“Emotions as a Bridge To Understanding the Future of Images and Society”

Sociology today is developing a pluralistic, methodological, and epistemological approach to the world of images—artistic, photographic, videographic, or cinematographic. Here, we will use a content analysis perspective, which, although still not widely known or appreciated, has existed at least since the 1930s and has numerous highly prestigious proponents—A. Weber, K. Mannheim, N. Elias, P. Bourdieu, R. Sennett, and others. We will therefore attempt to interpret the meaning of images, starting from Weberian interpretive sociology and his relationship to social and visual hermeneutics and the method of iconological analysis. We will also draw on the concepts of “future” and “emotion,” their interrelationships, and the ways in which sociologists approach them. In this work, the future is understood as a cultural fact (Appadurai and Villegas, 2015) and a sociocultural construct, while emotions are considered to produce feelings, identifications, and memories in images, even more so than words. In fact, they stimulate imagination, introspection, and understanding, and thus announce/denounce a reality or imagine alternatives to it. Finally, we argue that sociologists, in analyzing images, are “creators of the future” (Bell & Wau, 1971), and consequently, so is Visual Sociology itself. We conclude that emotions constitute a bridge to understanding the future of images and society.