This essay explores four different versions of visual sociology – and a fifth that centers on their relatedness – that scholar-practitioners frequently have to navigate, acknowledge or otherwise attend to in their own research and teaching. Over the past five decades, the first four became familiar to me through my own engagement in visual sociology, and the fifth emerged while writing this essay. Taken together, these different versions of visual sociology can be perplexing. Passing through them over the course of a somewhat atypical academic career, however, led me recently to rediscover visual sociology once again, not only as a mode of sociological inquiry, but also as a form of recursive praxis that can enrich understanding of culture and social life for both academic and folk communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]