Visual sociological study of body-self image: On reflexive organization of visual experience and social world

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This pilot study is for a visual sociological investigation of everyday life, on a theme: the reflexive organization of visual experience and social world. Research tasks are three: 1)visualizing everyday experience through auto-imagery method and constructing image-database, 2)analyzing life world through content analysis of visual data and image-elicited interview, 3)formulating and assessing visual method with image/discourse.Auto-imagery method is a research practice via construction and utilization of the image-database with auto-photographic images and explanatory descriptions, which is regarded to represent everyday life world close to the subjective. Content analysis of 3100 images/discourses by all 310 students brought the light on the rather homogeneous life worlds, with a poor variety of favorite goods and friendship, which seem to be not-lonelily though heavily privately enclosed. Unlike precedent studies in Euro-America, our database showed much less representation of fami … More ly, of individual/social activities, and of images of subjects' bodies and appearances. This may be because of some technical or ethical constraints on photographing, and also because of somehow static and low-self-presentational characteristic of students' representing their everyday lives.Related to this, data was enlarged, through asking 14 subjects to photograph about additional five themes (college, friends, family, body, oneself), and to make verbal description in interview. This made arguable how was the correspondence between each experience and visual data, as there were some cases of substitutable indirect imaging of objects. For comparison, the similar visual research via image/discourse was completed on experiences of a place: museum. It was a finding that a research process itself became a medium for activation of visitor's experiences, but also that representation of these experiences were not unexpectedly diversified nor colorful. And, on the whole, process and interpretation of data, filled with detail and volume, remain to be re-considered. Less