Seeing Like a Sociologist: Using Photography to Teach and Understand Sociology

Framing the Study

Although there are no unbreakable rules in photography, photographers generally use a set of techniques to compose or frame a shot—everything from placing elements along key lines and intersects to using natural elements to frame a subject (Grill and Scanlon 1983). In sociology, framing is akin to theory. Indeed, the sociologist Howard Becker (1974:11–12) likens the initial decision of the photographer—what to photograph and how to position it in within the lens of the camera—to the way in which theory guides the researcher in data collection: “As you look through the viewfinder you wait until what you see ‘looks great,’ until the composition and the moment make sense. . . . The theory tells you when an image contains information of value, when it communicates something worth communicating.”

After describing this analogy early in the first unit of the course, I introduce my students to the famous photographer Dorothea Lange. Lange may be well known to professors, but many of today’s college students are encountering her for the first time. Therefore, I spend some time providing the requisite background information on Lange and situating her work in terms of the class topic. In class, we read excerpts from Polanyi’s (1944) The Great Transformation and about the historical emergence of capitalism and its consequences. Polanyi was writing in the aftermath of the Great Depression, which left millions of people in the United States out of work and often homeless and hungry. Adding to the destitution was a prolonged drought and a series of dust storms that led to the mass migration of hundreds of thousands of families out of the Midwest and into states like California in search of work. In that I teach in California, this story has marked relevance for those students who descend from “Okies” (migrants to California from Oklahoma) as well as those who migrated from Mexico under similar conditions or who suffered alongside their families in the Great Recession.

In response to the Great Depression, many signature government agencies, such as the Social Security Administration, were established. Among these was the Farm Security Administration, which employed Dorothea Lange from 1935 to 1939 to document rural poverty in the country. By far her most famous photograph in this regard was “Migrant Mother” (Lange 1936), but I do not show the students this photo until the second unit of the class. Instead, I spend the first unit “setting up the shot.” In later interviews, when she recalled how she came to take this photo, Lange (1996) explained that she had been traveling in California photographing migrant workers. Driving near San Luis Obispo, she passed a sign that read “Pea Pickers Camp,” and she pulled off to find a makeshift camp and a woman sitting under a tent with her children. After asking permission, Lange took seven photographs of the woman and her children that day, five of which she sent to the Farm Security Administration. She did not take extensive notes or even the woman’s name, but the caption she provided read in part “Nipomo, Calif. Mar. 1936. Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32 . . . Destitute in a pea pickers camp” (Library of Congress 2019). I show students some of the photos that Lange took that day, again saving “Migrant Mother” for later inspection (see Figures 1–3).

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Figure 1.

Lange’s first shot of migrant mother.

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Figure 2.

Close-up of migrant mother and young children.

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Figure 3.

Migrant mother and baby breastfeeding.

Lange claims to have quickly taken the pictures, but critics point out that the camera equipment she used was clunky and that the photographs suggest that she carefully framed the scenes (Davis 2020). In one, for example, the woman’s teenager daughter is present. But in the rest, she is absent, and only the three youngest children are in the frame. Lange was clearly trying to capture a particular story, and as a class, we discuss how she might have framed each shot. I point out that Roy Stryker, who led the documentary photography program at the Farm Security Administration, provided photographers with “shooting scripts,” which provided key words and guidelines on what scenes to focus on (Library of Congress 2024). I emphasize, too, how sociologists come to the field with ideas that affect what they focus on. Thus, in both photography and sociology, one must have the aim of a deeper engagement, a more specific focus to direct one’s lens. To use Becker’s (1974:12) words, you want to write about something “sufficiently complex to sustain the weight of a real exploration of society.”

Many students are familiar with the inverted pyramid, whereby your topic starts broadly and then narrows as you get closer to the focus of your writing. We use this visual to map out the author’s research focus in the first monograph we read: Ngai’s (2005) Made in China, which explores the mass migration of young Chinese women to the city of Shenzhen to work in factories. Drawing on the introductory chapter, we map out Ngai’s broad focus and her narrower research question. We ask, “What is her angle?” to better understand how her theory of capitalist exploitation and the patriarchal family shape where and how she focuses her sociological lens. I am careful to point out that academic writing can be heavy, laden with jargon. It can be easier to “read” Lange’s photography, but both are just tools for telling a story. Here, I situate academic writing—descriptive ethnographic material but also quantitative analyses—as storytelling devices that we can pick and choose depending on our audience.

Having established academic writing and the photographic image as two ways of telling a sociological story, I assign students a “one-pager,” which is a short, one-page photo essay. I describe the assignment as a study of the various “great transformations” that have defined California’s Central Valley. In class, we review the assignment instructions, which are to (1) select one concept or theory from Unit 1 and brainstorm how it might relate to the region; (2) review at least three scholarly sources that address the topic as it relates to the region; (3) find or take five photos that capture the concept as it applies to the region, selecting one to be the centerpiece of the essay; (4) write a paragraph (at least eight sentences) below the photo, describing and applying the concept to the region; (5) add a title and a section called “Further Reading,” in which the scholarly sources are cited; (6) write a reflection on the second page that explains why the photo helps to frame the concept and what challenges or insights emerged from the assignment; and (7) upload the assignment to Canvas but also print the first page in color.

Because this assignment is quite different from other assignments students may have encountered, I provide them with a sample assignment to clarify expectations around formatting and content. Note, too, that students can either find their images on the Internet, and cite them accordingly, or use photos of their own. In this course, about one-third of the students take their own pictures for these assignments. On the day the essay is due, I bring painter’s tape to class, and we hang the essays on the wall to form an exhibit. The class then does a gallery walk, using sticky notes to tag the essays they find most compelling. We conclude with a class discussion of the photos and the concepts they depict, which simultaneously serves as a unit wrap-up activity.

Working with Data

Once pictures are taken, photographers process the images. At one point, this process occurred in a dark room, wherein film was literally processed. Today, processing occurs digitally, with photographers deleting, cropping, and adjusting images to present a theme in the most artistic and evocative manner. In research, this is akin to working with one’s data. Not all data in a study are used, and certain aspects of the data are highlighted to bolster a sociological analysis. For example, quotes are often edited, much like a photograph might be cropped, to focus the reader’s attention. Finally, the data are presented in a particular order to tell a story. At best, this presentation can help make a coherent sociological case; at worst, it can result in a misleading or even fabricated representation of a subject. As Knowles and Sweetman (2004:13) argue: “It is as easy to select a particular quotation that supports the point one is making as it is to manipulate the framing, lighting or tone of a photograph to present the desired effect.” Thus, both photographer and sociologist must be conscious that the choices they make are ethical and in keeping with the world they are observing.

The process of working with data—whether it be a photographic image, ethnographic observations, interview quotes, or statistical results—is a crucial one. It is the shift from what is to how we portray what is. Students often do not know how to critically read a sociological monograph, assuming that what is published and printed on a page is truth. Therefore, it is important for instructors to emphasize that it is a scientifically constructed truth bound by norms, methods, and ethics. To demonstrate, we consider the final image that Dorothea Lange took that fateful day—the image that would become the “face” of the Great Depression (see Figures 4 and 5). There are two remarkable aspects of the image that came to be known as “Migrant Mother.” First, when we compare it to the other images that Lange took that day, it appears that Lange might have positioned the mother and children for the shot. Indeed, Davis (2020) urges us to consider what the encounter between Lange and the family looked like that day:

We can look at the photo as an iconic representation of true American grit in the face of adversity. But a photograph also performs an act of transformation; it takes a moment fluid in time and fixes it into a timeless image. Thus, Lange’s photo has turned an impoverished woman . . . into an object — whether of admiration, pity, or fascination — for the consumption of a more affluent public. But what if we try to return the picture to its fluid moment, as an encounter between two people?

How, Davis (2020) wonders, did the children end up at their mother’s side looking away when in earlier images they are smiling and milling about the camp?

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Figure 4.

Original Version of “Migrant Mother.”

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Figure 5.

Final Version of “Migrant Mother.”

The second notable aspect of the photo is that when we compare the negative to the final image, we see that Lange edited the image. Specifically, in the final photograph (Figure 5), the woman’s thumb grabbing the tent pole in the lower righthand side has been removed. Records suggest that Roy Stryker protested the erasure of the thumb by Lange, arguing that it ruined the integrity of the photo. Lange, however, insisted that the thumb was too glaring a problem with the photo and removed it anyway (Davis 2020). This does not suggest anything nefarious; photographers routinely alter photos for aesthetic reasons. But it does suggest that the image is not a pure representation of reality. And this provides an opportunity in class to consider how social scientists and other scientists do not simply document reality, what Gusfield (1976) refers to as the “windowpane theory” of science. Certainly, they write in a way that creates the illusion that they are mirroring reality, just like Dorothea Lange did. For example, scientists might use passive voice to write themselves and their decisions out of the picture. Acknowledging these rhetoric devices, argues Gusfield (1976:31), does not render science “corrupt and useless.” It simply recognizes that science frames and represents the world in a particular way and that this “interpretation involves theater—it involves a performance” (Gusfield 1976:32).

Gusfield’s (1976) observations about the rhetoric of social science is helpful to understanding social science texts. As with all writers, sociologists maneuver the text to tell a cogent story, rearranging words, sentences, and chapters so that the sequencing of the argument is logical. They also write in a particular way to portray itself as a social science. To write scientifically, argues Gusfield (1976:17), is to write for peer-reviewed journals or university presses; to highlight theory, methods, and data; and to document institutional affiliation and credentials. Ethnographers push these boundaries by using thick description and discussing the relationship between the scientist and subject. Even here, however, the tone is often detached and authoritative. Having examined these rhetorical choices, the class delves into the ethnography for Unit 2 (Donna Goldstein’s [2003] Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown) in a more intentional way. What is the author trying to say? How does she say it? And why does she say it this way? I ask students to diagram the author’s major arguments and their sequencing. Then, we discuss the author’s writing choices, exploring how she cites other scholars, highlights theoretical concepts, and inserts herself into the text to establish authority.

The skill of piecing together an argument comes front and center in the photo assignment for this unit. Building on the one-pager, I ask students to construct a “three-picture story.” In art, this form is called a “triptych,” and it consists of three pictures displayed together as a single piece of art. Historically, triptychs were three-panel wooden carvings that were hinged together and displayed on altars. Today, they are usually paintings or photographs that are hung in some arrangement on a wall. In either case, their purpose is to tell a story, and in this case, it is a more complex form of storytelling than the one-pager. Not only does the assignment involve three separate photographs, but also the photographs must relate to one another aesthetically and thematically. Given that the theme of the second unit is urban precarity, we turn our attention to Stockton, the city in which our university is located. Forbes magazine once dubbed Stockton the country’s most “miserable city” due to its high rates of unemployment, poverty, and crime. Therefore, the assignment is titled “The ‘Miserable’ City,” with “miserable” in quotes to suggest that urban precarity is historically and socially constructed.

For this assignment, students are required, again, to select a sociological concept explored in the unit, do some research on how it might relate to Stockton, and find or take six photographs that tell a story about the topic, selecting three to be the centerpiece of the photo essay. Next, the guidelines instruct students to (1) work with the images, adjusting their size and composition to give the photos a particular and coherent effect for the story; (2) arrange the photos on one page in whatever size or layout makes sense; and (3) accompany each photo with a three- to four-sentence caption that together tell a sociological story related to social change. As before, students must give the essay a title; add a section called “Further Reading,” wherein they list three reputable sources on the topic; and include a reflection on a second page. The reflections for these photo essays are a critical part of these assignments. Here, students make the cognitive connection between photography and sociology and think through what it means to study social life accurately and systematically. As with the first assignment, these essays are hung on the wall on the final day of the unit as a basis for class discussion and unit review.

Telling the Story

Photography is riddled with ethical questions. Did the photographer set up the shot to get a particular image, or were the pictures truly candid? Did the photographer’s presence alter the scene they captured on camera in important ways? What did the photographer choose not to photograph and, thus, not to tell? Is it ethical to take pictures of others, even with their consent? Should we protect the identities of the people we photograph? Might the pictures we take have unintended or harmful consequences to particular people? In many ways, photography mimics ethnography: It introduces an outsider’s gaze into a social situation, a gaze that arguably alters the situation through its very presence and a gaze that has the power to “speak” and define the situation in a particular way (Lutz and Collins 1991; Pink 2001). Thus, ethnographers must be attuned to the power they exercise and the responsibility they have to the people they are studying, especially because those people do not usually get a say in how their story is told and are routinely caricatured or cast in a deviant or primitive light.

To explore these ethical issues, I share with students the ending to the story of “Migrant Mother.” In 1978, many years after Lange took and published this photo, a Modesto Bee reporter named Emmett Corrigan tracked down the woman from the photograph. She was 75 years old by then and living in a trailer park outside Modesto, California. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson, and she was born in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, in 1903. Although she was understood to be white by Lange and the Farm Security Administration, Thompson was of Cherokee descent. She married at 17 and migrated west to California with her family to work in the sawmills and farms of the Sacramento Valley. When she was 28 years old and pregnant with her sixth child, her husband died of tuberculosis. She would go on to remarry and have four more children, all while migrating throughout California for work. One day, while she and her family were driving to Watsonville, where they had hoped to find work picking lettuce, their car broke down. They towed the car to a migrant camp in Nipomo, and her husband and sons went into town to find car parts. As Thompson waited with her daughters under a makeshift tent, Lange appeared with her camera. As Thompson later recalled, she was not excited about having her picture taken that day. After Lange told her that the pictures might help educate the public about migrant workers and convince the government to help, Thompson consented. In a later interview, Thompson asserted, “She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did” (quoted in Davis 2020).

As we can see, Lange got many details wrong about Florence Thompson and her family. They were not pea pickers; they were just at the camp waiting to repair their car. They were also not recently arrived Dust Bowl refugees; they had lived in California for more than a decade. And if we are to believe Thompson, Lange was not altogether truthful. She said she would not publish the pictures, but after taking them, she sent them to the San Francisco News, which ran the iconic photo on March 11, 1936, above an editorial titled “What Does the ‘New Deal’ Mean to This Mother and Her Child?” (Dunn 2002). Although the government responded to the photo by sending food assistance to the camp, the Thompson family had long left the camp to find work in Watsonville. As Thompson’s son, Troy, later recalled “That photo may well have saved some peoples’ lives, but I can tell you for certain, it didn’t save ours’” (Dunn 2002). By all accounts, the Thompson family was familiar with the photo. Thompson told her husband and sons about Lange taking her picture when they returned to camp that day. Later, when the photo was published, her son saw it and shared it with the family. In later interviews, Thompson’s children suggested they were ashamed of it because it became the face of poverty and downplayed all that their mother did to ensure that they had the best possible lives. Katherine McIntosh, the daughter to the left of Thompson in the picture, explained “We never had a lot, but she always made sure we had something” (Gutierrez and Drash 2008).

In 1983, at the age of 80, Florence Owens Thompson died of a stroke. Her children had to collect donations to help defray the costs of her medical care before her death. Lange did not profit financially from the photographs either. Because she took them while employed by the government, they are considered a government work and are in the public domain. The photographs did enhance Lange’s reputation, however. In addition to helping earn her a Guggenheim fellowship, they conferred fame and a permanent place in the canon of American photographers. Lange was no evil monster, I point out to the class. She was a gifted photographer, and her work did help raise awareness of American poverty. But on the other side of the lens that day, there was a person. And whether we are behind the camera or collecting data, we must never forget that these are real people and that they will live and they will suffer long after we have written their story.

The story behind “Migrant Mother” has a parallel in scholarly studies of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the topic of our third and final unit. In this unit, we read Sonya Mojola’s (2014) ethnography about HIV in Kenya (Love, Money, and HIV). By way of introduction, I talk about how journalists and academics have represented the problem of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa—from maps depicting the prevalence of HIV to photographs of dying Africans whose identities and countries are never named. In these narratives, sub-Saharan Africa is often depicted in terms of infection and contagion—something that must be contained and even feared. One gets the sense that the entire continent is infected, although fewer than 5 percent of the continent’s population is HIV positive. The tragic story of the disease’s effects—often told through sensational pictures of dying Africans, dusty funerals, and orphaned children—focuses almost entirely on victimhood, stripping Africans of agency in fighting the disease. Like Thompson, they become the face of a particular tragedy. But they themselves rarely profit from the research funds and findings that their stories inspire. Both “Migrant Mother” and the larger narrative of HIV in Africa give us a place to discuss our responsibility toward the people we study and the power our narratives have to erase or empower them. We also discuss the assumptions behind these narratives and their potential to reinforce stereotypes.

The final assignment in the class is a photo essay titled “The Big Picture.” As I explain in the assignment guidelines, “the big picture” refers to both the complexity of the assignment and our responsibility toward our research subjects and the larger purpose of sociological research. The assignment is modeled on the “Photo Essays” feature in Contexts, a quarterly magazine published by the American Sociological Association that makes social research available and accessible to a general audience. ⁵ Students are instructed to write a 750-word essay on a theme from the third unit as it relates to California. The title, essay, and recommended sources should take up the first page of the essay. Next, students must find or take eight photographs that capture the theme as it relates to California. Photos should be arranged across multiple pages (however many they choose) in whatever size, color, or layout makes sense aesthetically or thematically. Each photo must be accompanied by a one- to three-sentence caption that describes the photo and contextualizes it within the essay that precedes it. Because these essays are due on the last day of class, there is no exhibit or class discussion of the essays. Nor do I ask students to reflect on their positionality or the ethical dimensions of the assignment because its due date competes with final exams. In reviewing the assignment guidelines in class, however, I remind students that photography, like ethnography, is an act of power. In deciding what to photograph, what photos to display, how to display them, and how to annotate them, students are giving voice to a particular narrative that the subject of the photo has little role in shaping. Who gets to “see” and who is “seen” by the research encounter? Who benefits and who does not from the essay? Who is erased and who is empowered by the interpretation? Students do not answer these questions; but the questions are posed for students to ponder.

Not Seeing

The initial feeling that most students described in encountering these assignments was that of frustration. They used words like “hard,” “challenging,” “difficult,” “tough,” and “hellish” to describe the learning process. One student, for example, described “trouble,” another felt “frustrated,” and a third admitted the assignment was “no small task.” As one student summed up, the assignment was “far more difficult than [he] imagined it would be.” Of the difficulties students described, condensing a massive amount of information into a short narrative (n = 12) and finding and selecting photos (n = 12) were the most frequently mentioned. Identifying scholarly sources (n = 10), choosing or narrowing the topic (n = 7), and taking, editing, and moving the photos (n = 7) were other common challenges. Students described an overall sense of discomfort with the assignment because it was something new and different:

I have never done that before.

I am quite inexperienced in this type of storytelling.

I didn’t know where to look.

This not knowing can be understood as a kind of not seeing or going into the assignment blind.

The reflections suggested that students had to work through these frustrations to complete the assignments. Again, to use the metaphor of “seeing,” they had to see the project through. They did so in two ways. One was to “dig” for information—a word that at least three students used to describe the process of reading local news, looking through academic databases, and drawing on their existing knowledge. In their essay about a local controversy surrounding a neighborhood golf course, one student describes this process as follows:

I really wanted to know why a golf course like this would be struggling and I happened to stumble across a scholarly article that detailed the rise of golf courses in the U.S. . . . between 1970 and 2000. . . . In this time period, developers . . . oversaturated the market with golf courses everywhere. As golf died in popularity, the demand for these golf courses decreased and they either closed or became subsidized by their local government.

Other examples of this strategy abound in the reflection papers. One student drove around Stockton to better understand the city, another got in touch with a former high school teacher who taught about environmental change in the Central Valley, and still another reviewed the minutes of city council meetings to understand a proposal to build more low-income housing.

A second strategy that students used to see their way through the assignment was to narrow down topics and images, to be intentional about what information they included, and to edit text and crop pictures to focus on the most important things. If the digging they described was a kind of groping in the dark, this strategy was more akin to bringing something into clear focus. One student described this as “reducing, rephrasing, and rearranging.” The not seeing, the digging, and the focusing that students experienced reveals something about the learning process. As psychologists have long shown, learning often results in cognitive-emotional states such as frustration in students (Britt and Janus 1940; Graesser and D’Mello 2012). These challenges need not be negative, however, especially if they increase information-seeking behaviors and motivation (Wong 1979), which in this case they clearly did. As one student concluded: “Every day is another day to learn something new. If I could do this for another course, I would totally recommend it.”

Seeing Anew

After an initial experience of “not seeing,” students encountered a process of “seeing” or “seeing anew.” Some students described this as seeing connections between the course material and what they had learned previously or what they saw daily. When explaining how they arrived at a topic, for example, they said:

[I related] my surroundings to what I am reading about.

I pictured the warehouses and farmland that follows when you [come] from the Bay Area, entering the Central Valley.

I selected these photos because these are the things that I see every day on my way home.

Some students described an “aha moment” when they first “saw” the concepts we were learning in class in the world around them. For example, one student wrote about a local controversy that erupted when Stockton’s former mayor suggested closing a rarely used (and publicly subsidized) golf course to create space for low-income housing units:

The topic of my paper came to me rather spontaneously. I was driving to pick up my brother from school one day and as I passed by the Swenson Golf Course . . . it hit me. The controversy about the closing of Swenson Park erupted during my last year of high school and for months on end I was unable to avoid the many picket signs. . . . Seemingly everyone in the Lincoln Unified School District felt as if their community was threatened by the suggestion of low-income housing units in the area.

This quote suggests a moment of cognitive recognition (“seeing”) made possible by careful observation of everyday life. Students built on these observations to understand course material, as this extended quote suggests:

I remember reading somewhere that people used to take boats to ferry from the Central Valley to the Bay Area. It is difficult to imagine the rest of the Central Valley looking like the photo I took. A lot of water, birds, shrubs, wildlife, and plenty of oak trees. When I look at the Central Valley, it is just an extensive system of water control and irrigation, monoculture that stretches for miles, hot and dry weather with little water in sight, and hazy from the smog. I would imagine someone in China would feel the same way seeing Shenzhen before the 1980s and afterwards. It is completely different.

Using photography to help students “see” the connections between course material and surrounding communities can help bring sociological concepts to life.

In addition to seeing connections and the “strange in the familiar,” many students described the way in which these assignments helped make visible populations that had previously been unseen or invisible to society. The most common example of this form of “seeing”—one that was mentioned by five students—was the highlighting of homeless people who live in public view but are otherwise ignored by most residents and public officials. In another example, three students focused on the hidden labor histories of the Central Valley, such as the experiences of Black farmers and Filipino farm workers. Two other students showcased local celebrities, whose contributions are often overshadowed by narratives focusing on crime and violence in Stockton. Finally, many students noted the invisibility of workers who toil throughout the Central Valley—from people working in large warehouses hidden from view to farm workers laboring in open fields who are socially “unseen.” As one student remarked:

I think this photo emphasizes the fact that when it comes to the exploitation of people, those on the outside do not want to see faces, they do not want to really see the people, because then it makes it much more real and much more personal.

Another student described these examples as the “faces of people not being seen,” and as many students noted, it is not simply people who are made invisible but also places whose landscapes are hidden, erased, or ignored—from managed wetlands to poor neighborhoods.

The unveiling of the Central Valley’s social and physical landscapes evoked different emotions in students. One student described feeling “overwhelmed and claustrophobic” thinking about an Amazon warehouse worker and how there was “someone like her running around every time I buy something online.” Other students remarked that they were saddened by the fact that it was so difficult to find information and images of the hardworking, ethnic communities that helped develop the Central Valley. But students also reported a sense of enjoyment and pride in “researching [their] people” and showcasing their community. As one student remarked, “I was excited to work on the visual essay because I’ve lived in Stockton my whole life, so this was a great opportunity to talk about my community.” Indeed, many students felt personally connected to these essays. Making course content relevant to students’ lives can foster student learning (Bernard 2010), and the process of “making seen” can help students reconsider and redefine narratives often written by others. Perhaps for this reason, students used words like “liked,” “helpful,” “fun,” “interesting,” and “excited” to describe their learning experience because it gave them the opportunity to explore their history, showcase their community, and make seen a people or place that they cared about.

Seeing Beyond

The third and final learning experience that students described moved beyond actual seeing to a deeper analysis that I am calling “seeing beyond.” Here, students described the photos but also drew out the photos’ symbolic, aesthetic, and sociological value. Five students, for example, noted the symbolism in the photos they took or selected. One essay featured an image of the inside of an Amazon warehouse with row after row of floor-to-ceiling shelves of products. In the center of the picture is a lone worker standing on a ladder to reach for a product. Later, the student reflects on the photo:

I chose the picture with the woman picking products from the shelves because she looks tiny compared to the aisles full of products. . . . I decided not to crop the image because what makes an impact is the aisles and shelves. . . . However, I did edit the photo by [centering] the woman. I did it to emphasize the woman and to point to the viewer that her job and her life are more valuable than the stuff around her.

In another example, a student photographed a homeless encampment from her car window. Later, she noticed the side mirror of her car in the photo:

There is a message located on the mirror which reads, ‘Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.’ First off, I think a lot of people look down on homeless people and think of them as ‘lesser’ because of the belief that if they are on the streets, they must deserve to be there. . . . In this way, a person who is homeless may be dehumanized to the point where they are almost seen as an object. Second, I believe in a similar way people try to distance themselves from the homeless population by avoiding them or ignoring them when possible.

In both examples, the students are delving more deeply into the data—in this case, images—to not simply illustrate a topic but also tell a sociologically informed story.

In other cases, students drew out details in the photos or grappled with the photos to try and understand the sociological story that they told. I came to see student references to “stories” and “storytelling” as commentary on their attempts to make sociological sense of the photos, or to “see” the photos in less obvious and more sociological ways. One student, for example, observed the sacks of cotton in historic photos of Black farmers in the Central Valley and wondered “what story can be told” through these details. In another example, an essay about a neighborhood’s fight to keep its golf course became a story about suburban society. Golf courses, even if rarely used, signal or convey an ordered suburban environment. In contrast, the very idea of affordable housing conjures up ideas of crime and urban disorder. Hence, the fight to “save” a golf course was really a battle over maintaining a particular social order. This analysis went far beyond pictures of yard signs and weeds growing through cracks in a public golf course. It read into those signs and cracks to see something not in the images—demographic change and downward mobility in a Californian neighborhood.

“Seeing beyond” represents not simply seeing symbolically or sociologically but also questioning how things are seen. In one essay, a student reflects on a homeless man standing at an intersection asking for money. Read one way, his presence is indecent—a sign of urban blight and disorder. Read another way, the student opines, his presence represents an act of astonishing humility—the courage to be seen when everyone would rather that he and the problems he represents (urban poverty, unaffordable housing, social inequality) stay out of view. In that same essay, the student reflects on his photographic encounter, noting how later when studying the photo, it looked like the man in the image was looking at him, the photographer: “I knew he couldn’t see me, but when I looked at photos, it felt like he was looking right at me.” In this last learning encounter, we come closest to the photographic encounter between Lange and the “migrant mother.” Like Lange, students could be applying a story of their own making rather than drawing out the “real” story, infringing on the privacy and singularity of the people they are studying, and/or benefiting from the encounter in ways that their research “subjects” are not. The same problem, however, could occur in any experience with student field work and no doubt occurs when professional sociologists go to the field as well. “Seeing beyond,” in this case, becomes an opportunity to entertain alternative interpretations and to appreciate what makes for a strong (or weak) sociological analysis.