WESTERN TRADITION

How a western tradition in art and/or photography has influenced the visual aspects?

How a western tradition in art and/or photography has influenced the visual aspects?

The western tradition in art and photography has influenced the visual aspects of contemporary consumer culture. The aspects of visual culture includes such as photography, cooking and fashion. Visual aspects employs images and other visual displays to analyze society and culture. As an emerging focus for study, it draws on two intellectual impulses that reflect a more general preoccupation with the visual. The first impulse is committed to using visual methods for research into human affairs and appeared roughly when Ph.D. programs in sociology were being established in America. The second impulse is concerned with the meanings of a culture's visual representations and has deeper roots in Western intellectual history (Becker, 1999, pp: 5).

Interest in developing visual methods for scientific research is almost as old as the camera itself. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists, physiologists, criminologists, eugenicists, and others had developed research agendas that used photography—and in some cases moving pictures—to produce evidentiary materials that were central to their arguments, whether as data or as illustrations. Sociologists, however, tended to use photographs and other visual displays more timidly and then only to illustrate an argument or to orient the reader to a topic under discussion (e.g., as maps and conceptual diagrams)(Grady, 1991, pp: 26).

Professional sociology in the twentieth century developed its identity as a field of study by defining its subject matter as superorganic, consisting of elements and processes that could not be reduced to the biology or psychology of the individual. Contemporary researchers—such as Francis Galton, Edward Curtis, William Herbert Sheldon, and Cesare Lombroso, to mention a few—who used photographs as data, however, relied on somatic evidence for theories that social ...