In recent years numerous works (Vander Gucht, Pina and Savarese), articles and contributions have asserted the equal legitimacy of visual documents, particularly photographic ones, in relation to the data usually used by the social sciences, particularly in sociology.

Would it not be possible to use photographic work from now on without any other form of epistemological and methodological examination? The question is worth asking, even more so because the equivalence of data and methods have not been the subject, at least in France, of systematic reflection. The time worn problems raised by the works of Terrenoire, Friedman, Naville, Fieloux, and Lombard, or of Tisseron, do not seem to have found solutions.

This contribution to the symposium is intended to sketch a reflection on the relevance of these equivalences from a set of photographs taken by a press photographer during the election campaign of François Hollande (2012), in which the positioning of domination specific to political activity in a democracy appears with a certain clarity.