Grounding Visual Sociology Research in Shooting Scripts

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This essay presents a method for integrating visual representations of social and cultural realities into sociological analysis. It unites strategies of documentary photography with those of grounded theory-based field research and demonstrates the consonant interactionist and interrogatory stance of the visual sociologist. The documentary photographic method of using “shooting scripts” to structure the visual field project is shown to have a complementary relationship to a grounded theory method, and both, together, offer the visual sociologist a structured way of initiating and sustaining photographic field work.