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VISUAL CRIMINOLOGY: Using Photography as an Ethnographic Research Method in Criminal Justice Settings

Visual criminology can be defined broadly to include the use of photography and videography for a number of purposes, including (1) ethnographic fieldwork and research, (2) news media usages of visual materials (e.g., crime photojournalism and war crimes photography) and (3) the collection of evidentiary (e.g., forensics) and other legal materials. This essay will briefly discuss the second and third, while focusing on academic research and related pedagogical issues. While visual anthropology, visual sociology and the broader field of visual studies have grown in significance in the recent past, visual criminology as a research methodology remains an under-explored area ripe for ethnographic investigation (data collection, analysis and theory building). This essay is based upon the author's experiences of conducting both officially approved photography of law enforcement activities, correctional facilities, forensic laboratories and antiterrorism exercises in the United States, as well as “street photography” of police-citizen interactions in a number of countries (USA, UK, Italy, France, Canada, Poland). Primarily these efforts focused on two related phenomenon: (1) the criminal justice system as an everyday work experience for criminal justice employees and (2) the nature of the communities and situations in which police and correctional officers interact with citizens on the street and inside criminal justice facilities. The social science issues to be discussed include (1) initial data collection decisions, (2) entry into the field, (3) ethical and human subjects concerns, (4) data analysis: from categorizing images to selecting specific images that have an ethnographic “richness” for depth discussion and, finally, (5) theory building. A theory-driven visual case study of police-citizen public encounters is highlighted. In addition to research, the creation of visual materials related to criminal justice has a number of pedagogical enhancement possibilities by introducing visual materials into the classroom and electronic teaching materials. Finally, a discussion of the role of visual imagery vis-à-vis text in criminological ethnographic description is undertaken, and then compared to academic criminology’s currently dominant research paradigm of combining mathematics and text in the effort to describe behavior and the forces at play in the social world. By combining both qualitative and quantitative methodologies a closer verisimilitude to lived experience might be possible. Photography as a form of visual criminology may have an important role to play in this process.