Visual Methods in Social Research

It was a pleasure to take up the invitation to review this second edition of Visual Methods in Social Research, as I had gained so much from reading the first edition and looked forward to returning to the updated volume. In the original book, Marcus Banks (2001, p. 7) argued that ‘our initial understandings or readings of images are always pre-scripted’ and he suggested that we ask particular questions about found images, ‘what the image is of, what is its context?, who took it or made it, when and why?, how do other people come to have it, how do they read it, what do they do with it?’. Drawing on Hindu philosophy, Banks encouraged readers to locate this more productive seeing in relation to ‘darshan’; the ability to see and understand multiple points of view and schools of thoughts; and I have carried this philosophy in my own work with visual and creative methodologies (Mannay 2016)