- 1 See Joël Petitjean, “La Commune de Paris” in Frizot (1994, p. 146) and Bajac (2000).
- 2 The Commune saw photography become a weapon of investigation in war logistics. See the article by H (...)
- 3 Ernest Appert’s photographic work “Prison des Chantiers, 15 août 1871,” includes photography by Lou (...)
1The connection between social science and photography goes back a long way. Both practices originated in the nineteenth century and share a general objective to explore the social and document and survey populations and public spaces. By use of a supposedly objective tool (the camera) to observe and investigate the world, photography has been favored by public institutions to inform but also guide viewpoints on information during crisis or war situations (such as the Crimean War, 1853-1856; the American Civil War, 1861-1865; and the Paris Commune, 1870-1871).1 The Civil War and the Commune triggered the wider-scale use of photography, employment of which had until that point remained occasional). During the Paris Commune, the national government in Versailles used photography to justify the bloody repression against the Communards. They resorted to: photographic montages (Lapostolle, 1988) facilitated by the collodion wet plate process, which made it possible to re-create events “as they happened” retrospectively using actors (telescoping time); watching the “theater of operations”2 live (retrospective reporting); reducing the actions of the Communards to acts of violence, especially towards ecclesiastics (sensationalism); and falsifying news as well as history (producing tailor-made information). The photographer Ernest Appert with his evocatively titled “crimes of the Commune” photomontages and the portraits he took in prisons3 is particularly illustrative of this propagandist exercise on behalf of Versailles.
2The Commune also marks the beginnings of the use of photography as a means of identification and administration of legal evidence. Originally made for commercial purposes, photographs paying tribute to the bravery of communard heroes were collected by the Thiers government and used to identify the leaders, both men and women, so as to have them arrested at the borders and condemned to be deported to a penal colony or executed. The Commune government, on the other hand, ordered photographs for administrative purposes in morgues and hospitals to identify the national guards killed in combat.
- 4 In 1878, the photographic service of the Salpêtrière hospital was created, led by neurologist Jean- (...)
- 5 In our interview with Stéphanie Solinas she discusses Bertillon's questioning of identity, which is (...)
3The systematic use of photography by the French police was implemented from 1872 with a specialized service, at the same time as happened with hospital services.4 In 1879, criminologist but also anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon developed a process to identify people from their photographs and some measurements, expanding Lombroso’s research on a typical criminal. The procedure included data and an anthropometric form on which the front and profile portrait taken in consistent exposure and lighting conditions of the arrested person took up one seventh of the space. The rest was reserved for various measurements of the head and legs and a “verbal” or “spoken” portrait: particular features such as scars, tattoos, and deformities, and physical traits such as nose, mouth, hair, and eyes. In 1890, the file held 90,000 records. The Bertillon method, or bertillonnage, gave way at the beginning of the twentieth century to the widespread adoption of fingerprints, but the habit stuck: “The individual is placed under an instrumental gaze (medical, judicial, moral) from every direction to measure deviations from a sort of unstated statistical norm.”5 The portrait—face and profile—endured.
4From the late nineteenth century, photography, published in books or projected at conferences, helped governments and the public to become aware of the social situations of the most disadvantaged; Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, a photographer also trained in sociology, are prominent examples in the United States. The Farm Security Administration’s photography program, launched in 1935 with more than twenty photographers, including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, set out to document the crisis experienced in the American countryside, “introducing America to Americans,” and supporting and even justifying Roosevelt’s New deal social program, which sought to improve the condition of smallholders following Keynesian guidelines (Mora & Brannan, 2006). Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother (1936),6 one of the most famous of the program, reveals the plight of a mother, an itinerant worker, surrounded by three young children, on the side of a road. It sensitively depicts the concern of this young woman for herself and for her children, her dignity in poverty, illustrating the chaos of farmworkers during the Great Depression. This iconic photograph embodies these years of crisis in the United States. The strength of the image comes from the combination of its documentary nature and aesthetic quality (Bazin, 2017).
- 7 Roy Stryker used the photographs of Hine (1874-1940) and Riis in American Economic Life and the Mea (...)
5But, beyond its images, the FSA photography program illustrates a documentary method which has become a reference for contemporary photography. Familiar with the photography of Riis and Hine,7 head of the program Roy Stryker was convinced of the effectiveness of photographic documents to support economic arguments and analysis, which was a pioneering perspective at the time. Before sending photographers on missions, he gave them a quantity of documents accompanied by a script. In addition to the shots, photographers were required to write substantial notes. Dorothea Lange worked closely with Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on agricultural conflicts in the 1930s. In their book An American Exodus (1940), their approach overlapped that of sociologists and anthropologists: “We use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field” (Hermange, 2000).
- 8 This theme is discussed by Pierre-Marie Chauvin and Fabien Reix (2015) with reference to Clarice St (...)
6Sociology, for its part, was built from a desire to objectify knowledge of social situations and discard prejudices or “preconceptions” (Durkheim, 1895). Its pursuit of scientific legitimacy as well as competition with the so-called exact sciences in the academic field led sociology to distance itself from sensitive approaches such as photography. Should this be seen as the reflection of an androcentric conception of scientific credibility,8 which for sociologists entails theoretical study and the distancing of forms and expressions associated with entertainment, or a lasting philosophical distrust of the “power of images” (Bredekamp, 2010), which the humanities struggle to integrate outside an aesthetic approach? A review conducted by Clarice Stasz (1979) of the journal American Journal of Sociology shows that articles containing photographs are more often written or co-written by women, which could support the hypothesis of gender bias. In the academic world of sociology, the use of photography could be considered “frivolous.”
7Since the beginning of the twentieth century, ethnologists have used photography as part of their observation methods (Malinowski, 1922; Bateson, Mead, 1942). They have used it to complement, or even, for Malinowski, to “verify field notes” (Piette, 2007). Mauss, in France in 1925, advocated the use of photography to “collect… and memorize multiple details relating to the facts observed” (La Rocca, Bou Hachem, 2007). Anthropologists and sociologists have thus long reduced the role of photography to its descriptive qualities, while maintaining a certain suspicion of its limitations (in terms of camera range, special effects, etc.).
8From the 1970s onwards, social science was more directly interested in the specific contribution that photography could make to the methodology of the survey. In the United States, Howard Becker (1974) sought to give a place to images, developing the scientific basis for studies in visual sociology, to document fields of observation. In line with this, social science research in France has given increasing importance to images and photography as a tool for scientific exploration (La Rocca, 2007; Maresca, 2007; Chauvin and Reix, 2015). Pierre-Marie Chauvin and Fabien Reix proposed the name of “visual sociology” for “any form of sociology which makes use of ‘images’…, mainly photographs and film, and granting these a central status within the logic of sociological investigation and/or argumentation.” This was a major change in the field of social science since photography was no longer only a means of completing field notes, but also a tool of investigation, or even a restitution tool in investigations.
- 9 The publication Dynamique des recherches en sciences de l’information et de la communication (Walte (...)
9Regarding Information and Communication Sciences research, references to images, their analysis, and their conditions of production abound.9 Semiological and sociological approaches thoroughly engage in the interpretation of images, analyzing their symbolic value as well as the ways in which they are perceived. Because of the great importance given to images by the cultural industries—cinema, television and today digital platforms—there is much research into the circulation of images, their classification, their subjection to algorithms, and the participation of audiences in their creation and dissemination.
- 10 There is no reference to photography as a professional field or photographers in Dynamique des rech (...)
10However, there has been little Information and Communication Sciences research into photographers as documentarians and their reflection on the status of the images they produce.10 Photography, via postcards and use in the press, is a cultural industry which developed from the second half of the nineteenth century (Freund, 1974). It has undergone profound changes thanks to the evolution of technology and the democratization of practices leading to a new level of “icon-overload.” Moreover, its professional field constitutes a space for discussion and creation that is particularly aware of the challenges of representation by the image but also innovative thanks to the competition it faces on digital platforms and in the press. The intense investment effort to cover the costs of computerization and digitization has outweighed the news agencies that are undergoing a process of concentration. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the 3A (SIPA, Sygma, and Gamma), symbols of the glory days of French photojournalism, in turn fell victim to financial groups. Within a decade, most news agencies had been decimated and their photographers made redundant (Denoyelle, 2023). Commercial opportunities were thus reduced, and more recently, the increasing dissemination of amateur images—especially on online platforms but also using artificial intelligence software—is intensifying the competition. These upheavals profoundly affect economic models, and in return provoke a necessary process of “distinction,” in the Bourdieusian sense of the term. The professional field of photographers must indeed bring value to their social and economic activity by producing images that are different from those that non-professional photographers can create, armed with a smartphone or AI. The realization of a personal investigation, whether it is photojournalism or documentary, and the production of a text become important elements in the legitimization of their approach and its singularity.
11One aim behind the concept of sociophotography which we will discuss in this issue 14 of Hybrid magazine is to introduce into Information and Communication Sciences investigation processes a space for dialog and research and creation using photographic approaches. The meeting points between social science and the arts are increasingly numerous and fruitful. Since the 1980s, contemporary art has experienced a “social turn” (Foster, 1996) that questions the disciplinary boundaries between science and art. Artists have become researchers (Caillet, 2019) and investigators (Fournout, 2021), developing their own models of investigation. At the same time, in the academic field, research-creation offers the prospect of the restitution of results of research that engages with the image. At Harvard, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, led by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, promotes innovative combinations between ethnography and visual arts.11
12Several recent examples of partnerships between social science researchers and photographers show the value of connections between these two practices of investigation and research. Examples include the collaboration between sociologist Florence Weber and photographer Jean-Robert Dantou on “Les murs ne parlent pas” (2015);12 the work of sociologist Magali Uhl on the rephotography of a Vancouver neighborhood (2022);13 and the work of Cécile Cuny (2023).14
13For Information and Communication Sciences, the value of sociophotography is to reintroduce the sensitive, aesthetic dimension of the image, to better understand its “effects”—thus adding a new aspect to image analysis—but above all to be able to relevantly exploit the “power of images” (Bredekamp, 2019): the evocational, emotional, semiotic, and iconic powers of a “thought in presence” (Uhl, 2015) for the purposes of research.
14This presupposes moving away from a restrictive vision of photography that is confined solely to the realm of observation and the collection of information and its trail, and instead opening the possibility of “visual narration” (Uhl, 2015) in an investigation or in the restitution of its results, following in the footsteps of “mimesis” (Schaeffer, 1999; Fournout, 2021) and making use of displacements, or even processes used in fiction. Rather than being descriptive, photography can indeed be the expression of an interpretation of a social fact. The work of “mimesis” can entail a search for analog forms aimed not at describing but embodying a fact differently, resulting in a more sensitive manner of awareness-raising. For example, in her book Le soleil ni la mort (2022), an account of an investigation into Californian transhumanist entrepreneurs, Stéphanie Solinas portrays images of sunset and moonrise. These photographs, taken aboard an Alcor Foundation aircraft involved in the cryogenization of bodies, offer, by analogy, the representation of a vantage point on terrestrial life; they open the prospect of overcoming death, which can be taken as a denial or a path to hubris. Analogy is one of the techniques widely used by photographers to describe what is not seen. It is only by paying attention to photographers as reflexive investigators that it is possible to make room for the photographer’s desire to represent the unrepresentable. We can cite Samuel Bollendorff’s work on immolations, Le grand incendie (2015),15 in which he offers readers the representation of an empty space, that of immolation, after the drama, echoing a disappearance, a space conducive only to readers’ recollections. Mimesis can also follow fiction to propose an interpretation, in the manner of Cindy Sherman’s metamorphoses which highlight and denounce rather than “describe” the fixed roles devolved to women in American society.16 Alongside approaches inspired by mimesis, we can recognize forms of counter-mimesis, understood as the exploration of a utopian or dystopian imaginary, in the manner of design-friction.17 Counter-mimesis supposes a particular posture: after evaluating the risks associated with certain practices, it is possible to imagine an alternative and give it representation, in a space of fiction and prefiguration.
15This presupposes introducing into the protocol of the survey itself, in addition to classical qualitative techniques of social science (by interview or observation, participant or not), the possibility of a pragmatist, experimental approach, inspired in particular by approaches imagined by photographers who propose “new documentary forms” (Méaux, 2019, p. 12).18 These collaborative experiments could transform the practice of investigation by researchers in information and communication sciences with, in turn, significant hermeneutic gains, as observed by Yves Citton (2024) by analyzing research-creation theses by Matthieu Raffard (“En flottement libre. Enquête stackographique autour de la trottinette en free floating”) and Boris Le Roy (“De la création littéraire à la spéculation. Écrire la finance”), defended in 2023. In his thesis, Matthieu Raffard dissects various implications of the self-service electric scooter; he uses the object to illuminate the situation of the world via stackography. Stackography stems from photography as an “observation method to detect the mode of existence of an object on each of the layers of the ‘stack’, based on close observation of its materiality” (Raffard-Roussel, 2021). It is inspired by Benjamin Bratton’s (2021) concept of the “stack,” defined as the compilation of six different layers (Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User) to construct a “planetary” approach to urban planning. Yves Citton (2024) views it as the invention of a singular methodology for a singular object, responding to
our need for multi-perspectivist and multi-scalar approaches to understanding (and, if possible, taming) the technical realities put in place in recent centuries, which are now beyond us to the point of threatening the habitability of our only Earth.
Photography is both part of the investigation and of its shaping.
16This issue of Hybrid proposes a configuration of this dialog between social science, information and communication sciences, and photography, by organizing a polyphony based on articles, interviews, and research-creations. Polyphony must here be taken in the full sense: the stakes for interdisciplinarity involve listening to the discourse of photographers, shifting towards professional fields dedicated to photographic creation, and comparing approaches to research on the image. The issue is part of a scientific and educational experiment initiated as part of a collaboration between Paris 8 University, EUR ArTeC, and ENS Louis-Lumière, within the research-creation workshop entitled “Sociophotography Investigates the Digital Transition.”
17Collaboration between the arts and the sciences is at the heart of the ArTeC University Research School, which has supported this workshop-laboratory project for seven years. The concept of sociophotography emerged from the creative experience of this workshop in which we developed work with the students which combines processes and issues specific to Information and Communication Sciences research into digital uses and photographic creations. Current research trends around digital technologies highlight the contribution of arts and creative experiences to understanding digital environments (Renucci & Reol, 2015).
- 19 “(Dé)politisation des esthétiques en ligne: le cas-waii desu des cultures Harajuku,” text by Anne-C (...)
- 20 “See beyond the visible,” text by Ons Bounouh, Ruvens Ely Boyer, and Sadio Sallah; photographs by L (...)
18We define sociophotography as the result of collaboration between a photographer and a researcher in Information and Communication Sciences aiming to construct a perspective on social facts using a critical approach and sensitive expression. The collaboration consists of collecting documents and evidence based in particular on surveys by interview, but also on field observations. In the framework of our investigations, the field includes digital spaces. Participants analyzed the functioning or nature of exchanges which take place there. The end productions result from this double approach to the survey and reflect the authors’ intention in a realm which may be documentary in the strict sense or borrow the codes of visual creation and also of fiction (mimesis or counter-mimesis). Within the realm of documentary, we can cite the work of Malo Le Bayon and Ariane Marrec who took full-length portraits of influencers with whom the team had conducted interviews.19 These portraits taken at the heart of the urban public space, in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, symbolize the importance of their offline presence, in a dynamic of re-politicization of harajuku jewelry beyond their circulation on social and digital networks. In a vein of fiction by analogy, Léa Martineau’s visual productions seek to make spectators feel a form of empathy with the situation of the blind and visually impaired at the Maison de Victor Hugo20 by placing themselves “in their shoes.” The portraits of the two blind people who were accompanied by the team to better understand the importance and limitations of access strategies for people with disabilities are particularly effective. They offer a bright representation of their faces in an atmosphere full of warmth. But the photographer also seeks to show the emotions experienced by these people in the museum using images bathed in an enveloping light that softens the contrasts, capturing the detail of a wall hanging or a point of view on a room, playing with synesthesia. In this respect the photography moves away from realistic, utilitarian, immediately understandable representation, and can thus sometimes surprise the viewer since rather than depicting the systems provided by the museum to guide the visually impaired, it proposes a perception that is sensitive and humanistic and completely consistent with the conclusion of the investigation, which underlines how precious human support is for this type of visit.
19Sociophotography, in its very formulation, seeks to question the limits of the concept of documentary photography, both in its professional practice dimension carried in the press and in the way it is perceived as an artistic current oriented towards the spaces of contemporary art and galleries. The desire to “persuade and convince”—to use the expression of photography historian Beaumont Newhall who has worked hard to separate the history of photography from that of photographic technique (Braun, 2005)—and photography’s value “as a powerful weapon to awaken social consciousness,” persist. Sociophotography also embodies photography in direct contact with an interpretation of the social, a societal photography where information prevails.
20Finally, photographs produced in the context of the workshop are as functional as they are fictional, aided in this by the means of hybridization offered by digital technologies. In the spirit of Jean-Claude Lemagny’s La photographie créative (1984) and Cercle d’images (1977, 1991), debates on the photographic medium, materiality, and aesthetics—on photography as art in its own right—are pertinent. Sociophotography revisits the past and, it could be argued, reconnects with humanist photography of the 1930-1960s, whose social engagement and political scope have often been watered down. And it questions the future: are we not witnessing the evolution of a New Reality with a greater social and political dimension which is driven precisely by the digital transition and its impacts of depersonalization or false dematerialization? Sociophotography is a practice, but it also provokes an epistemological debate about photography. For example, it follows in the footsteps of the photosociography of Abraham Moles, one of the founders of Information and Communication Sciences, who theorized a series of “creative methods” that anticipated the documentary turn of photographers in the 1980s in the continuation of the crisis of photojournalism and the entry of photography into the field of visual arts (Figini, 2025).
21Through the concept of sociophotography, we wish to test a dialog between two disciplines and practices, Information and Communication Sciences and photography, and we rely on their collaboration to explore complex social worlds. By trusting the documented creativity of photographers, we defend the idea that productions made within the framework of workshop-laboratories contribute to the creation of a “critical imaginary of the digital” (Jehel & Martin, 2023), giving sensitive expression to social phenomena which are invisible or have been rendered invisible or are poorly represented, thus enabling awareness. This is what Sophie Jehel sets out to demonstrate in her article (below), based on a selection of surveys carried out in the workshop. She is interested in the “act of image” (Bredekamp, 2010), that is to say in the power of the image as “speaker,” breaking with the ideology of digital “creativity” which leads to increased spontaneity, and thus a form of neutrality of digital creation. For the image to reach the status of “speaker” the photographer must have given it the capacity to do so using technical as well as reflexive skills. It is the personality of the photographer and her or his ability to transfer this into the production of the image, regardless of the degree of automation of this production, that produces meaning. Conversely, “creativity” as championed by the supporters of the cultural and creative industries seeks to benefit from the aura of creation, without experiencing the risks, and to make it an automatic corollary of the use of techniques. Via its production protocols, photographic creation is able to interpret societal phenomena associated with the digital context that can in turn elucidate Information and Communication Sciences. But this first requires the definition of methodologies for introducing the act of image into Information and Communication Sciences research, both in the documentation phase of the survey and in the production of its results. The article proposes a typology of the uses of photography in the sociophotographic investigation, enriched by analysis of more than 70 productions made as part of the workshop, linked to other photographic works.
22Pascale Colisson, who assisted in the workshop’s productions from a position outside the partner institutions, offers a perspective on the sociophotographic project, drawing on her expertise in journalistic writing. While (photo)journalism and sociophotography differ in intention and method on account of their relationship to temporality—an emphasis on current affairs for one and social constants for the other—they also differ on account of their relationship to sources, the role of interpretation, and in forms of restitution of investigations and photos. However, reflection around a cross-section of narratives and formats is common to both approaches: “For both journalist and researcher, the goal is to write to be read, without compromising on argument, while making emotions that play are subtly between the power of verbatim and the power of photographic language reverberate.”
23The second part of this issue invites photographers to explain their investigative approaches. The interview with visual artist Stéphanie Solinas adds complexity to the very definition of the documentary approach. Resisting an initial definition, she demonstrates her approach which intertwines concept with a documentary dimension of investigation and a strong focus on protocols. The presentation of her research uses displacement and “analogy” to explore the realms of identity, surveillance, transhumanism (Solinas, 2022). These themes have particular resonance for Information and Communication Sciences research on the digital industries. By rendering visible the realms of belief while taking a neutral stand on their truth, by “opening up possibilities” through art and photography for the invisible dimension that constitutes the human, and by rejecting the claim to objectivity of the “official tools” of identity, Solinas offers an alternative approach to the diversity of cultural filters.
24With a view to reviving humanist photography, photographer and filmmaker Nadège Abadie builds investigative protocols that allow her to test intuitions as well as validate them. In an approach that is more inductive than hypothetical-deductive, her qualities of paying attention and listening to people she meets in the field allow her to renew understanding of unknown social sectors with a focus on personal trajectories which fall within what she calls “the infra-ordinary,” in reference to Georges Perec. Her sensitive work manages to capture them in an original articulation of still image, animated image, and sound recording. Her documentary creation lets her “characters” speak in a way that gives particular intensity to their experiences.
25The third part of this issue is devoted to archival and experimental uses of photographic practices. These occur today in the new documentary photography that moves away from the purely “specular” approach to the image, to engage it in a practice of inquiry in the pragmatist sense of John Dewey. On digital social networks, fictionalizing approaches to archival photography are employed by public institutions to bring characters from history to life and convey the memory of their actions. Nolwenn Tréhondart investigates the Instagram account “IchbinSophieScholl” a fictional profile which, contrary to the guidelines of the major platforms, employs a mode of artifice to embody the life of the German resistance activist. The decontextualized use of archival images, in a commercial universe that is actually favorable to the ambivalence of the images circulating within it, has provoked ethical debates between Instagram users. This illustrates one of the possible pitfalls of sociophotography.
26We wanted to echo the attention paid to this manipulative use of archive images, in reference to the unique and hybrid approach of Marc Jahjah. Jahjah blends a theoretical interrogation concerning the impact of digital interfaces on narratives with experimentation using visual creation tools which are publicly available on these platforms, working openly on autobiographical or autofictional elements. In his article, he describes practices of publication on online platforms such as children’s games that fill in gaps in digital spaces made mystical under the gaze of the researcher-poet.
27This issue will give readers an insight into the richness of the field of sociophotography as a hybrid research-creation approach, combining Information and Communication Sciences and visual investigation. This form of documented creation is particularly relevant for tackling the digital transition and succeeding in distinguishing key elements in an increasingly invasive technological environment. The various alliances proposed here between visual art and Information and Communication Sciences have the common major challenge to stimulate imagination at a time when computational techniques aim rather to stifle it and put our brains into automatic mode, at a time when scientific writing itself, owing to the bureaucratization of research, also risks being stifled and becoming hermetic.