March 2014: Professor Ben Carrington (University of Texas Sociology Department) invited me to the fabulous city of Austin to give a lecture on sociology and photography and run a workshop with a group of postgrad students in the department’s ethnography lab (run by Professor Javier Auyero). This gave me the opportunity to read Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Berger, bell hooks and Les Back more carefully. I really should have re-read Stuart Hall’s work on representation as well.
Les Back has persuasively argued that sociology is (or should be) a ‘listening’ art. In the lecture – which is really a set of slides – I want to add smelling, touching, feeling, thinking and looking. As an enthusiast for Marx’s early references to ‘sensuous’ human practice, it occurs to me that we should be producing a sensuous type of sociology. This proposition isn’t properly developed here, but there are some good pictures. You should be able to download the presentation from here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/675rqxykabh17sv/UT%20Heart-Photography%20March%202014.pptx
At the workshop we were privileged to have a presentation from Professor Donna de Cesare, who teaches in the journalism programme at UT. Some of her marvellous work is available here. Her current book is here. The students showed some great photos too. The whole workshop reinforced my view that sociology’s ability to communicate its analyses of social reality is greatly enhanced by the use of photography. When the photographs are integral to the communication, treated seriously as a type of communication, rather than just ‘added on’ to the writing, we are moving towards a sensuous sociology, a sociology that works with the heart as well as the head.
