Visual methods: Innovation, decoration or distraction?

Whether they capture the still or moving image, visual methods are the oldest new methods in qualitative research. Anthropologists from Malinowski (1929) onwards have included photographs in field reports, and in later decades made films about different cultures (Ball and Smith 1992). Sociologists trained in symbolic interactionism such as Howard Becker (1974) and Doug Harper (1998) have been promoting the use of photography since the 1970s, as a superior means of addressing lived experience to written texts. However, relatively few sociologists, or those in related disciplines and subject areas, have taken up this opportunity. Why is it that there is, apparently, so much resistance or lack of interest in using visual methods?