Introduction

Like any other sort of material entering the context of criminological analysis, the visual can be approached, managed, decoded, produced, and considered in any number of ways. This chapter describes some of those ways, and notes instances in which a number of visual methods are already evident within criminology. We should keep in mind, though, that visual methodologies— like other qualitative methodologies— are often so peculiar and particular that they are developed individually, in order that they best suit the context of their use. Moreover, we should remember that despite their occasional fuzziness, methods and methodologies are actual things, and that sometimes— or, really, most of the time— what we call visual criminology is less concerned with and conditioned by method than it is by something more like tendency. Rather than rigorously outline the boundaries of visual criminological methods, I think it is essential that visual criminology instead perhaps borrow the sort of (anti)methodological promiscuity that already configures and informs cultural criminology (see generally Ferrell 2009; Hayward and Presdee 2010). A truly comprehensive overview, then, is a challenge that is impossible to meet in a short chapter (or even a short book). Rather than endeavor to offer such an overview, I simply describe the most common— and, I think, the most fruitful and promising— avenues of visual research already opened by and within criminology.

There are, it goes almost without saying, any number of ways in which criminology might methodologically approach the visual. The first task, it seems to me, is to parse the various approaches and tendencies along the first obvious point of cleavage: the origin of the image under the scrutiny of analysis. In what follows, I start by drawing a line separating a visual criminological method that trains its gaze on existing images and one that orients itself towards the production of original images. Finally, I turn my attention to what we might think of, perhaps, as a third broad methodological orientation for visual criminology: a method that is not so concerned with the provenance of the image, but rather with the ways in which images might be deployed as a part of methodological agendas in order to lead to or draw out new paths of insight into the social and material worlds of crime and harm.