1. Reliability of images: ambiguity, authority and contingency

Images have long occupied an uneasy position in social science research. As compared to writing, they have been seen as unsuitable for academic research due to their being:

• inherently ambiguous
• too subjective
• open to manipulation and trickery
• carrying ‘aesthetic’ qualities instead of ‘scientific’ ones
• carrying groundless claims of being typical or generalisable to a wider category

The status of images in social science has had an uneven history in the last century, progressing from an assumption of the image’s essential unreliability to visual anthropologists’ (such Bateson and Mead 1942) attempts to establish the photographic method as a tool in positivist approaches.

It is generally recognised today that photographs and film cannot be taken as unproblematic, objective records of reality (Loizos 2000). The effects of, for example, the nature of the power relations pertaining between photographer and subject, his/her choice of subject, camera positioning and angle, framing, lighting, editing, and other aspects of the ‘grammar’ of film all affect how the image will turn out and how it will be made sense of by the viewer. Semiotics has shown us how the meaning of images – how they are read - also depends crucially on the echoes they carry of wider cultural connotations, which are beyond the conscious intention of the image-maker (Barthes, 1993).

For these reasons, images become particularly free-floating when detached from their original conditions of production. For example, a famous but highly controversial 9/11 photograph taken by US photojournalist Richard Drew at the time of the first plane hitting the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, illustrates well the dangers of decontextualised images (to view image click here - may cause distress). The image shows a man falling from the North Tower apparently diving head first to the ground: the verticality of his body in perfect symmetry with the vertical lines of the tower. In reality, his body was tumbling about all over the place, but this one arrested moment caught on film suggested on the one hand a kind of purposive, human act of will that came to stand for the tragedy as a whole, as well as an aesthetically pleasing image that arguably reduces the subject to mere form – removing from view the actual horror of such a fall. The furore surrounding the picture’s publication described in the Esquire article here illustrates well the dangers of excising the image from its original context. The picture inspired both an Australian Channel 4 documentary by Henry Singer and a short film directed by US filmmaker Kevin Ackerman

In our own data, we confront similar issues.

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