Seeing is Believing is Knowing: Towards a Critique of Pure Vision: a Rejoinder

Matthew Kearnes’ (2000) response to my paper (Markwell, 2000) extends our understanding of the complex relationships between the visual, the verbal and the cultural by drawing on Foucault’s thesis of the ‘gaze’ and the need to avoid a simple teleological relationship between our visual experiences and our verbal accounts of that experience. In so doing, he reminds us that researchers must be cautious in assuming that visual images are actual rather than cultural, or that subjects’ verbal interpretations of images (even those taken by themselves) can produce universal or objective truths about such scenes. In this, Kearnes usefully highlights and reinforces one of the major problems faced by social science researchers (and one that I felt I had outlined in my own paper), that is the need to gain access to the human experience in a way that goes beyond Barthes’ (1973) role as the interpretive ‘expert’ and which actually involves the subjects in explaining their own experiences themselves. Contrary to Kearnes’ depiction of my epistemological framework, I believe that knowledge transcends experience, and that the construction of knowledge must necessarily involve reflexivity and understanding beyond empirical observation. The importance of the development of methods that seek to uncover the meanings subjects construct and attach to objects rightly remains central to empirical social science research and is clearly articulated in my paper. Rather than being guilty of Cartesianism, expressed by Kearnes as a perspective that positions vision as ‘uncorrupted by secondary connotations and cognition’, I begin with the premise that photographs are culturally constructed and as such are problematic and value-laden, and must be placed within a wider socio-cultural, economic and political context as is the duty of the social scientist. It was not my intention to offer up some sort of naive empiricism derived from a Cartesian objectivity which denied the social and cultural contexts and subjectivities in which interpretation and perception occur (Foucault’s [1973, xiii] ‘sovereign power of the empirical gaze’), and it is unfortunate if this is the impression I gave. At the same time, I seek not to deny the human experience but to examine it from as many different angles and through as many different research lenses as possible. These include visual images recorded by photography, participant observation, in-depth interviews and diary accounts. Fundamentally, I am interested in the construction of place and of meaning and, in the specific context of my paper, in the meanings that photographs and the objects of 341