Elisa Bignante, Geografia e ricerca visuale. Strumenti e metodi, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2011, 196 pages, illustrations, € 20 paper. ISBN 978-88-420-9664-1.

In the opening of her preface to Elisa Bignante’s Geografia e ricerca visuale. Strumenti e metodi [Geography and Visual Research: Tools and Methods], Gillian Rose states that, due to the fact that visual methods are currently widespread in different disciplinary fields, it is preferable to use the phrase "visual research methods" rather than "visual sociology." This assertion, as I will briefly show, highlights the crucial aspect that differentiates Bignante’s work from other similar contributions to image-based investigation.

The identification of a specific subdiscipline focused on the visual has been a prerogative of disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. First intended as the use of photography and film in ethnographic fieldwork, with seminal methodological contributions such as J.J. Collier and M. Collier’s Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (1967), visual anthropology has developed into a more complex and theoretical problematization of the visual with reference to cultural processes and human practices (Banks and Morphy, 1997). Visual sociology has been defined as an autonomous subdiscipline since the mid-1970s, initially in the United States and later in Europe (Henny, 1986). In an era of post-disciplinary studies, anthropological and above all sociological visual methods (as Gillian Rose’s assertion suggests) have been incorporated within a wide range of disciplines. Visual studies/visual methodologies, meanwhile, have become cross-disciplinary fields. From this perspective, it is worth noting that the journal of the International Visual Sociology Association (which was established in 1982), published under the title Visual Sociology since 1986, was re-titled Visual Studies in 2002. With this change, the journal was seeking to meet the needs of a growing number of visual researchers, whatever their backgrounds.

Image-based research has rapidly developed, and many handbooks and volumes from different disciplinary traditions have been published in the last ten years with the aim of presenting, explaining and discussing visual methodologies for multidisciplinary audiences. With her renowned Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (2012), first published in 2001 and now available in its third edition (with the new subtitle An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials), Rose has been pivotal in this trend. She devoted her book to visual methods in the social sciences without relating it to a peculiar disciplinary use of visual materials. Even if the exemplifications in her work often reveal the geographical background and interests of the author, the book is not intended to provide a guide for "visual geographers."

However, this is precisely what Elisa Bignante does in her book. In some ways, therefore, Bignante deviates from this tendency (from visual subdisciplines to multidisciplinary visual methodologies), since her book is firmly based on the relationship between geography and visual empirical research. Bignante finds that the reflection on how to employ the visual in research activities has traditionally been articulated less within geography than in other disciplines. Given the growing recent engagement of geographers with visual methodologies, an approach which has been far more popular within the fields of anthropology and sociology, Bignante’s aim is to provide a series of exemplifications of the use of such methodologies within geographical research practice. The book’s intent, in other words, is to show why and how geographers should use visual techniques in their research activities. The book, however, does not attempt to establish a ‘visual geography’ (an interesting comparison could be made with the recent emergence of ‘visual urbanism’), but rather sheds light on the potentialities of a visual perspective on geographical research and, furthermore, of a geographical perspective on visual research.

In the introduction to the book, Bignante explains how the need for a deeper understanding of the relations between geography and the visual has been hastened by the emergence of a Visual Turn within cultural geography in the last decade. However, Bignante finds the justification for her book in a longer and persistent paradox, namely that despite longstanding familiarity with the visual, and perhaps due to the fact that it was somehow taken for granted, geographers have seldom felt the need for an in-depth methodological reflection on the use of visual tools in their research practice. Bignante seems to underestimate the long history of the speculation around visuality and visual tools in geography (see for instance Driver, 2003; Rossetto, 2004) while providing only some hints of the past engagement of geographical thought with the visual (Bignante, pages 8-11). However, it must be noted that the book is intentionally grounded in present (and future) geographical research practices. It is also worth noting that Bignante clearly separates the "visual" from the "cartographical," to which much epistemological, technical and methodological reflection has been devoted in the past and present.

The book focuses on photography first and on video second. However, the strong link with the discipline of geography constantly pursued by the author leads her to include, among numerous examples, visual tools such as photo maps or mental maps which are often treated apart from the typical subjects of visual studies/visual methodologies. From this perspective, the book only briefly touches upon (but does not highlight) a promising aspect of visual research. Excluding the long collaboration between art and map historians, the relationship between map studies and visual studies has been deficient in reciprocal communication. In her preface, Rose reflects on the fact that some geographical visual tools, such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS), follow methodologies that are distant from what is commonly understood with "visual methodologies," and are therefore correctly not included in Bignante’s  (as well in Rose’s) book. Elsewhere in the preface, giving some examples of everyday visual practices and visual methods, Rose passingly (but significantly) refers to in-car satellite navigation. Bignante, indeed, warns the reader that her review of visual tools leaves aside cartography, participatory mapping, GIS and participatory GIS, aerial photography and satellite photography (page xviii); she does, however, include the technique of "mental maps." Maps, in the hybrid visual form in which they are conveyed by new technologies, are likewise included  in her review. For example, she refers to the use of digital "visual maps," Google Maps within photo/video diaries and Google Earth within the photo-mapping technique. The ubiquity of digital cartography and the incorporation of maps in our everyday practices as well as within art, design, communication and many other fields, I believe, requires a new, complex appreciation of the "visual" in cartography. It also calls for a new conceptualization of the fluid relationship between the two in digital devices (and consequently in visual research practices).

Geografia e ricerca visuale is made up of five chapters. The first chapter consists of some introductory pages on visual research in the social sciences. It also contains a preliminary exploration of the role of the visual in past and present geography, with reference to different epistemological backgrounds (from Positivism to Post-Structuralism and from Constructivism and the Cultural Turn to Non-Representational Theory). The subsequent chapters are organized according to  images produced within a given visual research activity. Bignante here uses a distinction which is well established within visual anthropology and visual sociology, namely the distinction between obtaining information from existing visual images and obtaining information with visual images produced by the researcher or the researched subjects during the activity. Accordingly, the central chapters of the book are devoted to the following subjects: geographical research on images, that is the analysis of existing visual materials with focus on spatial issues (chapter 3); and geographical research with images, that is the investigation of spatial issues through the analysis of visual materials produced by researchers (chapter 4) or by the researched subjects (chapter 5).

As a consequence of her sensibility for spatial concerns (Bignante suggests that all visual research is always also spatial research), the author interestingly remarks that doing visual research from a geographical perspective does not exclusively imply the use of visual materials and visual tools. Notwithstanding the fact that visual research is usually identified with the employment of those means, Bignante highlights how the direct (unmediated) observation of spatial phenomena is also crucial to the "visual geographer."

Chapter 2 introduces the interpretation of visual materials and includes the following techniques: visual content analysis, semiotic analysis and discourse analysis. Chapter 3 reviews and discusses the following: the production of photographs or videos by the researcher as the main method (photo-documentation and re-photography); the production of visual images (photographs, drawings and sketches) as a complementary tool while using verbal methodologies; the visual presentation of research results, including photographs as an integral part of texts, photographs as a form of visual narrative parallel to texts, the photo-essay technique and documentary film. Chapter 4 discusses photo (and photo-screen) elicitation, video/film elicitation and subjective production of images, including autophotography, photo/video diary, photovoice, photo-mapping, mental mapping and participatory video.

The explanation of each technique is followed by at least one exemplification in the field of geography. It is in this rigorous counterpoint of theory and practice that the volume produces its best outcomes. As Bignante states, the review of the methodologies, rather than intending to cover all the existing techniques, intends to give clear exemplifications of each method. The examples are drawn mainly from recent books, articles or projects from different geographical contexts and different branches of geography (i.e., political, urban, rural, social, development and  physical geography).

The pictures included in the book (in black and white)  are an integral part of the text when used to document the exemplifications of the various techniques. They also function as evocative images when they are put below the title of each chapter and left intentionally without captions to stimulate in the reader an open interpretation of their content (and message) in connection to the chapter’s theme. In the same vein, the author opens chapter 1, 3 and 4 using some movies (Liew Schreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated , Wayne Wang’s Smoke and Bent Hamer’s Kitchen Stories) to evoke and discuss theoretical aspects of visual research.

The concluding chapter concentrates on the difficulties and challenges to which visual research is exposed. It briefly reflects on technical and logistic problems, legal and ethical aspects, the impact of new technologies and the still prevailing skepticism towards the presentation of visual research results through videos, exhibitions and websites (for which some examples are provided).

Elisa Bignante is a geographer based at the University of Turin (Italy), and her work is presented as the result of a six-month stay in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway University of London. Even if projected towards an international audience, the book is written in Italian. In the Italian context, where visual sociology and visual anthropology have some national traditions but no effective exchange with geography, the volume appears as something totally new offered to educators, advanced students, to the community of academic geographers, to those who are involved in territorial management  at different levels, and finally to visual research practitioners interested in space. 

References

Banks M and Morphy H (eds) (1997) Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Collier J and Collier M 1999(1967) Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Driver F (2003) On geography as a visual discipline. Antipode 35(2): 227-31.

Henny LM (1986) A short history of visual sociology. Current Sociology 34(3): 1-4.

Rose J 2012(2001) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. London: Sage.

Rossetto T (2004) Fotografia e letteratura geografica. Linee di un’indagine storica. Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana 9: 877-910