The article aims to sum up the reflections concerning visual culture and the visual aspect of life that have appeared in Polish sociology over the last twenty years as well as to analyse the area associated today with visual sociology. The authors give a short review of the history of Polish visual sociology, indicating at the beginning the most essential scientific and didactic events in this field. Further on, they analyse the ways of understanding the notion “visual sociology” (and its cognate notions). They present the use of photography in anthropology and in social research, and give a critical analysis of the studies and representation of visual culture at the beginning of the 20th century. This leads them to the designation of two scopes of the contemporary notion of visual sociology: a more narrow (methodological) one and a broader one (which they call: “the sociology of visual culture”). In all, this analysis shows the ways in which the term “visual sociology” (and its cognate terms) has been gradually adopted, developed and re-defined in Poland.
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