become a space of contemplation, reflection, interruption and surveillance. While there is spectacular urbanism to attract tourists and new residents, there is life in the cities that remains hidden in the backstage of informal settlements or residential neighbourhoods. These spaces are not intended for widespread circulation and visual consumption of tourists, who have little time for anything other than the immediate, urban space they come to visit. The following two vignettes offer two complementary views of the ‘non-spectacular’ set in familiar cities in Canada and China. Our intention is to demonstrate how instant ethnography and long-term participant observation in complementing fashion can reveal the connecting tissue of the changing cities.

Instant Ethnography: In Situ and Online At the 2017 IVSA meeting in Montreal, Douglas Harper tasked participants, which included one of the authors, with the job of creating ‘instant ethnographies’. The aim of which is to survey the city, a largely new city to most of us in the room and return back two days later with a sense of what the city was about. While it was a thoroughly enjoyable task at the time, the question of temporality came to the fore. How can such an exercise be built upon to engage in the multiplicity of visually orientated research methods to not only recognize your immediate environment but also how can one continue to look at a specific place in the future as well as explore it, historically. In an effort to build upon the project, we thought, is it possible to continue to do such a project both on and offline. Whilst we have not returned to Montreal, through Google Street View, the project of site-specific observation still continues. Often considered as the ‘art of describing’ (Ingold 2014: 385), ethnography has become contingent with the idea of exploration in some form or another, be that via spoken word, written text or by visual means. To be ethnographic is not to just make recordings or ‘fieldnotes’ but also to make judgements—it is always, in the first instance, interpretative. To be aware of the frame one chooses and the context in which is it presented to others. For Tim Ingold, all this is simply ‘documentary’ (2014: 386). Whatever the discipline, these factors are always prescient when we analyse ‘data’ from the ‘field’—a process that is more often than not, longitudinal. When tasked with being an ‘instant ethnographer’, the ‘rules’ are broken. How does one explore a landscape and culture with little more than 48  hours? What do we look for and how do we extract information of

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

67

‘value’ that is telling and indicative of the society, space and culture we are contemplating? The author sought to investigate the everyday as a visual dialogue (see Fig. 3.4), a habitual practice within a mega-city structure. Signs of contestation, rupture and friction are framed in the hope to point towards discordance within a space undergoing robust change. Friction, so the dictionary definition tells us, is ‘one surface moving over another’. Walking down Overdale Avenue, a downtown district street in Montreal, my eye was drawn to what appeared to be a site of friction. Originally a domestic, suburban setting, Overdale Avenue is undergoing rapid gentrification and urbanization. A site peppered with confrontation between time past and time present, between local identity and global investment, the avenue was marked by distinctions in metaphoric and symbolic economic im/mobility. Looking down the street from the corner of Rue Mackay and Overdale one is met with Victorian terraced houses and established trees that neatly lined the right of the street. Facing them, amongst an assemblage of dwarfing glazed skyscrapers is the historic building of LaFontaine (Fig. 3.4). Once the residence of the first Prime Minister of the United Province of Canada, the building represents the battle between sentiment and profit. Examining Fig.  3.4, the historic building seems as if it is being ‘accommodated’ within the ongoing, neighbouring development, its cultural and historical capital ensuring that the building’s integrity is safe for now. In time to come, the building might be

Fig. 3.4  A composite set of photos taken during an ‘instant ethnography’ field exercise as part of Douglas Harper’s workshop at the IVSA meeting in Montreal, Canada, 2017. (Photo: Gary Bratchford)

68 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

consumed into the ongoing development as a gesture of cultural sensitivity and historical appropriation; a familiar site across Montreal where the façades of older buildings, typically church’s, become ‘features’ nestled into the body of newer structures. Their grounds become a surrogate for the next development. As the new skyscrapers move further across the landscape towards the Victorian houses, consuming the green space that was once present (see Fig. 3.5) the friction will soon become all too visible, if it has not already. Focusing on indicators of economic change, my attention turned to a car parked at the top of the street. The ‘ever changing detail of the city’ (Lynch 1960: 2) requires us, as visual sociologists, to employ all of our senses. We much seek to make connections between what we experience and what we reflect on. When I first documented the car, with the mishmash bodywork, a red bonnet and washed out gold body, the author felt he was recording the everyday. A sign of decay and assemblage, a bricolage of materials that articulated a ‘mend-and-make-do’ philosophy. Reading the car to be a metaphor of the vast gulf in the wealth between those

Fig. 3.5  Screen grab from Google Street View from the corner of Rue Mackay and Overdale, Montreal, Canada, 2014, prior to the IVSA workshop

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

69

holding onto their contested territory and those who are soon to come. Representing those that are ‘just getting by’ the car stood in opposition to the veneer of the development behind. The car presented a socio-cultural friction. By documenting the everyday, and exploring what everydayness is like, requires one to look at banality with an eye on causality—to make connections between what is seen and what is assumed. For me the car represented gentrification in process. However, how would one quantify these assertions? The car could have belonged to a resident, a construction worker, day-tripper, or reflected the transience of an individual or group, who are there only temporarily, simply moving through the space. The screen grabs in Fig. 3.5, captured June 2014, show the same car in the same location. Note the green space to the right of the frame, including the trees and grass. Further exploration of Google Maps, taken from the same date, shows that the area to the right of the car is not yet under development. The image in Fig. 3.6, taken two years later (2016), shows the same car, now with red bonnet, again in the same location. Note that construction

Fig. 3.6  Screen grab from Google Street View from the corner of Rue Mackay and Overdale, Montreal, Canada, 2016

70 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

to the right of the street is now underway. As of 2018 the car has gone but so too has any parking on the street. Instead, the sidewalks and parking spaces are filled with building materials. The road has been dug up ready to be resurfaced. To be an instant ethnographer in a space that is new and unfamiliar is an engaging and challenging task. We must learn to read the environment for signs that bespeak change, both predicting the future and reflecting on the past in order to make a comment on the now, if only to try and build a better picture of what we see. We should also try to be able to qualify our comments when we ‘return’ from the field through archives, image banks and online repositories in order to validate our observations and check our assumptions. The following vignette represents a different kind of temporality, as it is based on a three-year project and extensive fieldwork on urban mobility and social change in China. The visual enquiry aided by contextual and elementary photos that alternate the focus of attention helps to approach the electric bike as an access point to the everyday politics of urban mobility in China—and, consequently, allows to capture and theorize relationships between people, objects and the urban environment.

Claiming Chinese Cities2 The e-bike is the highly visible and present object in the urban social order in China. There are 200 million of them across the country in a variety of shapes and colours, cruising swiftly through the streets of mega-cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, as well as smaller cities such as Urumqi or Chengdu. The paradox is that not everywhere its appearance is considered politically and visually correct, as the narrative of its presence on the streets undermines the great vision and ideas of high-tech superiority and modernity, that many Chinese cities (such as Shenzhen) are aiming to achieve (Zuev 2018). This vignette is focused on the e-bike as a ‘theoretical object’ (Damisch 1994)—the one that insists on the existing agency of the object, its actual and practical ‘doings’ and ideological ‘sayings’. It asks us not simply to find and apply a theory in order to understand it but to produce such a theory. The e-bike in this case is a reminder that it is never enough to de-­ trivialize and deconstruct an object. And this is what visual analysis here is 2  Part of the data collected for this study was funded by ESRC grant (ES/K006002/1), 2013–2016.

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

71

very apt to do—to theorize the object through multiple visualization stripping the object of its multiple doings and sayings. The persistent visibility of the e-bike is a significant feature of urban life in China and in itself implies a discursive act of resistance and claiming the city, where its practical doings are a plexus of relations and tactics of subverting the dominant order of automobility (Zuev et al. 2019). The e-bike is a distinct agent, which contributes to the composition of a larger visual urbanscape and the ‘look of things’ in Chinese cities. E-bikes are a powerful metaphor to understanding conflictual relations in the Chinese urban landscape, practical conjunctions and underlying tensions in it. Nowhere is the presence of the e-bike more apparent than in the most spectacular Chinese cities, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, which are driven by the logics of presenting its face as the front displays of Chinese high-­ tech, dizzying vertical architecture and sleek modernity (see Fig.  3.7). The e-bike simply does not (always) fit the spectacle of a fast car-driven society and nestles a contentious space of the Chinese city, where not only new migrants from the countryside but diverse social groups find themselves in search for a socio-technical assemblage that would meaningfully relate to their life in the city in a more convenient, comfortable and smooth way. E-bikes enable a manifold of journeys which increase their visibility in the urban space, as they contribute to a unique pattern and rhythm of the Chinese urban vehicular flow (see Fig. 3.8). Being the marginal vehicle in the transport hierarchy, e-bikes occupy the in-between spaces, the pavements and roads, narrow alley lanes and passages between high-rise blocks, claiming these interstitial spaces at the same time. Social practice theory scholars suggest that social practices can be regarded as a configuration of three elements: materiality, meaning and competences (Shove et al. 2012). This framework of three elements provides a useful starting point for guiding the visual inquiry and exploring the processes of negotiation and interpretation of technology, such as e-bikes in the context of everyday life. Previously, the everyday politics of e-bike mobility have been described as a specific mode of hidden resistance (to car or public transport use), and individualism which has its practical and economical underpinnings. The e-bike has been targeted by authorities as contributing to the image of an ‘informal economy’, primarily represented by the practices of e-bike taxi providers—the so called heiche or ‘black riders’ (Fig. 3.9). Their assembly at the crossroads is not illegal, but the provision of services is. Surprisingly,

72 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 3.7  The high-rise sleek modernity in Pudong, Shanghai, and in many other Chinese cities creates a distant backstage to the actual groundwork done by e-bike and variety of its users from commuters to businessmen, unwilling to waste time in a traffic jam. (Shanghai, 2014. Photo: Dennis Zuev)

they do not disband and, when asked what they are doing, they can simply respond that they are waiting. If they feel you are a potential customer, you could be offered a ride. Their little group is transient, and newcomers can come and leave whenever they feel like. Such aggregations are, indeed, the characteristic of the street corners. At the same time, it is a community, sometimes with an informal head (laoda), who may be in charge and regulating their flow or communication. Aspects of materiality refer to the vehicle and its immediate maintenance and use, while competences direct us to modes of riding, carrying or being a passenger, or pillion, transporting objects, parking, repairing. The meanings are the attributes of practice or identities hoisted by others or accepted by the users. These meanings are not only the authors’ interpretations of the produced images, but those vocalized by users themselves.

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

73

Fig. 3.8  Claiming the space: urban flow in Shanghai. E-bikes and bicycles are occupying space in the continuous front row, blocking the cars and bursting out from a narrow lane that they are ascribed to. (Shanghai, 2015. Photo: Dennis Zuev)

The meanings are thus discernible in minutia or details, which may give away the incongruence between the original, prescribed user scripts and newly produced, extended and reconfigured ones: be it decorations or repair ecologies, new functions, new ways of approaching the objects or modification and ultimately the employment of the objects for reaching different political goals and social tasks. While the e-bike is certainly used primarily as a transportation tool, it is not only an artefact but a space in itself, an activity space. Similar to car space, which gives an individual an enclosure of privacy, e-bikes in the same fashion delineate space for privacy and informality. For instance, food or express delivery workers commonly use e-bikes as a place to rest; the box placed on the footwell allows the rider to stretch on an improvised sofa (Fig. 3.10). The popularity of electric scooters with large soft seats is partially attributed to the fact that this is not only a vehicle but a mobile

74 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 3.9  Heiche—‘black riders’, informal e-bike taxi providers at the road junction in Shekou. While in most of the city of Shenzhen e-bike use was banned several times, it was quite common in Shekou district as they served local residents and tourists. Such informal provision is illegal but was tolerated by police even during the day. (Shenzhen, 2016. Photo: Dennis Zuev)

sofa or an armchair which acts as a guaranteed soft seat on a long commute during rush hour traffic. The original technological script of the e-bike as a vehicle is reconfigured as the e-bike is used for static activity—lying down, resting and communicating at pause. It enacts a different sort of corporeality—posture, bodily movement in contrast to the prescribed riding figure and balancing on two wheels. The e-bike becomes a tool of tactical urbanism and enables to claim immediate ground for activity, as it is turned into a bench allowing women to sit and knit wherever they choose (Fig. 3.11). Or to occupy an interstitial space by a father transporting his child and paused for a messenger texting break at the margin between two lanes of the busy street (Fig. 3.12).

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

75

Fig. 3.10  Food delivery worker resting with his smartphone on an e-bike in Beijing, 2017. (Photo: Dennis Zuev)

Contextual and Elementary Photos In this vignette contextual (Figs. 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9) and elementary photos (Figs. 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14 and 3.15) are used to refer to divergent scales of observation (Desjeux 1996), but essentially to two divergent types of relationality indicated by physical distance. These are the position of the object within larger networks of urban space, material objects, people, the position of elements in it and its immediate vicinity. In the first type, the e-bike is a part of the larger urban composition, and an element of the urban flow (Figs. 3.7 and 3.8). In the second type, the e-bike is an object that is composed of and signifies less visible elements of social practice—meanings (identities), competences (knowledge) and materiality, where all three may overlap and suggest how e-bikes inhabit social life (Figs. 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12 and 3.14). Dialectic between the two groups contributes to understanding of the social order as a nexus of visible and invisible, formal and informal qualities. The contextual photos juxtapose the e-bike in an urban space, silhouetted with the images of high-speed and high-rise modernity, at the same

76 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 3.11  Knitting on an e-bike in Chengdu, Central China. (Photo: Dennis Zuev)

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

77

Fig. 3.12  Occupying interstitial space between two lanes in Shenzhen, South China, 2016. (Photo: Dennis Zuev)

time problematizing the issue of a lack of liveable or free urban space, specifically in the context of the largely sanctioned bike-sharing boom that was associated with irregular occupation of available space all over the Chinese cities. Bike-sharing concentrated near transportation hubs (metro stations and bus stops), aggravated the already marginal position of e-bikes which used the available parking. The final contextual photo is of the intersection in a city district, where informal e-bike taxis congregate. This is one of many other places, but the one depicted in Fig. 3.9 best shows the particular value of e-bikes as connectors to better accessed areas. This frontier feeling is provided by the T-junction and a wall of a closed dormitory compound, and the lack of any public transport station nearby. Some popular e-bike taxi hubs are indeed located near metro stations which are positioned at the frontier of two administrative districts, which makes it easier for riders to dodge the police. The elementary photos refer to particular elements of social practice. Children play on the e-bike with a carpet on the footwell which enhances the feeling of the domesticity of the e-bike, which is appropriated as a ludic space, a specific ‘activity place’ (Schatzki 2002). The father and child in Fig.  3.12 while away their time on an e-bike parked in between car lanes. The occupied marginal in-between space is thus sufficient for

78 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 3.13  Helmets are a cool fashion for teenagers rather than a practical or obligatory safety equipment for small children and those giving them rides on e-bikes. E-bikes are also a significant part of youth mobility in China. (Shanghai, 2014. Photo: Dennis Zuev)

engaging in other practices, where the e-bike serves as a protection, as a comfortable (soft) mount and as a legitimate platform to be in between the car lanes due to its road-user status. The posture of the rider, using the road markers, also creates a human-vehicle enclosure for a child standing on the footwell. The meanings element is also discernible in the photograph of young people using helmets (Fig. 3.13) in the summer—which reminds us that this is largely a fashion, and not the practical wearing of a safety equipment—compared with a more common practice of not using helmets even when riding with small children on the same photograph. Instead, this is anomalous as helmets are most commonly worn in the winter when they serve for insulation, rather than safety. The rare use of helmets in most of

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

79

Figs. 3.14 and 3.15  E-bike is not a shiny piece of technology, nor it is an aesthetically pleasing object for the owner. It is a stitched together ragged companion that does its job. The non-attachment narrative is attached to it with several layers of sticky tape. Another representation of the ecology of repairs is the DIY cardboard fender attached and conveying the transitiveness of the object. Multiple repairs reflect the value of the object in its rudimentary convenience and help to care against thieves, more attracted by shinier and more expensive machines. (Shanghai, 2016. Photos: Dennis Zuev)

the cases suggests the high degree of normalization and safety perception by e-bike riders. The e-bike and its surface (seat and footwell) are the limited yet private space in opposition to the space of the public transport, where one is disciplined to adopt a rectified position and is in constant contact with other passengers, who are inside the carriage and are reduced to prisoners ‘caught in a bubble of panoptic and classifying power’ (de Certeau 1984: 111). The e-bike is an open space, but yet a different kind of private place, an extension of home outside of home, a moving part of the dwelling, or more precisely a moving piece of furniture where one can rest, sit down, knit a sweater (Fig. 3.11) or send text messages (Fig. 3.12). The second element of social practice is materiality. Unlike a bicycle, it can be used as a stationed object, enabling sitting, sleeping or relaxing, feeling at ease in the private space, which is different from the enclosed privacy of the car. The materiality of the e-bike is also related to its technical ability enabling the users to maintain ‘elegance’—to be able to wear a suit or high heels, to keep upright posture and not to sweat extensively.

80 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Competence and materiality intertwine as we examine the ecology of repairs on the e-bike (Figs. 3.14 and 3.15). The ubiquitous repair stations can be used not only for small repairs but also serve as convenience shops where batteries can be recharged. There is also a high degree of individual repairs, often performed with basic materials as temporary solutions. This in its turn has additional meanings—making the e-bike less attractive for thieves and displaying the transitive pure practical meaning of the object (see Figs. 3.14 and 3.15), emphasizing non-attachment, as it can be stolen any time. This feature is revealing about the feeling of comfort that everyday objects bring, manifesting the minimalist threshold regarding maintenance that is accepted among e-bike users; the object can be rusted and all taped up (see Fig. 3.14), but this is sufficient for the user, who only needs it for getting around. The e-bike is an everyday and theoretical object, central to understanding the current urban social order in China and its peculiar ebb and flow, where e-bikes remain a persistent constituent of the urban rhythm. They are strikingly visible in the urban landscape, but at the same time are often pushed to the edge and related to the social margins through associations with marginal social and occupational identities (of courier workers, recyclers, informal taxi providers). E-bikes persistently occupy their space and maintain activity space for their users. It is an object that is being progressively domesticated and normalized, but as it does so it reconfigures the original technological scripts of riding and navigating the city. With this chapter we suggested how visual sociologists can build a much deeper understanding of the social processes in the cities when photo-artists’ work is given its sociological parlance and when our own exploration of the cityscape is guided by our sociological eyes and feet, regardless of the time available. Despite the fact that the pace of city life dictates certain instant-ness and research projects end with funding, we hope to inspire longer exposure and access to the city, as this will expose the riveting details of the social practices and their elements, as well as the complex politics of the intimate everyday life. As Stephen Shames in his Bronx Boys (2014) demonstrated, powerful stories that challenge our perception of urban metamorphoses emerge over decades of photographic or, indeed, observational and participatory intimacy with a city’s growing and changing subjects.

3  UNTANGLING THE CITY VISUALLY 

81

References Becker, H. (2007). Telling About Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Berger, J. (2013). Understanding a Photograph. London: Penguin. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Meditations (R.  Nice, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bratchford, G. (2020, forthcoming). Visualising Gentrification in Ancoats, Manchester: A Multi Method Approach to Mapping Change. In J.  Krase & J.  N. De Sena (Eds.), Gentrification Around the World: Gentrifiers and the Displaced. New York: Routledge. Brighenti, A. (2007). Visibility. A Category for the Social Sciences. Current Sociology., 55(3), 323–342. Damisch, H. (1994). The Origin of Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. Brooklyn: Zone Press. Desjeux, D. (1996). Scales of Observation: A Micro-Sociological Epistemology of Social Science Practice. Visual Studies, 11(2), 45–55. Elkin, L. (2017). Flâneuse Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. London: Chatto & Windus. Frank, R. (1959). The Americans. New York: Grove Press. Graham, S. (2016). Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. New York: Verso. Hall, T. A. (2017). Footwork: Urban Outreach and Hidden Lives. London: Pluto Press. Harper, D. A. (2006). Good Company: A Tramp Life. Boulder: Paradigm. Ingold, T. (2014). That’s Enough About Ethnography. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1), 383–395. Jurgenson, N. (2019). The Social Photo. On Photography and Social Media. London: Verso. Knowles, C., & Harper, D. (2009). Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krase, J. (2012a). An Argument for Seeing in Urban Social Science. Urbanities, 2(1), 18–29. Krase, J. (2012b). Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class. London: Ashgate. Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyon, D. (2004). Globalizing Surveillance: Comparative and Sociological Perspectives. International Sociology, 19(2), 135–149. Maloof, J. (2014). Vivian Maier. A Photographer Found. New York: Harper Design. NPdata.be. (2010, May 5). Hoeveel inwoners van vreemde afkomst in mijn gemeente? From http://www.npdata.be/BuG/125-Vreemde-afkomst/

82 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Pauwels, L. (2009). Street Discourse: A Visual Essay on Urban Signification, Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research, 1, 263–272. Pauwels, L. (2015). Reframing Visual Social Science. Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prosser, J. (Ed.). (1998). Image-Based Research. London: Falmer. Rykwert, J. (2000). The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Pantheon Books. Schatzki, T. (2002). The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Scott, M., Parkinson, A., Redmond, D., & Waldron, R. (2018). Placing Heritage in Entrepreneurial Urbanism: Planning, Conservation and Crisis in Ireland. Planning Practice & Research, 1(1), 1–18. Shames, S. (2014). Bronx Boys. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shore. (2010). The Nature of Photographs: A Primer by Stephen Shore. New York: Phaidon Press. Shortell, T., & Brown, E. (Eds.). (2014). Walking the European City. Aldershot: Ashgate. Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The Dynamics of Social Practice. Everyday Life and How It Changes. Los Angeles: Sage. Verhoeff, N. (2012). Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ward, K. (2003). Entrepreneurial Urbanism, State Restructuring and Civilizing ‘New’ East Manchester. Area, 35(2), 116–127. Whyte, W. (1941). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2769226?seq=1 Zuev, D. (2018). Urban Mobility in Modern China: The Growth of the E-bike. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Zuev, D., & Krase, J. (2017). Visual Sociology. Sociopedia.Isa. http://www.sagepub.net/isa/admin/viewPDF.aspx?&art=VisualSociology.pdf Zuev, D., Tyfield, D., & Urry, J. (2019). Where Is the Politics? E-bike Mobility in Urban China and Civilizational Government. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 30, 19–32.

CHAPTER 4

Social Media and the Visual

The way we consume news and information is radically changing. From the decline of newspapers and the rise of 24-hour rolling news to the shift in social media platforms, news (fake or otherwise) is increasingly consumed online (Reuters Institute 2019). Those aged 18–24 are likely to stay informed via YouTube, WeChat and Facebook, while those who are aged 50+ still prefer to watch the news on TV. Even more significant is the fact that teenagers use social media for almost everything they do, from following news and events to sharing photos of their daily lives. Images and social media play a central role in how they learn, have fun, communicate, socialize and become politically engaged. The use of social media varies from region to region. For example, through the Gulf States teens go for Facebook, while in China they log into Weibo or Douyin (TikTok) (with the latter rapidly becoming the global virtual and visual playground for teens). In Russia both young and old will share photos via VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and again Facebook. Social media platforms have also become a space for stimulating activism, reflected in the generational shift towards climate change and global, coordinated action amongst school children and college students (The Economist 2019). Important for us here is the fact that the news consumption today is both narrowcast and broadcast—from those sharing live feeds via Facebook to large institutions like the BBC. Additionally, the images we receive are also often from sources other than official news outlets and are typically shared by people we feel we know—the personal channels of YouTube and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Zuev, G. Bratchford, Visual Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_4

83

84 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Instagram personalities we subscribe to, and thus to whom we can relate and confirm the level of authenticity of the source of information. This is especially important when artificial, computer-generated videos and synthetic media (deepfakes) are growing in sophistication and volume. In addition to offering escapism and news, social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram enable users to develop a social and political visibility by attracting attention to events and social groups who may be on ‘the margins of the global system of violence’ (Hariman 2014: 151). While it is not a completely emancipatory tool, as we will aim to discuss in this chapter, the Internet and specifically social media platforms have widened the way we see the world and one another and, by virtue of this, how we perform for a potentially global audience.

Mining Social Networking Sites for Visual Data The Internet offers a vast visual data archive to sociologists and provides a host of opportunities for researchers to make sense of the world we live in. It is now commonplace to share our lives, visually on and through social media platforms. In particular, the use of social media offers a space to share an array of visually articulated moments, ideas, feelings, actions, emotions. Through the ever-increasing potential to see the otherwise hidden, private aspects of people’s lives shared openly and freely across social networking sites (SNS) in video and photo form, social media, the new digital networked world, is ripe for sociological exploration. In doing so, we can look to social media platforms and video websites as spaces where people and groups perform social, sexual and political identities, as well as where tribes and movements are born and grow. As we noted in Chap. 2, social networking sites contain a large amount of visual data and the knowledge of how to rigorously and methodically examine it has been very fragmented and often limited to big data. As Manovich (2011) argues, using big data from social networking sites can be less challenging as a data source for analysis, because they are organized, tagged and contain metadata. However, while uncovering global tendencies, such as which countries take the most selfies, such projects do not have the capacity to facilitate in-depth inquiry. More focused work, like that of Visual Social Media Lab (2018), aims to extensively examine these questions through exploring impactful datasets and images like that of the Alan Kurdi tragedy through macro and micro analysis. They do this by taking vast datasets, exploring their provenance and geographical

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

85

impacts through diffusion spots along the Twittersphere and then homing in on the image itself to unpack the content and explore the symbolic and emotional value of the photo through specific forms of content analysis. The visual offerings of social media remain in the shadow of oral narratives in social media studies in part, because there is little qualitative engagement with the visual data on social networking sites, which are in turn complex multimodal interfaces. Social networking sites, as well as video and photo-sharing platforms, include Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Snapchat, Pinterest, Meerkat, Periscope and primarily Instagram (some of which may have disappeared or new ones appear by the time this book is out) are becoming an integral part of the modern visual culture. Social media helps to shape the processes of data use, sharing practices, identity formation, self-presentation and, on the whole, visual communication and visual consumption (Zuev 2015). When using social media as a visual database, several methodological requirements need to be addressed. This can be examined through four relational aspects of social media. The first concerns the latent contextual aspect: the political nature of the social media platform which is a corporate profit-oriented institution, often in competition with other similar platforms, where hosting of user-­generated content is a subject to the economic allegiances of the platform. For instance, visual self-presentations on the hospitality network site CouchSurfing follow the logic of presenting a photo that puts forward a host rather than his or her dwelling, while on Airbnb, the actual hospitality aspect and host-guest relationship is of less significance and it is the commercialized aspect of the place, and not its human ingredient that is foregrounded. It is common for Airbnb to arrange for professional photographers to take pictures of the ‘listings’ or individual houses featured on the platform. The second concerns the technological aspect, which also relates to the contextual, but is more visible, as this is the interface of the medium which determines relations between the authors and texts. For instance, the technological aspect can be related to a particular mobile user interface, such as Tinder, generating a unique screened intimacy based on ‘swipe logic’ (David and Cambre 2016: 1). Also, unlike traditional photo-sharing websites, Instagram users have to upload photos via an app rather than through a browser. As a result, we experience the narrowed experience of photo-­ taking and photo-sharing. Thirdly, the social relates to the participation of users, who attain high status due to the presentation of their content and can later undergo status transition to professional ‘influencers’ with monetized content. Here, the

86 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

idea of capital transfer mentioned by Pierre Bourdieu (1986) is quite evident. For instance, the accumulation of a certain number of subscribers, views and likes in YouTube or Instagram can be translated into economic capital (accumulated via advertising). These users become a kind of public performer, who are engaged in an accumulative broadcast-visibility-­ monetization cycle. The fourth is rhetorical or textual, which contains paratextual elements and textual registers (verbal, audio and visual). The visual rhetoric remains one that is hard to crack due to its ambivalence and the multiple communities that will interpret the visual differently (see Fig.  4.1). As we will show below, the visual narratives in diverse social platforms follow their

Fig. 4.1  Visual in Tinder, a smartphone-­ based dating application. The user’s main profile photo depicts an image of the Portuguese carnation, a symbol of revolution. Is this a self-presentation for a dating app or a political blog?

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

87

textual logics (e.g. more stylized galleries in Instagram vs catalogue of images in Tinder app; see Fig. 4.1). In what follows, we aim to examine some of the themes regarding the nature of the visual in connection with these four relational aspects of social media and the scope of its visual content including context and user interface, social practices and meanings. We pose a number of pertinent questions: What is the visual in social media? How does it differ from the visual in older media or other platforms? How do the viewers and producers differ? What are the multiple logics of sharing, posting and producing images for social media? And ultimately, how do the produced images acquire a life of their own? Following Kress and van Leeuwen’s idea of visual grammar (1996), we suggest that there is undeniably a new visual grammar (syntax) of visual social media and visual social media practices. In the next section, we will review how the new hybrid visual aesthetics emerge in social media platforms. We will provide an overview of some of the practices and their political implications in the context of social media and will try to give some answers to these questions related to use, function, production and signpost to relevant works, thinkers and ideas emerging from visual sociology and beyond. In particular, we will focus on YouTube and the practices of radical video broadcasting and vlogging as an emerging form of news making.

Social Networking and Photo-Sharing: Memes and Selfies Social network sites were originally referred to as websites and platforms that allowed individuals to meet strangers and enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks (Boyd and Ellison 2007). Currently the term social media is associated with the platforms that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. The visual content has become a critical component of everyday social media, with some platforms explicitly centred on the visual (Instagram) and on those offering a mix of text and images in multiple forms (Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) (Highfield and Leaver 2016). But images do not move by themselves. They have to be taken and circulated or found, for example, through hashtags or algorithms. They have to be shared. And sharing of visual content has become the key

88 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

practice related to social media. But is it indeed ‘sharing’? Does this practice need to be redefined and reconceptualized in order for us to better grasp the deeper motivations and shifting meanings of visual ‘sharing cultures’? Photo-sharing has always been part and parcel of photography: from the early carte de visite that circulated in middle-class French society and across colonial territories as an early form of postcard, to slideshows, to participating in school photo-albums, as well as assembling and viewing family albums together (Chalfen 1987). The difference being that tangible ‘analogue’ photos viewed together in contrast to digital photo viewing (posting) are a ceremonial but essential part of establishing trust between users. For instance, in hospitality networks, where users form hybrid online-offline communities, members first meet each other online via visual profiles (Zuev 2008, 2012). Selecting, using and constantly changing images for social media profiles is now a part of daily life constituting the process of ‘performing’ an identity (or any number of identities). Sociologically, we can think about online photo-sharing as a ‘constellation of practices’ (Schatzki 1996) that have different meanings, require different skills and competences, and are embedded in diverse material settings (see Serafinelli and Cox 2018). The intensity of the stream of image-sharing defines how the photo is perceived—from gallery style Instagram to the news line style of Facebook or Twitter. Yet, photo-­ sharing in social media remains social, despite its instant, fast and maybe ‘ephemeral’ spirit; the goal is to connect and to maintain links with other members or friends, to supply a story of yourself, as they are shared to build up visual profiles of users. Indeed, the connectivity and online presence imply ‘sharing [is] imperative’ (Van Dijck 2013). Photo-sharing also includes expectation of rewards—feedback or likes, comments (verbal or emoji style) and encouragement from viewers. Photo-sharing has emotive and affective goals: the more views and likes, the higher self-esteem and self-contemplation of the author of the image; the author can achieve satisfaction from ‘non-sexualized voyeurism’ (Serafinelli and Cox 2018) or self-confidence. This is also true in the context of hospitality networks (as noted previously), the probability of being hosted by a stranger, where you are assessed as much by your visual presentation, appearance and ‘look’ as by one’s textual biographic presentation (Zuev 2008). Photo-sharing also has utilitarian meaning—geolocating oneself and pointing this to the social circle, stating ‘I am, or I was here’; however, geotagging can be removed for privacy reasons.

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

89

The ethos of sharing and user-generated content is the life blood of ‘participatory culture’, where users not only upload their original video or photo material, but where they create new meanings and radically different types of images, which resemble modified copies of the originals; memes are one such example. The phenomenon of memes is crucial in understanding the participatory culture across diverse social networking sites, through which memes circulate. The power structures underpin the associated process of viral diffusion or the ‘ultrafast sharing’ of visual material that through its contagious content reaches a vast audience. Berger and Milkman in their study of ‘spreadability’ of news items identified six features that enhance a content’s virality (2012): • Positivity and humour, as people are more likely to share positive stories • Provoking strong emotions, narratives with ‘wow’ effect • Packaging, simple and clear spread faster • Prestige, the social status of the author • Positioning, approaching the right connected ‘hub’ and ‘bridge’ users • Participation, which allows people to engage actively with the video Participatory culture has its own logic, where unfinished videos are more inviting for further ‘vernacular creativity’. Artistic practices of mocking and adding new humorous meanings to the original image, often skewing the primary goal of the image, in turn modify the audience and subvert the possible reading or interpretations. Social network sites where visuals are used, shared and circulated are not homogenous. Different platforms have different target audiences, functions, norms and conventions and offer diverse versions of self-­ presentation. This is most easily visualized by the now viral Dolly Parton meme challenge (Fig. 4.2). The US country music singer posted a collage of herself with four identifiable poses that reflected how one would present oneself on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Tinder and thus construct a different version of pseudo self-authenticity (Winnicott 1965). Created through Instagram’s downloadable collage feature or via collage template apps from Pic Stitch, Canva or Fotor, to name but a few, the use of collage templates on social media platforms is a popular tool for framing and sharing a sequence or thematic bundle of images, as well as providing a space for intertextual commentary on the presumed performative and visual syntax of a specific platform.

90 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 4.2  ‘The Dolly Parton Challenge’ a viral meme published online from Dolly Parton’s official Instagram feed in January 2020. https://www.instagram.com/ dollyparton/?hl=en

In Dolly’s image we are presented with four versions of the self, adhering to the visual rules and audiences of each platform. The quartet of images is an astute comment on performative role of the self and self-­ representation online. While LinkedIn is seen as your serious ‘professional’ network aligned to your employability, the opposite would be Tinder, where the emphasis is to present oneself as sexually appealing and playful. A host of celebrities and non-celebrities alike took up the challenge and sought to perform and present their various selves in visual acts,

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

91

confirming that celebrity is a discursive category and a continuously changing performative practice (Ekman and Widholm 2017). The notion of self-presentation and the various self is a common trope, sociologically (Goffman 1958) as well as through art history and visual criticism (Mirzoeff 2015). Since Goffman’s groundbreaking work, self-­ performativity (and its visibility) has been crystallized in the photographic selfie. The selfie is perhaps one of the most pivotal visual genres and practices of the social media era. The selfie (and self-representation such as the self-image) is, we argue, amongst other things, about securing identity, often in opposition to a stereotypical perception. The visual syntax of a selfie is to hold a camera with your hand or via a prosthetic object like a selfie stick in order to achieve the best view of yourself and the location you are in. Typically held two-thirds high in order to present a more flattering shot of yourself and/or to enable the photographer to achieve the widest possible frame to include friends or relevant and appealing locations within the shot. The selfie has long been a common feature on social media pages. The presentation of the self has multiple forms and allows for multiple modes of social and political expression. We can, like Dolly Parton suggests in her four-way visual meme, perform the person we want to be or the person we hope to be seen as (see Fig. 4.2). Through our daily routines, we can perform as the consumer (presenting ourselves with shopping bags), the winner, the traveler, the activist and the feminist. The latter two are perhaps best evidenced by the ‘normalize breastfeeding’ movement on Twitter and Instagram. Known by the shareable hashtag #normalizebreastfeeding whereby women sought to post photos of themselves breastfeeding in public spaces onto Twitter and Instagram as a way to develop safe and supportive spaces to discuss and importantly visualize issues related to breastfeeding in a public space. To bring the act into being whilst placing the emphasis on the performance of self-visualization plays an important role, firstly as an empowering and perhaps emancipatory act but also as a way to frame the event as both global and local or ‘glocal’. We also perform our gender, sexuality, race and class through visual social media, with different platforms driven by the economics of attention (Lanham 2006). In doing so, we play out different roles to fit the norms and conventions of each social media space in order to attract the specific form of visual-social conversation.

92 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

It’s understood that the most visible group on social media are young people and particularly young women.1 Historically it could be argued that it is precisely this latter group that had little or no control over their visibility or on how and when they are seen. From the work of John Berger (1972), through to Laura Mulvey (1975), the presentation of the female form has largely been the object of desire and control of the male gaze. Moreover, to think about a selfie as a space of performativity and the body as a contested site of vision and acceptability, the female body as well as the disabled body, is often measured against very narrow standards (Hess 2011). It is thus no surprise that such movements emerge in social media to rightly challenge a visual economy laden with unrealistic expectations about their self-image. Thus, the selfie and social media platforms offer people the opportunity to make an attempt at how their visibility is framed. Once an image begins to circulate, the author will undoubtedly lose control over how that self-image should be read, understood and the context of production. They can, at best, try to ‘guide the gaze’ of the audience through hashtags, grounding the image in a wider sphere of debate and relatable images. As such, the images within these spaces come with their own norms and conventions, codes of practice and aesthetic conventions which ‘fit’ with that platform. As visual sociologists we should regard these platforms as spaces of interaction and appearance specifically for those who otherwise might have been excluded from a ‘conventional’ visual economy, for instance, refugees. In this case, as we will explore, the selfie offers individuals and groups the opportunity to ‘make an attempt’ at how their visibility is framed. It must also be acknowledged that once the image begins to circulate, there is a potential that the original intention of the photo can be reframed and misappropriated.

A Glimpse of the Photographic Cultures of Facebook and Instagram We do not aim to review the existing scholarship on the nature of the visual in social networking websites, but we would like to acknowledge a few comprehensive studies that are visually oriented and where the image is given consideration. 1

 See, for instance, www.selfiecity.net for gender statistics on selfie posting.

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

93

One study that seriously considers the visual aspect of social media from an anthropological perspective is Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan’s Visualizing Facebook (2017). Miller and Sinanan’s aim is to understand the nature of social media photography and remind us that much of what we communicate via such platforms is non-verbal with an increasing emphasis placed on sharing and exchanging images without any textual comments. Emphasizing the prominence of two types of photographs that find their way to Facebook—actual photographs and modified images such as memes—they note that the posting of memes on personal Facebook pages is a common practice for Facebook users. The authors also suggest that the history of photography is the history of posing, which in turn leads to a question: what are the key poses and posing in the age of visual social media? Can they be distinguished and thus be added to the modern history of social media-inspired and aided photography? Currently, one can distinguish several genres in social media photography according to the posture or posing style which currently can be also related to the genre of selfies (see Hand 2017). These include but are not limited to ‘jumping photos’ (alone or in a group2), exhibiting muscular and fit bodies in a gym (‘gym selfies’) or ‘part-body’ selfie, for example, presenting a first-person view of one’s legs (‘hot dog legs’). There are also ceremonial, group selfies and solidarity (group) selfies during protest events. Elisa Serafinelli’s study on Instagram practices and digital life aims to show the changing practices of Instagram users and visually mediated social relationships ‘on the go’. Relationship between being mobile and viewing is the key defining feature of Instagram user’s performance. Formatting is greatly influenced by the ‘squared vision’ imposed by Instagram tiles. The impact of platforms like Instagram is in the potential for the users to better ‘see’ and connect with their environment. As Serafinelli states, ‘the extended use of the platform shows two types of changes: one is related to the improvement of photographic skills and the other is related to the development of the connection with the surroundings’ (2018: 68). The very practice of engaging with photography through Instagram points to the multiple ways in which the platform shapes and determines what the users define as vernacular photo opportunities. Similarly, Lev Manovich in Instagram and Contemporary Image (2017) suggests new categories for analysing the practices and styles of 2  See, for instance, a project of Philippe Halsman Jumpology in the 1950s, which now relates to a long-standing trend of jumping photos in social media.

94 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

visualization embedded in Instagrammism, which he contends is a new ideological code being born. He aims to find patterns of Instagram visuals and arbitrarily distinguishes between casual, professional and designed types of Instagrammism. Yet, importantly, Manovich refers to diverse stylizations of user galleries and contextualizes Instagram in a broader context of platform aesthetics, tallying that the platform affects the new aesthetics and aestheticizing class of young urbanites. While Instagram has taken over Facebook in terms of its image-driven ‘attention economy’ (Lanham 2006), with specific attention paid to highly curated images that are considered and stylized, Facebook remains the site for an occasional vernacular photo posting, reposting of some interesting meme or a video. It can be used for purely textual comments, seemingly closer-knit connections with family and friends as well as placing emphasis on textual based conversations over the shorthand exchanges and everyday practices found on Instagram. The multi-modality of Facebook’s visual function is nonetheless important. It informs the user who is online, offering users the potential to connect in real time. We may go through the posting history of friends and add some comments; Facebook also allows one to see a history of profiles and, in short, a history of seminal events or a catalogue of past forms of significant acts of self-presentation. Surprisingly, the Facebook interface has not changed much over the years, although new features have been added. However, unlike many social networking sites, it has not undergone a thorough visual makeover. A Facebook photography analysis by Miller and Sinanan suggests that the key feature of this social media platform is poor photography—indeed ‘absolute rubbish’ photography (Miller and Sinanan 2017). While on Facebook trivial photos were often taken for and while having fun, in Instagram these trivial photos (food porn and ‘gym’ selfies) are often put through a number of filters to make them look glamorous and more aesthetically pleasing. However, these ‘rubbish’ photos are the very social glue of the ‘mass’ photo-sharing 3.0, in contrast to sharing photos in the ‘old days’ via slideshows from the trips or carefully crafted family albums with relatives and friends or via dedicated photo-sharing platforms (such as JuzaPhoto or Blipfoto). While Facebook photos are more instant akin to news reel presentation, Instagram is a rarified ‘stylization’ similar to an ongoing virtual exhibition carefully curated in terms of placing and formatting the images. Both Facebook and Instagram have different

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

95

rhythmic structures. Where Instagram photographs can be arranged carefully to provide a purely visual collage the rhythmic structure is cyclical, whereas Facebook visualization is determined by linear time. The use of additional images or emojis in commenting on photographs can be understood as a form of performativity that extends visual communication but substitutes verbal conversation. This underscores the performative aspect of posting comments—they might, more or less consciously, be staged for the views of others. The exposure of emotional reactions is, in fact, a driving force of social media interactions, expressed predominantly in the most basic manner by the various emoticons and emojis on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms and apps, as well as in everyday text messaging or emails. To account for this public act of observing, social media reception should be understood as a public performance, in which users manifest their sentiments, dispositions and motivations and make them mutually understandable. More specifically, in an activist or social movement framework, as well as in the analysis of transnational solidarity, the use of social media platforms, images and insignia, like the example noted above regarding Tinder, has a very particular resonance and is worthy of extensive analysis. For a visual sociologist, it is important to analyse how and under what conditions social media imagery works and to what end. For example, Bratchford (2018) notes that pic badges used within the frame of a Facebook profile photo (or even changing a profile photo to an unilateral image of solidarity), like a rainbow during gay pride marches or the New Zealand national flag during the Christchurch shootings in 2019, can form communities of sympathy through signs and symbols rather than texts. To this end, the collective use of images and political or socially loaded frames create, albeit often only for a short while, impromptu collective publics who, through their adopted collective image, take on a performative role—that is, to engage in the production of meaning in the form of user comments and/or sharing of user-generated content. Moreover, shared photographs bearing testimony to distant suffering (Boltanski 2005; Chouliaraki 2008; Hill 2019) turn the social media user into a first-order observer. While the example noted above on Tinder is also a marker of one’s political or ideological position (see Fig.  4.1), so too does the image work as a way to ‘speak’ to or engage like-minded singles.

96 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Social Media and Surveillance When we think social media, we are aware of our immediate audience, but we must also consider the surveillance aspect. Who else is watching our family photos? Surveillance is a multifaceted phenomenon and is a key ethical concern not only for researchers but the platform owners, who own the photographs once uploaded (on Facebook) and the surveillance parties—from police and border control to parents or potential employers. The ‘consumer surveillance’ is a constant but invisible feature of browsing the Web. By participating in social media, you should, by default, accept that you are being observed. The EU data protection acts in some European countries (introduced in May 2018) caused wide public protest and prompted many users to clean up their social media (Facebook) profiles, deleting comments and photographs, as well as searching for alternative web-surfing practices with increased privacy, for example, employing non-tracking search engines (such as Qwant). To summarize on the politics of privacy and corporate dataveillance, it seems that the issue of privacy has not held a large space in the consciousness of the users (Serafinelli and Cox 2018), and people are often willing to share data without considering the potential consequences or negative effects for them (Zuev 2018: 104). Thus, sharing and privacy concerns appear to be significant but more in the academic understanding and ethics of data management while users of photo-sharing platforms are ready and happy to trade their photos or data for the services they get in return. Facebook’s announcement, in 2009, that they were the proprietors of all of the visual and textual material of their users, had very little impact on membership and user registration to the social media platform. While the policy remains, the membership of social media platforms continues to grow worldwide, resulting in profitable outcomes, linked to the marketization of free personal data that is converted into capital. In the following section, we shift discussion from the politics of photo-­ sharing to some examples regarding the nature of the shared photos in social media: the production of images by the users before posting them and subcultural influence on the social networked visibility.

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

97

Moving into Social Media: Dashcams and GoPros The Internet has provided multiple platforms for impression management, self-presentation, manipulation and visual data storage. The modern visual sphere is extensively ‘shared’, more publicly available, user-generated and uncensored. The fundamental relationship between self and society is questioned in a number of studies on social networks where excessive amounts of personal data and visual data are ‘overshared’ (Agger 2012). For instance, the increased presence of dashcams in cars in many countries leads to the growing awareness that this technology for justice and altruism will increase urban surveillance (Park et  al. 2016). In Russia, Poland and China, the use of dashcams has now become an integral part of the driving experience of individuals. The few existing studies show that dashcam users in South Korea are driven by reciprocal altruism/social justice and monetary reward (Park et al. 2016), while in Russia dashcams are primarily used as evidence collection against corrupt traffic police. But the videos accidentally capture anything from insurance fraud to crime, road accidents and meteors falling from the sky in 2013. The enthusiastic sharing of these videos served the basis for an award-winning documentary Road Movie by Dmitry Kalashnikov (2016), who admits: Dashcam videos, they’re very specific. They’re not like all the other crazy videos on YouTube. The most wonderful thing about it is that there is no one controlling the camera while it’s recording. Everything is happening by chance. There is no director, no cinematographer, no one controls the composition of the frame.3

Since most of the dashcam videos are found in YouTube, the idea of the film was to translocate the YouTube inhabiting video compilations to the widescreen format of the cinema. The videos from dashcams are characterized by uncertainty and the scale or the emotional grip of the event: from different angles of the meteor falling from the sky to action-movie road brawls and fast-pace police chases, but at the same time they often work out as artfully directed movie scenes. The situations of liminality are sprinkled with ‘about to die’ 3  Someone Made A Documentary About Those Insane Russian Dash Cam Videos. https://www.fastcompany.com/40522300/someone-made-a-documentary-about-thoseinsane-russian-dash-cam-videos. Accessed 20.01.2020.

98 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

moments (Zelizer 2010) crouched in the always familiar setting of a car, where events are narrated with the visual register outside the car and the audio register within. This ‘fly-on-the-wall’-style filming,4 without the director and without the actors, where the real life beyond the window is the stage, and the conversational narrative, is provided by people in the car who we do not see. Dashcam videos present one important issue: as we are (probably) moving towards autonomous mobility futures, the visualization from the car is becoming an important feature of safe driving, contributing to gradual normalization of pervasive surveillance. Dashcams are but one emerging ‘wearable’ or mobile (vehicle-based) visual registration technology that defines the experience in a given place, but the unintended consequences of this technology are the production of another type of uncontrolled, unedited, accidental video generating extreme visibility. This extreme visibility, enabled by a dashcam, is an instance of how wearable and video or photo recording devices shape our experience of movement, interaction and reaction to the unfolding events, first-person witness accounts via accidental presence and ‘unintended panopticon’ (Chalfen 2014). As Lev Grossman contended (2006), one can learn ‘more about how Americans live just by looking at the background of their households in YouTube videos’. Similarly, we can learn a lot about the streetscapes of the Russian cities just by looking through the videos from the dashcams, uploaded in YouTube. The visual material from dashcams can be entertaining and highly popular among the social media spectators, but at the same time the actual dashcam users are accidental witnesses ready to contribute their dashcam footage to the common pool of evidence, regardless of the incentives or the identity of the requester, if it can help other people and thus enable creation of dashcam-based crowd-sensing campaigns (Park et al. 2016). Similar to a dashcam, the rise of the GoPro has enhanced the ‘first-­ person perspective’, both in terms of self-presentation and mediation. The GoPro offers those who observe the visual material a ‘presentness’ to a given situation, allowing the spectators to be ‘in the moment’ as well as afterwards when uploaded and shared online. From a digital/visual research perspective, the use of mounted cameras during research participation has grown in the past decade (see Pink 2017; Wang and Smeaton 2013). As Sarah Pink noted, there exists a methodological gap, specifically 4  Fly-on-the-wall-style filming normally implies that people do not act but are recorded in real situations, sometimes without knowing.

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

99

in ethnographic approaches to the function of technological, digital and data-permeated elements of the contemporary environments we live and move through (Pink 2017). This includes visual strategies like GoPro’ing as a way to better see how we engage with the material, sensory and social aspects of our everyday lives. For Sumartojo and Pink (2017), this is unpacked through the analysis of commuters cycling to work each day wearing camera-mounted body cams similar to the driver’s dashcam. More critically, Rebecca Stein has analysed the GoPro and the rise of new media technologies within the battlefield, specifically in Israel/Palestine. Stein also takes an ethnographic approach to spotlight the collapse of the ostensible digital guarantee, that is, the promise of new photographic technologies to work better and faster for those subjected to social and political injustices, providing new solutions and advancements to a variety of social and political ills (Stein 2017: 57). Framing this photographic failure as a ‘lapse’, particularly where human rights are concerned, Stein presents the notion of ‘an ethnographic lapse’ as a space to further engage with the social and process-based inadequacies invested in digital technologies as transformative tools for social good. While GoPros and other ‘new media’ present us with the impression of immediacy and connectedness, ‘lapse’, specifically within the context of Israel/Palestine, is a space of critical and political engagement that refuses the progressivism typically associated with the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ (2017: 64). Stein argues that within the Israeli/Palestinian context, Palestinians’ hardship and Israeli ill practice have been recorded in its minute detail, decade after decade and technology after new technology. As noted in Chap. 1, the peer-to-peer streaming of images in a post-9/11 context has shifted our proximity and experience of conflict and terrorism. Tools like the GoPro, when linked to social media accounts like Facebook, can render acts of terror and violence such as the 2019 Christchurch shooting spree where 49 people were shot dead, live online, as a form of media-­enabled performativity. Using his GoPro, the gunman live-streamed his assault via the LIVE4 app which is typically used for extreme sports and live music. The live-stream replicated the carnage from the first-person perspective as in a computer game, showing the attacker’s embodied perspective as he drove across the city and then ran into a mosque to open fire. The virality of the event was part of the performativity of the new age of media consumption, specifically linked to horrific events of media spectacles. The 15-minute video was repeatedly shared and uploaded to YouTube with category tags including ‘education’ and ‘people and blogs’.

100 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

As we note, GoPros have also proved to be ideal tools for recording the rhythmic structures of mobile experiences and interactions (Popan 2019), as well as for tracing experiential happenings and memories (Sumartojo and Pink 2017), human rights abuses as well as mass shootings. But essentially and primarily, they are the tools for the enchantment of witnessing and sharing the visually compelling movement through various spaces. They serve to produce extreme visibility, as a GoPro is employed for depicting the moments of affective encounters with nature (see Fig. 4.3) or urban environments. Unsurprisingly, GoPros have become a favourite tool of rooftoppers. An extreme urban climbing subculture, rooftoppers, as we will show in the next section, take this extreme visibility to a new, literally skyward, level.

Fig. 4.3  Screenshot from a video made with GoPro Hero with a characteristic extreme fish-eye (wide angle) perspective. The hands of the operator are busy, but head-mounted camera records a stream of action and photos can be later singled out as photos. This logic of producing a constant video stream is similar to practice of droneviewing: a video is made first, and then if necessary, screenshots can be made as single photos. Cape Espichel, Portugal, 2015. (Author: Dennis Zuev)

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

101

Vertigo-Inducing Selfies and Extreme Visibility The transnational phenomenon of selfie-taking can be earnestly considered as one of the most dangerous photographic practices alongside war zone photojournalism. Tragically, selfie takers often fall of cliffs in Norway or Portugal5 or when performing stunts when rooftopping on high-rise buildings and bridges. Rooftopping, a form of gaining access to the top of cranes, disused chimneys, bridges or roofs of skyscrapers, has become a global subculture from Moscow to Hong Kong and is commonly associated with broadcasting one’s ascents via social media. Scaling the heights for a photo is not only a stunt justified by the accumulation of potential likes on social media, but a form of thrilling exploration of the small ledge between life and death. Although aerial and skyscraper-view photography dates back to Alexander Rodchenko’s ‘vertiginous plunge’ photography in the 1920s Moscow, and even earlier to Alvin Coburn’s ‘Octopus’ (1912), the practice of ‘from above down’ perspectives, it has been envigored through a confluence of a spatial practice of rooftopping, photography and social media (Deriu 2016). The subculture of rooftopping or roofing is part of an urban exploration or ‘place-hacking’ (Garrett 2013) practice that is part of the modern urban experience, which has given rise to the prolific generation of rooftopping selfies. Selfies and videos of rooftoppers eventually transformed the transgressive spatial practice into a normalized and highly commodified event (Deriu 2016). To emphasize the impact of the virality of rooftopping images, we could refer to another example of a vertical flaneuse, a South Korean photographer Ahn Jun and her exhibition and book entitled Self-Portrait (2018). In these works, she presents a series of nearly suicidal self-portraits depicting herself perched on a rooftop or cliff edge with a first-person perspective of her feet dangling in the air, directed towards a dizzying abyss of concrete shafts below. Such banalization of the height, via visual and spatial experience, approximates us to the geometry of our built environment and the verticalization of our habitat. In rooftopping (see Fig. 4.4), selfies (and images of oneself) are considered legitimate trophies gained in an extreme and transgressive feat of scaling the heights without safety equipment. The act of ascent is paired 5  Polish couple fall off cliff and die while taking selfies. https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08/11/polish-couple-fall-off-cliff-and-die-while-taking-selfies/. Accessed 12.09.2019.

102 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 4.4  Rooftopping part-body selfie. CC Copyright: ‘Shoe 1’ by sev52 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

by the spectacularity of the climb. Sheer vertical falls are presented given indexicality through the inclusion of the climber’s sneakered feet presenting a trivialized perspective of being a hair away from death. In this regard, it too has its own visual syntax, like that of a selfie. Rooftopping, despite its aberrant extreme selfie-taking and GoPro hero shots, can also be seen as a form of visual documentation of our own human aspiration to move cloudwards (Bratchford and Zuev 2020) and to reclaim the right to the city (Garrett 2013). Youth subcultures can be seen as a primary engine in establishing genre and trends of self-promotion via visual social media. In the case of extreme and spectacular visibility of the skywalk performances by roofers, the thrilling photos from above remind us how young people are constantly looking for new ways to advertise themselves. In an effort to connect to their immediate and real surroundings, rooftoppers present/perform for a global audience, sharing their affective experiences and transgressive performances of overcoming obstacles as part of the ‘everyday politics of fun’ (Thorpe and Ahmad 2015). As Deriu (2016) argues, the broad appeal of

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

103

these images seems to restore the irreducible realism of the photograph, which is being undermined and disenchanted by a stream of computer-­ generated and modified images and videos. Thus, a selfie or a video of a rooftopper to some extent helps us to recover our belief in magic, as the truly dizzying spectacle of life is recorded from a newly found aerial vantage point. The roofing photographs, despite their obvious objective to accumulate likes on social media, make a radical statement about the politics of visibility. Often portrayed as deviant and self-endangering adventure seekers, rooftoppers reclaim their youth and re-make their visibility by stepping on the ledge of a high-rise building. This ledge in a different context becomes the last stage and a jumping point of deprived and desperate individuals. Invisible to their social others, they climb to the urban top to command extreme attention (Hillenbrand 2020). This dangerous game with life and death is made visibly poignant through its narrowcasting. The eminence of a freefall becomes a powerful and spectacular message of the preciousness of life for young viewers. The most impressive thing about social media, however, is that it is not the spectacular and extreme that makes the most common content, but vernacular, ordinary and mainstream or indeed ‘absolute rubbish’, that generates mass audiences and brings spectator capital.

YouTube: Broadcasting Yourself for Social Impact and Money When we want to listen to an all-time favourite song that we used to have on tape (yes, one of the authors still remembers that time!), to find a recipe and ‘cooking demo’, to learn how to make slime with our children, or to finish off the evening by watching a summary of that football game you missed earlier that day, or even just to read the comments to the game— and thus participate in it, we often automatically go to YouTube. YouTube’s video-sharing platform is an ultimate black hole, where over 300 hours of videos are uploaded every minute, more than half of YouTube views coming from mobile devices. Its reach is unique, although not permanent or globally accessible. It is not freely accessible in the People’s Republic of China, despite the fact that many Chinese media including CCTV have an official YouTube account. Different countries block access for different reasons: infringement of copyright, political sensitivity,

104 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

content which is deemed offensive to religious or national feelings or sometimes even for no apparent reason. Since YouTube’s invitation to ‘Broadcast Yourself’ in 2005, the means and methods for self-broadcasting have increased exponentially (Bratchford 2018). The promise of ‘broadcasting yourself’ made YouTube the preferred space for diverse modes of self-expression. From aesthetic or political, radical and vernacular, YouTube became the ultimate platform for activists and non-institutional actors, who were not given voice at state-­ run media and engendering new mediated modes of political engagement and citizenship (Askanius 2012; Vergani and Zuev 2011, 2013). YouTube has become the global space for contentious politics, where localized solidarities have been promoted, thus encouraging people to share information in more expressive and creative ways. It has led to the proliferation of videoblogging and user-generated content, where the visibility of you-­ yourself was measured according to subscribers, views, likes and comments. Importantly, YouTube has become the preferred space for young people not only to access music—the most viewed category of videos on YouTube (Leurs et al. 2018)—but also to participate in civil society and become politically engaged through social change-oriented videos (Raby et al. 2018; Strangelove 2010). In the complex multimodal interface of YouTube, videos have become multi-authored texts, which could be directly viewed, with the enablement of interactive comments, and contextualized in the navigational links that recommend related videos. Videos on YouTube have become texts, where the mode of single authorship has become hard to trace. Instead, multiple authorship becomes the key feature, where new practices of video modifications (such as ‘fansubbing’) have appeared. Due to its inherent shareability, YouTube video content can easily fit to the interface of any other webpage or platform, erasing or hiding the original authorship of the text. YouTube videos also have a relationality. They can move and migrate across platforms and spaces. They can be edited and cropped, muted and redubbed, embedded into Tumblr feeds, turned into GIFs and viewed on slideshows, on iPhones, computer screens or projected in public spaces, over and atop of monuments or statues for political and social commentary. For the visual sociologist, it is appropriate to consider YouTube in its richness as a multimodal text with a distinct architecture (Benson 2017). This includes a dynamic relationship between the content of the video, the text of the author (below the video) and interaction of commenters with these different elements of the video. The viewing of the video as a specific

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

105

textual unit requires us to also consider the co-occurrence of video and comments. The comments will often point to the incongruences of the description, title or even suggest where the viewing should start, by adding the time codes. Thus, the comments significantly determine the viewing of the upload, despite the original intention of the author. Without being modified, the viewing is significantly impacted by such practices as the sequencing of the video into time segments—which can be done by the author or the viewers. User comments often provide additional forms of community engagement, offering key hypertextual links to the soundtrack or why this video is being viewed, often stating that ‘X video or TV show brought me here’. YouTube video comment sections facilitate and foster forms of community practice providing recommendations on what else could be watched or listened to. These practices comprise the user-generated content as much as the video itself; however, the video author may simply disable the comments to the video, which significantly reduces the further modification of the visual-text interplay. Consideration of the textual register or the ‘writing part’ of YouTube is crucial in understanding the process of remediation (Benson 2017), that is, processes of authoring and the development of the video, acquiring new layers of meaning through the multiple interpretations of the viewers. The videos also acquire tremendous spectator capital, as they are not only watched and liked or disliked but written about with comments suggesting anchors for multiple multilingual interpretations of the same text. YouTube offers instantaneous access to a global audience and the potential for the significant empowerment of the video producer. Moreover, YouTube and the relationality of the process, including uploading, sharing, audience development through clicks, likes and follows, also give unprecedented access to the viewer. In doing so, social media platforms are an essential tool for circulating a variety of ideas and discourses, enabling alternative visual storytelling in contrast to mainstream TV media. As various user-generated stories converge on YouTube, it transforms into a contested space, where practices of video or image production and circulation have conflicting logics often giving voice to fringe publics and radical discourses. In the following vignettes, we suggest that video- and image-sharing platforms are important sites of visibility politics, where the distinction between the private and public space merges in one continuum. Indeed, the private space is made more visible to generate

106 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

even stronger and more affective intimacy between the presenter and the viewer. In the following vignette, we will speak about videoblogging as a form of emancipation of spectator in the YouTube age with emphasis on three specific vlogs in the Russian language YouTube vlogosphere.

Political Videoblogging in Russia: Subversive Politics and Spectator Capital Video shows and Internet broadcasts on YouTube are often termed as ‘post-television’ due to the way in which ordinary citizens and celebrities engage in an interactive conversation with the viewers. In modern Russia, where state media strictly regulate the news content, specifically during moments of national tension, for example, during or after municipal or nationwide ‘elections’, it is the videoblogs or livejournals that ‘fill the gap’, supplementing the ‘official’ narrative of the state media. Videoblogging has become a standard feature for sharing news and reflections on YouTube. Organized and hosted by individuals (anchormen, presenters, journalists or critics), some of whom were expelled from official media channels or left their posts in state media, but who nevertheless have been very popular due to their other cultural production work. Due to their already established media profile, their newly established online YouTube channels and the rise of the Internet enabled each presenter or anchorman to maintain a prominent voice within the national political discourse (see Fig. 4.5). In 2017, the Russian documentary producer and 1990s TV icon Leonid Parfyonov6 became a reluctant vlogger, with his weekly vlog Parfenon (736,000 subscribers). While he never ceased production of documentary films, he resumed his previously televised project Namedni on YouTube, continuing to maintain a visual presence across television, cinema and online platforms. The style of the vlog itself is unique, as spectators move between his house, where he goes with a signature feature of wine tasting and informal conversation with viewers—where often his dog is present, to different locations: gallery exhibitions or restaurants which structure the contents of a 30-minute show. The show is literally a domestication of 6  In the 1990s Parfyonov created one of the most popular shows Namedni (Recently) while working for the NTV channel, which was one of the most important developments in the Russian media during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency.

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

107

Fig. 4.5  Composite collage of screenshots of various videoblogs in Russian YouTube. Collage on canvas: Dennis Zuev

a news reel, wrapped in a conversational discourse, that constructs co-­ presence and invites interaction between the spectator and the ‘anchorman’, especially as each video ends with the vlogger offering his salutations with the viewer, and clinking his glass of wine against the screen in the same way you would say ‘cheers’ with a friend. Although not being a platform for protest and largely an outlet for discussing the current cultural agenda, opera festivals, exhibitions or films, and always wine tasting, Parfyonov often briefly and poignantly discusses political life in Russia. Due to an immense and undisputed spectator capital earned through his previous non-political TV shows, the vlog paradoxically becomes a highly influential cultural political medium as the spectators discuss these issues in the comments. When watching Parfyonov’s vlog, a different proximity with the viewer is generated. It is akin to a typical Russian home-kitchen conversation with the signature of informal setting for the subtle, casual but friendly intimacy (Boym 1994: 148). Even the commercials within the vlog are often staged within his apartment and performed entirely by the presenter himself, which boosts the creative capital of the show and the performer.

108 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

This fast-paced videoblog is an example of the affordances YouTube offers in terms of alternative televisual broadcasting. The videoblog appeals to a middle-class audience, with an emphasis placed upon ‘high-brow’ culture, framed around reviews of new films, books and exhibitions as well as poetry performances and the analysis of particular artworks, including, but not limited to, fine art paintings. As part of this televisual experience, the New Year’s Eve shows are even live-streamed. The importance of the blog and its appeal to middle-class spectators is based upon the stream of conversation about a variety of topics, touching upon the similar interests and expertise of the presenter, in addition to his highly authoritative view regarding the political situation in Russia. The subtle political message is in the actual freedom of movement performed by the presenter, visible through his extensive travel vlogging, which includes broadcasts from Georgia to France and New York to Vologda (his home town). Arguably, the most politically explosive YouTube channel is the channel Navalny Live led by Alexey Navalny, a long-time opposition leader and director of the Fund Against Corruption. His channel, with its 3.75 million subscribers (in addition to the more casual viewer), can be classified as a dissenting voice within the Russian media sphere. Navalny unilaterally discusses the news that does not receive coverage in the state media and each show is loaded with sharp and offensive remarks towards the powerful state apparatus and the national President Vladimir Putin. Interestingly, Navalny and his team have pioneered the use of drones in documentary films, used in particular for the analysis and examination of politicians close to Putin, for instance, ex-PM Dmitry Medvedev (On vam ne Dimon 2017). The documentaries are made with an investigative and journalistic tone, based on the gathering and dissemination of incriminating evidence, with drones providing crucial footage to scale the high walls of the heavily guarded villas of the Russian political elite and to expose their wealth and lifestyle. The drones act as tools of sousveillance or citizen’s control (Mann 2002) as they transmit images of the lives of the powerful and rich, now the subject of an omnipresent eye from above, the feature of ‘liquid surveillance’ (Bauman and Lyon 2013). While the emotional tone of Navalny’s channel can be inciting and angry, prompting the audience to support or ignore a particular candidate in  local elections, the key reaction to his oppositional and activist work includes the charge of being a foreign agent working to destabilize political life in Russia—a common trope used against those who oppose the political status quo. Some of the news covered by Navalny touches upon

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

109

sensitive topics and information ‘leaks’ to create public outcry including the waste-recycling scandal in the Arkhangelsk Region, ethnic tensions in the Republic of Yakutia or the police abuse of power. The channel’s force is in the ability to display domestic politics local, regional and social issues and injustice, going beyond the grand official narratives of Russo-­ Ukrainian relations or Russia-Western ideological clashes televised on state TV channels. The ultimate case of spectator capital is the highly influential videoblog by Yuri Dud, who started his career as a sports journalist but later became famous for conducting interviews with Russian celebrities (musicians, writers, entrepreneurs) and currently has one of the biggest spectator capitals in RuTube—over 7 million subscribers. His channel was initially based on interviews with a range of celebrities and became a ready-made model that later was copied by several other Russian journalists moving into the YouTube Interview genre. The in-depth interviewing, which lasts for over an hour, starts with staple questions, followed by sensitive and uncomfortable probing questions that, for example, enquire about the guest’s relationship or attitudes toward President Vladimir Putin, the question of Crimean sovereignty or alcohol consumption and so on. In 2019 feature documentary films were added to Dud’s channel, where the common topic of each remained the relationships between the state and its citizens. Similar to documentaries made by Alexey Navalny, the films by Yuri Dud are a tribute to the investigative journalism that was, for a time, a dominant feature of Russian media during the 1990s, when privately owned nationwide broadcasters such as the NTV channel exposed uncomfortable truths and falsehoods challenging cover-ups by officials (Belin 2002). Importantly, Dud took up some of the sensitive themes in his recent film Beslan. Remember (2019), discussing one of the turning points in Russian modern history—the hostage crisis and school siege in Beslan in 2004 while posing some pivotal question in his preface to the film: Our reasoning is as follows: in the past, the state made a mistake that led to a tragedy, now the state has to give as much care as possible to those who suffered. And only through this care it may earn people’s forgiveness, and later their trust. Does the state do everything it can to earn this forgiveness? Does the state do everything it can to earn this trust? Or maybe some people too embarrassed of this subject, and are trying their best to never, ever talk about it?

110 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

The goal of this vignette was to demonstrate that public politics in Russia is a shifting landscape where alternative political and social commentary plays out on and offline. The new online culture chimes with our reflection on how news stories are being produced today. While the state media remain in charge of the dominant reading of the global news and dictate the framing and visual treatment of key stories and news agenda, there is a parallel universe within the YouTube vlogosphere. Unlike censored and firewalled Chinese Internet, Internet in Russia remains fairly open despite ongoing discussion and attempts to censor content. Importantly, the influential Russian vloggers remain physically based in Russia and often engage with their audience offline, organizing cultural events and meetings with the audience (L. Parfyonov, Y. Dud) and participating in public street protests (A. Navalny). While most of the Russian vloggers produce content in Russian language, some of their films are subtitled, allowing for the possibility of exponential reach and global impact. Affording different visual politics, these alternative news forums also shift how audiences engage with Russian news and challenge the conventional online-offline geo-spatiality of receivership. The key implication for understanding the nature of visual politics presented in this way is that YouTube is not only the medium for becoming a celebrity and broadcasting oneself but, in the context of regulated media freedom, also about broadcasting unpopular, invisible and ignored issues. In this instance, stating unpopular truths in front of the camera is an empowering act and a reminder of the plurality of views regarding events and people. The practice of vlogging exemplifies how social media are not only a site of everyday socialities but also a site of politics, where conflicting performances question existing relations of power. Visual social media engenders new formats for the participatory post-television era, where spectators become the capital of the vloggers and simultaneously exert influence in lobbying their chosen topics for discussion by moving certain ideas to the top of the comments thread, so that the vlog presenters can potentially see and discuss them. As we will show in the next vignette, social media, and YouTube in particular, can also serve as a potent arena for spurring violence and distrust.

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

111

Innocence of Muslims: Circulating Fake Films with Grave Consequences In September 2012, a short trailer to a film Innocence of Muslims was circulated on YouTube and caused havoc in the Islamic world. The trailer featured a film that in fact was never produced, but the scandal it helped to generate demonstrated the capacity of user-generated media to instigate religious and political debates. Coupled with the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo publishing anti-Islamic cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, over a dozen Islamic countries protested against the visually instigated blasphemies. After having searched for the film on YouTube back in 2012, the discovery was that the film was a hoax with only a trailer produced. In the days to follow its YouTube release, the trailer became the subject of a YouTube shutdown by several countries with Muslim majority populations and people took to the streets. What could we learn about these kinds of visual products which stir anger, irritation and embarrass global leaders? Through content analysis we can see that the video (its style, theme and appearance) was emulating the previously debated Jyllands-Posten cartoons that also caused worldwide protests in 2005 (Müller and Özcan 2007). The display of the film Innocence of Muslims on YouTube was very similar to the disruption caused earlier in 2012 by the iconoclastic and militant anonymity in the message of Pussy Riot’s Punk Mess in Moscow (Gapova 2014). And the case of the author of the trailer, Nakoula Basseley demonstrated that anybody could become a media ‘celebrity’ when capitalizing on sensitive religious issues. Defined as an anti-Islamic film, Innocence of Muslims gives valuable insights about production, circulation and further offline reaction to the fake visual product, particularly in light of the fact that not many people were actually able to watch it before it was removed from the Internet. There are two key ideas that could be used in the analysis of the impact of the film—the idea of visual or digital storytelling (Couldry 2008) and the idea of image-cloning.7 The Internet is a prime platform for creating stories. Digital storytelling by means of video and textual resources provides frameworks for understanding and imagining and reimagining society. Digital storytelling is the act of telling stories in a collaborative way characterized by visual language 7  These are some of the results of discussing the film with two colleagues Dr Matteo Vergani and Dr Lukasz Rogowski.

112 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

and short standard formats (Couldry 2008). For example, the YouTube video incorporates several essential features of political digital storytelling: the polysemantic structure, emotional personal experiences of the audience and cultural schemes that define a certain ‘interpretive community’ (Vergani and Zuev 2011). The language of iconicity in the video contains similar features: it is polysemic; it is emotionally rather than rationally driven and is interpreted through previous experiences. The reality is thus easily manipulated as facts are kept obscure, invisible and out of frame. The resulting political visual stories are a mixture of powerful sacred images and storytelling transformed into potent engines of political engagement, collective or individual protest or even direct action, which is preceded by radicalization. In the case of Innocence of Muslims: the trailer and stories that it accumulated, including those contributed by radical opinion leaders, helped build up emotional energy that exploded out onto the streets across national borders. Innocence of Muslims is also a curious case for observing the act of image-cloning, as it shows the consequences that a flow of images can have in social media networks. The idea of cloning originates from W.J.T. Mitchell’s book Cloning Terror (2011), and the metaphor of cloning can be used for image politics in social life. The image is not produced, but ‘cloned’, not technically reproduced but virally disseminated, which results in a global ‘burden’ of representations. The controversy over the video did not appear immediately after it was released (Al-Rawi 2017), but only after its trailer was posted on YouTube. Following the act of posting, the author is no longer able to control the dissemination or ‘information cascade’ (Chesney and Citron 2019), as it is cloned on a mass scale— downloaded, copied, modified, commented and in general given a new modality as a text. The cloning process was key to the film’s virality; thus, in order to avoid escalation of violence, several national governments asked YouTube to delete the video. Finally, the cloning of the video meant that not only the signifiers were modified and copied but the signified—the symbolic meanings were also subverted. In Pakistan, the video prompted a declaration of a national holiday dedicated to ‘the special love’ for the Prophet of Islam, allowing the crowds to channel their anger against the video (The Guardian 2012). While clashing with police, the protesters switched their attention to destroying symbols of the ‘West’ and its media which promoted the circulation of the visual—burning effigies of the American President Barack Obama and setting cinemas on fire. Innocence of Muslims taught us that

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

113

we should be cognizant of a deep simulacrum that could spur actual violence or psychological damage. Image-cloning is becoming even more widespread, as social media occupy more space in our lives and the technologies are becoming more proficient in producing fake and modified visual content. Distinguishing between the fake and the real will be ever more difficult than in the previous era of Photoshop and will require advanced technological capacities and visual cultural literacy for detecting fakes and distinguishing them from artistic fiction. Since the controversy with Innocence of Muslims, the circulation of fake videos and deep simulacra has become more sophisticated. With significant advances in technologies and politics of visual misrepresentation, social media becomes the primary contentious space, where algorithmic or computer-generated images or deepfakes become key actors. Our ability to see truth is challenged even further, as the deepfake content in the Internet is increasing—with a major part of it being nonconsensual porn (Kalf 2019). While applications such as Zao or Dublicat allow users to create their own deepfake videos via face-swapping or ‘refacing’ with celebrities, DeepNude allowed the removal of clothes originally present on the bodies of photographed people.8 Here, we bump into the crucial issue that we have touched upon in other chapters—the issue of privacy both on and offline, and the trustworthiness of the visual artefact. Finally, the politics of misrepresentation, fueled by the exponential growth of deepfakes and corporate lack of control over the circulation of visual content, will be crucial issues for sociologists to examine and respond to in the near future. It will be paramount as the trust in video and visual evidence will erode as will the trust in the institutions we look to for checks and balances. In our penultimate chapter, we shall look towards the sky as the latest realm of visual sociological enquiry.

References Agger, B. (2012). Oversharing: Presentations of Self in the Internet Age. New York: Routledge. Ahn, J. (2018). Self-Portrait. Kyoto: Akaaka Publishing.

8   The app has been taken offline by its creator. https://www.vice.com/en_us/ article/qv7agw/deepnude-app-that-undresses-photos-of-women-takes-it-offline. Accessed 12.12.2019.

114 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Al-Rawi, A. (2017). Islam on YouTube. Online Debates, Protests, and Extremism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Askanius, T. (2012). Radical Online Video: YouTube, Video Activism and Social Movement Media Practices. In Lund Studies in Media and Communication (Vol. 17). Lund: Lund University. Bauman, Z., & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Belin, L. (2002). The Russian Media in the 1990s. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18(1), 139–160. Benson, P. (2017). The Discourse of YouTube. Multimodal Text in a Global Context. New York: Routledge. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Berger, J., & Milkman, K. (2012). What Makes Online Content Viral? Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192–205. Beslan. Remember. (2019). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF1UGmi5m8s Boltanski, L. (2005). Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp.  241–258). Westport: Greenwood. Boyd, D. N., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. Boym, S. (1994). Common Places Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bratchford, G. (2018). Constructing the ‘Right Image’: Visibility Management and the Palestinian Village of Susiya. Humanities, 7, 98. Bratchford, G., & Zuev, D. (2020). Aerial Visibilities: Towards a Visual Sociology of the Sky. Introduction to the Special Issue. Visual Studies, 35(6) (in print). Chalfen, R. (1987). Snapshot: Versions of Life. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Chalfen, R. (2014). ‘Your Panopticon or Mine?’ Incorporating Wearable Technology’s Glass and GoPro into Visual Social Science. Visual Studies, 29(3), 299–310. Chesney, R., & Citron, D. K. (2019). Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security, 107 California Law Review, 1753–1820. Chouliaraki, L. (2008). The Mediation of Suffering and the Vision of a Cosmopolitan Public. Television & New Media, 9(5), 371–391. Couldry, N. (2008). Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space of Digital Storytelling. New Media & Society, 10(3), 373–391.

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

115

David, G., & Cambre, C. (2016). Screened Intimacies: Tinder and the Swipe Logic. Social Media + Society, 2(2), 1–16. Deriu, D. (2016). ‘Don’t Look Down!’: A Short History of Rooftopping Photography. The Journal of Architecture, 21(7), 1033–1061. Economist, The. (2019, December 19). Teenagers Are Rewriting the Rules of the News. Ekman, M., & Widholm, A. (2017). Performative Intimacies and Political Celebritisation. In A. Kuntsman (Ed.), Selfie Citizenship (pp. 65–74). Cham: Springer. Gapova, E. (2014). Becoming Visible in the Digital Age. Feminist Media Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.988390. Garrett, B. L. (2013). Explore Everything. Place Hacking the City. London: Verso. Goffman, E. (1958). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday. Grossman, L. (2006). You –Yes, You, Are the Person of the Year. Time. http:// content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html. Accessed 20 Jan 2020. Guardian, The. (2012). Pakistan Explodes in Fury as South Asia’s Muslims Join Anti-US Protests. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/21/pakistan-asia-muslim-us-protests. Accessed 12 Mar 2020. Hand, M. (2017). Visuality in Social Media: Researching Images, Circulations and Practices Images. In L. Sloan & A. Quan-Haase (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (pp. 215–231). London: Sage. Hariman, R. D. (2014). Watching War Evolve: Photojournalism and New Forms of Violence. In L.  Kennedy & C.  Patrick (Eds.), The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict (pp. 139–164). London: I.B. Tauris. Hess, S. (2011). Locating the Bodies of Women and Disability in Definitions of Beauty: An Analysis of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. Disability Studies Quarterly, 31(1). [online: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1367/1497]. Highfield, T., & Leaver, T. (2016). Instagrammatics and Digital Methods: Studying Visual Social Media, from Selfies and GIFs to Memes and Emoji. Communication Research and Practice, 2(1), 47–62. Hill, D. W. (2019). Bearing Witness, Moral Responsibility and Distant Suffering. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(1), 27–45. Hillenbrand, M. (2020). The Cliffhangers: Suicide Shows and the Aesthetics of Protest in China. Cultural Politics, 16(2), 147–170. Kalashnikov, D. (Dir.). (2016). Road Movie. Kalf, S. (2019). What Does a Feminist Approach to Deepfake Pornography Look Like? https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2019/10/24/whatdoes-a-feminist-approach-to-deepfake-pornography-look-like/. Accessed on 12 Feb 2020.

116 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Lanham, R. A. (2006). The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leurs, K., Omerović, E., Bruinenberg, H., & Sprenger, S. (2018). Critical Media Literacy Through Making Media: A Key to Participation for Young Migrants? Communications, 43, 427–450. Mann, S. (2002). Sousveillance: Secrecy, Not Privacy, May Be the True Cause of Terrorism. Available at http://www.wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm. Accessed 20 Mar 2019. Manovich, L. (2011). Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data. Available at http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/067-trendingthe-promises-and-the-challenges-of-big-social-data/64-article-2011.pdf. Accessed 12 Jan 2020. Manovich, L. (2017). Instagram and Contemporary Image. Available at http:// manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image. Accessed 12 July 2019. Miller, D., & Sinanan, J. (2017). Visualizing Facebook. London: UCL Press. Mirzoeff, N. (2015). How to See the World (A Pelican Introduction). London: Pelican Books. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2011). Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Müller, M., & Özcan, E. (2007). The Political Iconography of Muhammad Cartoons: Understanding Cultural Conflict and Political Action. PS: Political Science & Politics, 40(2), 287–291. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. On vam ne Dimon. Don’t Call Him “Dimon”. (2017). https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=qrwlk7_GF9g Park, S., Kim, J., Mizouni, R., & Lee, U. (2016). Motives and Concerns of Dashcam Video Sharing. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘16) (pp.  4758–4769). New  York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. Pink, S. (2017). Technologies, Possibilities, Emergence and an Ethics of Responsibility: Refiguring Techniques. In E.  Gomez Cruz, S.  Sumartojo, & S.  Pink (Eds.), Refiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Popan, C. (2019). Bicycle Utopias. Imagining Fast and Slow Cycling Futures. London: Routledge. Raby, R., Caron, C., Thewissen-LeBlanc, S., Prioletta, J., & Mitchell, C. (2018). Vlogging on YouTube the Online, Political Engagement of Young Canadians Advocating for Social Change. Journal of Youth Studies., 21(4), 495–512. Reuters. (2019). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019. Reuters Institute. Schatzki, T. (1996). Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VISUAL 

117

Serafinelli, E. (2018). Digital Life on Instagram. New Social Communication of Photography. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Serafinelli, E., & Cox, A. (2018). Privacy Does Not Interest Me. A Comparative Analysis of Photo-Sharing on Instagram and Blipfoto. Visual Studies, 34(1), 67–78. Stein, R.  L. (2017). GoPro Occupation: Networked Cameras, Israeli Military Rule, and the Digital Promise. Current Anthropology, 58(15), 56–64. Strangelove, M. (2010). Watching YouTube. Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sumartojo, S., & Pink, S. (2017). Empathetic Visuality: GoPros and the Video Trace. In E. Gomez Cruz, S. Sumartojo, & S. Pink (Eds.), Refiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Thorpe, H., & Ahmad, N. (2015). Youth, Action Sports and Political Agency in the Middle East: Lessons from a Grassroots Parkour Group in Gaza. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 50(6), 678–704. Van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Vergani, M., & Zuev, D. (2011). Analysis of YouTube Videos Used by Activists in the Uyghur Nationalist Movement: Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Methods. Journal of Contemporary China, 20(69), 205–229. Vergani, M., & Zuev, D. (2013). Production of Solidarities in YouTube: A Visual Study of Uyghur Nationalism. In R. Nathansohn & D. Zuev (Eds.), Sociology of the Visual Sphere. New York: Routledge. Wang, P., & Smeaton, A.  F. (2013). Using Visual Lifelogs to Automatically Characterise Everyday Activities. Information Sciences, 230, 147–161. Winnicott, D.  W. (1965). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (pp.  140–157). New  York: International Universities Press. Zelizer, B. (2010). About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Zuev, D. (2008, September 5–8). Cross-Cultural Comparison of Visual Self-­ Presentations on a Social Networking Site: The Case of www.couchsurfing. com. In Presentation at the First ISA Forum of Sociology, Sociological Research and Public Debate Barcelona, Spain. Zuev, D. (2012). Couch Surfing as a Spatial Practice: Accessing and Producing Xenotopos. Hospitality and Society, 1(3), 227–244. Zuev, D. (2015). Cities and Visual Consumption. In D. T. Cook & J. M. Ryan (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Zuev, D. (2018). Urban Mobility in Modern China: The Growth of the E-bike. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 5

Seeing Like a Drone

Drone technology has historically been invested with emotion and agency. As an emergent technology, drones were theorized as hostile machines, presented as part of a ‘kill chain’, their presence in the sky pointed towards a system of combat and surveillance that lacked humanity (Cockburn 2015). Within combat zones Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or ‘drones’ were presented as surgical and clinical. Advocates for militarized drones, such as Predators and Reapers (their names invested with sight, precision and speed), offered counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns a crucial advantage in the role of intelligence gathering and a safer way to engage in ‘neutralizing threats’. Critics claimed that their use reduces late modern warfare to a video game, in which killing becomes all too casual (Plotnick 2012). More recently, the ubiquity of drones, domestically as well as for smalland medium-scale industrial use, presents a more utilitarian everyday value, from tracking poachers to aiding  humanitarian relief projects (O’Driscoll 2017). It is without question that as we move further into a vertical realm of acting, behaving and seeing, the drone has extended our gaze and furthered our capacity to act and behave. However, the sky and atmosphere remain a surprisingly underexplored domain for visual sociologists. While there is a need to summarize some of the important go-to references regarding drone affordances, our principle aim here is to conceptualize the specific kind of visibility that drones have afforded. In doing so, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Zuev, G. Bratchford, Visual Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_5

119

120 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

we suggest some  questions for the agenda for the visual sociology of drones as follows: –– How does this particular technology visualize reality differently from other media? –– How does it give us a different feeling of space from the air? –– Does it create a particular emotional and atmospheric tension? –– How does it make us feel differently about a given  location, site or place?

Towards Aerial Visibility An important aspect of modern life is not only how we observe and make record of the visible or reconcile with the invisible but also how our presence and movements are being observed by agents of power, from the sky and both at and across borders. We are not only being seen and recorded continuously via social media presence and surveillance technology, but we can be potentially recorded and gazed at any time by the mobile eyes of surveillance airplanes, drones and satellites. This extension of the gaze is becoming an everyday practice that is largely facilitated by the ubiquity of enhanced visual technology, including drones. Approximately 2.5 million drones were sold in 2016 and, according to a Business Insider report, the revenues from drones’ sales are to top $12 billion in 2021 (Business Insider 2020). No longer an exclusively military application, drones are being increasingly used by tourists, activists, radical militants (alternative), news media outlets and humanitarian agencies. Chinese-based DJI owns 70 per cent of the market for consumer and commercial drones, with its Phantom model the most popular of its range due to its superior photo- and video-capturing capabilities (Financial Times 2019). Indeed, most hobbyist drone imagery that is taken each year is the result of image capture performed by DJI drones. DJI also produces drone detection systems for prisons, airports and religious sites (see Chap. 6), while Israel is the largest exporter of military drones which are increasingly used by police units and border guards in addition to nation states. In an effort to capitalize on the capabilities of instantaneous visibility and firepower, some of the smallest militarized states make up a large portion of this consumer market, including Azerbaijan, due to their ongoing border conflicts and inability to develop advanced arsenals. Yet even those with the largest military budgets employ drone technologies as a means of

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

121

surveying borderlines. While drones have operated along the US-Mexican border (Gusterson 2014) since 2003, Israel’s management of Gaza and its population (Tawil-Souri 2011; Weizman 2007) has been mostly vertical rather than horizontal, since 2005. The US-Mexican border and Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinian Territories as well as in Azerbaijan vis-à-vis Nagorny Karabakh region represent a shift in the way drones have been deployed, domestically, and normalized, specifically in the US via the rhetoric of the ‘homeland security complex’ (Risen 2015: 85). Bolstering and widening the techno-spatial system of ‘control[ing] without occupation[ing]’ approach outlined by Eyal Weizman in the Israel/Palestine context (2007: 239). Drones, thus, increasingly perform the functions of the vigilant and algorithmic border guards, which can in the future be encoded with patterns of behaviour to identify suspicious and transgressive activity.

Regulating Air as a Contested Space In December 2018 a drone flew under the radar of Gatwick Airport’s DJI Aerospace detection system and plunged the airport into chaos, resulting in over one hundred thousand stranded passengers as the Christmas travel period began. What caused these drones to disrupt the air traffic at the airport remained a mystery. In September 2019, climate change activist group Heathrow Pause1 prepared to fly multiple drones near Heathrow Airport with the aim to ground flights and draw attention to its expansion of the airport and the impact upon the local, natural environment. While the aerospace surrounding airport terminals and runways are defined as no-fly zones for security and safety reasons, other sites, including national parks or natural reserves, are constantly adjusting their policies regarding the use of drones.2 Added to this, a verticalization of traditionally horizontal practices including agricultural work and delivery services coupled with the threat of airborne terrorist attacks by non-state actors, companies such as DJI, for example, have taken precautionary steps to ‘geofence’ sensitive national security locations, creating no-fly zones for 1  Heathrow Pause is an activist group with the aim to respond to climate and ecological emergency related to the expansion of Heathrow Airport. https://heathrowpause.org/pilots/ 2  As the national law around drone use in UK is changing fast, the policies of National Trust that manages national parks and sites are being adjusted. https://www.chroniclelive. co.uk/news/north-east-news/flying-drone-northumberland-coast-national-12394309

122 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

their own products (Financial Times 2017). As the vertical dimensions of power become enmeshed with the amateur desire to participate in domestic drone piloting, the skies above us become ever more contested and turn into a ‘public space’, where the question of ‘who owns the sky’ gains new resonance (Banner 2008). In many countries outside of the EU, a blanket ban on drone use has been in effect until recently, but the growing demand for aerial photography and other commercial use is slowly opening up the sky. The central project of the drone industry today is gaining access to the civil airspace (Sandvik 2016); however, there has been considerable resistance from public and government bodies. The government is often concerned by issues of security and potential chaos, while resistance from the general public is associated with threats to privacy. National regulations do not always reflect the security concerns of the state, but, instead, reflect a culture of prioritizing the privacy and property rights of its citizens. For example, the drone operating regulations of New Zealand require the drone operator to get the permission of the property owner and the occupiers of that property where a drone takes flight, making it very difficult to operate the drone without breaking the law. Drone use by tourists has been prohibited due to the potential impact of non-­recoverable technological waste in pristine areas, global common zones like the Antarctica, where humans are supposed to have null impact. There is a growing regulatory effort in many countries to limit the use of private (and non-private) drones. The reactions to these efforts are crucial in contextualizing the practices of drone use and specifically the production of videos and photos. For instance, in the UK ‘the drone code’ is followed by most pilots, where large corporations get privileged access to what is indeed a common resource—the air above us. Exemptions to the code will have to be made, as the relationship between height and power in some global cities is becoming contested (The Guardian 2016).

Theorizing Drone and Visibility The theorizations of drones are multiple and take influence from a range of disciplines and perspectives. An object/subject of study in their own right (Chamayou 2015) they have firstly been theorized as the eye of war or a killing machine (Benjamin 2013). For a visual sociologist, there are

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

123

few studies beyond the omnipresent ‘military eye’ (Gregory 2011), addressing the drone as a new media that engenders a new visuality or enlarges the field of visibility—leading to pertinent questions of what to show and what consequences it may have on the subjects or environment. Visibility is a complex phenomenon, which is constituted of multiple processes that lie at the intersection of two domains—aesthetics and politics (Brighenti 2007)—an intersection through which our selected practices and regimes exist. But politics is also a ‘question of aesthetics, a matter of appearances’, as Jacque Rancière contends (1999, 74), and a ‘battle over perceptibility’ (Rancière in Guénoun and Kavanagh 2000: 11). Perceptibility, to be seen or sensed as real or to be observed and distinguishable is intrinsically linked to power. Drones and aerial vision, as we will discuss, are linked to these ocular domains and the battle over visual rights, to see and been seen, to be rendered visible, wilfully or otherwise and to make oneself or community ‘appear’ is as important to examine as the drone itself or the images it produces. For in between this is the sense-­ making practice of visuality. What interests us in particular is not purely physical vision, but the resulting visibility and performativity enacted from an image and its reproducibility for a multitude of groups and a range of functions as a result of the use of drones. Examining drone-mediated image-taking as a sociological exercise (visual sociology) is largely absent (see Zuev and Bratchford 2020). While sociologists have not quite yet worked out what to do with drone images as an object of analysis, other fields, such as surveillance and urban studies (Greene 2015; Waghorn 2016), international relations (Grayson and Mawdsley 2019) have taken engaging strides towards enhancing our understanding of the wider visual field of drone use. Drawing on the sociological concept of visibility (Brighenti 2007), our aim here is to better distinguish between varying regimes of visibility and drone use in relation to the visibility of recognition, of the spectacle, surveillant visibility and visibility as control. Considering the theoretical underpinnings, we pose two extra sets of pertinent questions for visual sociologists: –– How does the new visibility affect what we see—subjects and events—and how we can be seen within a multiplicity of landscapes? –– How do drones contribute to understanding of visual knowledge? And ultimately, what are the ethical implications for this emerging volumetric visibility?

124 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Unlike recent studies on “drone-topia” as a way to approach dystopian realities of ubiquitous surveillance and domination (Hildebrand 2020), we argue that the emerging dronetopia3 is a space of aerial visualization in contrast to the space of the visualization on the ground. It helps to interrogate the continuously unfolding hyper-visual sphere that humanity is opening for itself—the area of looking from above and from a perspective that was not accessible earlier. Dronetopia, for us, is an emerging intellectual space, where military, technological, legal, visual and research perspectives on the use and implications of aerial images for user communities need to converge. In the next section, we delineate the conceptual field of drone afforded volumetric visibility and provide empirical observations of this new visibility. Firstly, by focusing on the aesthetics of visual material produced by military and activist footage and, secondly, by relating it to the politics of visual production behind them.

Drone Methodology and Volumetric Visibility Since Gillian Rose called for a more empirical geographic inquiry into visual culture (2003), the drone has emerged as one of the prevailing tools through which to engage geographies as an observant practice, where the researcher becomes an ‘observant participant’ (Wacquant 2010), mapping the continuously changing diversity of human lifestyles, forms of territorial organization, ‘ecological situatedness’ (Fish et  al. 2017) and  aerial subversions in urban environment (Garrett and Anderson 2018). Unmanned aerial vehicles were initially conceived as weapons or weapon carriers before becoming a domestic toy framed around their capacity to extend vision and visuality. From slow and visible Zeppelins, which provided an intimate and proximate relationship between bomber, the city and the casualties below, the visual affordance of aerial vision, specifically in war, has become clearer, cleaner but also further removed from the battlefield.

3  We do not connect to the idea of utopia or utopianism as heuristic, but rather to a broader concept of topos (place) and spatial politics of aerial visibility.

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

125

Distance, Derek Gregory argues,4 is not a morale absolute. A death is a death and a kill is a kill, no matter what the proximity is; distance is a complex issue exacerbated by the weaponization of drones. While the vision and experience of aerial warfare has moved, in keeping with the technologies employed, so too have the technologies shifted and changed depending on their application. While the drone is primarily still thought of as a weapon of war and terror, it also exists as a ‘good weapon’ and a working tool with a useful humanitarian payload. Sandvik and Jumbert (2017), exploring the material and discursive creation of the ‘good drone’, suggest that the very presence of unmanned flying vehicles in the air makes a difference. It can have a ‘disciplinary’ panopticon effect, or a tracking eye effect, when a drone remains undetected and beyond ‘line of sight’. The drone as a socio-material assemblage is appropriate for thinking about the ‘politics of the possible’—the utopian vision of technology, its future functions and benevolent deployment of ‘quasibodies’. Drone technology has become a constitutive part of a new visual method that is indicative of a cultural shift in visibility making and protest tactics, as well as in social participation. Much like photography clubs or the grouping of people who ‘use’ visual capture to enable or enhance their hobby or extend their social network, the drone is lesser of a gadget than a tool for seeing (Birtchnell and Gibson 2015). One such example of this is the ongoing development of ‘drone methodologies’. As Garrett and Anderson suggest, there is a breach between the geographers who are deploying drones and geographers who are interested in understanding the human dimension of drone use and the experience of the drone user (Garrett and Anderson 2018). The authors argue for a ‘more than visual’ set of drone methodologies, as the practice is both multi-sensual and multimodal (ibid.: 355). While the multi-sensual can be appealing to the beginners, excited about the piloting experience and overcoming the elementary forces and regulations, for the advanced practitioner, drones become as natural a visual production tool as a smartphone or a video camera.5

4  War at a Distance: Derek Gregory—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUDaZr5JScs. Accessed 10.08.2019. 5  These observations are based on the interviews with tourists using drones, as part of our ongoing research regarding the tourist drone use and incorporation of drones into tourist practices (2018–2020).

126 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

The emergence of drone-aided video production is one of the significant ongoing shifts in the perceptual system and practices of visibility, surveillance and video-imaging, arguably as much as the creation of photography and, later, its digitization. These shifts are the first aesthetic element, which in turn generates new symbols. Some of these new elements are the volumetric perspective enabled by drone videos, the rapid ascending-descending visualization, visual trespassing, and due to the physical invisibility of high-flying drones anti-surveillant visibility—the practice of looking at that which is officially denied. While it is recognized that digital photography and mobile devices have made photography accessible to the mass population, drones are now making aerial photography and aerial video-imaging mainstream. Thus, we must begin to recognize how drone photography is being implicated into visual practices that perform and construct ways of seeing (Berger 1972) as well as burdening us with representation (Tagg 1988). Part of this burden is due in part to what Stephen Graham (2016) has termed ‘vertical orientalism’ specifically situated in drone-related warfare and the issue of seeing and killing an indistinct ‘other’ from afar. This is further complicated by the digital burden of data overload and hyper-visibility that comes from ‘persistent surveillance’, and the need to resist the practice of visual trespassing enabled by drones, potentially collecting sensitive data regarding the targeted subjects. The concept of the gaze captures the essence and intention of drone-­ enabled aerial experiences and points at specific relations of power (Grayson and Mawdsley 2019). As Peter Adey writes (2010), ‘aerial gaze’ is plural, and beyond the ocular and visual. Instead, it is a multisensorial experience, due to a combination of practices and materials that make a ‘convergence of information from two or more different perspectives’ possible (Adey 2010: 109). Building on this, our intention is to more extensively explore the ‘seeing’ or visibility aspect of droneviewing. What we can see with the drone and what the drone presents, how its presence in the sky may regulate social practices on the ground, primarily the appearance of those below when seen through a drone. For instance, due to the practice of targeted killings by US drones in the remote federal administered tribal areas (FATA) region of Pakistan, strikes have profoundly impacted everyday life with residents reporting unease about engaging in social activities like funerals or festive celebrations in order not to draw the attention of the military (Joseph 2017) in case they are mistakenly ‘seen’ as a terror cell.

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

127

Drones further contribute to the aerial photography practice previously undertaken from balloons, kites, airplanes, helicopters, bird-mounted cameras and satellites (Kaplan 2006), as they furnish the producer with a different rhythmic and scopic structure of a visual narrative. The drone produces visibility that contributes to our perceiving of the vertical space: the volume and atmosphere above our heads. One of the constitutive processes of drone-afforded visibility is droneviewing. It is a constellation of viewing and imaging practices enabled by drones, embedded in visual-­ material properties (technology, sensors, rotors, motor, battery, camera), that, in turn, shapes what and how objects, scenes and scenarios are presented for consumption and ultimately experienced. More specifically, the attribution of the image as artefact and the experiential qualities of consuming said images are informed by power relational dynamics, which determine the relationship between the subject and the distant object. The power dynamics will structure what and how we see a particular event (such as the protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and resulting clashes with the police) (Zuev and Bratchford 2020) and can be referred to as scopic regimes that can be understood as an assemblage ‘of practices and discourses that establish the truth claims’ (Feldman 2005), specifically in political arenas. Truth, like power, is often contested, and so too is visibility. To take these notions and measure them against an array of scopic regimes can be important as an analytical device in understanding different discourses of temporality and relationships between time and viewers (Manderson 2017). Regardless of the status of the drone (military, consumer or DIY), militaristically, or at least corporately, the human operators have a unique power as Wallace-Wells (2014) suggests, to project intelligence into the air and to exert influence over vast expanses of space. Yet, the testimonial capacity of drone technologies and of DIY aerial photography have pushed a ‘threshold of participation’ (Keysar 2019) over spatial conflicts and protest events, enabling a move beyond the embodied presences and subjectivity (see Fig. 5.1). Aerial photography has aided diverse user communities (militants, war and citizen journalists, humanitarian workers, environmental activists, tourists) to construct their own persuasive and legitimating visual narratives of truth from above as a means of resisting the dominant discourses or official vision or reading of events, territory, actions and conditions of possibility. While the focus of drone analysis has, as we have noted, been commonly framed around theatres of war from a national, military perspective,

128 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 5.1  Solidarity march in Sheikh Jarrah. Photo made with DIY balloon-rigged cameras. July 2011. (Author: Hagit Keysar)

in the next section we will analyse cases of droneviewing within similar arenas but by different user communities—news organizations, militants and activists.

Contested War Views Satellite and airplane images of war zones, specifically the footage of ‘precise bombing’, were given limited release to the public during the First Persian Gulf War. More recently, drone use within war zones has had multiple uses beyond military capacities including non-combatant observant roles such as their use by news organizations. Russia’s engagement in the Syrian Civil War in 2016 marked a new stage in the visualization of the war

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

129

from above. Drones piloted by Russiaworks, a subsidiary of the Russian state TV Company VGTRK, reported the scale of destruction in Syria and the devastated urban landscape after heavy fighting. The videos, surprisingly, have been borrowed and used by Western media such as CNN, Al-Jazeera as well as other Russian media (RT channel) alike to show the ongoing war and damage. For the first time, the war view from above was generated by the media due to the affordance of the Russian military control of the airspace. In Syria, the Russian presence in the sky was disturbing to the US military, as it occupied the Western military fantasy of total airspace domination. The news organization provided an alternative view from above on the war in Syria in ways that Western media could not. To a large extent, this has been achieved by the involvement of drones and the successful military ‘embed’ of the Russian drone crew Russiaworks. Needless to say, in Syria it was not only the clash of ideologies but of visions from above contributing to an overall visualization of war and particular contested incidents, such as the bombing of UN humanitarian convoy in April 2016. The portrayal of war in Syria by Russiaworks was described as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘propaganda’ designed to promote Russia’s military involvement in the country with the intention to raise the acceptance of the Russian involvement, the startling scale of devastation produced by the drones was beyond question. The participant observer perspective was not attained by flying below the clouds, but in contrast at the level of sewage trenches and the walls of the houses—swarming around ruins like an airborne insect. While debates about the drone are going beyond its access capacity, in this particular instant of contested space, it was about the advantage of who first gets access to the space above the ground level. The video Drone view on battle in dead city near Damascus6 made in 2016 provides an exemplary narrative of an aerial war view that combines a multiplicity of camera angles and recorded material. One camera shows a drone cameraman and his vehicle escorted by a Syrian police Land Rover providing security during the launch and subsequent video-shooting. As the drone flies over the destroyed and abandoned city, no signs of life are to be seen, the drone approaches the balconies of the abandoned apartment blocks, flying over rooftops, giving a wide-angle camera pan perspective of clusters of houses reduced to uninhabitable rubble. Continuing its reconnaissance, the droneviewing is fast-forwarded through the 6

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWD79Eedgg0. Accessed 12.03.2017.

130 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

protruding urban ruins and heaps of rubble, while tracking the military vehicles with the militant gaze of a ‘straight down’ perspective that records the vehicles moving and preparing for a strike. Recorded footage of explosions, rising smoke and dust engulf the drone, add to the cinematic feel of the droneviewing practice, where experience of the immediacy of war and its capacity of compelling storytelling is foregrounded. In many Russiaworks recordings, drones pierce the clouds of dust, showing projectiles landing on the targets and witnessing destruction with no reference to any side of the conflict. The flow of the flight footage seems unedited and the absence of textual commentary both amplify the sensation of an impartial observer. The smoke dissipates as the drone flies and presents a closing high-pan view of natural landscapes in the background and scenes of urban destruction in the foreground—thus altering our usual frame of reference, that of the top-down military black and white perspective so commonly seen during past conflicts. Drone footage adds a degree of clarity, motion and depth to the portrayal of conflict that may dramatically alter the way wars are covered by the media. The Syrian conflict was the most media-covered conflict in history, and in early 2017, the Russian-drone videos were the only drone footage covering the war: the actual battle scenes, the destruction of big cities and the life in the destroyed cities. The Russian RT channel extensively used them for providing a spectacular and privileged perspective of real ground fighting and missile attacks, a perspective previously available only to low-flying military airplanes and helicopters with the dedicated military documentary cameraman. This privilege of drone coverage has led to political debates between the US and Russia, regarding who owned the Syrian airspace. While the two airpowers had been contesting airspace and the vision of Syria from above, militant insurgent groups deployed drones to advance their agenda in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drone warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan had been covered extensively by researchers, but few studies explored the reversal of this arrangement—the use of drones by the militants against the foreign troops, which marked the new phase of producing the regime of counter visibilities afforded by the drones, where the drone gaze was no longer unidirectional but mutual.7 7  The first use of selfies by civilians with Taliban in 2015 were another peculiar feature of how militants embrace visual technologies for conveying the feelings of strength, euphoria

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

131

In Fig. 5.2 we present a collage of screenshots from what is alleged to be the first drone-assisted video produced by the Taliban media wing Al-Emara8 during an attack on a military compound. The adoption of drone technologies by groups like the Taliban reflects a number of aesthetic-­driven choices underpinned by the inherent and explicit use of drones. The use of aerial footage in the video, which follows the movement of the suicide bomber from the prayer where we see his face to the moment of explosion, adds a dramatism of ‘about to die’ moment (Zelizer 2010). Moreover, it extends the psychological effect aimed to promote the desired version of truth and demonstrates the capacity of deploying new technology.

Fig. 5.2  Composite collage using screenshots of the start and the finish of the video made by Taliban with the use of the drone to film a suicide bomb attack on army compound in Helmand province, Afghanistan, 2017. (Collage of screenshots: Dennis Zuev. Credits: Al-Emara, Afghanistan)

and celebratory mood. (BBC (2015) Taliban selfies: Why militants posed for photos in Kunduz. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34387854). 8  Drone films Taliban suicide bomb attack on police HQ in Helmand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPyh3JuyxOA&t=6s. Accessed 10.01.2017.

132 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

The available version of the video is an edited narrative that first starts from the ground with a militant seated on the ground in a contemplative pose, possibly praying, then saying farewell to his comrades and leaving for the targeted destination in the Humvee. The narrative continues with a shift to the droneview of the vehicle moving along the dusty road to the target destination—an Afghan army compound which it drives into and explodes. The drone hovers over the site until the cloud of smoke reaches the machine, presenting a remote angle of the mission completed by the suicide bomber. The narrative goes back to the ground perspective and ends with showing the scene of destruction, as evidence of the suicide bombing. The use of a drone demonstrates the increasing embeddedness of the new visual media and technology by militant groups, such as the Taliban in addition to extensive YouTube propaganda used by neojihadist militants (Vergani and Zuev 2015). The drone-assisted ideological warfare staged by the militants against the West in Afghanistan manifests awareness of the new visibility provided by unmanned flying vehicles and marks an important development in visual politics of transnational recruitment of young sympathizers to neojihadist groups. The video also shows evidence of a visual literacy bound by a desire to make compelling multi-cam narratives, purposefully made for an audience aware of cinematic and storytelling conventions. While the military drones collect imagery for preparing the remote targeting and attacks, the militants use drones to register and convey their resistance and the journalists use drones to show the scale of destruction resulting from the war from above. In the following section, we suggest looking in more detail at how the drones become the empowering machines for the citizen journalists and activists in many countries.

Droneviewing and Visual Activism Pakistani photographer Noor Behram showed the close-up ‘ground zero’ level of drone attacks in federally administered tribal areas in Pakistan: destroyed houses, dead children and pieces of Hellfire missiles—visual evidence of what happened, thus completing an assemblage of the distant imagery produced by drones from above and the close-up imagery on the ground. The photos of Behram were used as a form of visual activism and the #NotaBugSplat installation sought to counter the dehumanization of people looked from above as distant pixelized targets (Erincin 2016).

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

133

The online campaign #NotaBugSplat9 added a virtual dimension of protest to the dronetopia, where relationships between the drone pilots and potential distant targets on the ground were respatialized. There is a crucial ‘geography of the remote’ that is linked to drone deaths like this and the visual activism that is produced as a result. The scale and size of the #NotaBugSplat installation, plus the deployment of the hashtag as part of the visibility-enhancing performativity online, work to challenge notions of visibility and distance that the drone, as technology, is precisely trying to diminish. While drones bring spaces and objects into closer proximity, the sites and airspace they operate in are very rarely ever seen or heard of. As Judith Butler (2009) noted, the casualties, like that of Behram, are ungrievable because they are already dead. To this end, this death before death is a consequence of colonial and orientalist geography. Targets are produced through a ‘space’ upon which death becomes permissible and through the ‘production’ of space death is sanctioned. Spaces and communities that become the focus of the drone are often hidden, invisible and unknown beyond the prism of war. However, as the art project by James Bridle Dronestagram demonstrates, the use of social media tools and networks can visualize the otherwise invisible. The fact that drone pilots can watch hours of close-up videos of people killed in drone strikes (Rae 2014) leads to a unique situation of viewing and dissociation. By contrast, videos of martyrdom are meant to do the opposite. Despite being physically remote, pilots can see the results of killing and are not removed visually unlike the pilots of a manned aircraft, who don’t see the collateral damage of their strikes and thus relate to this situation in a different, perhaps less stressful way. Although it is argued that drone pilots have a decreased level of association with the target on the ground (Culver 2014), the fact of viewing the aftermath of the destruction close-up can in fact increase the level of horror for the drone pilots, in part, due to the possibility to maintain a prolonged visual presence post event. As we have shown above, the practice of droneviewing is no longer the exclusive domain of the regular army but can be opposed and resisted by the DJI consumer drones operated by smaller guerrilla militant groups. Military droneviewing is just one facet of the war view, with other

9  While an often-quoted example in research literature #NotaBugSplat is a significant example of counter-visibility and spatialization of drone use.

134 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

alternative views from above and from the ground that demonstrate the respatialization of the warfare (Gusterson 2014). On 21 November 2011, the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) launched a helium balloon which captured the image of the University of California Davis community gathering to protest against the use of pepper spray by police against protestors on campus. The image was one of the first views from above portraying a protest event. Recent studies of drones used by the activists to construct the ‘protester panopticon’ (Waghorn 2016) suggest seeing the protest space volumetrically, with power operating across multiple dimensions. From an activist perspective, the use of the drone and DIY aerial photography using kites and balloons (Keysar 2018) have multiple purposes, both as a tool of recording and disseminating images from events as well as creating opportunities to see locations that would otherwise be inaccessible. Constructed from a reusable plastic bottle, cut in half and fitted with a cheap/simple digital camera, held in place by rubber bands, the camera is switched to continuous shoot mode and pointed towards ground. The DIY rig (Fig. 5.3) secured to a balloon or kite has its roots in eco-­ activism and was first deployed in 2010  in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, whereby the organization helped ‘Gulf Coast residents to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own documentation of the spill… and hoping that such data collection will support environmental research, policy, and legal uses in coming years’.10 These actions and techniques, as Keysar notes, are part of a broader ‘practice and discourse, termed “civic science” which concerns the democratization of technoscientific tools and methods through the development of participatory technologies and collaborative practices between scientists and citizens, and citizens and themselves’ (Keysar 2018: 2). The use of non-motorized drones, such as the DIY rig noted, can be considered one of the latest additions to what Steve Mann refers to as ‘sousveillance’ (2002). As a form of surveillance from below, the notion of the drone as a co-opted technology further decentralizes the notion of observation as asymmetric. Defined by Mann as a means of ‘recording an activity by a participant in the activity’ to ‘produce transparency in all directions… [in turn] seeking to reserve the otherwise one-sided panoptic 10  For more information on the Public Lab process, see https://publiclab.org/wiki/revisions/media/356. Accessed 15.11.2019.

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

135

Fig. 5.3  DIY rig made with a plastic bottle and a cheap digital camera. The rig can be attached to a balloon or a kite for grassroots spatial mapping. The bottle rig has the camera pointed vertically to the ground and a simple knot on a string pressed against the shutter button keeps it taking images while in the air. (Author: Gary Bratchford)

gaze’ (Mann et al. 2006 in Goldsmith 2010: 922), sousveillance points to a practice that, through the use of a camera and the embodied presence of an activist or observer in the protest arena, one might reclaim visibility as a form of resistance to top-down governmental surveillance. Applying this notion to aerial photography (drone or otherwise) as well as the handheld camera or camera phone identifies another shift in how the battle over perceptibility is both on the ground and now airborne. The multiple modalities of drone use, from cheap ‘disposable’ drones such as the ‘occucopters’ used during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 (Culver 2014), can claim the aerial space of the protest, avoiding the ‘frozen zone’ of on the ground cordons used to limit and/or reduce the gaze of the media or protesters in a contested area whilst not being concerned over drone damage or confiscation.

136 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Should we begin to think about droneviewing as a way to intervene into the regimes of visibility that seek to shape and control our perception of politics and its actions helps us to both challenge and see how constructed visibilities are closely aligned to the distribution of power? Once a space for asymmetric vision and control, the skies are opening up as the newly contested arena. Thus, the adoption of the drone and similar tools can help shift how the visual is used, marking what Meg McLagan noted as a move from documentation through photojournalism to a means of strategic communication (2006). This means of producing counter-visibilities, as we suggest, promote a widening of the space in which politics can be conceived, performed and seen. Taking this shift from documentation to strategic communication is just one of the multiple modalities related to tactical droneviewing in and related to sites of protest as well as seeking to alter public opinion through a redistribution of the often in/visible. The military gaze of drones associated with violence and territorial penetration is being currently reconsidered by a new wave of drone-pilot-­ researchers as they use drones for art and scientific projects and underline the capacity of drones ‘to bring antipodal, alien, underrepresented, incongruous, and inscrutable spaces into a dialogue with an audience’ (Fish et  al. 2017). The very technical capacity of drones to ‘fly-by’, ‘reveal’, ‘track’ and ‘chase’11 the subject visually at varying speeds allows the visibility in parallel, non-intersecting planes, the new geometry of engaging with the subject is the essence of a ‘different’ drone-afforded visibility. Drone piloting itself is a multisensorial experience, situated primarily in atmospheric interaction. Hence, users piloting the drone are not concerned with the visual production but the experience of battling and playing with the elemental forces (Fish 2016). However, for the large majority of pilots—the sky is the space for visual enjoyment, and the process of droneviewing is quintessentially ocularcentric. The examples we have presented demonstrate that, in warfare, drones are no longer used exclusively for inflicting physical violence, but as weapons in information warfare and occupation of airspace. The very presence of news organizations’ drones, under the umbrella of military forces holding control of the territory/ airspace, implies allegiance and production bias, where the difference in the identity of the producer will impact the image itself. Only the images

 Some of the names given to specific shots in drone video-shooting.

11

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

137

appropriate or favouring the purposes of this organization could be circulated. Droneviewing performed by militant groups or paramilitary border vigilantes presents alternative views and visions of war, further deepening the battle of visibility and truth. While the military use drones to visualize space and targets from a ‘straight down’ overhead perspective, the news media show the effects of war in a ‘high-pan’ perspective of destruction contributing to the visual grammar of droneviewing more akin to broadcast media. For the protesters and activists, drones are the methodology to not only produce a video of the event but also to challenge the power dynamics of surveillance by seeking to reverse the visual (and power) arrangement— producing anti-surveillant visibility. In the activist perspective, drones are the tools of empowerment for minority or vulnerable indigenous groups whose interests may be severely restricted by access to the mass media, which may choose not to spotlight their grievances, reducing the visibility of the events or rendering them completely invisible (Zuev and Bratchford 2020). The drone creates a new kind of spectator perspective—a proactive and less vulnerable witness at a safer distance than the activist on the ground. Visual sociology has always attempted to address the issues beyond the picture and beyond the frame. The new practices of surveillance will engender new practices and geographies of invisibility, and the new regimes of gaze, such as droneviewing or the facial recognition technologies, will lead to the proliferation of camouflage and deception techniques resisting this very gaze or technologies. The dynamic relationship between technologically afforded visibility and the analysis of vision beyond the scope of the ‘seeing eye’ will undoubtedly become a key direction in visual sociology.

References Adey, P. (2010). Aerial Life. Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Banner, S. (2008). Who Owns the Sky?: The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, M. (2013). Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. London: Verso. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.

138 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Birtchnell, T., & Gibson, C. (2015). Less Talk More Drone: Social Research with UAVs. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 39(1), 182–189. Brighenti, A. (2007). Visibility. A Category for the Social Sciences. Current Sociology, 55(3), 323–342. Business Insider Intelligence. (2020). Commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Market Analysis—Industry Trends, Forecasts and Companies. https://www. businessinsider.com/commercial-­uav-­market-­analysis. Accessed 20 Feb 2020. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Chamayou, G. (2015). The Theory of the Drone. New York: The New Press. Cockburn, A. (2015). Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Culver, K.  B. (2014). From Battlefield to Newsroom: Ethical Implications of Drone Technology in Journalism. Journal of Mass Media Ethics., 29, 52–64. Erincin, S. (2016). Digital Media and Performance Activism: Technology, Biopolitics and New Tools of Transnational Resistance. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 12(3). Online. http://liminalities.net/12-­3/ newtools.pdf Feldman, A. (2005). On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Cultural Studies, 19(2), 203–226. Financial Times. (2017). Drone Maker DJI Updates Software to Thwart Terrorist Use. https://www.ft.com/content/317ab47c-­2baa-­11e7-­bc4b-­5528796fe35c Financial Times. (2019). How the Commercial Drone Market Became Big Business. https://www.ft.com/content/cbd0d81a-­0d40-­11ea-­bb52-­34c8d9dc6d84. Accessed 20 Mar 2020. Fish, A. (2016). Seeing Revolutionary Info-structure. Keynote at the Mobile Life Centre, University of Stockholm, March 17, 2016. https://savageminds.org/2016/03/23/seeing-­revolutionary-­info-­structure/. Accessed 12 Mar 2017. Fish, A., Garrett, B., & Case, O. (2017). Drones Caught in the Net: Piloting Above Information Infrastructure. Imaginations. http://imaginations.glendon.yorku.ca/?p=9964 Garrett, B., & Anderson, K. (2018). Drone Methodologies: Taking Flight in Human and Physical Geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43(3), 341–359. Goldsmith, J. (2010). Policing’s New Visibility. The British Journal of Criminology, 50( 5), 914–934. Graham, S. (2016). Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. New York: Verso. Grayson, K., & Mawdsley, J. (2019). Scopic Regimes and the Visual Turn in International Relations: Seeing World Politics Through the Drone. European Journal of International Relations, 25(2), 431–457. Greene, D. (2015). Drone Vision. Surveillance & Society, 13, 233–249.

5  SEEING LIKE A DRONE 

139

Gregory, D. (2011). From a View to Kill. Drones and Late Modern War. Theory, Culture and Society, 28(7–8), 188–215. Guénoun, S. K., & Kavanagh, J. H. (2000). Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement. SubStance, 29(2), 3–24. Gusterson, H. (2014). Toward an Anthropology of Drones: Remaking Space, Time and Valor in Combat. In M. Evangelista & H. Shue (Eds.), The American Way of Bombing: Changing Ethical and Legal Norms, from Flying Fortresses to Drones. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hildebrand, J. (2020). Drone-topia as Method. Mobilities, 15(1), 25–38. Joseph, G. (2017). Mapping the Drone War Over the Pakistan. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/01/mapping-­the-­drone-­war-­over-­pakistan/513071/ Kaplan, C. (2006). Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity. American Quarterly, 58(3), 693–714. Keysar H.  A (2018). Spatial Testimony: The Politics of Do-It-Yourself Aerial Photography in East Jerusalem. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(3), 523–541. Keysar, H. (2019). A Spatial Testimony: The Politics of Do-It-Yourself Aerial Photography in East Jerusalem. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(3), 523–541. Manderson, D. (2017). Chronotopes in the Scopic Regime of Sovereignty. Visual Studies, 32(2), 167–177. Mann, S. (2002). Sousveillance: Secrecy, Not Privacy, May Be the True Cause of Terrorism. Available at http://www.wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm. Accessed 20 Mar 2019. McLagan, M. (2006). Technologies of Witnessing: The Visual Culture of Human Rights. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 191–220. O’Driscoll, D. (2017). UAVs in Humanitarian Relief and Wider Development Contexts. K4D Helpdesk Report. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Plotnick, R. (2012). Predicting Push-Button Warfare: US Print Media and Conflict from a Distance, 2010. Media, Culture & Society, 34(6), 655–672. Rae, J. D. (2014). Analyzing the Drone Debates. Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare and Military Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Risen, J. (2015). Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. New  York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Rose, G. (2003). On the Need to Ask How, Exactly, Is Geography “Visual”? Antipode, 35, 212–221. Sandvik, K. B. (2016). The Public Order Drone: The Proliferation and Disorder in Civil Airspace. In K. B. Sandvik & M. G. Jumbert (Eds.), The Good Drone. London: Routledge. Sandvik, K. B., & Jumbert, M. G. (2017). The Good Drone. London: Routledge.

140 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tawil-Souri, H. (2011). The Hi-tech Enclosures of Gaza Forced Migration and Refugee Unit: Working Paper Series, pp. 1–19. The Guardian. (2016). Attack on the Drones: The Creeping Privatisation of Our Urban Airspace. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/dec/12/attack-­ drones-­privatisation-urban-airspace. Accessed 14 Feb 2020 Vergani, M., & Zuev, D. (2015). Neojihadist Visual Politics: Comparing YouTube videos of the North Caucasus and Uighur militants. Asian Studies Review, 39(1), 1–22. Wacquant, L. (2010). Participant Observation/Observant Participation. In Giddens and Sutton (Ed.), Sociology: Introductory Readings (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Waghorn, N.  J. (2016). Watching the Watchmen: Resisting Drones and the “Protester Panopticon”. Geographica Helvetica, 71, 99–108. Wallace-Wells, B. (2014). Drones and Everything After. Available at http:// nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/drones-­t he-­n ext-­s martphone. html. Accessed 14 Mar 2017. Weizman, E. (2007). A Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Zelizer, B. (2010). About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Zuev, D., & Bratchford, G. (2020). The Citizen Drone: Protest, Sousveillance and Droneviewing. Visual Studies, 35(6) (in print).

CHAPTER 6

CODA: Towards a Visual Sociology 3.0

New Visual Technologies for Age-Old Issues and a Little More An eerie picture unfolds as a drone flies over the deserted streets of the city of Wuhan in January 2020, the epicentre of the new coronavirus epidemic. Wuhan has been under lock-down along with many other cities in the Chinese province of Hubei. We already know what is happening—the world’s media have been attentive to the situation, depicting state officials, medical staff and masked urban residents in situ, juxtaposed with an international effort to repatriate non-Chinese residents. The drone imagery is not simply providing the objective knowledge of total shutdown of a city larger than London, or simply an aerial perspective of the spatial planning or the lack of street traffic (Fig. 6.1). Rather, the drone shows the ‘ghostly emptiness’ from the perspective of the safe witness; we are presented with a snapshot of urban disaster management and the visible condition of trying to manage something unseen. The short droneview of Wuhan is a snapshot of the existential moment of stasis and disrupted flow. It is an image of forceful discipline and mass

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Zuev, G. Bratchford, Visual Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_6

141

142 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 6.1  Drone conveying the continuous emptiness of the cityscape in Wuhan, China, 2020. Screenshot of the video Extended Drone Footage Shows Wuhan During Coronavirus Quarantine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_contin ue=1050&v=XOVUB3hFrdQ&feature=emb_logo

obedience as well as anxiety and fear.1 These images can be interpreted as the politics of containment, organization and politics of visuality as well as uncertainty. The post-production editing of the drone footage fosters a spectral sense of unease and renders the affective—atmospheric terrain of the event or condition tangible, cinematically built through the creeping tension of continuously empty streetscapes. There is no sound, no need for a soundtrack, as the piercing silence makes the visual more poignant, sublime, in the sense of ‘momentary arrest of our interpretive facilities’ (Callahan 2018: 476). There is, unexpectedly, a sense of violence because the eerie landscape of an empty city could as easily be mistaken for a dead city.

1

 Zuev, Interviews (2020).

6  CODA: TOWARDS A VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 3.0 

143

The drone enables us to elevate our imagination and inhabit Wuhan for a few seconds in an embodied and affective way and ‘gain the situated understandings of what it might feel like’ (Pink 2017: 11) to be there. The scene of the empty Chinese mega-cities has a largely conventional ‘global’ resonance—a modern cityscape. We are presented with the hallmarks of Western urbanism—huge, multi-lane concrete highways cutting through the city and supressing the greenness. Suddenly, with the absence of cars, the centrality of this highway, adjoining bridges and buildings exceeding the frame of the image, emphasizes the location’s super-modernity. The scene is dystopian and could be anywhere and nowhere. As the virus and quarantine move to Italy and Spain, we are beginning to see a different form of urban living that has a clearly defined geographic designation. A vision which becomes overtly resounding when looking at the spatial outlays of the modern city. Starting with this example of droneviewing in Wuhan, we argue that aside from the methodological techniques which we have discussed, we must be cautious about seeking new objective findings. Rather we should seek new understandings and perspectives from which these technologies can afford, confine or underpin. We must explore how images emerge with or in relation to new technologies and how with new visual creativity new ethical questions will arise (Pink 2017). Relationality, as we have suggested, is based on the action of diverse processes and exceeds the ‘visual’ of visual sociology that which is visible and routinely ‘examinable’. In this regard, the focus is not solely on the image itself or its reading. Rather it is on the assemblage of relations and networks that bring images into being and what they, the images, stand for. Part of this relationality is evidenced in the shift from the sociological analysis of images to a sociology with images, as well as the need to examine the ‘in-betweenness’. It is here that we move away from the image per se and think more routinely about visibility and the process of becoming in/visible. This can be understood and examined in a number of ways, including a move from a relatively straightforward documentary approach to a more technoscientific, collaborative and participatory discipline. In Chap. 1 we exemplified the relationality of the image through the work of Gilles Sabrié. What we are presented with is the ‘in-between visibility’ of the technoscientific as a way to map and manage populations. In the same ilk, we can look to the art space of public galleries as places where visuality and the relational image are being introduced as an engaging artefact that

144 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

is representative of unseen power, presented in the form of non-human interaction. This is perhaps best articulated by Hagit Kayser’s video installation Restricted Zone: Temple Mount, co-created with Barak Brinker (2019) (Fig.  6.2). In this work, the drone project is a blend of critical, action-­ based fieldwork. Collaborative and participatory practice manifests as political artists, Keysar and Brinker, test the technological and civilian restrictions over the aerial space in Jerusalem. Displayed as a video installation, Keysar and Brinker present a sensorially provocative work that reveals invisible walls in the sky over the city. Unable to fly their drone over Temple Mount, the drone footage, which is projected onto a vast wall at the back of a darkened room, seems to stop mid-air, implying the limits to visibility expressed in a relation of what can be included and what should be excluded. The viewer is presented with a vista over the iconic sandstone buildings of Jerusalem. A technological barrier (geofence) encoded into the flight interface of drones manufactured by the Chinese company DJI

Fig. 6.2  Hagit Keysar’s visual Installation Restricted Zone: Temple Mount, co-­ created with Barak Brinker as part of Visual Rights, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, 2020. (Photo: Rob Battersby)

6  CODA: TOWARDS A VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 3.0 

145

prevents them from taking off or passing through the area. The material existence of this restricted zone is revealed through making its invisible boundaries seen. Within the room the viewer is immersed in the complementary audio produced from the drone software. Played aloud across the room, it repeats ‘restricted zone reached’ over and over again. To reinforce the visibility of this no-fly zone (NFZ) around Temple Mount or al-Aqsa, the zone is replicated by a big red, tangible dot on the floor (Fig. 6.2). From galleries to social media platforms, we as researchers are charged with the responsibility of seeing ‘the in-between’ and working out who is present, omitted or subjugated. As sociologists we can look to a range of everyday actions, spaces and platforms as sites of historical power imbalances and contemporary issues, like those presented in Keysar’s art installation. From hidden barriers in the air over the city to the analysis of hidden labour, wealth and consumption, we must remember to question what we see and how it is presented. This notion is perhaps best framed in the surge of visual social media food photography. Arguably, such images place an emphasis on indulgence and lifestyle, in ways not too dissimilar, visually and contextually, to the Flemish still life paintings from the 1600–1800s. Whilst the foodstuff depicted in the still life paintings of the 1600–1800s is exotic, they are also removed from the context of their production. In this regard, the focus of the painting is a reflection of its owner’s wealth and status, rather than the painter’s skill. The social labour and colonial exploits that brought this food to the table are distanced (Jones 2019). Instagram food photography, arguably, displays a similar lack of awareness to the modes of production. Both still life paintings and elements of Instagram photography foreground wealth and consumption aligned to experiential status. For instance, we can suggest that to commission or buy a painting of a high-value item, in this instance exotic food items, typically largely inaccessible fruits, is contemporaneously akin to being in the space of high-value material consumption like expensive/elite dining experiences and designer goods and recording it. In part, this visual approach is also linked to dating apps that blend gamification, such as swiping, rating and randomization with the mechanism of mediated intimacy as well as visual acts of self-presentation and performance rituals that are aligned to status, wealth and lifestyle. Food photos are often a crossover, contextualizing frame. We present ourselves in desirable restaurants or luxurious locations, eating fine food, champagne flutes and luxurious dinner settings. We are communicating our ‘culture’ through images of conspicuous consumption, often embedded within appealing holiday photos, high-end material goods such as cars, watches, in vogue dogs and clothing (Fig. 6.3).

146 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

Fig. 6.3  Composite Instagram screen grab of the self-performance of glamorous living

From photographing food to the documentation of places, landmarks and events, we are, as Jurgenson (2019) suggests, becoming constant tourists always looking for potential photographs and seeking out any number of microevents to record and share. More generally, the image-­ speak of social media is composed of the profound and the silly; images of a lunch sit unproblematically next to an image of a disaster scene. Photo-­ sharing is the epitome of the continuous visual storytelling—a never-­ ending visual dialogue with anyone who is willing or happens to look. And perhaps this endless excessive visual storytelling is nothing but a race with death, each image of ourselves is the ode to the abundance of life moments, however big or small. Although images of ourselves are nothing new, and artists from Jan van Eyck to Marcel Duchamp and Cindy Sherman made self-depictions, the circulation of selfies in social media marks a significant

6  CODA: TOWARDS A VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 3.0 

147

shift towards the acceleration of self-documentation (Jurgenson 2019) and self-presentation (Rettberg 2014) that are yet to be fully reconciled. Through selfies we document our individual experience of the city and our connection to the place, at the same time disconnecting from the spirit of the place in a tourist gaze 3.0 (Urry and Larsen 2011). In this new tourist gaze, selfies become a new performance of consuming the place. Such excess in visual self-documentation has prompted Vienna—one of the global cultural capitals to launch a bold campaign to encourage visitors to reformat their viewing of the cities. Unhashtag Vienna, a selfie-shaming campaign, was launched by Vienna’s Tourist Board in 2018 to direct our attention to the act of seeing, and not the act of self-documentation, inviting the documenter to ‘enjoy the city behind your pics’ and to savour the aesthetics of photographic scarcity—indeed a nostalgic feeling. Unhashtag Vienna was also an attempt to resist the selfie and hashtags as signs of mobile culture and instead to decelerate and immerse in the Viennese inertia and cosiness (Kunzelmann and Mayerhofer 2014). However, the logic of spectacular urbanism and aggressive tourism-­ driven marketing inevitably dictates that only one year later, in 2019, Vienna would launch its first ‘selfie heaven’ pop-up museum, whereby visitors were invited to become part of the artwork on display. Yet, selfies are not only done for us—as we have discussed, they are the imagedata currency for connecting and sharing. Photo-sharing, as we have noted, is the pivotal practice to understanding the relationality of the image—the connective tissue, an exchange that involves not the images per se but sensations and experiences. ‘The imperative of sharing’ (Van Dijck 2013) is co-emergent with the imperative of new mobility, materiality of which is represented by portable devices that facilitate easy access to online visual storage and stimulate a constant visibility for visually based sociality. As we upload images in social media profiles, we signal our presence— our activity and indexicality to a place or event. Even those of us who remove ourselves from the visual function of a specific platform like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat might still use the platform to send messages. We struggle to consciously decouple ourselves from the medium. The very logic of the visual in social media activity is the notion of presence. Thus, it is not always about the constant upload of n number of selfies or self-produced images at regular intervals, but regular production of presence—through comments, emojis and 👍 (virtual gestures). Indeed,

148 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

presence, when it is made visible online, is the visibility of connection and openness to communicate.

Final Words We opened this book with a snapshot of our troubled times, where the image is a vastly powerful tool, politically and socially. Images are transactional, they move within networks and are invested with emotions and ideas, ideologies and (false)hopes, misinformation and revelation. They are part of a new global language but also fraught with misinterpretation. We stated that, in the last 20 years, the world and the way we see it has changed rapidly, and for most of us, this is true. Huge shifts in visual technologies, related to both hardware and software in terms of size, mobility, power and connectivity, have altered or influenced our everyday life practices. Moreover, new forms of scholarship that foreground the visual as the springboard for understanding our society, past, present and future are now mainstays in many institutions across the globe, yet these approaches are often compounded by strict disciplinary boundaries. With the exponential growth of network-assisted visibility and the ways that images are created, used, stored, shared and deployed, we are now more connected than ever. We are watched and surveilled but also at a social level, changing how we engage with one another, tell stories and communicate emotions, from calmness to anxiety; these are significant shifts in social interaction. With all this in mind, we sought to address some of these themes and to pivot on topics that included an overview and discussion of methods and approaches, old and new. To signpost to emerging and transdisciplinary ways of working and seeing communities and spaces, including socially engaged photography, the rise of big data analysis, the analysis of urban spaces on and offline, mobility and urban environment, performativity and social media as well as shifting our sociological lens to the sky. We also placed a marker in the sand for a way to think about the network of visible and invisible objects, images and interfaces in a relational context linked to the power of vision to shape what we see and how we behave. While we move through the streetscapes and vertiginous heights of the city, social mediascapes encoded with multiple scripts, we come to see that visibility is in the persisting and resilient presence of our new, hyper-visual world. Where images have significantly altered our perception of truth, impacted our ways of telling stories, the image will continue to re-enchant

6  CODA: TOWARDS A VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 3.0 

149

and reconnect us, to question and to revise, to store our memories and to distort our visions. Now more than ever, we relate to each other via visual narratives as much as we do via written words, as we continue to participate in them ourselves and contribute to the narratives of others. While this book is a ‘pivot’ on the subject, signifying a provocation for revised thinking and new ideas, so too is it a starting point for the next sociology 3.0. Acknowledging this, we want to pose four sets of questions connected to relations of the image and the social world: 1. What do the visual social media platforms allow us to communicate? What do we learn about different cultures that incorporate the use of similar platforms and visual tools? And how do the practices differ and are similar across varying borders? 2. What is visual data in the age of BIG visual data and how does the visual data become so influential? 3. What do we learn about new ways of living in the city and new forms of everyday urbanism? How can we harness images and visual sociological ways of theorizing to depict and examine emerging and changing social practices and human interactions? 4. As we move upwardly, what is the next step in a more rigorous visual sociology of the sky? Will it be participatory, as we have noted previously, or more aggressively contested? How will social relations be managed and articulated through verticality and atmocultural consumption?2 As we have highlighted earlier, we are experiencing the shift in analysis from singular image to image-data streams, which are mediated by corporate power and surveillance logic. While focusing more on these image-­ data streams, we do not dismiss the iconicity and significance of a single photo. Instead this focus needs a thoughtful consideration not only of the context but the relationality of the images as mobile data. By mobility of the image, we imply that the content and authorship of images is constantly changing as they are faked, modified, shared or used for purposes not originally intended by the producer. We maintain that while ‘logics’ of the software, platforms and application remain important to understanding the visual syntax of the images, there is still very little venturing into individual practices of 2

 On atmoculture, see Brighenti and Karrholm (2018).

150 

D. ZUEV AND G. BRATCHFORD

self-presentation or self-documentation across cultures. While the new ways of watching are shaping surveillance imaginaries (Lyon 2018), one of the themes that has been threaded through our chapters is the issue of social surveillance and the proliferation of “surveillance cultures”, where consumers and citizens play an important role in generating visual data. Surveillance cultures are constituted of ways of watching and in parallel of antisurveillant visibilities, the ways of subverting and resisting surveillance practices. These transforming and proliferating cultures require that visual sociologists embark on further exploration of what constitutes visual data, as well as visibility and presence, specifically the objects and social processes, co-constituting visibility/invisibility. Visual sociology will continue to uncover and put under scrutiny the emerging and transforming elements of the practices—the material relations, competences and meanings—and most importantly will do it cross-­ culturally and across borders, contributing to the mapping of the diversity of the social world and establishing a stronger belief in its epistemic mission.

References Brighenti, A. M., & Karrholm, A. (2018). Atmospheres of Retail and the Asceticism of Civilized Consumption. Geographica Helvetica, 73, 203–213. Callahan, W. A. (2018). The Politics of Walls: Barriers, Flows, and the Sublime. Review of International Studies, 44(3), 456–481. Jones, E. (2019, September 28). Are You Going to Eat That? Instagram Food Photography and the Dutch Still Life. Retrieved from https://medium.com/ swlh/are-you-going-to-eat-that-instagram-food-photographyand-the-dutch-still-life-b9bb1bd179a9 Jurgenson, N. (2019). The Social Photo. On Photography and Social Media. London: Verso. Kunzelmann, H., & Mayerhofer, E. (2014). Viennese Inertia: Cultural and Political Deceleration and Local Identity Construction. In S.  H. Donald & C. Lindner (Eds.), Inert Cities. Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris. Lyon, D. (2018). The Culture of Surveillance. Watching as a Way of Life. London: Polity. Pink, S. (2017). Technologies, Possibilities, Emergence and an Ethics of Responsibility: Refiguring Techniques. In E. G. Cruz, S. Sumartojo, & S. Pink (Eds.), Refiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research. Cham: Palgrave.

6  CODA: TOWARDS A VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 3.0 

151

Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing Ourselves Through Technology. How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Urry, J., & Larsen, J. (2011). The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage. Van Dijck, J. (2013). You Have One Identity: Performing the Self on Facebook and LinkedIn. Media, Culture and Society., 35(2), 199–215.

Glossary

Big Visual Data  extremely large sets of visual information that are typically sifted and analysed computationally. Dashcam (dashboard camera)  onboard video camera that continuously records the view ahead through the vehicle’s front windscreen. Deepfake  computer-generated images or videos of people. Drones  unmanned aerial vehicles also see UAV in text. Dronetopia  emerging intellectual space on the use and implications of aerial images. Droneviewing  a practice of visual production using a drone. Emoji (from Jap. e (絵, “picture”) and moji (文字) character or ideogram  a social, visual shorthand used to express an idea or emotion. Facial Recognition  technology that is capable of identifying or verifying a person from a digital image. GoPro  a brand of video camera that largely stands for a generic action camera commonly attached to one’s body during an activity or mounted on a bike or helmet when cycling, rock-climbing and so on. Hashtag  a type of metadata tag used on social networks such as Twitter or Instagram. Meme (from Greek “mimeme”)  typically an image produced for social media platforms that incorporates an idea, behaviour, style or feeling

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Zuev, G. Bratchford, Visual Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9

153

154 

GLOSSARY

that is framed around a text and complimentary image. The images are often, though not always, of celebrities or well-known people. Pic badge  a virtual badge that can be located within one’s social media profile to communicate an affiliation or to show ones support for a movement or agenda, typically, political in orientation. Relational Image  an image understood as a bundle of social relations including multiple authorships, practices of its production, circulation and environments of its use. Rooftopping  unauthorized and unsecured ascent of objects such as rooftops, cranes, antennas or bridges. Visual Social Media  social media websites or apps (mobile applications) using or driven by a significant amount of visual content. Vlogging (video blogging)  a form of blogging for which the medium is video.

Index1

A Activism, 83, 132–137 Aesthetics, 32, 34, 39, 48, 58, 87, 123, 124, 147 platform, 94 Afghanistan drone, 130–132 Taliban militants, 131, 132 Alan Kurdi, 14, 45, 84 Archive(s), 5, 26, 42, 62, 70, 84 Atmosphere, 119, 127 B Becker, Howard, 9, 24, 28, 37, 57, 58 Big Visual Data Selfiecity, 45, 47, 65 VSML, 26, 28 Body, 45, 47, 58, 68, 92, 99

C Camera, 6–8, 14, 17, 25, 27, 33, 37–41, 56, 65, 91, 97–100, 110, 125, 127–130, 134, 135 Car, 3, 59, 61, 68–71, 73, 77–79, 98 automobility, 71 China e-bike, 15, 70–72, 76, 78, 80 Hong Kong, 1, 57, 65, 101, 127 informality, 15 mobility, 15, 70, 78 surveillance, 65 urban, 15, 65, 70, 71, 80, 141 Wuhan, 141–143 City informal, 66, 77 Jerusalem, 144 New York, 2, 3, 44, 58, 59, 108 spectacle, 3, 53, 54, 64, 65, 71 as stage, 53–57, 72 street photography, 24, 57–59, 62, 64 vertical, 61

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Zuev, G. Bratchford, Visual Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9

155

156 

INDEX

Collier, Malcolm, 34, 37 Consumption, 3, 17, 53, 54, 61, 65, 66, 83, 85, 99, 109, 127, 145, 149 Creative commons, 42 D Dashcam, 17, 97–100 Deepfakes, 84, 113 Digital, 1, 2, 3n2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 23–25, 32, 34, 40, 42, 46, 62, 65, 84, 88, 93, 98, 99, 111, 112, 126, 134, 135 DIY, 79, 127, 128, 134, 135 DJI, 120, 121, 133, 144 Drone aerial visibility, 120–121 Dronestagram, 133 dronetopia, 17, 124, 133 droneviewing, 17, 100, 126–130, 132–137, 143 pilots, 122, 129, 133, 136 regulations, 122, 125 strikes, 126, 133 visual activism, 132–137 war views, 129, 133 E Ethics online, 42 participatory methodology, 43–44 “situated,” 42 Ethnography instant, 66–70 visual, 56 Events, 1, 3, 9, 15, 16, 27, 29, 33, 40, 46, 83, 84, 93, 94, 98, 99, 110, 123, 127, 134, 137, 146

F Facebook, 3, 5, 6, 15, 46, 83–85, 87–89, 92–96, 99, 147 Facial recognition, 6, 137 Fieldwork, 8, 15, 27, 42, 56, 57, 70, 144 Filtering, 32–33 filter, 2, 5, 94 Flaneurism, 55 Food, 73, 75, 94, 145, 146 Frame, 8, 9, 13, 16, 23, 36, 45, 58–63, 66, 67, 69, 91, 92, 95, 97, 108, 112, 124, 127, 130, 137, 143, 145 Friction, 1, 67–69 G Gaze aerial, 126, 135 male, 92 tourist, 29, 147 Geofence, 121, 144 Geography, 8, 133 Google Street View, 15, 66, 68, 69 GoPro, 3, 17, 97–100, 102 H Harper, Douglas, 9, 27, 29, 38, 57, 58, 66, 67 Heng, Terence, 9, 27, 28, 40, 42 Homeless, 40, 55, 65 Hong Kong, 1, 57, 65, 101, 127 I Image analysis, 11, 12, 14, 26, 28, 32–40, 45, 46, 123, 143, 149 circulation, 15, 23, 47 compositionality, 35–37, 45

 INDEX 

deepfake, 113 direct analysis of photographs, 37 image-cloning, 112, 113 interactive analysis, 36 interpretation, 14, 23, 31, 47, 72, 89 politics, 14, 112 relational, 1–17, 26, 31, 35, 36, 45, 127, 143, 147–149 Informal, 32, 42, 59, 66, 72, 74, 75, 77, 80, 106, 107 informality, 15, 54, 73 Innocence of Muslims, 111–113 YouTube, 111 Instagram, 15, 24, 46, 84–95, 146, 147 Internet, 16, 24, 25, 42, 65, 84, 97, 106, 110, 111, 113 Intimacy, 80, 106, 107, 145 Israel, 1, 16, 99, 120, 121 J Jerusalem, 144 K Keysar, Hagit, 127, 128, 134, 144, 145 Knowles, Caroline, 8, 9, 12, 13, 27, 57 Krase, Jerome, 9, 10, 13, 33, 34, 54–57 L Live–streaming, 3, 99, 108 M Manovich, Lev, 6, 45, 65, 84, 93, 94 Materiality, 23, 27, 71, 72, 75, 79, 80, 147 Meme, 1, 2, 6, 25, 87–94 Migrants, 57, 64, 71 Mobility, 5, 13, 15, 67, 70, 71, 78, 98, 147–149

157

mobile devices, 11, 25, 103, 126 Multi–modality/multimodal, 26, 27, 85, 94, 104, 125 Multisensorial, 24, 29, 30, 126, 136 ocularcentricity, 29 N Narratives, 6, 10, 12, 26, 27, 32, 36, 38, 46, 56, 57, 70, 79, 85, 86, 89, 98, 109, 127, 129, 132, 149 New Media, 14, 45, 99, 104, 123 New York, 2, 3, 44, 58, 59, 108 P Participatory visual workshops, 38 Pauwels, Luc, 4, 13, 24, 26–28, 33, 54–56 Performance, 1–3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16, 31, 44, 54, 57, 64, 65, 91, 93, 95, 102, 108, 110, 145, 147 Performative, 2–4, 31, 35, 45, 56, 89–91, 95 Photo-elicitation, 37–39 Platform, 1, 2, 4, 6–8, 11, 15, 24–26, 32, 41, 46, 64, 78, 83–87, 89–97, 103–107, 111, 145, 147, 149 Politics aesthetics, 32, 123 everyday, 70, 71 contentious, 104 of spectacle, 54 visibility, 105 visual, 110, 132 Posing, 6, 15, 28, 33, 93, 109 Practices, 2–4, 4n3, 8–17, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29–32, 37, 39, 40, 44, 45, 57, 59, 64, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77–80, 85, 87–89, 91–94, 96, 99–101, 104, 105, 110, 120–127, 125n5, 130, 133–135, 137, 144, 147–150 photo-sharing, 147

158 

INDEX

Privacy, 42, 63, 64, 73, 79, 88, 96, 113, 122 Prosser, Jon, 12, 33, 38, 40, 56 Protest, 24, 65, 93, 96, 107, 110–112, 125, 127, 133–137 R Relational image, 1–17, 35, 36, 45, 143 Remote, 39, 126, 132, 133 Resistance, 71, 122, 132, 135 Rituals, 12, 27, 32, 145 Rose, Gillian, 12, 31, 35, 36, 124 Russia Moscow, 47, 101, 111 TV, 106, 129 vlogging, 108 S Sabrié, Gilles, 6, 7, 143 Scopic regime, 16, 17, 31, 32, 127 Self–documentation, 32, 147, 150 Selfie, 17, 45, 47, 64, 84, 87–94, 101–103, 130–131n7, 146, 147 rooftopping, 101, 102 Self–presentation, 11, 85, 86, 91, 94, 97, 98, 145, 147, 150 Semiotics, 28, 36, 56 Sharing, 3, 5n4, 6, 15, 25, 31, 41, 46, 77, 83, 85, 87–97, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 146, 147 Smartphone, 25, 29, 40, 41, 75, 86, 125 Socially engaged practice, 30, 43 Sousveillance, 108, 134, 135 Spectator capital, 103, 105–110 Streets, 14, 15, 24, 29, 54–59, 62–70, 72, 74, 110–112, 141 Streuli, Beat, 62–64

Surveillanace CCTV, 6, 7, 65, 103 infrastructure, 65 social media, 64, 96, 120 street photography, 64 Syria Alan Kurdi, 45 refugees, 45 war, 129 T Technology, 6, 7, 11, 24, 25, 31, 32, 71, 79, 97–99, 119, 120, 125, 127, 131–134 Time, 3, 6, 8, 14, 15, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32–34, 36, 37, 40, 42–44, 46, 47, 54–56, 59, 64–67, 71, 72, 74, 77, 85, 94, 95, 97, 98, 103, 105, 108, 109, 120, 127, 129, 147, 148 Tinder, 85–87, 89, 90, 95 Tourist, 13, 29, 53, 54, 56, 65, 66, 74, 120, 122, 125n5, 127, 146, 147 Twitter, 24, 46, 85, 87, 88, 91, 95 Twittersphere, 46, 85 U United Kingdom (UK), 1, 43, 121n2, 122 Manchester, 56 Urban environment, 59, 63, 70, 100, 124, 148 flow, 73, 75 rhythm, 80 Urbanity, 94 Urban screenscapes, 57

 INDEX 

V Vienna, 147 Visibility activism, 133 invisibility, 126, 150 omnipresent, 57, 64–66, 123 politics, 2, 4, 5, 10, 32, 54, 96, 103, 105, 123, 124n3, 136 volumetric, 123–128 Visual collage, 95 economy, 92 (non)visual data, 33 syntax, 16, 89, 91, 102, 149 Visual Sociology IVSA, 8, 66–68 range, 11–14, 46 Research Committee 57, 8

159

W Walking, 15, 29, 56, 64, 67 War views, 128–133 visualization, 11, 28, 45–47, 71, 91, 94, 95, 98, 124, 126, 128, 129 Y YouTube Russia, 107, 109 visual social media, 13–15, 32, 40, 45, 47, 87, 91, 93, 102, 110, 145, 149 vlogging, 87