Open research questions in Photography and Visual Culture
34 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 2,824 Photography and Visual Culture papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
The reason for this may be the lack of interest or resources of media houses or insufficient knowledge of para- Photo coverage of Tokyo Paralympics in Serbian Press 111 sports, but this type of coverage means the denial of information (invisibility of disability, limited number of sports and athletes), that could arouse the interest of people with disabilities in the possibility of practicing (professional) sports.
Because RPPCs were the catalyst for amateur photographers throughout the United States (Bogdan & Weseloh, 2006), these images could reveal a plethora of underrepresented and under-researched communities through readily available but under-utilized archives.
Nuanced Archival Triangulation (NAT): An Interdisciplinary Approach for Studying Quotidian Photography · 2026 · DOIWithin the recent scholarship on everyday photography, however, little attention has been paid to the photographic practices of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), one of many marginalized groups whose photography has not been explored.
Seeing and communicating: photography and young male adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder · 2020 · DOIThe case of Solentiname thus serves to open a discussion concerning under-explored cultural alliances within Latin America and beyond, providing a close-up view of localised aesthetic practices seen in relation to transnational solidarity networks, framed by the context of the massive sociopolitical transformations underway during the Cold War.
That worthwhile objective, however, is defeated by a weak, sometimes misleading historical context; inadequate glosses on a number of the reproductions, often little more than paraphrases of content; and the author’s insufficient research, which weakens the authority of her analysis of the FSA and its photographs.
In particular, Batchen calls attention to the pervasive but remarkably understudied category of photography he describes as “ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought … by everyday folk from 1839 until now, the photographs that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy.
Ordinary Pictures and Accidental Masterpieces: Snapshot Photography in the Modern Art Museum · 2008 · DOIThe study of nineteenth‐century practices of building collections of scientific photographs provides the background for a discussion of the significance of picture archives in the history of science, of the historical mechanisms that frame some pictures as “scientific” and others as “unscientific,” and of the need for further research on how scientific images generate meaning.
Contrary to orthodox historical analysis, the images of Samoa in illustrated magazines and encyclopaedias were not limited to a small repetitive gallery of partially clothed women and costumed chiefs; and the ways in which readers understood Samoa from photographs and text raises questions still to be explored.
The Imaging of Samoa in Illustrated Magazines and Serial Encyclopaedias in the Early 20th-Century · 2006 · DOIThen, I believe, it will seem strange that so little was for so long not understood about one of the world's most absorbing and rewarding phenomena, the remarkable capacity of the human face to reflect, in its multiple arrangements of five part patterns, all the contrasts and subtleties of human personality.
The paper pays particular attention to the peculiarity of police photographs as a form of happenstance yet significant documentation capturing historical moments that might otherwise remain elusive.
Not much is known about the visit, yet his travels to Nuuk and Maniitsoq provided the artist with visual material for his paintings for more than twenty years afterwards.
Originality/value This study sheds light into an understudied area which is the building cleaners’ invisible and dirty work experiences and how that impacts their lives via a photovoice research.
“If there is no garbage, we do not exist”. A photovoice research on cleaners doing dirty work · 2023 · DOIPhotographs remain one of the under researched genres in communication, especially in the Global South, yet scholars have argued that contemporary societies have, through the use of photographs, turned their citizens into ‘image junkies’ and created ‘the most irresistible form of mental pollution’.
In the form of poetic fragments, “The Human that is Lacking” offers a response to Saiful Huq Omi’s photograph reproduced in these pages, in an attempt to “co-see” the image with the photographer.
Our illustrative examples show that it is insufficient to think about and analyze visual images only in connection with representations of large scale violence and interstate war.
But modern nation building and colonialism should be examined together in research, rather than separating them and placing nation building as central to modernization while placing colonialism as a side effect or exception of modernization.
For this purpose, pictures are not understood as merely rhetorical or propagandistic representations of political statements, which are actually to be thought of independently of the particular picture.
” With the sundering of this relationship and the creation of a closed border with an enemy state, “south Lebanon could not establish equivalent ties with the rest of Lebanon.
Abstract As ethnographic studies of the visual gatekeeping process at newsrooms are scarce and the increasingly digitised news era demands for reconsideration, this article focuses on the results of a qualitative study at the photo news desk of a Flemish newspaper in Belgium.
Although transportation and outdoor recreation are well‐recognized aspects of national parks, few studies have explored these aspects from the perspective of human geography as a means of analyzing historical landscape change.
Historical Landscape Change in Yellowstone National Park: Demonstrating the Value of Intensive Field Observation and Repeat Photography · 2017 · DOIFocusing on pregnancy and early childhood, we sought a way to open questions about how the “hard facts” of biology are given force and presence through “soft” actions of care.
It develops an archaeology of the screen from a specific angle, excavating the little known efforts to turn the sky into a kind of super-screen, the ultimate media display.
Photographic Memories is a pleasant read and includes a fair number of useful observations but they are insufficiently knitted together for it to compose an edifying whole.
Following an overview of studies that engage with young photographers, this article demonstrates why still very little is known about young people's photographic practices – that is, the range of ways and media through which young people take, feature in, and use photographs.
Limited research undertaken in advance of the implementation of the photograph policy advised that the measure would assist people with literacy problems.
Most-cited papers in Photography and Visual Culture
- The politics of pixels: A review and agenda for critical remote sensing · Progress in Human Geography · 2022 · 88 citations
- The Everyday Life of Security: Capturing Space, Practice, and Affect · International Political Sociology · 2021 · 55 citations
- A fragmented picture: reflections on the photographic practices of young people · Visual Studies · 2008 · 39 citations
- Ballot Paper Photographs and Low-Information Elections in Ireland · Politics · 2007 · 38 citations
- Drone views: a multimodal ethnographic perspective · Visual Communication · 2022 · 34 citations
- The citizen drone: protest, sousveillance and droneviewing · Visual Studies · 2020 · 31 citations
- Testing the impact of images in environmental campaigns · Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2020 · 30 citations
- Digital cameras and domestic photography: communication, agency and structure · Visual Communication · 2009 · 25 citations
- The social life of images · Visual Studies · 2020 · 25 citations
- Visions of Peace in International Relations · International Studies Perspectives · 2019 · 23 citations
Most recent work
- Recirculating Resistance Stories: Reflections on Environmentalism and Art at Nämforsen · Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History · 2026
- LANDMARKS IN JAPANESE POSTWAR AVANT-GARDE PHOTOGRAPHY · SYNERGY · 2026
- Negative Ontology in Street Photography: Evidence of Absence · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Del índex al algoritmo. Fotografía, imagen generativa y régimen visual emergente (2018–2025)<b></b> · Revista Panamericana de Comunicación · 2026
- Borders · Borders in Globalization Review · 2026
- Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination, N. Binaisa, V. Buthpitiya, K. Kalantzis, C. Pinney, I. L. Selejan and S. Young (eds) (2023) · Journal of African Cinemas · 2026
- Seeing Indian in Chicago · American Studies in Scandinavia · 2026
- Book Review: Ofer Ashkenazi, Sarah Wobick-Segev, Rebekka Grossmann, and Shira Miron, Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany · Contemporary Jewry · 2026
- Review of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers · Communal Societies · 2026
- Street Atmospheres: Photographing Worlds‐in‐the‐Making in Jakarta · City & Society · 2026
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