Book excerpt: In contemporary Western societies, the visual domain has come to assume a hitherto unprecedented cultural centrality. Daily life is replete with a potentially endless stream of images and other visual messages: from the electronic and paper-based billboards of the street, to the TV and Internet feeds of the home. The visual has become imbued with a symbolic potency, a signifying power that seemingly eclipses that of all other sensory data. The central aim of this four-volume collection is to explore key approaches to visual research methods and to consider some of the core principles, issues, debates and controversies surrounding the use of visual techniques in relation to three key enterprises: 1) documentation and representation; 2) interpretation and classification and 3) elicitation and collaboration. Volume One: Principles, Issues, Debates and Controversies in Visual Research serves as a theoretical backdrop to the field as a whole. It introduces core epistemological, ethical and methodological debates that effectively cut across the four volume collection as a whole. Volume Two: Documentation and Representation illustrates approaches to visual documentation and representation, from classical documentaries to contemporary, state of the art modes of visual anthropology and ethnography. Volume Three: Interpretation and Classification examines core debates surrounding and approaches to visual analysis. Volume Four: Elicitation and Collaboration explores participative approaches to visual inquiry.