Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials

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London’s existing built environment seems to have been intensified: the London Eye has been upgraded; the skyline has even more striking tall buildings; the Kitchen is a huge building over which drones hover and sweep. As Gaboury convincingly argues, computer graphics are mathematical and spatial objects first, that are then made visible; they are not inherently visual. Chapter 6 focuses on psychoanalysis and the roles that art/images play with the internal abstract functions of the human mind.

The final chapter is on mixing up the methods and the benefits of using more than one – although, really it is mostly about finding better ways to focus on audiences and to decide how they see the images. Surveillance – particularly of a kind which is essentially ‘self-surveillance’ – is terribly important to Foucault, as it shows how institutions impose their power on people in ways that are not immediately obvious or obnoxious. It’s an excellent addition to the genre of film in which a working-class London neighbourhood is invaded by hostile outsiders (see also Attack the Block (“INNER CITY VERSUS OUTER SPACE”) and Cockneys versus Zombies (“This city ain’t big enough for the both of them! I completed an ESRC-funded project on this theme with Dr Monica Degen at Brunel University in 2009, in which we compared how people experienced two rather different town centres: Milton Keynes and Bedford. I’m probably a bit over-focussed on such things, but it did seem to me that there was a strong and interesting convergence between these computer-generated marketing images and how the city as a whole was pictured in The Kitchen.

This text serves as a resource to understanding visuals as both material objects and tools of meaning making. They were just casually there in the background, the viewer hurried past them much in the way that Andor was hurrying.

Rose provides an example where an Black man is used in one advertisement distributed in a particular neighborhood and a White man is used for distribution in a different neighborhood. I’m Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, UK, and my university home page is here. The book explores the different 'politics of sentiment' in which family snaps participate in both their domestic spaces in the public space of the contemporary mass media. Hoelzl and Marie work through a very productive definition of digital images as images that are co-constituted with software; Rubinstein and Sluis explore the networking of photos; Mackenzie and Munster coin the useful term ‘invisuality’ to refer to the algorithmic analysis of the vast banks of images collated by social media platforms; and Beller points to the political economy driving those same platforms.

This appears to remove users/humans/posthumans from the site of the algorithm – which is odd because the actual sites of algorithmic labour are full of humans (as well as computers). But getting stuck on the bigger questions of structure really do need time away from the text, a conversation maybe or an insight that comes from just letting things sit – even if you think you’ve got that sorted before you start writing (and you should think that).