| Summary: | Some sociologists – of which I am part – do not use (or use very few) images in their research, and such a (non) choice is often overlooked. Yet, images may provide valuable lessons in terms of methods and analysis if one considers them as empirical datas and research tools as well as materials for feeding back the results of the research. This article shows that this heuristic potential also concerns “wild uses” of images, that is, partial, more or less rationalized and controlled uses carried out by a sociologist who was not familiar of visual studies. Here, images were entangled in social relationships involving the researcher, respondents and readers/listeners of the research, and were useful in several ways: taking an inventory of the “seen” and “unseen” within the ethnographic work, producing lay discourses about the object and therefore, new empirical datas, and support further thoughts on the – aestheticized, enchanted, partial, etc. – relation of the researcher towards its fieldwork. Thus, this article does not advocate for a use at all costs of images, but rather invites to take advantage of their possibilities included by non-experts of visual sociology.
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