Visual Sociology [2 ed.] 103217109X, 9781032171098

Citation preview

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“At last, a book that brings back the joy of knowledge rooted in daily life, in the humanity of relationships. Douglas Harper enthralls us with an academically sound presentation in a beautifully flowing style that often refers to real-life moments to bounce off theory. A necessary boost for visual researchers and students.” Christine Dole-Louveau de la Guigneraye, Lecturer in Communication, Pierre Naville Center, University of Evry–Paris-Saclay, France “Any good movie producer would have entitled this book, Visual Sociology: THE SEQUEL. The first edition was, and remains, an indispensable guide to anyone interested in learning about the variety and mechanics of visual social research. Doug Harper lays out in exhaustive detail the kinds of questions you can study with images of various sorts and then tells you how to go about completing a project. In this new edition, however, the focus changes to a consideration of what it feels like to address the challenges of visual research as you’re doing it. Examining a selected number of the signature methods of visual social research—photo and video ethnography, photo elicitation, archival research, picturing the built environment, and photo voice, to mention a few—Harper zeroes in on case studies of his own and others’ work to demonstrate what’s involved in the enterprise. It’s all about managing your impressions, developing relationships, knowing your equipment, constant comparison and interpretation, being patient, and above all increasing your conceptual awareness of the world around you while respecting the people and worlds you encounter in your journey. Visual social research is expanding dramatically and increasingly popular among students and teachers. But the excitement it generates also masks a dirty secret: that many are attracted to doing visual research because they think it is cool and fun and easy to do on the fly. Harper argues to the contrary that a more visual social science only increases the need for rigor that social research demands. Making pictures of people intensifies your relationships with them, deepens the complexity of your entry into their worlds, invites discussion and debate about your conclusions and all of this takes time and attention. Social scientists have long realized that there is a joy to working with, and studying, people and their doings. Doug Harper, who more than anyone else is responsible for having created a more visual sociology, reveals just how much the craft of visual discovery and analysis has to offer social scientific engagement.” John Grady, Professor Emeritus of Sociology,Wheaton College, USA “Within the current digital transition, where filmic and photographic image is king, we are overwhelmed by a variety of images able to both deliver and contaminate information. Visual sociologist D.A. Harper, co-founder of the International Visual Sociology Association, has always been focusing academic attention on the visual lens as a method and a tool to grasp, analyse and understand visual messages and meanings of our times. His prestigious book, today published in an updated version, is in fact able to provide us with a decisive scientific contribution which, thanks to an engaging and compelling writing style, accompanies the reader into the complexity and value of images as data along the analogue-digital migration paths of our image society.” Piergiorgio Degli Esposti, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Bologna, Italy

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Visual Sociology

This new version of the authoritative textbook in the field of visual sociology focuses on the key topics of documentary photography, visual ethnography, collaborative visual research, visual empiricism, the study of the visual symbol and teaching sociology visually. This updated and expanded edition includes nearly twice as many images and incorporates new in-depth case studies, drawing upon the author’s lifetime of pioneering research and teaching as well as the often neglected experiences of women and people of color. The book examines how documentary photography can be useful to sociologists, both because of the topics examined by documentarians and as an example of how seeing is socially constructed. Harper describes the exclusion of women through much of the history of documentary photography and the distinctiveness of the female eye in recent documentary, a phenomenon he calls “the gendered lens.” The author examines how a visual approach allows sociologists to study conventional topics differently, while offering new perspectives, topics and insights. For example, photography shows us how perspective itself affects what we see and know, how abstractions such as “ideal types” can be represented visually, how social change can be studied visually and how the study of symbols can lead us to interpret public art, architecture and person-made landscapes. There is an extended study of how images can lead to cooperative research and learning; how images can serve as bridges of understanding, blurring the lines between researcher and researched. The important topic of reflexivity is examined by close study of Harper’s own research experiences. Finally, the author focuses on teaching, offering templates for full courses, assignments and projects, and guides for teachers imagining how to approach visual sociology as a new practice. This definitive yet accessible textbook will be indispensable to teachers, researchers and professionals with an interest in visual sociology, research methods, cultural theory and visual anthropology. Douglas Harper is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Duquesne University, USA. He is a founding member of the International Visual Sociology Association and founding editor of its journal, Visual Studies. His ground-breaking work explores various aspects of visual sociology and makes extensive and creative use of photo elicitation techniques. He is the author of several books, including Good Company (third edition, Routledge, 2016), a pioneering visual ethnography of railroad tramps in the US; Working Knowledge (1992), a sociological examination of a rural bricoleur; and Simboli del fascismo nella Roma del XXI secolo (co-authored with Francesco Mattioli, 2014), which explores public interpretations of fascist symbols in contemporary Italy. He also co-authored visual ethnographies with

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British sociologist Caroline Knowles (Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, 2009) and, on the sociology of food, The Italian Way, with Italian sociologist Patrizia Faccioli (2009). Harper recently co-directed the documentary film The Longest Journey Begins, on a recovery community in Pittsburgh. His work has appeared in translation, and he has lectured and taught in leading universities in Europe and the US. Now in semi-retirement, he continues to teach part time and is focused on the completion of a thirty-year visual ethnography of Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy.

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Visual Sociology Second Edition Douglas Harper

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Designed cover image: © Douglas Harper Second edition published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Douglas Harper The right of Douglas Harper to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2012 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harper, Douglas A., author. Title:Visual sociology / Douglas Harper. Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022055402 (print) | LCCN 2022055403 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032171081 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032171098 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003251835 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH:Visual sociology. Classification: LCC HM500 .H37 2023 (print) | LCC HM500 (ebook) | DDC 301–dc23/eng/20221227 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055402 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055403 ISBN: 978-1-032-17108-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-17109-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-25183-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003251835 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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For Colter, with thanks, and to the memory of Doug Mitchell

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Contents

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgments

x xiv xv

Introduction

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Documentary photography and visual sociology

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Visual ethnography

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Visual research collaboration

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D O U G L AS H ARPE R AND KARIJN KAKEBEEKE

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Visual facts

150

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Visual symbols

212

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Teaching visually

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Select bibliography Index

299 307

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Figures

Unless otherwise noted, photographs are by Douglas Harper. 0.1 0.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17

Women washing clothes near the caves of Adjunta and Ellora Homeless woman and child “Ricking the reeds,” by P.H. Emerson, 1886 “The Seeds of Death” photomontage by John Heartfield, 1937 Stalin in the Moscow subway Wife washing her husband, by Bill Brandt, 1937 British woman drinking tea, by Bill Brandt, 1937 “Spade Squad,” prisoners digging mud, by Bruce Jackson Prison artist, by Bruce Jackson Women dressing chickens, by Charlotte Brooks, 1945 Judging canned goods at the New York State Fair, by Charlotte Brooks, 1945 Farm hands at “changing works” dinner, by Sol Libsohn, 1945 “I am proud of myself because I’m still standing,” by Susan Meiselas “This is my home,” by Susan Meiselas Grandma Ruby, by LaToya Ruby Frazier, 2007 Grandma Ruby, Mom and Me, by LaToya Ruby Frazier, 2009 World’s Greatest Mum Remembering the dead in Bologna A bottle gang in Boston Inside the Pine Street Inn Skid Row diner, 5 a.m. Couplings from a freight train at speed Carl, drying out Freight yard with brakeman Carl shaving in a hobo jungle Breakfast in a hobo jungle A bull local up the river Strawberry on a flatcar Unemployment office for temporary agricultural workers Apples picked by tramps Hobo jungle waiting for tramps Riding a piggyback Arapaho elder Josephine Redman, by Sara Wiles

2 3 12 19 20 22 23 30 31 34 35 36 38 39 43 44 52 53 59 61 62 63 65 66 67 68 69 70 70 71 72 73 78

List of figures xi 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 3.21 3.22 3.23 3.24 3.25 3.26 3.27 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 4.17

Footrace, Arapaho Language and Culture Camp, by Sara Wiles Cheyenne Frontier Days, by Sara Wiles Finishing the shark idol, by Raj Sekhar Aich Self-portrait, by Jason Yuk-Fai Lighting up the Rosebud Welding the new bumper Cutting the arch Trimming the arch Using the tractor in the woods Gathering corn for ensilage, by Charlotte Brooks, 1945 Threshing wheat, by Charlotte Brooks, 1945 Man with bananas Violence and passion Competing ads using the female form Balancing light Willie’s fingers A classroom in Africa, by class participants Female teachers in Africa, by class participants Religious leader and kids talk about sexuality, by class participants A health clinic, by class participants Exhibition of photovoice images, by Karijn Kakebeeke Orthodox Jew in Amsterdam, by class participants Empty bench, Holland, by class participants Beautiful view without viewers, by class participants Waste bins standing in a row, by class participants Public cleanliness in Holland, by class participants Same gender couple on a traffic light, Holland, by class participants An immigrant’s view, by class participants An immigrant fitting in, by class participants Birds reminding one of home, by class participants Birds as a portal to memory, by class participants Installing a large window Craft farm, aerial view Hybrid craft/industrial farm aerial view Industrial farm, aerial view Retired farm, aerial view Abandoned farm, aerial view Buck and Carmen, father and son farmers Inside a freestall barn, industrial farm Inside a stanchion barn, craft farm Hong Kong, high-rise slum Hong Kong, high-rise capitalism Hong Kong cosmopolitan intersection, panorama Hong Kong, pedestrian market intersection, panorama Piazza Maggiore, Bologna, Sunday without traffic Neptune, Nereids and a tourist, Piazza Maggiore Entering the piazza, panorama Medieval parade in costume

80 81 85 88 102 102 103 104 105 109 111 115 116 116 119 120 129 129 130 131 131 135 136 137 137 138 139 140 141 141 143 151 155 155 156 157 158 159 160 160 166 166 168 169 170 171 172 174

xii List of figures 4.18 4.19 4.20 4.21 4.22 4.23 4.24 4.25 4.26 4.27 4.28 4.29 4.30 4.31 4.32 4.33 4.34 4.35 4.36 4.37 4.38 4.39 4.40 4.41 4.42 4.43 4.44 4.45 4.46 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15 5.16 5.17 5.18

Mimes busking Kids playing in the piazza Kids chasing pigeons in the piazza Class on the steps of the church, Piazza Maggiore Grandparents explain history to their grandkids Protesting the Gulf War Tourists en route, Bologna Selfies in the piazza Tourist bus in the piazza Italian mom pushes her kids through the crowds Tractor funding project, Piazza Maggiore Buskers in the piazza University students protesting Waiting in the rain Coffin rest, Lake District, UK Consecrated land, Lake District, UK Ewen, Michigan intersection, 1970, by Jon Rieger Ewen, Michigan intersection, 1990, by Jon Rieger Ewen, Michigan intersection, 2005, by Jon Rieger A communal meal on a farm in Tuscany, unknown Workers looking for daily labor, southern Italy, unknown Peasant women and children, southern Italy, unknown A rock band prepares to play before a Beatles movie, by George Johnson, 1964 X-ray shows pacemaker, by Jon Prosser Mind map, by Jon Prosser Train journey, 1, by Ricabeth Steiger Train journey, 2, by Ricabeth Steiger Train journey, 3, by Ricabeth Steiger Drawing that explains a mechanical repair, by Suzan Harper Mixing signs: Piazza Maggiore and Apple ad Mussolini with Italian history on his shoulders Square Coliseum Communism as mad child University of Rome, Sapienza Mosaics at Foro Italico View from St. Peter’s cupola of fascist neighborhood The boulevard that connects St. Peter’s to the Tiber Angel carrying fasces The Roman salute in Predappio Storing an unpopular sculpture under the bleachers Vietnam Veterans Memorial seen from across the grounds Visitors streaming past the Vietnam Veterans Memorial A family pauses to look Three soldiers added to the memorial A sea of names Pointing to the Lincoln Memorial George Washington and Guyasuta on Mount Washington, Pittsburgh

174 175 175 176 176 177 178 178 179 179 180 181 181 182 185 185 188 189 190 196 197 198 199 202 203 204 205 206 207 218 221 222 224 226 227 228 229 230 231 231 234 235 235 236 237 238 241

List of figures xiii 5.19 5.20 5.21 5.22 5.23 5.24 5.25 5.26 5.27 5.28 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14 6.15 6.16 6.17 6.18 6.19 6.20 6.21 6.22 6.23 6.24 6.25

Comparing the faces and expressions of Washington and Guyasuta Tourists encounter the sculpture Homeless memorial sculpture seen from behind. Edmonton, by Tara Milbrandt Homeless memorial sculpture, artist tiles, side panels, by Tara Milbrandt Bagpiper marks the event as a funeral, by Tara Milbrandt Artist tiles, details, by Tara Milbrandt Amazing grace, by Tara Milbrandt Indigenous group singing, by Tara Milbrandt Young man takes flower to sculpture, by Tara Milbrandt Hand gives flower to the sculpture, by Tara Milbrandt Demonstration against the war, 1970 Making pasta in Italy Hanging an exhibition of student work in Strasbourg Urban ghetto in Iceland The rustbelt, Clairton, Pennsylvania Farming in a snowstorm Manure spreader in winter mud Students reclining in Roman winter sun Nudging into traffic, Rome Two lanes become three, Rome Creative merging, Rome Pantheon piazza, Rome Italian students at the Campo di Fiori Mural by Maxo Vanka Trapped in words, by Jasmijn Antonisse Son dancing, 1, by Jasmijn Antonisse Son dancing, 2, by Jasmijn Antonisse Son dancing, 3, by Jasmijn Antonisse Portrait in leaves, by Jasmijn Antonisse Light beyond, by Jasmijn Antonisse Artificial insemination, by Jasmijn Antonisse Becoming Mom, by Jasmijn Antonisse Past to present, by Jasmijn Antonisse Examining negatives at a class dinner Sailing with the class

242 242 246 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 261 267 268 270 271 274 274 275 276 276 277 280 282 284 289 290 290 290 291 291 291 292 292 296 297

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Tables

4.1 Craft and industrial farms 5.1 Analyzing cigarette ads

153 216

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Acknowledgments

My deep thanks to the IVSA, my intellectual family for my whole career. For six of the years since the first edition of Visual Sociology I served as President of the IVSA and seeing visual sociology up close in a period of transition stimulated me to consider this project. Beyond that we are a community of friends whose work has guided and continues to inspire me. My thanks to Suzan Harper who was a large part of several projects described in this book. Again, her drawings demonstrate how art and science can work so well together. Several close friends again doubled as critics and copyeditors, including G. Igor Schaffner, Greig Tennis, Chuck Hanna and Toni Johnson. The work grew through discussions with my son Colter, a writer, anthropologist, photographer and critic. Jeff Hayes continues to teach me the architecture of visual knowledge, Peter Egan reminds me to write for a those who did not study Max Weber, and my brother Todd, an artist, also reminds me that visual sociology should not be afraid of beauty. Thank you all! I have worked on the ideas in this book with friends and colleagues spread wide and far. In Holland and Belgium they include Rob Boonzajer Flaes, Ton Guiking, Luc Pauwels, Marije van Mierlo, Jasmijn Antonisse, Patricia Van der Does, Sonja Edelaar, Imke Gooskens and Karijn Kakebeeke. Karijn and Jasimijn have contributed directly to this volume. In Italy they include Patrizia Faccioli, Pino Losacco, Monica Sassatelli, Marina Ciampi, Francesco Mattioli, Alick McLean, Piergiorgio Degli Esposti and Monica Palladino. In Switzerland, Ricabeth Steiger, one of the finest photographers I know and have worked with, again graces this book with her work. In the UK, important visual sociology colleagues and collaborators have been Caroline Knowles, Paul Jones, Gil Golding, Susan Hansen and Jon Prosser. Since the first edition of the book I have gained new colleagues and friends in France: Joyce Sebag, Jean-Pierre Durand, Christine Louveau and Alexandra Tillman in Paris and Christine Lazzaret in Bordeaux. For thirteen years I created and edited the journal Visual Sociology (now Visual Studies), and I could not have done that without Jon Rieger, who singlehandedly managed the business of the IVSA during that formative era. Now that the IVSA is all grown up, these precarious times seem like ancient history, but they are history none the less. Jon is gone, though he will always be haunting us with his garrulous affection, waiting for his final shot of Genever. Special thanks to those who invited me to give guest lectures or workshops on visual sociology, including Manu Ortiz Escámer at the University of Mexico, Jon Imber at Wellesley, Les Black at Goldsmiths, Elijah Anderson atYale, Francesco Erspamer at Harvard, Francesco Mattioli at the University of Rome, Kristjane Nordmeyer at Westminster

xvi Acknowledgments College, Gil Gillespie at Cornell, Hubert Knoblach at the Technical University in Berlin, Pino Losacco at the University of Bologna, Mitch Duneier at NYU and Irene Sartoretti at the School of Architecture at the University of Strasbourg. A small number of inspired editors have been critical for visual sociology, committing to projects that were outside the mainstream, and often had very little precedent. Doug Mitchell at the University of Chicago Press was a magnificent seer, editor and friend, now tragically passed. At Routledge I thank Gerhard Boomgaarden for his interest when we first discussed this project several years ago and his patience and support throughout its long gestation. Rebecca Brennan and Chris Parry have been outstanding editors for this edition. What I imagined as a modest update became a ground up revision, and I tested their patience with extension requests again and again. I have had the pleasure to co-author several studies in visual sociology. My thanks go to Patrizia Faccioli, Caroline Knowles, Tara Milbrandt and Francesco Mattioli for what we accomplished together that we could never have accomplished alone. In this book there was collaborative work as well. Karijn Kakebeek co-authored an examination of photovoice in the form of an extended conversation.Tara Milbrandt interrupted her busy life to photograph and reflect on somber yet celebrative events at a sculpture dedicated to the homeless in her hometown of Edmonton. Photographers who graciously shared their work include Sara Wiles, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Bruce Jackson, Susan Meiselas, Tara Milbrandt, Jason Yuk-Fai, Ricabeth Steiger and Raj Sekhar Aich. Thanks to all of you, your generosity and good will astonishes me. I wish to express by gratitude to Dean Kris Blair of Duquesne University for supporting this project, a fine expression of generosity to an Emeritus professor no longer in an active teaching role. This book threatened to take over several months of my life shared with Christine. Thank you so very much for questions that always zero into the center of the target, and mostly thank you for your patience, love and support and your very good humor!

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Introduction

When I was twenty years old, at the height of the Vietnam War, I traveled to India to study philosophy. It only took a few hours in the chaos of Bombay to realize that just getting through the next seven months would take everything I could muster. I was overwhelmed by it all: the sounds, smells, the crowded universe of touch, but most of all by the world pouring into my eyes. Philosophy would have to wait. My father had lent me his treasured WWII vintage Argus C3, but it met an unhappy end my second day in Bombay. After a few weeks of being camera-less I implored my parents to empty the family coffers so I could buy a Nikon F from two travelers I had met who were ill and needed cash to get home. The money was wired, the camera purchased and I still remember holding it in my hands for the first time, bringing it to my eye and releasing the shutter. There was a feeling of seeing being made concrete; having something left over from the reality passing by. Maybe in this way I could manage India. I returned to the States with a new passion—photography—and a few years later, to a Ph.D. in sociology. During that period Howie Becker wrote the seminal article on visual sociology, “Photography and Sociology,”1 where he suggested that reliability (will the research produce the same results over and over?) and validity ([is it “true”?) were as relevant to visual methods as they were to quantitative methods. He also suggested that documentary photographers might gain from reading what sociologists had to say about the social conditions they photographed, and that sociologists could learn a great deal by studying the deep immersion and intense efforts to understand that guided the best documentary photography. At the time it was unheard of to take photography seriously in sociology, and Becker was a leading voice in the discipline.This was a huge step forward for visual sociology. Sociology was different in those times, at center stage of politics big and small. It was not enough to keep one’s distance and to regard the world as a laboratory. Sociology was an invitation to unmask inequalities, inspire change, to involve oneself in social movements and to experiment with new ways of living. Many of us thought that making sociology visual was a parallel to making society visible, and that led to seeing into social realities via engaged fieldwork, merging theory with observation and practice. We saw and experienced sociology as an impassioned discipline. We not only wanted to understand the world, we wanted to change it. We thought with our hearts and eyes as well as our minds. Seeing led us to immerse ourselves in society; photographing or studying photos others made drew us in, both our minds and our passions. Becker was not, of course, the only sociologist to think visually, but he was the most well known. In the meantime, by the mid-1980s, several of us became the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA2), after failing by a vote or two to become a section of the American Sociological Association. Looking back, these were fortunate events, because DOI: 10.4324/9781003251835-1

2 Introduction

Figure 0.1 Women washing clothes near the caves of Adjunta and Ellora. I knew nothing about the women I photographed.They were living figures seen against ancient sculptures in what looked like a dance with history. Later I came to question what I saw as an exotic scene, my own privileged presence as a western traveler and photographer.Yet it was incredibly beautiful, a momentary dance of working woman and ancient sculptures.

Introduction 3

Figure 0.2 I was inside a train looking out. A woman with her child walked the length of the train, cup extended, asking for money. The mother was desperate from poverty, hunger and leprosy. I have struggled from then until now to find a place for photography in my reactions to such scenes of social cruelty and injustice.

the organization that came into being was truly international, not just a North American organization with the adjective affixed, and as an independent organization we have sponsored a journal and yearly conferences in which the discipline developed and evolved. This book is based on the premise that the world that is seen, photographed or otherwise represented visually is different than the world that is represented through words and numbers. As a result, visual sociology leads to new understandings and insights.The world behind statistical data exists but the world behind the numbers is often an abstract reality, and one that is normally taken for granted. Many of us believe that a visual approach can invigorate a discipline that is increasingly abstract and distant from the world it seeks to understand. It is often said that few sociologists doing research ever speak to, encounter or even observe a fellow human being, but most are adept at statistics.Visual sociology is an invitation to do sociology differently, to study the world as it appears, and to use cameras and other means to define those appearances as well. In short, visual sociology is an invitation to open the eyes of the discipline to a reality beyond a computer screen filled with numbers. The book is also premised on the idea that seeing is complicated in and of itself. What we see depends on the physical position of the viewer and, if we record it, the capabilities and limitations of the technology used. Seeing also depends on the social position of the viewer: personal histories, gender, age, ethnicity and other factors that lead a person to see one message from the infinite possibilities in a given visual universe. The construction of meaning does not stop there, images gain successive meanings as they are interpreted by one audience after another as they pass through history.

4 Introduction Said another way, I am defining visual sociology as a way of visually studying social issues. I am imagining a sociologist with a camera or an artist’s brush, but I am also suggesting that visual sociology includes the study of how we see as much as what we see. I admit to a strong predilection for photography. Mine is an affection, such as one has for pastel paintings or bebop, that I first discovered as an art student and that has only grown in the decades since. I like to take photos because I never am sure what the camera is going to teach me about seeing, and I take great pleasure in looking at photos, whether printed, reproduced in books or on computer screens. I have found that photography is about self-discovery as well as the discovery of society, which explains its presence in liberation movements and participatory research as well as the fine arts. I approach the field with this in the background, but I also recognize that an interest in photography is neither required nor even expected in the developing visual sociology community. Students are now skilled at recording reality visually and spreading these images and films around the world. Cameras used to be tools for professionals, now they are part of the cell phones most of us carry.The world has never been more visually aware and visually engaged, and this means that the time for visual sociology has most certainly arrived.

Preface to the second edition The book was and is a personal journey through visual sociology. There are ten years more years of work to draw upon. The world has also changed in ten years, and what does that have to do with visual sociology? I think in the following are some themes to consider. •

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Visual sociology has expanded far beyond the North American/European borders where it began. It is now taught and researched around the globe by those who study their own scenes and issues. This has contributed to what is called the “ontological turn” in ethnography whereby reality is understood as emerging from and defined by those experiencing it. It is a call to overcome the ethnocentrism that we unconsciously experience but often are unaware of. It is a call to transcend the domination of the white European/North American voice in ethnography and it makes the case that what is photographed or filmed needs to be understood in terms and realities of those in front of the glass. The internationalization of visual sociology is also due to communication technology made more simple and reliable. Last week I gave a guest lecture in the Netherlands via zoom, and half the students had dialed in from locations around the world. My presentation drew on images I had made in a piazza in Italy and in Minneapolis, and I had a distinct feeling of ideas and images crashing across borders, informing, argued over, contended with. My experience is more and more the norm rather than the exception. The events of the past ten years that have consumed our interest include war, migration, social disruption and climate change emergencies. The documentation of these international events, and arguments about their meanings, have been front and center in the visual sociology movement.This is not to say visual sociology is all about social problems and crises. Some of the most interesting new work has been on the routines and rituals of daily life, ongoing social movements concerning gender politics, neverending debate over the meanings of the symbolic environments and many others.

Introduction 5 •

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The digital revolution has democratized filmmaking, photography and image distribution. What very recently required an expensive portable sound sync camera and audio recorder can now be approximated on a cell phone. In fact, extraordinary films have come from the phones we carry, which have a potential impact that would have never been imagined just a few years ago. One could argue that one of the most important documentary films in the US in recent years was Darnella Frazier’s nine-minute, twenty-nine-second video of ex-Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck until he had killed him. This technically crude video led to the conviction of Chauvin, one of a small handful of convictions of police in the US responsible for more than a thousand suspect deaths every year. The film was made by a bystander with a cell phone, bravely asserting her constitutional rights, and distributed through the world on YouTube or Twitter. It is also true that we experience the tragic and unresolved Russian invasion of the Ukraine largely through the improvised photojournalism of the current moment. We have begun to face both our ease and our discomfort in a virtual world. I write in the spring of 2022, when it appears that COVID may have receded into the category of an irritant, and those of us who were not frontline workers can look backward over twenty-four months of life lived mostly via the internet. Education became zoomified and it both works and does not. A tiny university seminar taught on zoom forces everyone to be present; each of my students’ expressions and words are vividly public. A large class on zoom? The opposite. It used to be assumed that the more deeply we become virtual, the less we are human. Now we inhabit a middle ground and many of us find it easier than we are comfortable to admit.

In the past ten years several books have been published on visual sociology.3 They are different in personality and orientation, but they complement rather than compete with each other. The beauty of being a part of this intellectual movement is that most of us know each other and we feel ourselves pulling a collective project forward. My recommendation: take what is most useful from each of them. I am imagining myself as a professor who has never thought seriously about visual sociology, or a student who wonders what it may have to do with them.What can I write in the final pages of this Introduction to help them out? It strikes me that debates about whether or not a photograph is empirical evidence or whether “reflexivity” and “positivism” are mutually exclusive may be of little interest. I have decided instead to make a list of what visual sociologists do, and key it to the chapters of the book, a simplistic overview that offers at least a roadmap of ideas and methods. OK, here goes. A list. Nuts and bolts. •

Visual sociologists make photos or films to study cultures and social issues. Sociologists call this a (visually assisted) form of “participant observation” or “qualitative research.” Anthropologists (and sociologists who chose this path) often call their version “visual ethnography,” which infers the study of culture. When researchers get deeply involved in studies such as this they are often personally challenged and changed, and as a result what they learn and report is both subjective, from their own emotional and psychological experiences, and objective, about the topic they are interested in. The acknowledgment of this complexity is called “reflexivity” and it is particularly

6 Introduction

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relevant to visual ethnographers. I have devoted a section of this book (Chapter 2) to this approach. Visual sociologists have helped make qualitative research more collaborative (Chapter 3). The prior research model, with a hierarchical relationship between “researchers” and “informants,” has given way to the researched and the researcher being as equal in their partnership as possible. How is this done? In photo elicitation, we use photos to guide interviews. This is collaborative because the researcher and researched reverse roles; the person being interviewed interprets images and teaches the researcher from her or his knowledge or experience. We also give cameras to people and ask them to make photos of films of their own experiences, relevant to our research question, which is called photovoice. We make films as teams of insiders and outsiders, called participatory filmmaking. Other forms of collaboration in visual research are rapidly developing and it is perhaps the most vital part of the movement at the present time. Visual sociologists make images or films to study what can, with qualifications, be called data. This is discussed in Chapter 4. In these situations, we treat images as evidence.The social construction of the image is at the core of qualitative methods such as visual ethnography, but here we are accepting that the image can tell us reliable and valid information. I do not find this dual character of the image to be troubling. For example, imagine we are a sociologist looking at social change and we’ve rephotographed a road crossing in northern Michigan, as Jon Rieger did over several decades. Rieger tells us, “Here is what this intersection looked like thirty years ago. Using the same camera lens and matching the light and time of day, here is what it looks like now.” We compare; we make lists from what we see on the two photos; we decide what words like “dilapidated” mean and in the end we come to conclusions based on visual evidence. Photos can also picture the same reality in ways that are unrecognizable. In an example I will describe, a farm seen from eye level and from 2,000 feet in the air, the same actual reality, are unrecognizable as the same thing. Visual sociologists also study the visual world qualitatively. We study documentary photography (Chapter 1) because these photographers have often photographed and studied the same things we do, and they are often extraordinarily skilled at making photos and films and they have developed a particular visual sensitivity that makes their work stand out. We could say we are studying the world second-hand in this instance; documentary photographers do not claim to be visual sociologists, but often they feel like close cousins. We study aspects of society like architectural styles.We study public art and reactions to public art, like Confederate statues or fascist buildings. We study advertisements in printed magazines or that appear on computer screens, or even in building designs like Apple stores. We dig into media studies and attempt to dismember and understand the flow of media that swims around us. In these tasks we use approaches borrowed from semiotics and some that are not. This is covered in Chapter 5. We teach in a partly visual way. After two years of the pandemic all professors have all become skilled at inserting images into PowerPoints. Just a few years ago it was a huge production to set up a slide projector and show slides as part of a lecture. Because visual sociologists are now used to this, we are spectacular at it. Well, better than average.

Introduction 7 •

We also teach courses in visual sociology where we ask students to do all of the above, that is, make photos to study the social world, study visual culture around them, do participatory social research and study the visually symbolic environments we all inhabit. I discuss visually teaching and teaching visual sociology in Chapter 6.

I have written this book using case studies. That is, I illustrate my ideas by looking at examples of a research style or general topic rather than offering an encyclopedia or annotated bibliography. Some of these are revisits to my own projects, and many ideas and examples are new. I have covered fewer topics in this edition, each in more depth. The book now moves from documentary photography to visual ethnography, to collaborative visual research. I then cover what I call “visual facts”—that is, material that might be most familiar to sociologists new to the visual approach, and then segue to the study of symbols and social semiotics. The book ends with a discussion on teaching sociology visually. So, enough said, time to get into it.

Notes 1 Becker, Howard S. 1974. “Photography and Sociology.” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1 (1): 3–26. 2 I described the early history of the IVSA in Harper, Douglas. 1996. “Seeing Sociology.” American Sociologist 27 (3): 69–76. 3 Ali, Erkan. 2018. Interpreting Visual Ethnography: Texts, Photos and the Construction of Sociological Meanings. London: Routledge; Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene De Lange and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community and Policy. Los Angeles: Sage; Gubrium, Aline and Krista Harper. 2013. Participatory Visual and Digital Methods. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press; Pauwels, L. 2015. Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Sebag, Joyce and Jean-Pierre Durand. 2022. Filmic Sociology:Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave.

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Documentary photography and visual sociology

Introduction Some might question beginning a book on visual sociology on documentary photography, but I do so for several reasons. Many documentarians work much like visual sociologists and studying their work helps us with ours. Secondly, studying documentary allows us to see how photos create meaning; we study documentary photography as an aspect of culture. Finally, when we study documentary photography we experience how different photographers see. For example, men have historically outnumbered women in documentary photography, but women have made documentary images nearly from the beginning of photography, and studying their work as an example of a “gendered lens” yields interesting results. Sometimes women and men see different aspects of the same situation, as I will describe in the documentary project known as SONJ, and often women have focused on topics men (and their largely male editors and publishers) have neither seen nor found worthy of attention. The same holds true for documentary photography emerging from almost any community or culture to some degree, whether racially, ethnically, socio-economically or age based. Documentary work coming from within the culture generally shows a different reality than work made by outsiders, which does not invalidate the work of outsiders, as Sara Wiles’ forty-year project among the Arapahos (discussed in Chapter 2) makes clear. Her empathy and continuing involvement created a path to cross-cultural understanding. To take the other extreme, the documentary autobiography by LaToya Ruby Frazier (also discussed) describes African American life in a postindustrial community that only an insider could write and photograph. Documentary photography or writing does not produce a truth about the past; rather, like all texts, their meanings are created, changing and often at odds with their claims. For visual sociologists what is often most interesting about documentary photography is what it tells us about how people saw issues in particular times and circumstances. They are histories of seeing, based on specific technologies that froze those images in time.They are brought into existence because photographers had a vision they were devoted to, publishers believed they could sell the books or governments wanted to use the documentary vision to make their own point. All these are rich sociological themes; visual knowledge, yes, but created in specific sociological and technological circumstances, themselves always in motion. Gillian Rose, in her masterpiece Visual Methodologies (now in the fourth edition) speaks of “sites” of circulation, audiencing, production and “the image itself,” and then asks comparative questions that relate to each of themes. This is offered in a clear visual scheme that is developed through the second chapter of her book.1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003251835-2

Documentary photography and visual sociology 9 There are two fundamental approaches to documentary photography, and we will use them both. The first is to assume that classifying photos as documentary identifies a quality that some photos have and others do not, just as beauty, from this view, indicates a quality that some objects have and others do not. This approach, which we might call an essentialist view, is more typical of the philosophy of aesthetics, art history, theology or ethics than it is to sociology. But while an uncommon perspective in sociology, and not my primary orientation, it is still useful. For example, looking at documentary in this way reveals commonly agreed upon definitions and conventions in documentary practice, including: • •

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Verisimilitude: documentary shows what existed at a given point of time and location. Sympathy: documentary is expected to engage the viewer. This may be due to the topic, how the photos are composed and presented, or a combination of the two. Photo historian Naomi Rosenblum commented that “while the social documentary photographer is neither a mere recorder nor an ‘artist for arts sake, his reports are often brilliant technically and highly artistic’—that is, documentary images involve imagination and art in that they imbue fact with feeling.”2 Relevance: a documentary image addresses a political or social issue. This can be as specific as a social movement of fishermen fighting a corporation that has dumped mercury into their fishing grounds (W. Eugene and Ailene Smith’s Minimata3), or as broad as an interpretation of an entire culture (Robert Frank’s The Americans4). In other words, documentary argues. Again we turn to Rosenblum: “images in the documentary style combine lucid pictorial organization with an often passionate commitment to humanistic values—to ideals of dignity, the right to decent conditions of living and work, to truthfulness.”5 This perspective continues to define documentary; turning to a magazine published by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University we read: “CDS promotes documentary work that cultivates progressive change by amplifying voices, advancing human dignity, engendering respect among individuals, breaking down barriers to understanding, and illuminating social injustices.”6

This view of documentary is consistent with critical sociology (dating at least to Marx and Engels); muckraking sociology of the Chicago School; the sociology of social protest during the 1960s; and the contemporary concept of public sociology. In other words, whether it accurately describes documentary photography, it certainly describes how a lot of people see sociology. This view of documentary is a lightning rod for critical comment from theorists including Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Martha Rosler, Sally Stein and Susan Sontag.7 Their critique of what I’ve called the essentialist documentary includes the idea that all photos are documentary in the sense that they have an indexical relationship with what was in front of the lens when the image was made; there is nothing in the essence of a photo that makes it documentary, or nothing in the essence of a photographer that makes her or him a documentarian. Rather than types of photos, these critics have helped us see different uses for photographs, and from this point of view these uses in one way or another promote the interests of the social class that dominates the ideological apparatus of the society. The photographer Dorothea Lange, whose images from the American Depression have great standing in communities that define documentary from the essentialist perspective, is often singled out for critical attention because her photos appear to offer compassion to those in the midst of the economic crisis, but, in creating ragged heroes and heroines,

10 Documentary photography and visual sociology Lange actually deflects the true cause of their plight: the structural failure of capitalism. Martha Rosler writes: In the liberal documentary, poverty and oppression are almost invariably equated with misfortunes caused by natural disasters: causality is vague, blame is not assigned, fate cannot be overcome … Like photos of children in pleas for donations to international charity organizations, liberal documentary implores us to look in the face of deprivation and to weep (and maybe to send money …).8 The critique further suggests that documentarians advance their own privileged positions as they document misery and suffering, even to the point of turning the people and objects in their photos into beautiful canvases. These are important critiques, and they often include examples of new photo documentary projects that incorporate the critical view. Many of these projects appropriate the work of well-known photographers and reassemble them into collages that try to raise unasked questions. In other words, the critique is much more than a rejection of previous practices, it is the basis of work that creatively reimagines photography itself. Generally, these critical voices and the new experiments are taking place in departments of art or cultural studies, and rarely in sociology, but it is a direction visual sociology must explore. The second view of documentary avoids the argument about whether the practice and its products can be defined by an essential ingredient or essence. This view, which we may call a constructionist view, asks how documentary has been created and developed in the practical activities of individuals, groups and institutions. The is a purely sociological view, understanding institutions, beliefs and actions as socially constructed and defined. From this perspective documentary produces objects (photographs, texts and movies, for example) that were made in the context of institutional practices and historical events or eras, which both reflect and sometimes challenge them. When we look at the institutional arrangements that surround documentary we ask such questions as: Is it paid work? If so, who pays and under what circumstances? Does it lead to a career? A profession? Who certifies it as such (who are the gatekeepers?) Who are the audiences for documentary, and how do they consume the work? What is its relationship to other careers or professions, such as photojournalism or academic programs, including sociology? And, what messages are documentary photographers allowed to generate? What is its relationship to the state? (It may suppress documentary, or it may use documentary as propaganda, for example.) Documentary expression depends on technologies to make and distribute information, and these technologies and the expertise they require are continually evolving. For example, with the invention of inexpensive cameras and the vast increase in the size and influence of the web (especially social media and YouTube), documentary photography and film have become democratized far beyond what anyone would have predicted even a few years ago. For documentary to succeed, there must be an audience, and audiences depend on many factors, including something as simple as whether there is a way to reproduce the information and make it available to potential viewers. This is extremely interesting in the early era of documentary, as I will describe. At some point, a cultural product gains the approval of cultural gatekeepers. For example, folklorist Tom Rankin oversaw the publication of the family photos of Maggie Lee Sayre, who spent fifty-one years on a houseboat on rivers in Ohio and Kentucky as a member of a family of commercial fishermen.9 Sayre’s photos are worth preserving, Rankin suggests, because they show us how

Documentary photography and visual sociology 11 at least one person who could not hear or speak communicated through photography. She lived in a largely unexamined world on the rivers of mid-America and, left to itself, the album would have never gone beyond Sayre’s small family circle. It was Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies, who was a gatekeeper with sufficient influence to define it otherwise. This perspective is well developed in Howard Becker’s 1982 book Art Worlds,10 but Becker also discussed this approach in relation to the topic in his article on documentary, photojournalism and visual sociology.11 No matter how one approaches it, it is clear that documentary is an in-between category, having never become a strong cultural tradition in its own right. Few people define and support themselves as documentary photographers; most occupy the nooks and crannies of several occupations and practices. Some are former photojournalists who want to explore a topic in more depth, and they may get support from grants; others are art photographers who explore subjects usually reserved for journalists. Some documentary writers, photographers and filmmakers are academics who integrate documentary into related disciplines such as English or folklore. Bruce Jackson, an English professor whose work is centered mostly on documentary writing, photography and filmmaking, has also experimented with audio recordings, film and archival documents as well as his own work.12 For a time, psychiatrist Robert Coles worked with photographers including Alex Harris.13 The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, which previously published the exemplary journal Doubletake, is an example of documentary studies as a program in a university. There are documentarians who support themselves from assignments, royalties or sales of photos, for example in the photo collective Magnum, but they are rare. The relationship between visual sociology and documentary was first analyzed by Howard Becker, who noted that the topics studied by documentary photographers and sociologists overlapped, and that they often worked in similar ways. But the products were often different; documentary in the end depended on compelling images or texts. Sociology is also an exploration, Becker suggested, but it is reasoned through social theory. I think Becker meant theory in a broad way, not just the ideas of the few who make their way into theory textbooks, but rather the general practice of analytical thinking. But even with this proviso, the nod to theory marks a real difference between the two forms.14 In the following I will describe documentary projects that have a particular resonance with visual sociology. I am interested in how documentary photography generated a public, how it found a topic and how it connected to history, economy and social change. But I am also drawn to these projects because they communicate strongly and effectively. The examples are chosen from a long list of photographers, and every sociologist who develops an interest in this topic would have their own. Please remember that I am not promising a comprehensive list, nor one that represents anything other than my own sociological focus and interests.

Early history P.H. Emerson I begin with the work of a nineteenth-century medical doctor, P.H. Emerson,15 who abandoned his medical career to photograph East Anglia in the 1880s.16 The central question for photography at the time was not whether it was sociology, but whether it was a fine art, and I may be the first to claim him as a visual sociologist.

12 Documentary photography and visual sociology

Figure 1.1 “Ricking the Reed.” P.H. Emerson and T.F. Goodall, 1886. Howard Becker was known for asking his students or workshop participants to take a full five minutes to study a photograph. See how what you see takes you to questions that might be illuminated with sociological ideas. So we will use Howie’s example to look at this image from the marshes in England 136 years ago.The details in the photograph are remarkable; it’s hard to know where to start. There are two men in matching hats and jackets loading cut reeds into a wide-beam wooden boat, which nearly fills up a channel in a huge marsh. They have been cut by hand, using the sickle that made its way onto the worldwide symbol of communism. There are many techniques and skill implied in the photo. The reeds will be used to as thatch for houses, and thatchers were highly skilled. Moving the reeds is a small part of a complex task. The men are harvesting naturally growing plants that will keep their houses warm and dry in the long, wet English winter. Who pays whom for these materials or labor? What is traded and given? Beyond the idyllic scene the British cities are industrializing and workers are crowding into slums close to their factories. Marx’s Capital will be published the next year, influencing virtually every subsequent discussion of social arrangements in industrial societies, including the workers on the marsh. In fact, the formative ideas of sociology,Tönnies GemeinschaftGesellschaft dichotomy, Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity, Weber’s economy and society, and Engels’ study of gender in the worldwide division of labor, to touch on a few, were emerging from exactly this moment, and the “renting asunder” of traditional European society by machines and a market economy was in full swing.

Documentary photography and visual sociology 13 To contrast the themes suggested by Emerson’s nostalgic rendering of the “old ways” of rural life, we would look at Jacob Riis’ photos of the slums of New York, Lewis Hines’ images of child labor in industrial factories, and the work of many British photographers such as Charles Booth who were documenting the almost incomprehensible social change in nearby London, Manchester and the rest of industrializing England. I invite you to do so. The images are a mouse click away. Source: Photo by P.H. Emerson © Alamy

The movement for photography as a fine art in the later nineteenth century—the world that P.H. Emerson contributed to—was part of the emergence of the rising middle class; managers, bureaucrats, officials and salaried workers riding the rising tide of industrial capitalism. With their new wealth they sought cultural legitimacy; suddenly art found an audience beyond the old elite. The rising middle classes consumed the mechanically produced art of the camera in family portraits and decorative photos, and they became amateurs who purchased cameras, joined camera clubs, entered their photos into competitions and made photography into a mass phenomenon. In this era, which dates to the 1860s, a style known as pictorialism came to dominate fine arts photography. The leader of this school was Henry Peach Robinson, who made staged photos with costumed models playing allegorical roles, posed in elaborate still-life studies. They were the rage for the new middle classes; to today’s eye they are sentimental and strange. Photographs made in the pictorial tradition were expected to resemble paintings; they were constructed in studios with props, artificial lighting and background sets. If photographers worked outdoors, they modified negatives to improve the look of an image, even painting on negative surfaces or combining negatives to fix contrast problems. Robinson’s 1886 book, Pictorial Effect in Photography, “provided the serious amateur with a guide to the beautiful in art based on respected principles dating from the Renaissance to Ruskin.”17 Because photography was to mimic painting; the ability of the camera to record sight accurately (for example, the sharpness of the camera lens) was seen as a problem rather than a solution. Pictorialism produced a reactionary movement called naturalism; the new view held that the camera should be a conduit between the world and the photographic negative. The artist should embrace photography’s possibilities to make something new in the art worlds of a new age.The photos made by naturalists such as P.H. Emerson were compared to impressionist paintings; both were artists mediating nature. Emerson could be considered a visual ethnographer because he observed and classified natural environments, including the people who inhabited the places he studied. It is likely he would have been drawn to either visual anthropology or sociology, had they existed. Emerson’s subjects were peasant farmers and fringe people who lived by legal or illegal means in the lagoons, swamps, long tidal flats and rivers of coastal east England. In the several years he and his collaborator T.F. Goodall spent in their company they observed how people fished, farmed, poached, navigated the seas and inland waters, and maintained their old beliefs and superstitions. They made photographs that won the respect of the international art world and that delight the modern eye. We see how people managed their environments, and how they were defined by their expressions, gestures and clothes.They are graceful images that show people comfortable in their places and spaces; the water is tranquil, and the light is muted. Portraits show people surrounded by their tools and gear and marked by lives of hard labor.

14 Documentary photography and visual sociology Emerson’s photos were made with a view camera on a tripod, carefully composed, correctly exposed, and printed and reproduced with an eye to craft and quality. What was the sociological context of this work? How did it fit into art worlds, and how did it gain sponsorship and audiences? Between 1884 and 1888 Emerson published four books on the cultures of East Anglian people that combined photography and text.18 They were produced in editions of a few hundred copies, and they included original platinotype (platinum) prints. Emerson was learning the then esoteric secrets of engraving and printing; halftone printing had yet to become common, and he oversaw the printing of the originals that became pages of his books. He made limited editions of the photographic albums and books, and afterwards destroyed both negatives and printing plates. The books were exceedingly expensive at a price of £5, which would pay for about six weeks in a luxury hotel in the UK at the time. These have now become precious commodities in the art collection world; I recently found an Emerson original title listed for $84,000. Emerson’s photography could be called “art approaching ethnography.” The art worlds of that time and place rewarded Emerson with an influential career that he only enjoyed for a brief time because of his own indecision over what he was trying to accomplish. His audience, the rising middle class, sought an idealized image of England with one foot in the preindustrial past. His books were precursors to visual ethnography, though he recorded observations and stories without the pretense of social theory. His work is regarded as the beginning of what came to be known as “straight” photography, clearing the path for figures such as Lewis Hine, Gisele Freund and Margaret Burke-White, though, of course, he was not alone in regarding photography as a way to show how common people lived in their normal circumstances. Because his subjects were rural people living in old ways his work took on a romantic, evocative quality, even though it simultaneously was regarded as a record of a different aspect of rapidly changing British life. His books were briefly the rage of a new art world that otherwise focused its attention on salons, galleries or international expositions. But he also understood how photos and writing could tell a story of a little-understood culture. He examined a way of life at the geographical fringes of England during a time of rapid social change and created a sympathy for the people he found there. From some points of view this is quite consistent with visual sociology. Jacob Riis Regarding the origins of social documentary, Naomi Rosenblum writes: Because social images were meant to persuade, photographers felt it necessary to communicate a belief that slum dwellers were capable of human emotions and that they were being kept from fully realizing their human qualities by their surroundings. … By selecting sympathetic types and contrasting the individual’s expression and gesture with the shabbiness of the physical surroundings, the photographer frequently was able to transform a mundane record of what exists into a fervent plea for what might be. This idealism became a basic tenet of the social documentary concept.19 She was referring to the work of Jacob Riis,20 a Danish photographer and writer, contemporary of P.H. Emerson, whose work pioneered the intensive visual exploration of the social crises of industrialization.

Documentary photography and visual sociology 15 Riis was an American immigrant who spent three hard years in his early twenties (1870–1873) in New York City, often spending his nights in police lodging houses on cots or hammocks suspended several high in a shabby room. These hard times developed a social consciousness that guided his next forty years as a journalist, a freelance writer and one of the first documentary photographers to take his camera into the dark sides of industrializing cities. His view that poverty created social problems stood at odds with prevailing sentiment, usually religious or social Darwinist, that saw the poor as responsible for their misery. He was first a police reporter, later a newspaper and magazine journalist and photographer. He was among the first to use a flash to make photos at night; this involved setting off a small magnesium explosion that created a harsh brilliance that showed dirt, raw woodgrain and filthy skin and clothes in more detail than a human eye would have seen. Riis’ flash photography placed nighttime people in a surreal visual universe. The experience of being photographed this way also probably left the subjects, often crammed into beds with whole families, wondering what had happened when the small explosion burst forth. Riis’ flash photos reinforce the point that the camera sees in a way the eye cannot; that photos are records editorialized via technology. Rosenblum argues that documentary photography has a humanitarian purpose, showing good humans surviving bad conditions. The circumstances Riis photographed included people sleeping in small cubicles made from rough cut lumber, stacked from floor to ceiling, or buried en masse in cheap pine boxes; children sleeping in stairwells or mobsters congregating in back alleys. Photos of police lodging houses show twenty or more sleepers jammed together on ledges, awakened for a photo, looking disconcerted. Riis not only photographed homelessness and the living conditions of the desperately poor; he also depicted piecework such as sewing taking place in people’s crowded apartments. Riis showed a side of urban life that by and large had not been seen in the US, though there were photographers working in England who had been photographing industrial slums for several years.21 He explored the meaning of his images with sociological logic; showing how tenements had developed, how people migrated from one region or city to others, and what happened as a result. He was interested in the effects of mixing cultures of different immigrants from Europe and the American South in the rapidly changing cities of the North. The prejudice that sometimes marks his writing is startling, but may tell us about the casual way people were categorized in these times: Cleanliness is the characteristic of the Negro in his new surroundings, as it was his virtue in the old. In this respect he is immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale. This was shown by an inquiry made last year by the Real Estate Record. It proved agents to be practically unanimous in the endorsement of the Negro as a clean, orderly, and profitable tenant.22 His approach was to connect images to concepts and ideas, and to explain what he had found in terms of economics, history and sociology. Riis identified economic variables that coincided with social characteristics or patterns of behavior for which he found visual referents. Riis found an audience because the liberal public had begun to question whether variables such as income, racial or ethnic identity or employment status influenced dependent variables such as crime rates and other indicators of social dysfunction. He did public sociology long before it was defined as such and subsequently influenced social

16 Documentary photography and visual sociology policies (the police lodging houses were closed, for example, after his exposé, which raises the question of where the homeless were to find shelter!). Halftone printing was being developed just as Riis came on the scene; his most important book, How the Other Half Lives, bridged overlapping printing technologies. Images in books or newspapers had been done via wood engravings; in Riis’ book there were forty plates, of which seventeen were halftones and the rest were wood engravings. The wood engravings did not reproduce the tonality or detail of a photograph, and because the engraver usually only drew the person or event in the center of the frame they tended to highlight individuals and deemphasize backgrounds, which were the sociological contexts of the images. By the time Riis wrote his later books the halftone process was common, and his halftone printed books were the first photo documentary projects. Others, such as Lewis Hine, soon followed. Riis gave hundreds of lectures illustrated with lantern slides, a technology that had been used in one form or another for hundreds of years.The lantern slide system projects a transparency by means of a lamp and a lens.Transparencies were first painted onto glass, but by the end of the nineteenth century photographic slides had been developed, and so began the “slide show” that for several decades were the boon and bane of middleclass family entertainment. In Riis’ day slide shows were public entertainment, showing faraway lands and famous people. Riis, however, offered a visual sociology of tenements, urban poverty, homelessness and sweat shops to audiences of activists preoccupied with the ills of industrial capitalism. Riis’ importance is often connected to the perfection of the halftone printing process, which made his work inexpensive to reproduce, and to his lantern slide projection shows, which encouraged an audience of reformers who sought images to reinforce their arguments. Because Riis worked before the movies became common, his presentations were among the first “image shows” for the masses. Riis’ most well-known images include the “bandit’s roost,” which has a foreboding quality because of the postures and poses of the shady cast of characters it portrays, and a photo of three crumpled youngsters who are perched sleeping on a fire escape ledge (though one of the kids has a slight smile; maybe Riis posed them!). Other memorable images include a photo of an empty police lodging house where people were given a sloping piece of canvas on which to sleep; these strips of canvas are several high and many deep in a human warehouse; or a photo of officials burying the unknown dead by stacking pine boxes in a mass grave. Riis focused on visual scars, but in a way that stressed the role of the social conditions rather than the actions of individuals. He showed people what was happening just around their corners and demonstrated that images could amplify the meanings of statistical charts and tables. His work demonstrated how documentary and visual sociology overlapped and reinforced each other.

The 1930s I next examine the role of documentary in an era of tumultuous social change: world economic depression (1929–1942 in the US); the rise of fascism in Italy (1923–1945) and Nazism in Germany (1933–1945). In the Soviet Union the revolution of Lenin in the early 1920s had given way to the totalitarian dictatorship of Stalin. Photo documentary is a seam running through these events, in each culture done differently and serving different ends. Still photography and documentary film in the form of newsreels overlapped as significant ways the societies told their stories, and I will discuss them both. We left P.H. Emerson investigating hidden cultures behind British industrialization and Jacob Riis revealing social problems during a period of rapid industrialization in the

Documentary photography and visual sociology 17 US. Industrialization altered all things, including how war was waged, first in the Boer War in Africa, where the machine gun mechanized face-to-face killing, and in WWI, which introduced the widespread use of mustard gas, aerial bombing and trench warfare, where troops rose from muddy gullies to charge across a narrow no-man’s land into the fire of machine guns. WWI was photographed, but the visual stories did not find a mass audience. It was in the 1930s that documentary captured the public imagination, in part because there were suddenly new ways to view the images. We begin with Italy and the formal beginning of fascism in 1923. Prior to his rise to power Mussolini had been a journalist and understood the importance of controlling what people saw and read. Until Italian preemptive war against Ethiopia in 1935 nearly bankrupted Italy, the fascist dictatorship rebuilt much of the Italian infrastructure. The material progress was accompanied by the suppression of dissent and the end of democracy. Newspapers were put under state control by 1926 and non-fascist papers were shut down. Libraries were controlled by the state; Italian history books were rewritten, and teachers and professors were required to belong to the fascist party and to teach in party uniforms. How did Mussolini create public support for a totalitarian dictatorship in a society that had long identified itself as the cradle of western civilization? One way was by mobilizing a version of documentary photography, in this case in the form of newsreels. The popular cinema industry in Italy operated mostly without censorship through much of the fascist era, and large numbers of American movies were shown during the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than control feature films, the government concentrated its propaganda efforts on an extensive newsreel industry. Beginning in 1925, the state-owned film industry LUCE (which translates as “light”) produced a steady stream of newsreels that were to precede every commercial film. LUCE made between 100 and 200 newsreels per year, covering world events and trends, and even topics such as clothing fashion in the ever-popular US, but the main focus were fascist programs including “public works projects, highway and railway construction, colonial expansion in Albania and Ethiopia, the Battle for Grain.”23 Because Italians had limited access to radios and had a low rate of literacy, and because cinema was popular throughout Italy, newsreels were a powerful way to build and maintain support for the regime. Here was social documentary organized by the state that left out topics such as the suppression of democracy and dissent, increasing poverty, ill-fated wars of conquest in Africa, anti-Semitic laws and the implications of the “pact of steel” which Mussolini signed with Hitler in 1939. The newsreel system was a carefully orchestrated documentary tradition that contributed to consensus in a dictatorship. In 1932, on the ten-year anniversary of the fascist rise to power, the LUCE newsreels were edited into a feature-length documentary, Mussolini Speaks.24 It was intended to create a favorable image of Mussolini abroad, and it was successful, particularly among Italian immigrants in America. The Italian example shows the power of documentary in a closed system. The state needed consensus at home and friendships with capitalist democracies. For the regime to succeed, it had to convince its population that only fascism had the strength to confront Soviet communism, that the social progress in Italy was real, the wars of conquest in Africa were legitimate, and that Mussolini was a capable leader. The newsreel system was an effective means to these ends. The Italian example was not unique. In England newsreels date to 1910 and became a powerful form of propaganda during WWI. One newsreel company was run by the British War Office, but several companies produced them simultaneously, seeking market share by emphasizing popular news stories and avoiding controversy.

18 Documentary photography and visual sociology Newsreels were also important in the US.American newsreels during the 1930s focused on world history (titles included “The March Toward War” and “Hitler Comes to Power in Germany”) but more typically focused on fashion, sensational national news such as the death of gangster John Dillinger; Congressional bills passed; Olympic competitions and other national sports events such as the World Series; popular culture such as national parades; and the stories of heroes such as Amelia Earhart. The introductory music was rousing and patriotic, and the montages that preceded the movies were meant to inspire, but until WWII approached their ideological messages were mild.25 John Heartfield The political left also communicated through documentary during the 1920s and 1930s. The most well-known example was the German magazine AIZ (Arteiter Illustrierte Zeitung), begun in 1921 to express solidarity with the Russian revolution. AIZ, which at the height of its popularity was distributed to over half a million readers in Germany alone, focused on the socialist worker movement in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and featured photos submitted by amateur photographers, reporting from the world of work and politics. This worker photography (arbeiterphotographen) depicted political rallies, collectivist organizations, political meetings and social problems of a German society in severe economic crisis. In addition to the worker-produced photography, AIZ featured photomontages which vilified Hitler, National Socialism, militarism, war profiteering and the connection of capitalism to war. These were made by John Heartfield, a German who anglicized his name to protest how England was then portrayed in Germany. Early in his career Heartfield worked with Geroge Grosz on the development of photomontage, and he was involved with the Dada movement in the 1920s. His work became increasingly political with his AIZ covers and he escaped Nazi attempts to find and presumably execute him (he was well known as near the top of the Gestapo’s “most wanted list” throughout the 1930s). He continued his political protest via photomontage from Czechoslovakia after 1933 and eventually the UK until the beginning of WWII. His photomontages were distributed as posters as well as cover art for AIZ, which was published in Germany until 1933 and then in Prague and Paris until 1938. As such it constituted a biting, overstated criticism of both fascism and Nazism. Heartfield’s photomontages became and remain famous in their own right. His story is told in a website currently run by his grandson,26 also John Heartfield, and his importance in the art world has remained strong. Oddly enough, his work has largely been overlooked in the visual sociology movement. As I explored Heartfield’s extraordinary photomontages I decided to reproduce an image I had not seen before. His images of Hitler with an esophagus made of coins, the dove of peace impaled on a sword, a stack of artillery shells as a cathedral or a German family eating nuts and bolts (the baby licking an executioner’s bloody axe) are well known; no need to reproduce them again. “The Seeds of Death,” however, has been overlooked in the discussions of his work that I am familiar with. I found it especially striking, employing extremes of double meanings typical in photomontage.“Sowers” primarily scatter seeds as the first step in reaping a harvest of bounty. Here the sower scatters seeds of war, destruction and death.The sower is himself dead, a skeleton with a Nazi helmet who stares at the viewer, as he casts swastikas on the ground. In the background are soldiers in gasmasks, carrying a corpse on a stretcher. Behind the marching soldiers is a wall of smoke and fire. It was the spring of 1937, as farmers prepared their fields for a fall harvest and the Nazis prepared their war machine for a world war that harvested sixty million living people.

Documentary photography and visual sociology 19

Figure 1.2 “The Seeds of Death: where this sower walks through the land, her harvests are hunger, war, and fire.” 1937. Photomontage, from Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), April 14, 1937. Source: John Heartfield photomontage ©The Heartfield Community of Heirs/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York, 2022

20 Documentary photography and visual sociology

Figure 1.3 Stalin in the Moscow subway.

With the ascendency of National Socialism in 1933, all critical German documentary, including AIZ, was repressed. The fate of photographer August Sander tells this story: in the early 1930s Sanders made photographic portraits of a wide range of Germans, listing them by occupation, social class, ethnic background and regional location. That portrait of then contemporary Germany was not consistent with the German concept of an Aryan race of stereotypical appearances, and Sander’s work was repressed. His photo work during the Nazi era was limited to the documentation of industrial settings and state projects such as the autobahn. The communist state in the USSR used images for ideological purposes as well, as shown in the wall and ceiling art of the state-of-the-art subway system in several cities. In Figure 1.3, recently photographed in Moscow, Stalin has a beaming smile, seemingly for all time, that is until the subway walls collapse.The Stalin mosaic is but one of hundreds of similar advertisements for communism that adorn the public spaces of the Moscow metro and squares in cities of the former USSR. The ideological messages are simple: communism works! (Even though it officially ended forty years ago or more.) There are no monuments to the millions who died in famines caused by failed state policies, nor to those who were executed because of their class positions or state paranoia. Bill Brandt In England, documentary and photojournalism appeared in magazines and newspapers such as the Picture Post and Harper’s Bazaar. Perhaps the most sociological of the photojournalists was Bill Brandt. While he became most well known after WWII for his

Documentary photography and visual sociology 21 surreal nudes, his original notoriety came from two books published during the 1930s, The English at Home and A Night in London.27 These books relied on the juxtaposition of opposites to comment on social class and on poverty and wealth in England. For example, facing photos in A Night in London depict an upper-class couple being waited upon from a sumptuous serving table at an upscale restaurant. The facing photo, showing the street outside the restaurant, features a homeless man searching a garbage can for food. The photo of the homeless man has been reversed, so the shape of his bent-over body matches that of the waiter in the facing photo; they bend toward each other and complete a circle. The reversing of the photo is apparent due to the words “wood” and “new” which appear backwards on the boxes of garbage. Both images have a strong message, but their juxtaposition increases their power. Brandt, writing in 1970, described this work: The extreme social contrast, during those years before the war, was visually very inspiring for me. I started by photographing in London, the West End, the suburbs, the slums. I photographed everything that went on inside the large houses of wealthy families, the servants in the kitchen, formidable parlourmaids laying elaborate dinnertables, and preparing baths for the family; cocktail-parties in the garden and guests talking and playing bridge in the drawing rooms: a working-class family’s home, with several children asleep in one bed, and the mother knitting in the corner of the room. I photographed pubs, common lodging-houses at night, theatres,Turkish baths, prisons and people in their bedrooms. … After several years of working in London, I went to the north of England and photographed the coal-miners during the industrial depression. My most successful picture of the series, probably because it was symbolical of this time of mass unemployment, was a loose-coal searcher in East Durham, going home in the evening. He was pushing his bicycle along a footpath through a desolate waste-land between Hebburn and Jarrow. Loaded on the crossbar was a sack of small coal, all that he had found after a day’s search on the slag-heaps. I also photographed the Northern towns and interiors of miners’ cottages, with families having their evening meal, or the miners washing themselves in tin-baths, in front of their kitchen fires.28 Brandt is often thought of as a documentary purist, but he often arranged and manipulated his images. He used models when necessary (his brother and his parents’ maid appear in several of his images); he altered prints with paint, ink and pencil, and he even scratched lines in his negatives when he wanted to stress a particular message in the photo. For example, a photo of a dirty child, shoeless, on a London street, contains a white smiling face in the background wall that appears to be chalk graffiti, but was added by Brandt by etching the negative with a knife.29 He printed skies from one negative and foreground from another to alter the mood of the image. Mid-way through his career he decided that he liked stark contrast and thus reprinted his most important images on #4 paper, which eliminated much of the shadow and highlight detail. As a result he became known for a contrasty look that only appeared decades after he had made his well-known documentary images, and in the process of reprinting he had eliminated much of the detail of both the highlight and shadow areas of his images. His alterations were crude by today’s standards, but they suggest that he would have enjoyed working with modern digital methods. By the war’s end he had become disenchanted with documentary and purchased an old Kodak wide-angle camera, designed for police work, to photograph surreal landscapes. Brandt wrote that he was inspired by Edward Weston’s comment that “The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make

22 Documentary photography and visual sociology

Figure 1.4 I chose these two images to experiment with Brandt’s practice of juxtaposing images of social extremes. Figure 1.4 depicts a woman washing her husband, a miner, at the end of his shift, before he eats his supper.The photo is from his series on the North of England. Photo by Bill Brandt, mid-1930s. Source: Photo by Bill Brandt © Bill Brandt Archive

Documentary photography and visual sociology 23

Figure 1.5 British woman drinking tea, from The English at Home. Photo by Bill Brandt, mid-1930s. Source: Photo by Bill Brandt © Bill Brandt Archive

24 Documentary photography and visual sociology use of it?” and thus he used the wide-angle lens of the Kodak camera because it “created a great illusion of space, an unrealistically steep perspective, and it distorted.”30 He had been interested in surrealism early in his life and he used the odd camera to photograph nudes, often outdoors, taking advantage of the peculiar focus, lack of sharpness and remarkable perspective of the lens to explore dreams, visions and the human form. Brandt summed it up: When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing … the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.31 Brandt documented social class in England by breaking some of the rules of the method, and he later left the genre. He was a photographer first and followed the camera to several interesting topics and methods. FSA The final look at the 1930s focuses on how the American government used documentary to make a case for its economic and social programs to mitigate the effects of the Depression. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photo documentary project is probably the most well known in the history of documentary. Two of the ten to fifteen most active FSA photographers were women, and Dorothea Lange became one of the most influential and documentary photographers of the era. FSA was directed by Roy Stryker, who had been an economics professor before joining the government. Stryker directed twenty-two photographers32 from 1935 until 1944 (FSA was only marginally active after the US joined the war), who collectively made more than 250,000 images. Stryker’s mission, purely and simply, was to show how the New Deal agricultural programs were both necessary and successful. This was an abstract goal for the photographers Stryker hired, who needed to make decisions about where to point the camera. What was their topic and how was it to be photographed? Stryker was a close friend of sociologist Robert Lynd, co-author with his wife Helen of the community study Middletown (1924) and its re-study ten years later, Middletown in Transition (1936). In 1936 Stryker met with Lynd to peruse early examples of the FSA work. According to stories that surround this meeting,33 it was there that sociological photography was first discussed, as Stryker and Lynd thought about directing photographers to record themes, subjects and ideas that would be natural topics to a sociologist. The results were called “shooting scripts”: practical guides for photographing social conditions. Shooting scripts encouraged photographers to think comparatively, asking, how do people of different social classes spend time at home, attend church, do activities outside work or spend leisure time? The shooting script asked the photographers to visualize the answer to specific questions, for example, speaking of the neighborhoods of different social classes, “What do you see out of the kitchen window?”The photographers were instructed to make images that would examine the relationship between density of population and pressed clothes, polished shoes and other indicators of self-esteem; they photographed newspaper headlines in various locations to see how local, national and international news was being disseminated. They were to photograph agricultural and industrial production: how food was grown, how animals were raised, and how farming was being mechanized and how factories, shops and other modes of production were in operation. Stryker asked his photographers to record government projects no matter how mundane;

Documentary photography and visual sociology 25 he also instructed them to photograph what the government wanted the country to look like as it fought its way out of a ten-year economic depression. Stryker wrote: We must have at once: Pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint the U.S. as an old person’s home and that just about everyone is too old to work and too malnourished to care much what happens.34 The shooting scripts were intended to provide a mental grid for photographers entering a new town, region or event, but it is not at all clear that they paid a great deal of attention to the scripts beyond that. There was no systematic comparison in the FSA archives between how social classes worked, lived in separate neighborhoods, spent leisure time or raised children, as Stryker and Lynd envisioned when they created the shooting script idea. The shooting script was a potentially powerful strategy, but it became largely background music for what took place. In the meantime, shooting scripts have been revived by modern visual sociologists for course assignments and other projects. FSA has been exhaustively studied; several years ago I found a several hundred page catalogue listing books, articles and shorter references specifically on the topic. In the meantime, more books have been written and more academic theses prepared. Simply said, there is a vast and ever-growing literature awaiting those who wish to go further. These examples of documentary during the 1930s, both as still images and filmscripts, show how a world in economic turmoil used photography and film to explore social problems, to argue for change and to bolster governments, both democratic and totalitarian. To go more deeply into this topic, one would examine socialist realism in the Soviet Union, and the propaganda machine in Germany that produced newsreels, film and still photography. The newsreel tradition in Italy was not so different from governmental newsreels in the US, which lasted until the 1960s. In addition, during the 1930s the privately organized and funded Film and Photo League created newsreels and still photos that focused on social problems, protest movements and social disruption in the US. It was a leftist organization of photographers and filmmakers in New York and Chicago, with smaller chapters on the west coast, and it offered an unblinking view of capitalism in freefall, with the inevitable crises of hunger, homelessness, unemployment, family desertion, runaway children and other social maladies. Given that there was yet to be a mass media in the modern sense of the term, the examples discussed above show how images could be controlled by the state, or could, in free societies, question its legitimacy.

Documentary in the 1950s and 1960s In the 1950s in the US two documentary projects are interesting in their extreme contrast. One was Edward Steichen’s 1955 photo exhibit “The Family of Man,” first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and eventually in nearly forty countries, and published as a book with that name that sold more than four million copies worldwide. Steichen intended to find a common thread in the human experience through documentary photography. The exhibit of slightly more than 500 images is guardedly hopeful, emphasizing rituals of birth, marriage and death. We cannot view this project without ignoring its historical context: the just-ended world war had claimed nearly sixty million lives and a new Cold War hung a curtain of fear over the world, for suddenly there were

26 Documentary photography and visual sociology nuclear weapons threatening human life itself. Seen this way, the project is an homage to optimism in very dark times. Seen another way, it was a naive advertisement for universalism, an assertion of a “family” of the human species. The vast criticism of this project is well summarized in the Wiki entry on the project. The other documentary bookend of the 1950s (at least in the US) was Robert Frank’s The Americans,35 drawing from 30,000 photos Frank made over two years as he drove across the US. Frank, a Swiss photographer, photographed American materialism, class and racial difference, political expression and how Americans meld into vernacular architecture. In Robert Frank’s America there is an overriding cultural malaise. The book was first published in Paris because Frank was unable to find an American publisher, and when it was published in the US it was panned by reviews in the popular photography press; one review that became widely quoted assailed Frank for the “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness”36 of his images. There were those in the US who embraced Robert Frank’s interpretation; the American printing was introduced by Jack Kerouac and the book became a pre-counter cultural statement.The importance of this work has only increased; in 2009 the book was reprinted and the collection toured major galleries in the US and Europe. I was an undergraduate in 1968, deeply interested in photography and sociology, when Aperture published a new edition of The Americans. The book was a revelation. Frank’s photos said that the problem in America was not the war in Vietnam or gender or racial oppression; it was American culture itself. Frank’s photos were a visual confirmation of then popular sociology by David Riseman, C.Wright Mills, Jules Henry and Christopher Lasch. The work continues to be seen as a viable interpretation of a culture at a particular moment in its history with dismaying relevance to contemporary cultural contradictions and crises. The placid 1950s led to the social turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s, an era that produced a flood of photographic documentary.The range and quality of these books was astonishing. Among the highlights is Bruce Davidson’s photo study of Harlem, in which he used a tripod-mounted large-negative camera to photograph the residents and street people of E100 Street.37 The naturalness of the photos suggests that Davidson bridged the differences in class and ethnicity that separated the photographer from his subjects, though the book could be and perhaps was criticized for transforming poverty into art. The long exposures in the dark settings encouraged stern expressions and formal poses. But the photos were also ethnographic: Davidson showed families in their spaces inside and outside their apartments, doing what they normally did. The book showed how African American and Puerto Ricans cohabited a densely populated urban space, not just that they did. Davidson’s focus had been common ground for documentary photography: East Coast, urban, the poor. During the 1960s, however, documentary expanded to cover a wide range of sociological topics. At about the same time Bruce Davidson photographed Harlem, Bill Owens, a photojournalist, took a course from visual anthropologist John Collier who assigned him the task of photographing his own community. His work resulted in the book Suburbia,38 which shows the middle class in one of the many communities that were sprouting in flimsy abandon from the fertile fields of California. Owens photographed houses with thin walls and fake Italian decoration; refrigerators stuffed with huge apples and oranges, large loaves of spongy white bread, cheap beer and soft drinks. People were often chunky and softly muscled, but they were having fun; they appear satisfied with their lives. In one photo a family turned toward the camera, disturbed from a Sunday

Documentary photography and visual sociology 27 afternoon football game with mildly annoyed expressions that seemed to say:“get on with it so we can go back to our game!” A portrait of Owens and his wife is included in the gallery at the end of the book, and he photographed his fifteen-member extended family in their suburban living room. Most photos have brief captions; for example, a couple is pictured in front of their open garage filled with motorcycles, cars and a speedboat, and the caption reads: “We enjoy having these things.” Another photo shows a teenage son climbing a very small tree, his father below, sweeping leaves toward the street.The caption expresses the son’s view: “My dad thinks it’s a good idea to take all the leaves off the tree and rake up the yard. I think he’s crazy.” There are few if any bookshelves in any of the homes; the furniture and decorations are inexpensive and the dwellings look insubstantial; for my European students they confirmed stereotypes of America. The project showed that photo documentary could highlight one’s own place and the rhythms of life that sustained it. His sequel39 had more detail but less of a sense of discovery, and his following work failed to snag the public’s eye. He is now a crafts beer entrepreneur. In the meantime, several documentary photographers photographed their communities, which can also be seen as studies of social class. They include Mary Lloyd Estrin’s album of her family and their neighbors in the manor-like homes of a Chicago gated community;40 Norman Sanders’ photographs of his family and neighbors in upscale Rockland County, New York;41 Larry Clark’s photographs of his friends whose lives circled around hard drugs, sex, violence and guns;42 Peter Simon, who photographed life on a rural commune;43 and Eugene Richards, who photographed his working-class community in Boston caught in the politics of school desegregation.44 These and others unmentioned books were visual ethnographies in the form of visual community studies; records by insiders of ways of life across a broad swath of society. Some, like Eugene Richards’ visual poem on his desperate neighborhood, have been sufficiently important to be reprinted by Phaidon, one of the finest photo publishers in the world. As a whole, these books are an astonishing visual study of American society at a particular moment, and it is not surprising that young sociologists, including me, saw in them the seeds of a visual sociology movement. The war in Vietnam The war in Vietnam appeared in vivid color each week in the pages of LIFE and other then ubiquitous news magazines, and the constant barrage of photojournalism affected the growing anti-war sentiment. Secondly, many visual sociologists, myself included, were of draft age and trying to figure a way through the moral and political issues posed by the war. Several documentary books helped us understand the war, the Vietnamese and the experience of the American soldier. The most influential of these was Magnum photographer Marc Riboud’s extended photo essay on North Vietnam, published in 1970.45 As a French photojournalist Riboud was able to travel extensively in North Vietnam (as he had traveled and photographed in China in the 1950s, decades before the country was open to the west). Riboud and writer Philippe Devillers showed a North Vietnam that appeared to be collective, organized and heroic under the rain of bombs falling from American planes. It was a bicycle society in which war production took place in underground factories. The population was disciplined and devoted to leader Ho Chi Minh, who had fought against the French, the Japanese occupiers during WWII and now the Americans. The book told a different story than had been told by the American press; the enemy had a face and it was an appealing one.

28 Documentary photography and visual sociology The other notable documentary book on the war was Philip Jones Griffiths’ Vietnam, Inc,46 emerging from three years in the country. Griffiths’ war was a manifestation of American imperialism, and the power of Griffiths’ visual argument was his juxtaposition of mechanized war machine (and the corporations who produced them) and the determined peasantry it was unable to defeat. Discussion of photo documentary and the war would be incomplete without mention of LIFE photographer Larry Burrows, whose work was published in book form thirtyone years after his death in Vietnam.47 Burrows was a photojournalist who spent several years in Vietnam before and during the American military buildup, and his photographs presented the war in a more complex way than did photojournalists whose camera focused on the carnage alone. His first LIFE magazine essay was published in 1963 and it contains an image David Halberstam (who wrote the text for the posthumous publication) says captured the essence of the war: a photo of about a dozen bodies sprawled in the Delta muck, the Vietcong flag alongside them, another group of Vietcong prisoners huddled down, and the background, two American chopper pilots, ever so casually surveying the dead … The essential truth of that photo would take some time to dawn on the architects of the war and the general public—that if in the end it took Americans and American technology to kill Vietnamese, then the war could not be won, because the politics of it would inevitably favor the North Vietnamese.48 LIFE let Burrows choose his stories and the war in Vietnam allowed photojournalists a degree of freedom they have not possessed previously or since. Photojournalists moved through the country at will; in one essay Burrows looks over the shoulder of a helicopter machine gunner where 500 feet below soldiers are slogging through rice patties. The next photos take the viewer to the ground level, moving through with the soldiers, about to engage in battle. The dead are everywhere and North Vietnamese or Viet Cong prisoners are sullen, resigned or terrified; threatened and bullied by American soldiers or soldiers from the South Vietnamese army. Wounded American soldiers cry out in anguish or hug each other as they lay dying, as they suffer through battles at Khe Sanh or Mutter Ridge. Burrows brings us close to those who were directly affected by the violence. For example, he photographed 10-year-old Ngyen Lau, who had been paralyzed from a mortar fragment, as he spent two years in treatment in the US and returned to Vietnam as a cultural outsider. He photographed a hospital that manufactured and fitted artificial limbs for children. LIFE, which had long been identified with the political Right, ran stories week after week in which the war was presented in unsparing detail. It is often said that these news stories had a powerful effect on the declining support for the war in the US. The Vietnam war seems like a distant and largely tragic memory to Americans, but of course the real tragedy, suffering and social disruption was for the Vietnamese. A recent book by a Vietnam photographer leads us to consider landscapes of war, and the aftermath from the Vietnamese perspective. An-My Lê, born in 1960 in Vietnam, was among those evacuated in the last moments of the collapse of South Vietnam. Educated in the US, she became a photographer dedicated to “exploring the complexity that envelops

Documentary photography and visual sociology 29 war.” A recent collection of her work49 includes photos of Vietnam re-enactors in South Carolina (where her presence was said to “lend authenticity” to the grown Americans who redo scenes from the Vietnam war in great realism); formal, large negative photographs of and on aircraft carriers and a submarine having just broken through the Arctic ice, to images from Hollywood productions of war, to, finally, t her return to Vietnam where her images resemble dreams in sepia and white. Denied a photojournalism pass for the Iraq war, she photographed desert training in California. Her work asks us to draw back and consider war as a cultural phenomenon. Social movements Much of the 1960s documentary photography focused on social movements. An example is W. Eugene and Ailene Smith’s previously cited photo study of a fishing village’s response to the poisoning of their fishing grounds in Minamata, Japan.The Smiths became involved with the movement in addition to recording it; during a protest at the trial, Smith, then elderly, was beaten by goons from the corporation that villagers were suing, which led to his temporary loss of eyesight. Other photo studies of countercultures showed the civil rights movement, the student movement for democratic action and other manifestations of the 1960s. Among the most important are Alan Copeland’s 1969 People’s Park,50 which shows Berkeley hippies turning a trashed-out parking lot into a counter cultural park, at which point the police destroy it and attack bystanders in the process. Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 documentary shows social conditions preceding voting rights and the Civil Rights movement, including lynchings, police violence and a shocking image of a black man burned on a cross.51 Danny Lyon’s photographs of the civil rights movement were published after the fact by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and present a visual record of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1962 to 1964.52 It is a visual history of protests, police violence, solidarity and, in one photo, Bob Dylan singing on the back steps of a community center. David Fenton reproduced images from the Liberation News Service, which briefly served as an alternative source of images and information.53 Finally, the 1973 battle for Wounded Knee, which became a military standoff between native American activists (AIM) and the FBI that led to bloodshed, was documented from the inside out, and for a time changed how Native American struggles were viewed.54 Documentary photographers also told the story of counter cultures—hippies on communes55 and outlaw motorcycle gangs,56 prisons,57 deviant lifestyles including prostitution58 and Susan Meiselas’ first book, an examination of traveling carnival strippers seen from the perspective of the performers.59 The words of those pictured were included in a CD packaged with the second edition of book, in 2003. Gary Winogrand documented high society, political culture, public demonstrations, art openings and other manifestations of how the cultural elite weathered the storm of the 1960s.60 Chauncey Hare photographed the routines of life in corporate America before leaving his engineering job; his visual ethnography of bureaucracy shows the ordinariness of cubicles, files in boxes and workers dwarfed by their habitat. His other topic were home interiors, which look eerily similar. Like several influential documentary photographers mentioned above, Hare had a huge but momentary impact, with NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, exhibitions at MOMA and other leading museums. When his documentary vision disappeared, he left photography and became a therapist.61

30 Documentary photography and visual sociology

Figure 1.6 “Spade Squad.” Since the ground they worked was often muddy, the spades all had hole drilled in them to let the water drain when they moved the mud from one place to another. Arkansas, 1973. Source: Caption and photo © Bruce Jackson, courtesy of the artist

Bruce Jackson Bruce Jackson was one of a very few documentary photographers to photograph in American prisons as an extended, in-depth project. His prison photographs, published in several books and films (see his previously noted Wiki page), are from Arkansas and Texas, where, during the era he photographed, prisoners worked “on the line” digging ditches, ploughing land by hand, planting and harvesting the food they consumed, cutting the wood that heated the prisons with axes, and growing and harvesting the cotton that was made into their uniforms. This work was brutal and punishing, traditionally done from when the horse-mounted guards could see the prisoners well enough to shoot them if they tried to escape, to when they could not, that is, from sunup to sundown. A recent publication of his prison photographs by the University of Texas Press in in 201362 offers not only exceptional reproduction of several separate visual essays, but, importantly to a sociologist, background that shows how the work came into being. Jackson came to photography after interviewing prisoners and recording African American work songs in several prisons. In his mid-twenties he was part of a small team who produced the only documentary film on these work songs (Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison.63 On this film he worked with Pete Seeger and two of his family members. The southern prisons where Jackson photographed contained, speaking from the 1960s, when the photos were made were “a … culture that is a direct descendant of the

Documentary photography and visual sociology 31

Figure 1.7 Prison artist. He earned spending money making paintings for other convicts of their family snapshots, like the one of the boy with a huge Afro next to the towel at the foot of his bed. Sometimes he did pictures for himself, like the one behind his shoulder, which, he said, was not quite finished. The subject was the biblical flood, which I did not realize at first, because, unlike nearly all the classical iconography of the flood, his painting was not of the ark being boarded or the world as seen from the ark. Rather, it was from the point of view of those left behind to drown. His ark is the small bit of white at the top of the sea in the upper left corner of the painting, bathed by bright rays of sunlight. It is far too distant to be of help to anyone drowning in the foreground. And his point of view is deeper into the disaster than that of the victims. Source: Caption and photo © Bruce Jackson, Courtesy of the artist

nineteenth-century slave plantation, a culture that still exists.”64 The movie cited above and many of the photos in his first prison books show “the line,”—prison work crews working shoulder to shoulder with other Afro-American convicts, swinging axes or shovels, or working on their knees filling bags of cotton they pull over the land. In the film we experience the movement of synchronized bodies and the songs that pace their work. Jackson comments that it was partly the collective energy produced by the beautiful call and response singing that kept them alive during the long hours of hard work in the extreme heat and humidity. Jackson immersed himself in the prison culture over many fieldwork experiences. He rode in wooden wagons with the prisoners to and from the worksites, sometimes miles from the prison buildings, and he sometimes rode horses to see the prisoners from the guards’ perspective. He photographed them close up and from a distance, strange white lines that we can imagine undulating in patterned movement. The guards fit our expected visual cliches: tight uniforms, dark aviator sunglasses, cowboy hats and expressionless stoicism. There is startling power in the photos of people working side by side, singing as they swing axes or hoes.

32 Documentary photography and visual sociology The prisoners seem unaware of the photographer in their midst. He has been there so often, he is a natural part of the scene; the invisible recorder of a crowded and often violent culture defined by steel bars. Still, there is variety; some prisoners break rules and gamble; others (Figure 1.7) make paintings for the family members of other prisoners or for their own pleasure. His access to prisons in Texas and Arkansas was due to the respect he earned from George Beto, a Ph.D. who had been president of a college as well as a seminary before assuming command of the Texas correctional system. Jackson asked him why he had given him free reign to venture inside and record whatever he saw, and he answered: “How do people in my position find out what we’re doing wrong if we don’t let people like you in to tell us? And I thought we might have interesting conversations.” Jackson writes that “over the years, we did … Beto was an ethical man caught up in an industry in which worlds like that have far too little currency.”65 When Jackson tried to revisit the same prisons several decades later, after Beto had died, he was denied access. His documentary photos and films remind us of what is now invisible behind the wire. Documentary is integral to democracy, but the right to photograph does not ensure a right to access what the society decides to keep secret. Nevertheless, Jackson’s photos of the prison experience, including Death Row, in books and films, stand alone as investigations into total institutions. They remind us that to see is to know what happens behind the doors of our otherwise hidden recesses. Because of this documentary movement, there was a growing idea that culture— whether found in suburbia, corporate cubicles, hippie communes or biker bars—is visual and that it can be photographed. For many young sociologists (myself included) this became the critical backdrop for a visual sociology that laid the groundwork for what we hoped would be progressive change.

The once and present future of documentary And what has happened to documentary in the years since the publication of the first edition of this book? It would be hard to know the number of titles published per year, but the range of subjects and the complexity of images and themes seem to have grown while the book photo book has been challenged by multi-media and other forms of documentary expression.66 Documentary projects continue, however, and are increasingly creative. For example, Peter Manzel and Charles Mann organized a project in which photographers from around the world lived with and photographed statistically representative families of their respective countries for a week, and then had them remove their possessions from their homes to where they could be photographed.They used a similar approach to photograph how and twenty-eight families from around the world eat on a weekly basis.67 These are astounding projects with direct application to many commonly taught sociology courses. The Center for Documentary Studies continues to publish photo documentaries of exceptional quality in conjunction with Duke University Press. The publication of Danny Wilcox Frazier’s photos of Iowa, for example, show the seedy side of the verdant Midwest: despair, drugs, social decline.68 Frazier’s book is introduced by Robert Frank, now an elderly chronicler of the Americans. Mike Brodie’s A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, published in 2009,69 examines homeless youth on the move. The photos that comprise the book immediately recall those by Nan Goldin, that is, vividly lit, haphazardly framed, closeup portraits and environmental

Documentary photography and visual sociology 33 contexts of a precarious life not always survived. Brodie’s topic are teenage homeless kids, who ride freights and hitchhike through the dark underclass of America. The conditions are almost unimaginably dangerous and filthy and yet the message from the inside is of support and friendship, surrogate families of the dispossessed. The book consists of oversized prints of polaroid photos made en route. It is hard to imagine how he kept the equipment and preserved the prints. The minimal text at the end of the book offers a brief explanation, but his story is almost entirely through his images. In the meantime, from what internet sources one can locate, he grew out of his vagabondage and became a settled tradesman. Other recent projects are Nell Farrell’s photo/interview study of the effects of the Free Trade Agreement on young Nicaraguan workers,70 and David Bacon’s now thirty-year project documentation of migrancy, agricultural work, community and precariousness among the legal and illegal primarily Hispanic workers who harvest and process the food we largely take for granted.71 Farrell and Bacon draw upon a documentary tradition where the words of those photographed are balanced with images that show portraits and their contexts. Farrell, for example, focused on women and men in their twenties and thirties who work in the maquila industries, on dairy farms and sugar cane fields, and as lobster divers on the Miskito Coast, and Bacon, for more than two decades, has photographed the struggle of workers seeking fair wages and working conditions, legal recognition and a humane and fair life through which they will contribute to our labor needs and enrich our social mosaic. Bacon has seemingly become one with those he represents, and his work has gained a deservedly large audience. The global character of documentary is evident in the above mentioned An-My Lê’s On Contested Terrain, an overview of her thirty-year career documenting “landscapes of conflict” in Vietnam and elsewhere. Thy Phu’s recent Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam72 brings a native eye and interpretation to the experience of the American war in Vietnam. Her photos compare the experience in the North and South during the war and after, using a full range of photographic styles and types to explore what could be called an historical mosaic of a nation and culture-changing convulsion. Jennifer Bajorek’s73 recent work traced “the relationship between photography and decolonial political imagination in Francophone west Africa” in the years after independence in 1960. These projects are often intended as fine arts projects and the images are often presented as stand-alone artistic statements, with interviews, essays and other contextual information provided by others. They are a heartening evidence of a global documentary movement created by artists and photographers who are from the worlds they depict.

The gendered lens Throughout this brief history I have described the work of more male photographers than female. Photography came into being in the nineteenth century, when women were largely excluded from the professions, and while some nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury women did break loose of those sexist ties it was not until later that they began to make their documentary vision evident.There were, however, important women in the early and middle eras of documentary photography, and included Gisele Freund, Margaret Burke-White, Agnès Varda, Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham, to name a few. In the following I hope to do more than provide a list of their projects; rather, I would like to explore the idea of seeing and photographing as a part of the experience of gender, looking at a small number of case studies.

34 Documentary photography and visual sociology

Figure 1.8 Farm women dressing chickens. Brookles Farm, New York, September 1945. Source: Photograph by Charlotte Brooks © Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville Library

Several years ago I was researching the mechanization of dairy farming by interviewing elderly farmers with photos that had coincidentally been made when they were young farmers, in the early 1950s. The historical photographs were from the SONJ archive, a massive documentary project launched by Standard Oil of New Jersey for complicated public relations purposes, and this project was also directed by Roy Stryker.74 Two of the eight photographers who made photos of farming that I used in my interviews were women, Esther Bubley and Charlotte Brooks. Both of these women went on to influential careers as photographers, Brooks, for more than twenty years as the only female staff photographer for Look magazine, and Bubley as an award-winning photojournalist for LIFE magazine, among others.

Documentary photography and visual sociology 35

Figure 1.9 Judging canned goods at food exhibition, New York State Fair, September 1945. Source: Photograph by Charlotte Brooks © Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville Library

As I prepared for my photo-based interviews I noticed that Brooks and Bubley photographed the largely male agricultural work essentially as the men did, in other words they were close and involved, next to animals, manure and machines. But the women saw things that the men overlooked. Among the 200 images I worked with is a photo by Charlotte Brooks of a wall in the summer kitchen (negative number 33795) where male workers’ clothes are hung alongside drying corn, that I have a hard time imagining a man pausing to photograph. In another photo by Brooks (Figure 1.8) two women are plucking and cleaning a chicken in their kitchen (a job normally done outside, as the women I interviewed informed me). It is framed close and both women are cropped, and thus it becomes an image of work rather than workers. Brooks’ photo of two stern farmwomen judging canning goods (Figure 1.9) at the State Fair may be the

36 Documentary photography and visual sociology

Figure 1.10 Farm hands at dinner after threshing wheat on the Shaughnessy farm, Warsaw, New York, August 1945. Source: Photograph by Sol Libsohn © Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville Library

strongest example of a scene depicting women’s cultural worlds within the farm scene, food preparation made into a craft that would be sufficiently noteworthy to be entered into competition. Several other images by Brooks and Bubley, showing a Harvest Festival held in a Methodist Episcopal church, attended by well-scrubbed teenagers (negative 30636) and a portrait of a mother and son, each leading a cow (the son with a calf) in the Bath Fair (negative 30501) also suggest a female consciousness, though this is a subjective judgment, of course. Male SONJ photographers sometimes but rarely ventured into the world of women, and in one example, when they did, it showed a male interpretation. In this example, Sol Libsohn made two photos of a “changing works” crew eating dinner, with one image depicting the farmers being served by a woman who would presumably be the wife of the host farmer. These dinners, which took place during the several weeks each harvest season when the farmers worked together in informal labor pools, were a critical part of dairy farming, until technology evolved, farms expanded and collective work disappeared. It was seen as worthy of attention and it caught Libsohn’s eye. Sol Libsohn’s photos show the effects of the women’s work, the large dinner being served and consumed (Figure 1.10), but not the work of preparing the meal, which likely would have been seen in Brooks’ photo of the two farm women plucking a chicken and

Documentary photography and visual sociology 37 getting it ready to cook (Figure 1.8). Often women I interviewed spoke of helping each other prepare these feasts for eight or ten hungry workers, and the photo does not depict a holiday feast preparation because it is September, the season of the harvest, and they work in soiled aprons with looks of tedium. I return to this topic in Chapter 3, as I reflect on how a farm couple discuss what they see in a photo that shows women’s work. This discussion led me to the idea that if only men photographed what (male) farmers did we would not have photos of women’s worlds: their work and friendships, childcare, and how they spent leisure time honing their food preparation sufficient to enter it into competition to be judged by other women. I think this is a small example with large implications. Since the beginning of photography in middle of the nineteenth century we have seen the photographed world mostly through the eyes of men. What is seen as real, important, beautiful, compelling, boring or in any editorial way, has been mostly a male vision, that is, until recently. It is also important not to overreach. From my research I found that a small number of professionals, both men and women, photographed the same scene differently. That is a small but interesting observation. It would be better to examine the entire SONJ archive, or another archive such as FSA where women and men photographed the same topics side by side. It is possible there would be systematic differences and that would reinforce the view that, even in these highly professionalized situations, the lens is gendered indeed, which suggests that our historical knowledge based on such images is systematically distorted.

Contemporary women documentarians I think it is fair to conclude that, during the first half of the twentieth century, most women photographers adapted to a man’s world and a man’s vision, exceptions as noted in my example above. Margaret Burke-White was a consummate photojournalist, Helen Levitt a documentarian of the urban scene. Even Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s propagandist filmmaker and photographer, not only managed to salvage her career after the fall of Nazi Germany, but she went on to photograph the Nuba several decades later in a manner that, in the eyes of the critic Susan Sontag, recalled Nazi ideology.There are several exceptional histories of women photographers; Rosenblum’s 1994 treatise75 does an exceptional job looking back from then, and Fiona Rogers 2017 project76 interprets the substance and impact of contemporary women photographers, although from more of a fine art than sociological perspective. These are a good beginning. In the current era several photographers zeroed in on women’s experience filtered through the lens of gender. These include Mary Ellen Mark, whose projects include Streetwise, on the life of a homeless girl; Bombay, on prostitution in that metropolis in India, and Ward 81, where she lived for six weeks with the women she photographed in a state hospital in Oregon.77 Other influential examples of women seeing the women’s experience include Donna Ferrato’s 1991 photo documentation of violence against women, Living with the Enemy, vivid, explosive, immediate. She accompanied police on domestic violence calls and made photos that show the aftermath of male violence against women, women beaten, children wailing and households disrupted or destroyed.78 Laura Greenfield’s Girl Culture, published in 2002, features girl’s and women’s sexualized identities from girlhood to adulthood.79 In a similar vein, Justine Kurland’s work, especially her essay on “girl pictures” is part art and part documentary, reflecting her view of teenage girls as “fearless and free, tender and fierce.”80

38 Documentary photography and visual sociology Jo Spence’s Putting Myself in the Picture81 offers what she calls “a political personal and photographic autobiography” of a person coming to grips with her physical identity in health and illness, including an operation for breast cancer. Her career as a photographer melded with her work and consciousness as a socialist and feminist activist and her development of “photo therapy” are aspects of her work that will long endure past her premature passing. Finally, Ming Smith was the first African American photographer to have her work shown in the Museum of Modern Art.82 Her early work interprets African motherhood in Harlem, and her decades-long career developed a phenomenological view of African American women. Smith uses the camera as a creative tool, manipulating and re-making photos, giving them a life of their own. Her work is generally identified as cultural studies, in this case, because of the subject matter and her technique, of great interest to visual sociologists, at least this one. Susan Meiselas There are, of course, so many more. But I have decided to end this reflection with a focus on two photographers, whose gendered gaze is framed in global, economic, racial and

Figure 1.11 “I never went out; I never, ever seen shop for clothes, shop for food. I don’t know how to use a bank card. My friend helped me and told me do this, and she coming with me and I was always shaking. Now, slowly, slowly I’m learning everything. This bag is the first thing I bought on my own since coming ingo refuge. Since being a very small child until now everyone made decisions for me. This is the first time I’m wearing clothes, eating, thinking for me. I am proud of myself because I am still standing.” Source: Words by Rose, a woman in refuge, photograph by Susan Meiselas, original in color © Susan Meiselas, courtesy of the artist

Documentary photography and visual sociology 39 revolutionary consciousness and circumstances. These are Susan Meiselas, who became internationally famous for her courageous photo documentation of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua83 and, fifty years into her career, is still producing new work, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose first project was an autobiographical reflection of race, family and economic discrimination in a declining steel town near Pittsburgh.84 Her subsequent work has focused on postindustrial Belgium,85 the closing of the Lordstown, Ohio, General Motor’s Plant,86 and a five-year study of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.87 As it turns out, both of these photographers received MacArthur awards, which bring high honor and funding. During Meiselas’ course work for a Master’s in Education at Harvard, she enrolled in sociologist Barbara Norfleet’s first course focused on photography, co-taught with

Figure 1.12 “Bexley Women’s Aid tried to get me into refuge. They said, ‘You need to pack some stuff up, really important stuff like your documents, and see if you can get away.’ I went to the train station. They did the referral while we waited for the police to bring the travel warrant. I was then put on the train, given a taxi number, given eight pounds for the taxi. When I got to the other end, a taxi driver took me to the address I’d been given. At the refuge gate I pressed the buzzer, said, ‘I’ve been told to come here.’ ‘Not at this time you haven’t!’ There had been a mix up! I was a complete wreck outside. They must have seen me on camera, because the next thing I knew the gate was being opened. One of the residents, Sam, was carrying my bags in. Another girl, Tilak, showed me where my room was, said that she’d cook some food. It feels good every single time I walk up to my flat, just to wave my key fob and have the doors open. When I walk into the living room, I look at the fireplace and I go, ‘This is my home.’” Source: Words by Fran, a woman in refuge, photograph by Susan Meiselas, original in color. © Susan Meiselas, courtesy of the artist

40 Documentary photography and visual sociology photographer Len Gittleman. Norfleet was to author and curate several documentary studies,88 though she eventually moved from the sociology department to the Carpenter Center at Harvard. Throughout her career Meiselas photographed women, sometimes as the central topic of her projects and sometimes as part of a broader task. A project done in the early stages of her career documented “Prince Street Girls,” following adolescent girls in her neighborhood of Little Italy, New York.They are proud and defiant.The book that brought her into the limelight, Carnival Strippers, depicted strip shows in small town touring carnivals, powerful, grainy, unvarnished. Carnival Strippers conveys culture through images and words about a then common but little examined cultural scene. The text is drawn from 150 hours of taped or overheard conversations and interviews and tells us, almost entirely in the words of the women, how they became involved in small-town New England traveling strip shows. Meiselas humanized the performers, showing the strip show experience as a period of a working life. It was, for many, a way to move through a world that did not offer a lot of opportunities, and for others it became an identity. The photographs take the viewer to the back spaces of the carnival world where the women hang out and prepare for their performances, and we see them on stage before leering men. We hear the carnival “talker” enticing men to enter (“no ladies, no babies”). The photos are grainy black and white, creatively framed, showing men watching or women performing. Perhaps half the photos are portraits of the women, alone or together, and we sense their comradery. Meiselas presents the male voice and presence.Their words objectify the exotic dancers and women in general.Their words have a powerful correspondence with their appearance, generally leering and grabbing, though Meiselas also describes the dancers and the “talkers” as partners who are mutually dependent and sometimes respectful of each other. Nudity is presented as matter of fact, not a defining feature of the women. The gaze of the women to the photographer is direct and confident, though the voices are sometimes unsure and vulnerable. The book’s intensity and depth are what academic ethnographers seek and seldom achieve. Her second book, Nicaragua,89 presents the Sandinista revolution also from the inside looking out. The book consists of 71 photos that cover the popular insurrection from June 1978 to the Triumph in July 1979. They are in color, then unusual for documentary, and John Berger’s back cover endorsement reads: “By working in color, Meiselas has posed another difficulty for herself. Color photographs of this kind of subject inevitably give way to gore or to the anesthetization of violence. Here, instead, we have enormous control, a sense of the everyday, and a vitality rooted in an active community.” Meiselas’ subjects are both men and women, in the fields and villages and training as guerrillas. They are armed with 22 caliber rifles and small pistols, fighting American trained soldiers armed with US supplied tanks and automatic weapons. Her photo of a Sandinista soldier (later identified as Pablo Arauz, pseudonym “Bareta”), with a Molotov cocktail in one hand and a rifle in his other, became an iconic image of the Nicaraguan revolution, and later of Latin American revolutions writ large. It was copied as a fine arts painting by Joy Garnett, with background detail and all contextualizing information removed. Meiselas asked Garnett to remove the image from her website, which she did, but the issue was then taken up by artists from around the globe who felt appropriation

Documentary photography and visual sociology 41 of one art piece was not controlled by the copyright holder of the original. Subsequently, they copied the image into their own art and digital platforms, further decontextualizing it. Meiselas, who did not sue Garnett, nor seek licensing fees, met with the artist in a symposium in which the photographer and artist exchanged their views, which were reproduced in a 2007 Harper’s story.90 Their positions, in essence, are for Meiselas that the photo shows an historical moment that is captioned in the book where it appears. The person and his actions are seen in context, which respects him and the circumstances. As that context is stripped away the meaning of his life and his actions are removed. The artist’s contribution to the dialogue was that it is within the rights of an artist to appropriate the work of another, though in this case it could have been a more consensual exchange. To restrict that right would have been a restriction of artistic freedom. The entire dialogue (cited above) had deep reverberations in the art world and should be consulted. The photos in Nicaragua do not dwell on violence and death, though it is a constant theme, usually implied and sometimes portrayed. In this way her work differs from newspaper and magazine coverage of similar topics, in which photographers zap into a scene, get the photos and then zap onto their next assignment. Meiselas’ Nicaragua is a place with a history that is presented in a detailed timeline and several essays, and the photos portray the revolution as a catharsis of reawakening. But the revolution is also plowing fields, growing rice, teaching children in makeshift schools and providing medical care. Meiselas returned to Nicaragua ten years after the Triumph and “Contra war,” just before the election that voted the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) out of power to interview those who she had photographed and to co-direct the film Pictures from a Revolution.91 She returned again on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the overthrow of Somoza to install murals of her work made during the popular insurrection at the sites they depicted. In this way her work has had a living and evolving impact on those who appear in her images. Her depiction of the Nicaraguan revolution highlighted women as frontline soldiers, though that was not her central theme. The same can be said of her encyclopedic tome on Kurds, a monumental project that could be seen as a whole culture family album. The project, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, a six-year project, documents a cultural struggle with a deep history, yet it is intimate, drawn from 100 years of photographs that Meiselas gathered by collaborating with the Kurdish community and searching within western archives and those of multiple image-makers. Meiselas’ most recent work, A Room of Their Own,92 is set in the West Midlands, UK, inside a women’s refuge. As has been her working method throughout her career, she has encouraged people to tell their stories and found a way to shape them via photography and text into cultural description. Her partners in this project are women seeking refuge from abusive partners as well as from immigrant cultures that have constrained them. Her partner in the project was a community arts organization, Multistory. At the end of Meiselas’ book Multistory offers a statement: We invite artists to make arts with, for and about local people in response to their lives and experiences. We make work that sets out to be enjoyable and revealing. We want everyone—participants, artists and ourselves—to be engaged in the process and intrigued by the outcomes. Our work is driven by stories—discovering them, hearing them, shaping them, telling them and sharing them.93

42 Documentary photography and visual sociology Her concern for the safety of those seeking refuge led her to photograph mostly the spaces that were becoming “a room of their own.” They are spare spaces with minimal furniture, though painted in vivid colors. The book is printed in color, as has been most of her work, and the images move from their rooms to parts of bodies; women very seldom reveal their faces due to their fears of reprisal. The rooms are for their children as well, and often there are toys scattered about. It is minimal living, but it is safe. As the book progresses and the reader becomes acquainted with the often-harrowing stories, a few faces or parts of bodies are revealed, and then we see the women working on collages, drawings and messages as they collectively rebuild their identities free of the oppression of men or cultural patriarchy. We see casual photos of cooking and working together. We know something about the women due to the texts that accompany the images, and yet we know we are just glimpsing into a social process that is fraught with uncertainty. As is the case with all of Meiselas’ projects, the theme is self-determination and hope. Meiselas’ work blurs the line between documentary and visual sociology. Her projects draw on cultural understanding and extended experiences in the situations she depicts. She presents the worlds of those before her lens as though seen from the inside looking out. Finally, her topics are huge: institutionalized sexism, revolution, cultures without a state, and self-determination in a gendered and often violent world.Yet her views are from the smallest details and events, the micro view of the macro. LaToya Ruby Frazier Frazier’s first book, a visual autobiography set in a postindustrial steel town near Pittsburgh, leads the viewer to consider social, economic, racial, age and other “viewing platforms” in addition to gender from which documentary emerges. The book, The Notion of Family94 is a photographic autobiography of a black workingclass family, told from the perspective of the youngest member, LaToya. The book, fourteen years in the making, tells of a changing family and community. Her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, who briefly appears, and her grandmother and step-greatgrandfather comprise the family, living in the near postindustrial town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her viewing platform is gender, but also social, as Frazier is a product of a largely female environment, created by her mother and grandmother. The platform from which she photographs is also economic and historical. Braddock was a thriving steel town from the late nineteenth century until the mills closed in the 1970s, which left behind a deteriorating physical infrastructure to house ten percent of those who lived there at its peak. The implosion of the town led to white flight to the suburbs. This change was profound and fast, taking place within the lifetimes of the Fraziers, her mother and grandmother. And the viewing platform is also black America, the last to be invited to the industrial workforce and the first to be left behind when the industrial system collapsed. The black population of Braddock lives in a poisoned environment (Frazier suffers from an autoimmune disorder contracted from the toxic environment she grew up in, and when asked about her earliest memory she cites the pervasive smell of sulfur from the manufacturing process), an extremely isolated social environment, and a larger framework of racism. The power of the photos and terse, precise captions in service of a family history led her to the first ranks of young activist documentarians working today. She developed an

Documentary photography and visual sociology 43

Figure 1.13 Grandma Ruby, 2007. Gelatin silver print. Source: Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier © LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

early interest in photography and from her teenage years made portraits that drew from the daily family experience. These include, for example, a photo of her mother only seen from behind, in underwear, reclining on her bed, and her boyfriend sitting on the edge of the bed, naked from the waist up, looking out into space with vacantness and absence.The caption reads: “Mom’s boyfriend, Mr. Art, was my rival for Mom’s attention. Detached and numb, he reminded me of Stan, the father from Charles Burnet’s film Killer of Sheep. Working menial wage jobs is exhausting. It’s never enough to build a foundation.” Many of the photos show daughter and mother, portraits organized via a cable release to her tripod-mounted camera. In these portraits their relationship is not always harmonious. They are tender yet fierce. Her grandmother was the most important figure in her life, and she is portrayed with compassion and love. We see her age and die, but we also sense the photographer growing into womanhood as a budding photographer and activist. She presents Braddock in familiar images of postindustrial ruin, but these move from formal landscapes to specifics, notably the demolition of the Braddock branch of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), advertised on its website as a “$23 billion integrated global nonprofit health enterprise.” But these were not enough dollars,

44 Documentary photography and visual sociology

Figure 1.14 Grandma Ruby, Mom and Me, 2009. Gelatin silver print. Source: Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier © LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

it seems, to support a hospital that had served an impoverished community for decades, offering jobs and the only operating restaurant in the largely abandoned downtown, which the photographer and her grandmother often visited. One photo shows a protestor holding a sign in front of the mostly demolished hospital that reads “UPMC stands for Unfair; Profit; Making; Corporation.” Her photos are intensely familiar, beginning with a nude self-portrait that seems to say: “I will tell all.” We move from portraits to spare apartment interiors where her life was lived. Her photo of the family kitchen shows her darkroom prints taped to the refrigerator, and some rooms are filled to near bursting with her grandmother’s doll collection. Her photos then move us to the largely abandoned and collapsed downtown, and to the hospital being torn down in the background. Finally, she takes us to a structural overview in two aerial photos, made from a helicopter. In one of her YouTube lectures she tells of another family bravely holding out against a corporation that is stacking thousands of white plastic containers of recycled tires right up to their property lines, easy to read in the aerial but confusing from eye level. She tells us that just a generation ago these abandoned plots housed the workers who worked in the mills.

Documentary photography and visual sociology 45 In a YouTube interview with Gregory Crewdson, Frazier says, “All of a sudden we’re alive, born into a circumstance we can’t control so I think it’s our duty and obligation to be the mirrors in our society, and also the soul and spirit … we are bearing witness to the history that we find ourselves located within.” Her work is an example of autobiographical documentary in the service of social awareness and activism, ranking with the masters she quotes as her inspiration. In the eight years since the publication of her first book four additional projects have been brought to fruition, each with a specific take on postindustrial communities, the future of work, race and ethnicity. Few if any working today are more successful at making the invisible visible. While only a few decades ago women were a minority in a male world of photo documentary, it is now the case that the cultural universe of documentary photography seems equally female and male, and the gaze of women through the camera has defined much of how we see and define gender. Their work has shown us how women experience the world as adolescents, strippers, guerrilla soldiers, abused wives and partners, members of a persecuted minority, regular kids growing up in America, farm wives, women undergoing disfiguring surgeries and as refugees, to name a few. Their work humanizes both documentary and the audiences it finds. Might I suggest this is one of the most vital themes in current visual sociology, a beacon for the discipline itself?

In conclusion For all the potential offered, photo documentaries remain largely unused by sociologists aside from the minority in the visual sociology community, and that is unfortunate, a lost opportunity. Often documentarians gain access to communities that few sociologists have the courage or opportunity to enter, or they have a photographic vision that makes the mundane interesting or goes beneath the surface to explore forces such as economy, technology and racism.That is the case of Danny Wilcox Frazier’s vision of Iowa which shows a tawdry world behind the pastoral myth. Manzel’s comparative projects, getting thirty families from around the world to empty their possessions into their yard for a formal portrait, for example, are mind-boggling in their scope but because they are so unconventional they would probably not, sadly, be done by sociologists working in a university. Having used Manzel and D’Alusio’s book Hungry Planet as a required text in a global sociology course, I can attest to the interest of sociology students in seeing what the world eats and then photographing their own food habits, in detail and completely, as way to study their lives sociologically, environmentally and culturally. Documentary photography shows us how the world looked in a particular time and place. Why not use documentary photography to imagine what a theorist was seeing when sociological concepts came into their minds? For example, Louis Clergeau’s photos95 of smalltown France, its community rituals and events, and the organization of family life, work and leisure is what the sociologist Émile Durkheim was seeing when he defined the concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity. Does this help us understand what these concepts meant in the context of their creation? Or would you like to imagine with students what it means to belong to a culture and a national group that has no land to call their own? Susan Meiselas’ vast “family album” draws upon and presents a cultural mosaic of 100 years of Kurdish life. This list, and hundreds of documentary titles from across the globe and dating

46 Documentary photography and visual sociology to the beginning of photography (which coincides almost exactly with the beginning of sociology), belong at the sociological table. I think we should invite them to join us. When we take a documentary book from our shelves, we are holding an object that came into existence through extraordinary effort and expense. In a world where millions of photos are freely available on the web it is remarkable that documentary photography books exist at all. That they do attests to a hunger we have for something more than a flood of formless information that threatens to numb or overwhelm us. And we need to remember and appreciate how improbable the documentary book is: made from photos chosen from a huge body of work, constructed from a vision into an object that lasts beyond the fickle life of images on the internet, and made in what can best be thought of as an expensive craft. But the books are still being made, and in LaToya Ruby Frazier words, “when you take your photographs and you interview people and you have critical texts to put around it, it [becomes] a real tool for people to use, not only for knowledge, but also as a toolkit and a weapon to help them learn how to organize [for social change].” The documentary spirit awakens our consciousness and often shows us more than we wish to see. Yet humans seek knowledge and self-awareness, the sociological mission as well. A good marriage and a good place to begin.

Notes 1 Rose, Gillian. 2016. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Fourth edition. London: Sage, pp. 24–47. 2 Rosenblum, Naomi. 1989. A World History of Photography. Revised edition. New York: Abbeville Press, p. 341. 3 Smith, Eugene and Aileen Smith. 1975. Minamata. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 4 Frank, Robert. 1969 (originally published 1959). The Americans. New York: Aperture. 5 Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, p. 341. 6 Document: A Publication of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Summer/Fall 2005, inside front cover. 7 This perspective is found in: Rosler, Martha. 1989. “In, Around and Afterthoughts (on documentary photography).” In Bolton, Richard, ed. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 303–342; Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. 1991. Photography at the Doc: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton. 8 Rosler, In, Around and Afterthoughts, p. 307. 9 Rankin, Tom, ed. 1995. “Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre” Photographs of a River Life, by Maggie Sayre. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 10 Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. 11 Becker, Howard S. 1995. “Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It’s (Almost) All a Matter of Context.” Visual Sociology 10 (1–2): 5–14. 12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Jackson_(scholar). 13 Coles, Robert with photos by Alex Harris. 1978. The Last and First Eskimos. Boston: New York Graphic Society; Coles, Robert, with photos by Alex Harris and Thomas Roma. 1997. Old and On Their Own. New York: Center for Documentary Studies/Norton. 14 Becker, Howard S. 1974. “Photography and Sociology.” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1 (1): 3–26. 15 I recommend that interested readers Google or otherwise search for any and all of the photographers of interest who are discussed throughout the book.

Documentary photography and visual sociology 47 16 See Newhall, Nancy. 1975. P.H. Emerson. Millertown, NY: Aperture. 17 Bunnell, Peter. 1989. “The Pictorial Effect.” In Weaver, Mike. The Art of Photography, 1839– 1989. New Haven:Yale University Press, p. 156. 18 Titles include Idylls of the Norfolk Broads (1886), Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886) and Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888). 19 Rosenblum, Naomi. 1989. A World History of Photography. Revised edition. New York: Abbeville Press, p. 361. 20 There are many exceptional websites that archive Riis’ work, among them I recommend the International Center for Photography. www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/jacobriis?all/all/all/all/3 21 Henry Mayhew’s work was perhaps the most important early example. His book London Labour and London Poor was published about 1860 and included images that originated as daguerreotypes but were transformed into wood engravings for the book because the halftone process had yet to be perfected. 22 Unpaged excerpt of How the Other Half Lives, found on www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAr iis.htm 23 Ricci, Steven. 2008. Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 71. 24 See Ricci, Cinema and Fascism, pp. 135–139. 25 Newsreels from continental Europe, England and the US in this era are easily available as they continue to still find ready audiences. 26 www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/helmut-herzfeld-john-heartfield-life. Heartfield’s (the senior) life is also a testimony of the fickle politics of anti-fascism. His fate following WWII, told in his grandson’s accounts, shows him never again gaining a platform from which to mount an “art as political weapon” campaign as he had in the 1930s. 27 Brandt’s The English at Home (1936) included an introduction by Raymond Mortimer, published by B.T. Batsford in London. The unpaginated book was 72 pages long and included 63 illustrations. His book, A Night in London (1938) was simultaneously published in London, Paris and New York and was also brief, 68 pages with 64 illustrations. 28 Warburton, Nigel, ed. 1993. Bill Brandt: Selected Texts and Bibliography. Oxford, UK: Clio Press, p. 30. 29 This photo appears on p. 17 of Warburton, Bill Brandt. Discussion of the altering of photos appears on pp. 8–19. 30 Warburton, Bill Brandt, p. 32. 31 Warburton, Bill Brandt. 32 Most well known were Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee, John Vachon, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Carl Mydans and Ben Shahn. Others who had a smaller role, but went on to the SONJ documentary project and other careers in documentary and related photography included Charlotte Brooks, Esther Bubley and Sol Libsohn. 33 See Hurley, F. Jack. The Family in America: An Encyclopedia, volume 1, p. 650. This incomplete reference is due to the location of the reference on the web, where it appears without full citation. 34 See also Suchar, Charles. 1997. “Grounding Visual Sociology Research in Shooting Scripts.” Qualitative Sociology 20 (1): 33–55. 35 Frank, The Americans. 36 This review appeared in Popular Photography and is widely cited. 37 Davidson, Bruce. 1970. E100 Street. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 38 Owens, Bill. 1972. Suburbia. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press. 39 Owens, Bill. 1975. Our Kind of People. New York: Simon & Schuster. 40 Estrin, Mary Lloyd. 1979. To the Manor Born. Boston: New York Graphic Society. 41 Sanders, Norman. 1977. At Home. New York: Morgan and Morgan.

48 Documentary photography and visual sociology 42 Clark’s first book, Tulsa (New York: Lustrum Press, 1971) was based on photos Clark made of his teen friends in suburban Oklahoma shooting speed, having sex and playing with guns; his subsequent work, Teenage Lust (1983) and several films were looking backward at these forms of life from middle age. 43 Simon, Peter and Raymond Mungo. 1972. Moving On Standing Still. New York: Grossman. 44 Richards, Eugene. 1978. Dorchester Days. Wollaston, MA: Many Voices Press. 45 Riboud, Marc and Philippe Devillers. 1970. Inside North Vietnam. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 46 Griffiths, Philip Jones. 1971. Vietnam Inc. New York: Collier. 47 Burrows, Larry. 2002. Larry Burrow’s Vietnam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Introduction by David Halberstam. Burrow’s death reminds us of the very many journalists and documentarians who risk their lives to document dangerous places and scenes. 48 David Halberstam in Burrows, Larry Burrow’s Vietnam, p. 14. 49 Lê, An-Le and Dan Leers. 2020. An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain. New York: Aperture. 50 Copeland, Alan. 1969. People’s Park. New York: Ballantine Books. 51 Hansberry, Lorraine. 1964. The Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster. 52 Lyon, Danny. 1992. Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Durham: Duke University Press. 53 Fenton, David. 1971. Shots. New York: Douglas Book Corporation. Also see Ray Mungo’s 1970 book Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with the Liberation News Service. Boston: Beacon Press. 54 Anderson, Robert, ed. 1973. Voices from Wounded Knee. Rooseveltown, NY: Akwesasne Notes. 55 Mungo, Raymond. 1970. Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life. New York: E.P. Dutton. See also Peter Simon’s 1970 book of photos, Moving On, Holding Still, New York: Grossman Publishers. 56 Lyon, Danny. 2003 (1967). Bikeriders. New York: Chronicle Books. 57 Lyon, Danny. 1971. Conversations with the Dead. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. See also: Jackson, Bruce. 1977. Killing Time: Life in the Arkansas Penitentiary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 58 Hecke, Roswitha. 1982. Love Life: Scenes with Irene. New York: Grove Press. 59 Meiselas, Susan. 1975. Carnival Strippers. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 60 Winogrand, Garry. 1977. Public Relations. Boston: New York Graphic Society. 61 Hare, Chauncey. 1984. This Was Corporate America. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art. 62 Jackson, Bruce. 2013. Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons. University of Texas Press. 63 www.folkstreams.net/films/afro-american-work-songs-in-a-texas-prison 64 Jackson, Inside the Wire, p. 16. 65 Jackson, Inside the Wire. 66 In this vein, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, which for 20 years awarded the Lange-Taylor Documentary Prize (named after Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor), a $20,000 award for book projects combining documentary writing and photography, was temporarily suspended in 2011 as the prize committee considers how documentary expression is changing as the publishing environment itself is evolving through the digital revolution. 67 Menzel, Peter and Charles Mann. 1995. Material World, A Global Family Portrait. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. And Menzel, Peter and Faith D’Aluisio. 2005. Hungry World:What the World Eats. New York: Random House. 68 Frazier, Danny Wilcox. 2009. Driftless: Photographs from Iowa. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. 69 Brodie, Mike. 2013. A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers. 70 Ferrell, Nell. 2010. Nicaragua Before Now: Factory Work, Farming and Fishing in a Low-Wage Global Economy. Santa Fe, NM: University of New Mexico Press. 71 Bacon, David. 2016. In the Fields of the North. Berkeley: University of California Press. I recommend visiting his website (http://dbacon.igc.org/) for a comprehensive list of his extraordinary canon of work.

Documentary photography and visual sociology 49 72 Phu, Thy. 2022. Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 73 Bajorek, Jennifer. 2021. Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa. Durham: Duke University Press. 74 See Harper, Douglas. 2001. Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 8–13. 75 Rosenblum, Naomi. 1994. A History of Women Photographers. New York: Abbeville. 76 Rogers, Fiona. 2017. Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now. London: Thames and Hudson. 77 These books are listed in the Selected Bibliography. 78 Ferrato, Donna. 1991. Living with the Enemy. Millertown, NY: Aperture. 79 Greenfield, Lauren. 2002. Girl Culture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 80 Kurland, Justine. 2020. Girl Pictures. New York: Aperture and Kurland, Justine, 2021. Highway Kind. New York: Aperture. 81 Spence, Jo. 1986. Putting Myself in the Picture: A Personal and Photographic Autobiography. London: Comet Press. 82 Smith, Ming. 2020. An Aperture Monograph. New York: Aperture. 83 Meiselas, Susan. 1981. Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979. New York: Pantheon. 84 Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2014. The Notion of Family. New York: Aperture. 85 Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2017. And from the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise. Belgium: MACS Grand Hornu. 86 Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2020. The Last Cruze. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 87 Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2022. Flint Is Family in Three Acts. Göttingen: Steidl. 88 Several of Norfleet’s books are listed in the Bibliography. These include an elegant photo essay on the elegantly rich, All the Right People, and other projects she curated from the archives of small-town photographers or collections where she interprets daily life and culture. An example is The Champion Pig. She was an influential curator and interpreter of American culture but this work emerged after she moved from the sociology department to the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. I was in Boston and Cambridge during this time and remember Harvard’s politically conservative and quantitative department, and thus visual sociology had to wait for its successful gestation in departments more open to experimentation. Indeed, that was what I found waiting in the Brandeis department just a year later. 89 Meiselas, 1981, Nicaragua. 90 “Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas, On the Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the Art of Context.” Harper’s Magazine (February 2007): 53–58 (pp. 56π57), 91 www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8s4eJWEmX4. The film, available on YouTube, takes Meiselas back to the experiences she photographed to see what happened a decade down the road. It is a mythic and lyrical film,; examining both Sandinista and Contra experiences; it ends with Meiselas saying, “What we lost was the luxury of the dream but for the Nicaraguans it was much more.” The film has all the complexity of the historical moment it embraces. 92 Meiselas, Susan, with women in refuge. 2017. A Room of Their Own. West Bromwich, UK: Multistory. 93 Meiselas, A Room of Their Own, p. 200. 94 Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2014. The Notion of Family. New York: Aperture. 95 Couderc, Jean-Marie. 1996. A Village in France: Louis Clergeau’s Photographic Portrait of Daily Life in Pontlevoy, 1902–1938. New York: Harry Abrams.

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2

Visual ethnography

Overview Most simply said, ethnography is the study of culture, traditionally done by anthropologists and sociologists. Visual ethnography is ethnography done with cameras, drawings or other visual means. Visual ethnography springs from the same instincts and desires as documentary, with the added dimension of social theory. Academic theories are living bodies of ideas that, while decades or centuries old, continue to define our point of view. This is important but I do not want to overstate it. It is difficult to define exactly how theories steer our work, except that perhaps they guide us towards what to study. Maybe they make us commit to a more balanced view of a topic, a deeper look beyond the sensational. However, many visual sociologists, myself included, have always been and continue to be inspired by documentary photography and find the line between the two blurred. In the early stages of the movement, dating to Bateson and Mead’s work in the 1930s, visual ethnographers were regarded as scientists and they thought of themselves that way. Now, after the so-called reflexive turn in the late 1960s, the ethnographer has become a storyteller, with her/himself written into the story. The stories still emerge from theories and they remain committed to the highest standards of evidence, but they are also understood to be incomplete, contradictory, replete with impressions and feelings—in a word, human. I begin with a look at some of the assumptions, definitions and tensions that are often taken for granted about visual ethnography. Ethnography requires in-depth participant/observation, but doing (being a participant) and observing are always in tension. Introducing cameras (both moving and still), pencils and pens, computer simulations and other visual tools adds to the tension between these roles. In recent decades the assumption that the researcher remains on one side and the “observed” on the other has evolved to (but not replaced) research drawing from collaboration between researcher and those who are studied. The forms of collaboration are varied, powerful or subtle, and it is not at all agreed what they achieve. But it is agreed that visual methods are more easily adapted to research collaboration than the old ways of looking, talking, tape recording or remembering, and writing. There is also an irresolvable tension between the idea of culture as categories, “facts,” if you will, and films, photographic studies and written descriptions that tell cultural stories. This has come to be known as the “ontological turn” in anthropology, where it had been generally accepted that different cultures define the same realities in different ways (this is called the “epistemological” perspective). Most of us now accept that what one culture DOI: 10.4324/9781003251835-3

Visual ethnography 51 defines as real may have no parallel existence in a different culture. “Dreaming,” for example, may be defined as a beckoning of ancestorial spirits, a time travel into different realities (as it is in several cultures), or it may be scattered fragments of impressions and memories chatted at over the morning coffee and forgotten, as they are in mine. Culture is made by humans, more than one, acting together, what the anthropologist Jim Spradley defined as “shared definitions and plans for action.” Culture exists when more than one person sees, hears or senses something and agrees what it is.The definition will be shared and accepted by others. Paranormal investigators see needles jiggling on a machine and sense the presence of ghosts, as do their colleagues.They are primed by their culture to sense the same thing, and yes, there is a ghost. Normally we speak of cultures as consisting of groups who share ideas, actions or settings: religions, athletic teams, professions, workplaces or scenes where they hang out. A squad of soldiers struggling through muck and violence becomes a culture looking out for each other, and when sociologists studied these men in WWII it was clear that they fought for each other rather than for an abstract ideal. Culture also consists of things. Statues, clothes, art, dwellings, food and drink, graveyard decorations. In England they are faded words on leaning planks of marble; in Italy they are photos of the deceased etched into ceramic surfaces, visual likenesses that have disarming charm—polyester shirts, bulging waistlines, bad haircuts and intense smiles—or they are sculptures that cry for a heaven where the best parts of life are preserved. I chose these examples because, having lived and worked in both of these countries, they seem to reflect their cultural context.Yes, they seem to. It is a feeling, a sense a place having known them from the inside. The ethics that guide visual ethnography are complex and variable. A published photograph or film can have a profound effect on an individual, yet what is considered an ethical breach or ethically appropriate in one situation or national culture is not in another, but visual research is done across these cultures that may be local, ethnic or national. Thankfully, we are guided by a detailed statement on ethics codified by the parent organization of visual sociology, the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA).1 For example, in the US the right to freedom of speech protects our right to photograph in public. An ethnographer can legally photograph routine interactions on the street without asking permission, and a bystander can photograph a policeman kneeling on the neck of a suspect. In America we celebrate this freedom and believe that it helps preserve our democracy as well supporting a vibrant tradition of documentary photography, journalism and visual ethnography. Photographing strangers in public, however, is considered an invasion of privacy in other countries that the US strongly resembles, such as Canada or France. Beyond the issue of legal rights, photography in social science research needs to be driven by a higher ethical sense that recognizes the power of imagery and its potential damage to those photographed. As a result, social research generally requires a review by professional ethics boards that are strongly focused on protecting the rights of subjects. The Institutional Review Boards (IRB) committees are situated in universities and their mandate and specific directives vary from one university to another. I explore the topic of ethics in more detail in Chapter 6, as an aspect of teaching. Most of us are aware that our actions affect what we are observing. In the language of modern social science we have become reflexive, and since we are aware that our presence affects what we are studying, we include our story of doing the research when we write it up or make a film.

52 Visual ethnography

Figure 2.1 Grave in London “THE WORLD’S GREATEST MUM.” I have long been struck by the ethnographic messages hidden in death memorials. The English cemeteries I have visited are overgrown and poorly kept, and feel seldom visited. Of course, many of these cemeteries hold the bodies of those who died decades or even centuries ago. Still, the contrast between the sentiments expressed (“The World’s Greatest Mum”) and the state of the grave seems to hint at some ambiguity. This is speculative and informal visual ethnography, but certainly fun.

The reflexive revolution has been deeply intertwined in visual ethnography. This was perhaps first evidenced by the work of Jean Rouch, one of the first to use portable, sound sync cameras to film in a natural and flowing way, and it has been part of increasingly experimental forms of photo-based visual ethnography. Suddenly, two or more voices are ferreting out the meanings of an image in interviews, or actually making films together, which has come to be called participatory filmmaking. In this instance reflexivity leads to collaboration. These new forms of research are discussed in Chapter 3. Visual ethnography invites experimental writing and photography/filmmaking. That may be because, as the discipline becomes more reflexive, the study of culture gets closer to the scene it describes. Some visual ethnographies are made by one person, who observes, photographs, films or draws, and observes, interviews and writes. At times the ethnographer observes, interviews and writes and a separate photographer makes the images, as did anthropologist Loring Danforth and photographer Alexander Tsiaras in their powerful and poetic study of Death Rituals of Rural Greece.2 When sociologist Caroline Knowles asked me to work with her on a study of immigrant life in Hong Kong,3 my job was to translate her

Visual ethnography 53

Figure 2.2 Grave in Bologna. What to make of the Italian example? The cemeteries are beautiful parks, inviting the tourist as well as those who come to remember.Very often the graves are decorated with portraits preserved in ceramic, framed and attached to the gravestone. Memorials seem saturated with unabashed love. On one grave a rascally older man with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down has a hand up in greeting: the text says “Ciao!” In this photo we have a beautiful woman and an artful cross. She is missed.

54 Visual ethnography ideas into photographs. This was a remarkable role change for me, working as a photographer alone, and one I relished. In any case, there are two jobs, one writing and one photographing, and that needs to be decided upon and organized. Those are enough premises. It is time to look more closely to what has been done and where it might go in the future.

Balinese character Mead and Bateson’s study of Balinese character4 began in the 1930s, and was published in 1942, the year the US entered WWII and the world was debating, with terrible consequences, whether or not race was a biological reality, and whether culture emerged from genes or circumstances.5 Anthropologists had used photography before Mead and Bateson’s study, and, as summarized by Elizabeth Edwards,6 photography provided the data that supported racist theorizing of early anthropology. Specifically, photos recorded body measurements and physical characteristics that were used to classify cultures and ethnic groups. Mead and Bateson changed the direction of visual anthropology because they used photos to make new arguments about culture. Few if any subsequent visual ethnographies approach its depth or reach, and the book has achieved a canonical status, both praised and criticized. I approach the book by asking: what did it do well, and what not so well? Was it a convincing argument for visual ethnography? Why, given its importance, did it not revolutionize anthropology and begin a simultaneous movement toward visual sociology? Balinese Character came from a discipline that believed it was a science.The authors both had extensive backgrounds in Pacific Islands anthropology; Mead had already published on adolescent adjustment among young women in Samoa, and Bateson had written an ethnography situated in New Guinea. Mead often expressed her frustration over using words to express the reality of a culture that the words did not come from. Perhaps photographs could partially help. She wrote in her application for funding to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) that “the camera will neither be naive at the start nor experienced at the end of the research”;7 it was a tool that recorded what was there, no less, no more, and balanced the inherent bias of words. No one had attempted a photo project on the scale they imagined, and they underestimated what it would involve.Writing in her autobiography several decades later, Mead observed: When we planned our field work, we decided that we would make extensive use of movie film and stills. Gregory had bought seventy-five rolls of Leica film to carry us through the two years. Then one afternoon when we had observed parents and children for an ordinary forty-five minute period, we found that Gregory had taken three whole rolls. We looked at each other, we looked at the notes, and we looked at the pictures that Gregory had taken so far and that had been developed and printed by a Chinese in the town and were carefully mounted and catalogued on large pieces of cardboard. Clearly we had come to a threshold—to cross it would be a momentous commitment in money, of which we did not have much, and in work as well. But we made the decision. Gregory wrote home for the newly invented rapid winder, which made it possible to take pictures in very rapid succession. He also ordered bulk film, which he would have to cut and put in cassettes himself as we could not possibly

Visual ethnography 55 afford to buy commercially the amount of film we now proposed to use. As a further economizing measure we bought a developing tank that would hold ten rolls at once and, in the end, we were able to develop some 1,600 exposures in an evening. The decision we made does not sound very momentous today. Daylight loaders have been available for years, amateur photographers have long since adopted sequence photography, and field budgets for work with film have enormously increased. But it was momentous then. Whereas we had planned to take 2,000 photographs, we took 25,000. It meant that the notes I took were similarly multiplied by a factor of ten … and the volume of our work was changed in tremendously significant ways.8 When they returned to the US they printed several thousand of their most important images, which they projected, studied and coded on individual cards. All images had been dated and were coded to field notes written by Mead. Eventually, 759 of the 25,000 were published in their elegantly designed book that commemorated New York Academy of Science’s 125th anniversary. It is unlikely that anthropology had or has ever looked as good! The book’s large format made it possible to print five to twelve images on a page that appeared across from long captions. Some photos required longer captions than others, and some topics used more photos than others. Mead wrote a fifty-page introduction on the photos and the book concludes with an essay on the history and the then current situation in Bali, but it is the images that carry the argument. The anthropologists first study Balinese material culture, including the village layouts and agricultural details, including irrigation and tool use. They segue to proxemics and body language (kinesics), trance, mother-child interaction, sibling interaction, stages of child development and rites of passage. Photos of rites of passage emphasize social integration. Some sequences show unfolding events over a few minutes and are more like film excerpts, others combine photos from different events and times. Bateson’s framing was tight when he photographed social interaction, centering his subjects and excluding extraneous information, utilizing a short telephoto lens.While the authors describe Mead as directing Bateson’s photography, Bateson also wrote that “In general, we found that any attempt to select for special details was fatal, and that the best results were obtained when the photography was most rapid and almost random.”9 Mead and Bateson concentrate on how culture adapts people to each other. We see the tendency of people to place themselves into groups, and then to seek to separate from each other in “awayness” or trance. Their study emphasizes how Balinese define, touch and define their bodies and the food that goes in and the excreta that comes out.We learn a great deal about rituals that move the Balinese from one life stage to another. We learn hardly anything about how Balinese meet, court and marry each other, or how young adults interact with their parents. There is some but not much attention paid to material culture, especially housing and agriculture.The plates often integrate images of Balinese art with photos of people mimicking the postures and poses portrayed. Like all ethnographies, Balinese Character tells some cultural stories but not all, and Mead introduces the book by saying that there was great cultural variation within Bali, and that their story is incomplete. Their method works better for some topics than others. Bateson’s photos record details of trance and parent-child relationships particularly well, but they are less successful at depicting the details of burial rituals. The authors write, “when a new corpse which has been kept in the house about ten days is to be carried to the graveyard for cremation, all the repulsion toward the fact of death crops up. Men overcompensate, plunge their arms into the rotting corpse and boast that their skin has crawled with maggots.”10 The photos

56 Visual ethnography do not show these details; it is nearly impossible to understand how the rituals unfold from the photos alone. Likewise, a topic that should take well to photos, the positioning of hands in daily life (plate 21) is limited to eight photos, and several are more descriptive than anthropological. Plate 29 (Eating meals) shows how the Balinese regard eating with shame (their backs are to each other; they look down when they eat in crowds; they quickly shove food into their mouths off the backs of their hands), but other sequences such as plate 36 (Eating snacks) shows actions without much context or explanation.Throughout the book some photo sequences had greater clarity, power and significance than others. This points to a larger problem with visual ethnography, which is that it is easier to create an argument with words than with photos alone. We are used to linking meanings together from words, but less used to doing this with photos. I have come to think of photo sequences in a project like Balinese Character as windows on a large building through which we see unfolding aspects of culture. But there are many spaces on the wall between the windows that the viewer must fill in. The view is always incomplete, there is all the wall space between the windows where the full story lives. Balinese Character remains a strong argument for visual ethnography. It is artful science, a vision of what the discipline could become. Why, then, did it fail to revolutionize anthropology, and, perhaps, social science in general? There are, I think, four answers. First, the project was seen as an attempt to represent visual ethnography per se, but, impressive as it was, a single book is simply not powerful enough to revolutionize an entire discipline. This may be an unfair criticism because Mead and Bateson had modest goals for the book, as reflected in their introductory statement: “This volume is in no sense a complete account of Balinese culture, even in its most general outlines. It is an attempt to present … those aspects of our results and those methods of research which we have judged most likely to be of immediate use to other students.”11 A second explanation is slightly ironic in the context of the first: the book set the bar higher than could be reasonable reached by others. Few ethnographers have the skill or energy to do a project of similar scale, and few academic publishers were likely willing to publish what at first glance resembled art rather than anthropology. Even when ethnographers subsequently used photography, they seldom did so imaginatively and rigorously. Consider a project completed several decades ago, as described by the Colliers in their text on visual anthropology. Bernard and Shirley Planalp did field research for eighteen months in an East Indian village, exposing 1,000 rolls of 120 mm film, producing more than 1,000 medium-format images. The Colliers say this was a great success, the “technical and visual content of their study,” printed by a professional lab, “could match any professional study made in India.”12 It was undoubtedly a great achievement, but to my knowledge the photos did not lead to an academic publication, and their impact on the discipline was minimal. Like most photos made during fieldwork, they were made with great effort and they were probably studied when the authors wrote their ethnography, and then they were left in file cabinet to age and yellow. I remember my first anthropology professor, David McCurdy, showing me a stack of photos made during his Ph.D. fieldwork in India. So many carefully made images, dusty in the last drawer of his filing cabinet. I think my professor’s example was more common than not, and because so few anthropologists took photos seriously, Balinese Character had few imitators. Balinese Character was also said to lack scientific rigor, which was at that time anthropology’s holy grail. For example, Lois Barclay Murphy and Gardner Murphy, who reviewed the book in 1943 for the American Anthropologist, found that the photographs

Visual ethnography 57 were not up to hypothesis testing. The Murphys cite Mead and Bateson’s assertion that deflection of emotion among children leads to withdrawal among adults, but the reviewers point out that the authors do not use their photos to test this hypothesis.The photos show that some children seem to deflect emotion and that adults are withdrawn, but the photos are limited in demonstrating the assertion. The reviewers suggest that Mead and Bateson should have chosen children at random and photographed them over time, allowing for systematic comparison. It would be possible to do this, but it would require a vast effort with a large research staff. In any case, the reviewers assert that testing hypothesis cannot be equated with identifying a cultural phenomenon in a handful of cases. The reviewers also question whether the authors are guilty of sampling error. Do the photos show typical situations, people and circumstances? There are some ways to crosscheck the photos by looking for common elements, but more written information would help. They write: What can be photographed, and what gets left out because it is hard to photograph? How should such gaps be filled in? How universal are the specific situations which are photographed, or which provide the most usable pictures from the point of view of visual clarity rather than documentary completeness? … In our culture, and presumably in others, one tends to photograph those who are photogenic, those who do not move around too fast.13 The reviewers want to know much more about the people and circumstances shown in the photos.They call this “checking the indirect evidence” from photos, and this would involve the analysis of full demographic and sociological information on all people who are in the frame. But they acknowledge: “Obtaining adequate records of all the essential kinds of people defined in age, sex, class terms, as well as other terms important to the specific culture … catching the sequence of life through the seasons and through the individual life history, all this may well be regarded as a frightening undertaking.”14 Bateson and Mead are caught in the same conundrum that scientific critiques of ethnography usually produce but doubled down when you add images: ethnography cannot measure up as science if science requires proofs of validity and reliability, and basing ethnography on images makes this more, not less, obvious. It is also likely that Balinese Character did not force a paradigm shift in anthropology because soon after it was published film rather than photography became the dominant form of visual ethnography and it largely commanded Mead’s interest from then on. The shift to film was partly due to the development of portable 16 mm film cameras, which were unable to record sound until the 1960s. Mead and Bateson exposed several thousand feet of movie film during their research that became important ethnographic films, and Mead devoted considerable energy to anthropological filmmaking throughout her career. It may be that film (and, eventually, video) is a better way to do visual ethnography than still photography if one is speaking of making a comprehensive record.Whole events can be shown, human action can be seen in context, and the subjectivity of a culture can arguably be communicated more successfully in moving images, with or without sound, than still photos. These arguments are taken up in the many histories of anthropological filmmaking15 and lie outside the purview of this book. We are left to ponder the fate of visual ethnography as represented by Bateson and Mead’s project. It began a tradition that continues to this day, despite the waxing and waning of ethnography per se. It continues to show the potential of analysis drawn from

58 Visual ethnography imagery, and it reminds us of the effort that in-depth projects require. The imperfections are easy to see, but the work never seems to be diminished by the critical attention it continues to receive.

Post-Balinese character While in-depth photo-based visual ethnography did not become the centerpiece of visual anthropology, it has not disappeared. Examples include Richard Sorenson’s visual and ethnographic study of child development in New Guinea,16 anthropologist Danforth and photographer Tsiaras’s photo study of death rituals in rural Greece,17 Franck Cancian’s photographic study of central American peasant culture18 and Charles and Angeliki Keil and photographer Dick Blau’s study of the role of music in Romani lives.19 It is important to mention the influence of John Collier’s previously cited text Visual Anthropology (1967), and the second edition with his son Malcolm, published in 1986. While these books addressed the larger topic of visual anthropology and their interest was more toward material culture, they also discussed visual ethnography, especially the use of ethnographic photos in interviewing (see Chapter 3). Recent noteworthy examples of what would typically be classified as visual ethnography include Steven Feld’s study of what he calls “jazz cosmopolitanism” in Accra.20 There is Sara Wiles’ forty-year visual ethnography of the Arapaho, which I will describe in depth later in this chapter, sociological studies of male homelessness by Mitch Duneier and Ovie Carter and a second by Philippe Bourgois and photographer Jeff Schonberg, also discussed later in this chapter. The list is rather short, and while there is no simple explanation for this trend, the answers may not be so different than our musings on the inability of Balinese Character to revolutionize the discipline several decades ago. I am heartened by the great projects that do not come with a blueprint, hungry publishers or any real guarantee of success. They are evidence of work driven by intellectual passion and commitment.

Rail tramps and homelessness I turn to my first project, a study of railroad tramps that became my Ph.D. (1975) and my first book, Good Company.21 This was the first in-depth visual ethnography by a sociologist, in the spirit of reflexivity, I will share the story of why and how I did the research. As were many of the first generation of visual sociologists, and as I reflected in Chapter 1, I was inspired by documentary photography swirling around me and inspired by changes in sociology and anthropology that were part of the cultural revolution of the times. I was introduced to anthropology by Jim Spradley, then championing a method called ethnoscience. Spradley’s study of the Skid Row homeless22 was one of the first studies of an American sub-culture that showed the limitations of the then standard sociological tool kit of questionnaires, statistical analysis and assumptions of scientific objectivity. He was interested in photography and invited me to work with him on a project that became my dissertation and first book.While people were not then talking about “reflexivity,” my immersion in my fieldwork and first-person narrative led me to integrate the story of the research process with the story of the culture. I had moved to Boston after graduating from college to work on Spradley’s project. For several months I photographed Boston’s Skid Row, a tough inner-city neighborhood unlike any I had known in Minnesota. It took some effort to be comfortable on the streets and at first I kept my distance and used two cameras, one with a telephoto lens. Eventually, I overcame my fear and began to talk to the people I met, explaining my intentions and

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Figure 2.3 A bottle gang in Boston. The tramps described the several hours they had spent getting the seventy cents for the pint of White Port, which they drank fast to get a buzz, and to avoid getting hassled.

asking for their help. I hoped that my respect for them and sympathy for their tough times was evident.The photos I gained from those experiences, made mostly with a wide-angle lens, were entirely different from those made at a distance. I began to use less equipment and eventually evolved to a smaller and much less obtrusive camera, a fifteen-year-old Leica M, which did not even have a light meter. A friend named Jesse moved into our small urban commune in downtown Boston. Jesse was an African American from New York who had been a junkie and a pusher for most of his adult life and as a result he knew the streets. He recognized that I did not, and often accompanied me on my forays into Boston’s most intense neighborhoods, to look out for me, he said. Jesse told me what he would photograph were he doing the project, and in this way became a mentor. He also became interested in sociology, and we began tape recording our discussions about his life as a pusher and junkie in New York City. Jesse described it as a difficult life of violence and instability, yet with an odd regularity. He made his way uptown every day, with several hundred dollars in cash to buy drugs from Mafia, who, he said, were violent, unreliable, dishonest and not very smart. Thanks to him thirty people got what they defined as their daily medicine and Jesse made enough to support his growing habit. Until it did not, and until his Mafia contacts got into a mini war about who would control his little piece of the drug trade. He escaped to Boston and for many months was clean and making a new life, for a time in a methadone clinic working for friends of my boss at the Harvard School of Public Health. Then it fell apart; he

60 Visual ethnography became addicted again, got in big-time trouble and disappeared. It was heartbreaking, and undoubtedly much worse for Jesse, whom I never saw again. This was far beyond reflexivity; this was life and research as the same messy and wrenching life. The homeless men Spradley had studied in Seattle often talked about jumping freights and I had read many books about hobos and tramps, extending back to the nineteenth century. In the early 1970s older men on the road might have been on the trains with Woody Guthrie, amazing as that sounds. From the vantage point of my life in Boston I had no idea if rail tramps still existed, but exploring the idea struck me as compelling. The great days of the early 1970s! Taking a temporary leave from my job, I hitched from Boston to Wyoming, where I met an old friend, Prang, and we made our way to Seattle, where I photographed the streets and missions Spradley had described. After a few weeks getting to know the Seattle Skid Row we drove over the Rockies and into prairies looking for the tramp culture we had heard about on the Seattle streets. We followed the tracks of the old Great Northern in Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas, hanging around freight yards and camping in the old van I had purchased in Seattle, or setting up our tent in overgrown fields. Most of the tramps we met wanted little to do with us, but some were encouraging enough that I began to imagine joining them on the trains. That fall I began graduate school and enrolled in a one-year course on fieldwork with a quizzical and yogi-like professor, Charlie Fisher. After reading several fieldwork classics (including George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London), I decided to spend two weeks on Boston’s Skid Row in mid-winter, carrying pocket change and hoping to find refuge in a mission. Like many universities, Brandeis closed for a month due to the energy crisis and I had the time available and my fieldwork project to complete. I dressed in ragged clothes I had bought in a thrift store and brought an ID. I took the subway one frigid afternoon in February to Boston’s Skid Row and walked for an hour before finding my way to a mission. I was startled by how I was treated; I was suddenly either invisible or an object of disdain. I was afraid of the night, and my teeth were chattering. I nearly got back on the subway and went home. I vividly remember the Pine Street Inn, the mission where I found a bed. There were more than 200 beds on each of two floors, eighteen inches apart and nearly touching end to end. My bed was a straw-filled mattress covered with a plastic cover, a hospital sheet and a single green army blanket.Turned one way I looked directly into the eyes of a tramp; turned the other I stared into the eyes of another. Though the night the room was filled with cries emanating from anguished dreams and incessant coughing that would cascade from one end of the room to the other. The tall room had a wall of windows and the headlights of elevated metro trains filled the room with eerie light as they passed very close to our windows in regular thundering intervals. We were dispatched to the street at 5:30 am to pass the twelve hours until we were let back into the mission. There was a diner that catered to the homeless and for a quarter I could buy a cup of coffee and a donut in the early morning darkness. I looked for subway grates in out-of-the-way sidewalks where hot air would warm a tramp huddling under cardboard. I stood in line for watery soup and a bologna sandwich at a police station (and another to go, my food for the day) where I would also get my chit for another night in the mission. I looked for work at the temporary labor office but was never hired even though I was more fit and healthy than anyone else waiting. On a couple of occasions, I ventured into public libraries until I was asked to leave. I searched public phones for change and felt elated when I found coins. How remarkably wonderful those nickels and dimes seemed! I learned to fill up time and I was surprised at how soon it seemed natural

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Figure 2.4 Inside the Pine Street Inn, a mission where more than 400 homeless men slept each night.

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Figure 2.5 The Skid Row diner was the only place open at 5:30 am, and it was packed with men just let out of the mission. A quarter would buy a cup of coffee and a donut, and it was brief respite from the cold.

to be a bum on the streets. But I did not get deeper into the lives of those I met beyond learning the practicalities of getting by. Near the end of my experience I asked my boss and friend Frank Speizer, whom met me every fourth day to check on my safety, to fetch my camera from my apartment. This was the old Leica, covered in black electrical tape. I snuck the camera into the shelter, feeling compromised doing so, and took a handful of photos by holding the camera on my lap. I set the aperture, shutter speed and focus without viewing through the viewfinder (Figure 2.4). At night I cradled it in a small bag on the cot where I slept; others had precious possessions they kept by their sides, so this was not in and of itself unusual. I took the camera with me during the last two days on the street and made images of my new normal such as the diner in the early hours of the day (Figure 2.5) and the line at the police station waiting for our chit to enter the mission. This was the only time I have photographed with a hidden camera. When I rode freights I told anyone who asked that I was a graduate student in sociology working on my Ph.D.This was such an odd thing to say that most people just burst out laughing.What a great line! I remember a tramp responding to me by replying: “Actually I’m a banker!” I was sharing the life, eating out of dumpsters and dodging rail cops; I could claim to be anything I wanted. My ambivalence about my photos I made in the mission remains, yet I still use the photos to show the culture I experienced. During these two weeks I also spent several hours each day writing field notes in the small journal I carried. These were raw, direct observations, with the sociology in the background. I felt the words were embodied interpretations, much like the photos I was more and more involved with making.

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Figure 2.6 Looking down at the couplings between train cars, en route.

64 Visual ethnography After being on the streets in Boston I realized that sociological fieldwork meant involving myself much more deeply than I had previously been willing to do. For the next three summers I rode freights through the American West, with my camera and notebook, looking for tramps and trying to understand their worlds. On the longest of these trips, five weeks from the middle of August to early October, I met up with a tramp named Carl, a WWII combat vet who had spent most of his adult life on the road. We met late one afternoon in the Minneapolis freight yards; he was crouched in a boxcar, and he did not want any company. It was the last night of his three-week binge and he was drunk and filthy. At that moment he did not strike me as the cultural informant I was seeking. A day later and several hundred miles later we met again in the wrong freight yard in Montana, having been directed to the wrong train by a brakeman who wanted us out of his yard. I offered food I had brought along (a loaf of white bread made into peanut butter sandwiches) and since he was nearly broke and hungry he accepted. As a result we “buddied up” (as tramps described their relationships on the road) and continued on toward the apple harvest in Washington State on the freights. It was not unusual for an older tramp to have a young companion, so I was accepted as Carl’s sidekick. I told Carl I was a writer, and after he got through his hangover he shared his personal story and his thoughts about the tramp life and the characters we encountered. He was articulate, well read and intelligent, though hardened by his experiences and not without remorse over the demon alcohol. He also idealized writers and mentioned reading George Bernard Shaw and Jack London and admiring them as cultural outsiders. I did not mind being mentioned in the same sentence with either one of them! Carl’s life consisted of episodic drunks, often weeks long, followed by rough traveling, hard physical work and abstinence from alcohol, until the job ran out or he got bored and went on a binge that would last as long as his money held out. Tramps, including Carl, picked fruit and other crops from Washington to Florida, and did other work connected to agriculture such as cleaning grain spills in freight yards or herding sheep. Tramps were often cheated by labor contractors and exploited by employers, so many of them (Carl included) felt a connection to the hobos of the past and the radical labor unions of the homeless like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He knew this history in more detail than I would have imagined or guessed. Carl described obvious categories in the tramp culture, including different kinds of tramps such as bindlestiffs, homeguards, jackrollers and mission stiffs. These were labels earned by what people did, what they looked like and what one might expect from them. Carl also explained the informal rules about getting drunk, riding trains, sharing food and appearing in public. The rules, he said, were understood by everyone but followed by few, and I felt I was beginning to understand the culture and realized that these conversations, where Carl spoke of his own disappointments and dreams, would not have happened had we not been on the road 24/7, in boxcars, hobo jungles, camping in patches of grass behind junk fields and other landscapes of the tramp. Tramps often rationalized their lives as more authentically American than the middleclass vacationers that we saw driving along the highways alongside our freights. They saw themselves as independent, tough, individualistic, living in the moment, escapees from the materialistic trap of the middle class. They rationalized the binges that used up all their wages as well-earned vacations. As Carl explained this, he added that it was all fine and dandy to stay high for several days in a nice hotel, but he sometimes drank when he was not planning to, and then the binge emptied his pockets and transformed him from a person with a degree of self-respect to a pathetic beggar on the street, drunk and filthy, the way he was, in fact, when we met in the Minneapolis freight yard.

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Figure 2.7 Carl, drying out.

During the five weeks we were together I watched Carl transform from a bum to a worker in the apple harvest. I noticed that he put his wages away for whatever the next step of his life would be. I had begun to drop little hints that maybe Carl might set aside some of his wages for the cabin in the woods he said he dreamed of. But when I said those things he did not even answer. In the end I simply walked out of the orchard cabin where we had been living and I never saw him again. Of course, I have no idea of how he ended his days, and the question has haunted me throughout my life. The project became my dissertation and eventually, my first book, Good Company.23 For the first edition the book designer made the final selections of the photos and organized them to made good design sense, but with little sociological logic. Quite frankly, I was so thrilled to be working with the University of Chicago Press that I did what I was told to do. In later editions I made the design decisions and did my best to sequence the photos to tell the cultural story. I had also come to realize how deeply a project like this touches a researcher. They take years to do and years to publish. Often they involve leaving the comforts of home. The questions that guided my research became my personal questions because I shared the society of which tramp culture was part. I was to write and photograph several more ethnographies, each one having a similar impact. As I look back I realize how impossible it is to talk about the things I have studied without speaking about the life I have led. The book helped the visual sociology movement get underway, just as photo documentary and visual ethnography had begun to shift away from their previous spotlights into the focus of cultural criticism.24 The flood of documentary books that examined American social issues had receded; the society that in the 1960s had been so interested in

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Figure 2.8 Freight yard with brakeman. A brakeman was often willing to tell us which trains would take us toward our destination if we spoke the lingo. For example, you asked, “Where’s the highline hotshot making up?” And if the brakeman was friendly he might answer: “He’s making up on the second hump, with three helpers and a BN crummie.”

critical self-examination was suddenly less so. Photo documentaries even became rare in professional associations such as the Society for Photographic Education, as interest in cultural studies soared.25 A minority of sociologists used qualitative methods and only a handful were interested in visual approaches. Finally, there were only a few publishers willing to publish books that were partly artful and partly sociological, books that looked and read like nothing in the market at that time. For a while those of us who were interested in visual ethnography and documentary were a small group. I was among the lucky few to work with a sympathetic editor, Doug Mitchell at the University of Chicago Press. Over the next decades Doug brought four more of my visual ethnographies to press, and though Doug is no longer with us the Press carries on in its eclectic, innovative and often courageous publishing decisions.

Reflexivity in context The rebirth of visual ethnography has been partly due to growing interest in what is referred to as reflexivity, which I have previously introduced. How exactly is the term defined? Gillian Rose describes it: reflexivity is a crucial aspect of work that participates in the so-called cultural turn. There reflexivity is an attempt to resist the universalizing claims of academic

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Figure 2.9 We had made it as far west as Wenatchee, where we left the cross-country freight and looked for a local freight that would take us up the river to the orchard towns. Carl boiled water, pulled a bar of soap and razor from his pack, then washed and shaved. He handed the soap and razor to me and said: “Clean up or go up the river alone.”

knowledge and to insist that academic knowledge, like all other knowledges, is situated and partial. … It is becoming typical that before the results of a piece of research can be presented, the author must explain how their social position has affected what they found, a kind of autobiography often precedes the research results.26 Sarah Pink links reflexivity with the ethics of representation when she states: “In some cases this almost resembles a race to be the most reflective—a race that has inspired some to define visual anthropology as an unreflexive, unethical and objectifying practice.”27 It is also true that the separation between non-reflexive and reflexive visual ethnography may not be so firm as critics assume. For example, Balinese Character, created at a time when anthropology emulated science, does not include the critique of science implied in reflexivity. However, it is clear that both Mead and Bateson knew that social science knowledge did not come about in a vacuum, and that visual data helped tell the story of the knowledge being made. In the case of Good Company, reflexivity came to mean more than noting the effect of my presence on the tale I told. It also meant understanding how much the experience changed me. Living in a mission with lost men and on the road with tramps challenged every dream I cherished. I needed to tell that story as well as the story of the men I was with.

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Figure 2.10 After several days of traveling without a place to make a fire we relaxed at dawn in a jungle in Wenatchee. “What’s breakfast without toast?” I kidded Carl. He fashioned a bread holder out of a green branch and toasted our last pieces of stale bread.

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Figure 2.11 We boarded a bull local for the ride up the Okanagan River, to the towns where the apple harvests awaited us. At one point there were 38 men in the boxcar and a train conductor, who I had never seen speaking to a tramp, leaned in the door and detailed where he would be stopping or slowing enough to jump on the run. The freight train had become a passenger train for the agricultural workforce.

As a result, I spoke about my own vulnerabilities, fears and disappointments as part of what I experienced doing fieldwork. I had been with Carl for a few days, traveling more than a thousand miles across the country in boxcars when I wrote: The afternoon’s travel was broken by a two-hour wait on a siding north of Missoula. Finally an Amtrak passenger train sped past and we reclaimed our tracks to begin another ascent of the Rockies. The late afternoon sun kept slipping behind the mountains, then reappearing as we climbed higher and higher. The train worked hard and the ride was slow. We spent hours without conversation, and in the privacy of our trip I felt a deep loneliness. As we passed one of the few towns on the route— Thompson Falls, Montana—the train veered close to the houses and I watched a family through their window, sitting down to supper. The tramp crouched in his corner, now just a dark shadow. I felt lost and alone in the din and the approaching darkness. Near the end of our five weeks together Carl said to me, “I’ve watched you change— you’ve learned that you can make it on the road. Now, if something overloads, it’ll always be in the back of your mind—you might find this too attractive, but maybe it will be a different version.You don’t have to ride freights to be a tramp, you know …” In the end, studying tramps meant studying myself.

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Figure 2.12 Strawberry, a tramp on a flatcar.

Figure 2.13 The employment office for temporary agricultural workers, Brewster, Washington. We waited with other tramps for several days before being hired by a local orchard owner. With a brief handshake we became workers, trading our rough camping for a small cabin in the orchard.

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Figure 2.14 Apples, which we picked. The fruit bruised easily and we had to pay attention, but it was otherwise straightforward and good work. A full day’s work paid a reasonable wage, well over minimum wage rates, and our cabin was free.

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Figure 2.15 A hobo jungle in late afternoon, waiting for tramps. We spent several days waiting by the employment trailer and then, in the late afternoon, we trudged back to a camp where we cooked up what food we had.The food had been harvested, stolen or found in dumpsters. Mostly the same tramps met each day at the jungle. A few left were hired out each day, and others joined.There would be a fire, shared food and stories. After the evening darkened tramps would walk into the orchard to find a place to sleep under the trees. There was strict protocol: you did not follow a tramp for several minutes. It was assumed you and your buddy, if you had one, expected to be left alone. Carl and I slept under these canopies made by the branches laden with fruit for several nights, separated by the trunk of the tree.

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Figure 2.16 The freight back. When the season came to a close I headed back to graduate school in Boston. I had been warned by Carl and others not to ride freights out of the harvest because thieves—jackrollers—would have their sights on tramps who they imagined would be carrying their harvest wages. Indeed, an hour after taking this photo two jackrollers in Whitefish, Montana, tried to rob me. Only bravado and an idiot’s luck kept my notes, tapes, film and camera (and wages) from disappearing into the abyss.

Modern examples of reflexive visual ethnography I now look briefly at two visual ethnographies that take on similar topics as Good Company, roughly speaking, male homelessness. Each take a different strategy to the integration of theory, the reflexive stance of the ethnographer and the challenges of photographing culture. Righteous Dopefiend The first is a several year project by anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer Jeff Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend,28 that explored the lives of homeless drug addicts in San Francisco. This is a compelling project that demonstrates an interesting tension between the photos and text, that is, the photographer and the theorist. Schonberg worked close to the people he photographed to the point that there seemed to be no border between him and his subjects. The images have a compelling verisimilitude that literally thrusts the viewer into the images. Schonberg could only have achieved this visual intensity by deep immersion in the world he photographed. Bourgois describes the role of photos:

74 Visual ethnography The composition of the images recognizes the politics within aesthetics; they are closely linked to contextual and theoretical analysis. Some photographs provide detailed documentation of material life and the environment. Others were selected primarily to convey mood or to evoke the pains and pleasures of life on the street. Most refer to specific moments described in the surrounding pages, but at times they stand in tension with the text to reveal the messiness of real life and the complexity of analytical generalizations.29 The photos take the viewer to the street, and they depict the strategies used by homeless addicts to survive, negotiate their relationships and interact with the various institutions that both use and service them. They are intense close-up images that portray disease, filth, violence, death and disorder. They also show the affection, friendship and love that connects addicted street people, as they take care of each other and sometimes lie to, abuse or exploit each other. The photos detail interaction between homeless people and police, welfare agencies and hospitals, and they also show how the homeless addicts sometimes abuse each other. They show the conditions that the fieldworkers shared, often sleeping in the open with them, and fighting their battles or serving as intermediaries between the homeless and institutions. Sociologist Bourgois’ text often parallels and elaborates the meanings of his research partner’s images. A tension (for me) develops between text and images when Bourgois theorizes about what he sees as predatory institutions that further weaken the vulnerable (even as they claim to take care of them). The photos suggest different relationships between addicts and hospitals, social workers and others, who appear devoted to the survival of those they serve.This leaves the reader and viewer with the interesting question of which interpretation to follow. Perhaps the theory best describes the reality of the addicts’ worlds and this cannot be visualized. Likely the theorist and photographer experienced a different social world or perhaps the essence of the culture is a partly contradictory combination of the two. Sidewalk Mitch Duneier’s Sidewalk30 combines Duneier’s text with photographs by photojournalist Ovie Carter to document the lives of the precariously housed in Greenwich Village who make their livings by scavenging and selling used books and magazines, and sometimes panhandling. Duneier worked on the project for several years and participated in the life as well as observing it. Duneier was white and young and the people he worked with were African American and several years older. Carter, fifteen years older and African American, worked alongside him as a photographer. Carter continually experiments with perspective and framing. For example, his initial photo shows three used book and magazine tables from directly above. The photo would have been made by bending out of a window from a few stories up, using a short telephoto lens. The photo shows how people are distributed through the space, examining books and talking to each other.The tables are orderly and packed with merchandize, and they are set back from the pedestrian traffic, which flows along the bottom of the frame. The single image takes in much of the social scene and suggests in important ways how it is organized and operates. We then see a social map of the relevant streets, spread across two pages. Imposed on this map of streets and sidewalks are thumbnail portraits of the 24 African American street

Visual ethnography 75 vendors who played a role in the study, and three Caucasian administrator/politicians who first defended and then opposed street vendors.The thumbnails are captioned with names and brief identifiers. Howard is “a comic book vendor who takes no shit from anyone,” Hakim, the central figure in the ethnography, is “a book vendor who for years held court on Sixth Avenue.” We are thus introduced to the cast of characters whose lives consist of an orderly social topography, which is also the main theme of the book: this social world is driven by norms and other longstanding social understandings. The photos are otherwise uncaptioned, and they cover at least four aspects of street vendors’ lives: the work of scavenging and selling, the places homeless people spend time when they are not working the tables, the interaction between panhandlers and the public, and the interaction between street vendors and police. A handful of photos also show the politicians (white, well-dressed) in their efforts to rid the streets of the vendors or sometimes to protect their interests.While there is a great deal of discussion about whether it is ethical or legal to reveal the identity of research subjects, and many university IRB boards specify that the identity of all research subjects be hidden, Duneier and Carter not only name and picture them, but their book gives them voice. Duneier and a filmmaker Barry Alexander Brown continued the project with what Duneier called a “second methodological appendix” in a film also called Sidewalk.31 The film weaves together several modes: Duneier lecturing, with images from the fieldwork experience, moving to Jamaica, to where one of the figures in the book was deported. In the end the project goes beyond reflexivity to become a life merged with research. The final photo from the book shows worn-out shoes of a bookseller, photographed at street level.The paths these shoes have taken navigate the regulations, laws and other cultures of the street, as well as the consequences of the bookseller’s own habits, both productive and not. The main informant, Hakim Hasan, joined Duneier in university seminars, is listed as a co-author and wrote the afterword to the book. Some of his colleagues on the street joined him in California at one point to participate in university seminars, at normal adjunct professor salaries. The photographer, Ovie Carter, is a professional photojournalist, and Duneier reports that Carter shared insights on what Duneier was learning based on his own experiences and from caretaking his brother, who was then struggling with addiction. One of most admirable aspects of the book is the degree to which Duneier himself immersed himself in what he was studying, even running his colleague’s book table when he was away. Dunieier’s sidewalk project (book and film) made a strong case for visual sociology for the sociological mainstream. More importantly, it acknowledged and celebrated the lives of people who were little understood, contributing in several ways to the culture of the street.This was evidenced by one of the street bookseller’s comments that when he found a copy of William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces in the garbage, he read relevant chapters before selling it. He took pride in his place in the vibrant social scene of the sidewalk that Whyte had described. In these three visual ethnographies of homelessness the images and texts operate with different tensions and to different ends. In all instances we experienced research that was far from our normal lives. I was both writer and photographer, which influenced both how I did my work and how the text and photographs related to each other. For Bourgeois and Schonberg I felt the photographer defining the street life and the theorist making sense of a world he best understands theoretically. Finally, Duneier recounts his experience as an advocate as well as an ethnographer, and his colleague’s photographs offer visual context

76 Visual ethnography and explanation. Duneier’s visual ethnography continued beyond the book in the form of a movie that partly relied on images made by Carter, and then went further.

Studying Arapaho reservation life I turn to the work of Sara Wiles that describes, over more than forty years, Arapaho Indians who inhabit the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming. Sara Wiles was an MA student of Anthropology in the early 1970s and was posted to central Wyoming as a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA). She moved to the town of Lander, just south of the Wind River Reservation, became a social worker for several years on the reservation and coincidentally completed her anthropology MA at Indiana University. She became close to several families on the reservation, where she continued to work and visit, and for more than forty-plus years she continued to photograph, using the same Canon film cameras she began the project with in the early 1970s, as well as a medium-format camera used primarily for natural-light portraits. In the documentary film that describes her work, we see her printing photos in her home darkroom, which she did throughout the project. Wiles’ project is unprecedented in duration and depth. In addition to her two visual ethnographies (2011 and 2019), published by the University of Oklahoma Press,32 a leading publisher of American Indian studies, there are three films that describe her and her work.33 The books are every visual ethnographer’s (or photo documentarian, for that matter) dream: large format and printed in duotone on coated paper. No expense has been spared to reproduce the photos to the near quality of the originals.They are artfully made visual ethnographies, to begin with. But they are far more than coffee-table books that turn the furrowed faces of elders and the stampeding horse riders into familiar stereotypes. In her books as well as her comments in the documentaries she quietly distances herself from photographers such as Edward Curtis, who photographed American Indians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as “romantic primitives,” noble, beautiful and tragic. She suggests that photographers such as Curtis did a disservice to understanding across the cultural divide because the power of his images makes such convincing stereotypes. Indeed, Curtis’ photographs are achingly beautiful and idealized, still reproduced in many volumes, posters and cards. They show American Indians after the final wars with colonizing white settlers had pushed them to the brink of extinction but somehow still in all their glory, poised, erect, beautiful. Interestingly, two of the people Wiles photographed were also photographed by Curtis sixty some years before. One was Mary Agnes Crispin Goggles, whom Curtis photographed in 1910, identified only as “Arapaho Water Girl.” Sixty-five years later Wiles was invited to photograph Mary Agnes’ eightieth birthday party, where, she writes, the women who gave the party “pulled the shawl around her, tied the scarf around her neck, and brushed her hair.”34 The photo of the elderly Mary Agnes showed the “imperfections, her poor health, her weariness. They show her not as a member of a vanishing race but as part of a living community, receiving gifts and being pampered.” In describing the setting and showing the unvarnished reality of the person she photographs, Wiles offers some of the contexts that give the images wider meaning. A visual ethnographer must continually decide where to point the camera and how to frame, expose, focus and otherwise use the technology to record an idea.The director of the Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker, told his photographers working in the late 1930s to photograph “what is taken for granted now but will be remarkable fifty years from now.” This is a challenge the photographer faces, and it goes against

Visual ethnography 77 the urge to create photos that will be memorable or beautiful. Many of Wiles’ photos are aesthetically memorable as well as ethnographically rich, however. For example, an image on page 9 of The Arapaho Way shows nine priests in religious regalia and a single Indian woman dressed traditionally walking away from the Catholic reservation mission. The angle of the photo makes the cross appear to be leaning to the side and emerging from one of the priests’ heads. The Arapaho woman, in native dress, is comfortable in her own identity. Wiles describes the role of Christianity on the reservation in a balanced way, noting that fundamentalist Christian churches, on and off the reservation, “refuse to allow any type of Indian symbolism, music, or worship, and their preachers preach against traditional beliefs,”35 and that the Catholic mission also was in diametric opposition to traditional Native beliefs and practices.Yet for many it has been possible to participate in both religious communities and to look backwards sympathetically to their harsh and repressive experiences under the thumb of the priests and nuns. It is also the case that much was and seemingly is accomplished by the religious presence on the reservation. Many of her portraits are striking and beautiful, especially those from early in her project that present elders who seem patient, understanding and sympathetic. Many of Wiles’ photos are descriptive: we see Rubena Felter Hernandez at work as a highway flagger, John Yellow Plume kneeling by a gas pump, filing a container with gasoline.There are four portraits of Margie Pizarro, whose grandmother was photographed by Edward Curtis. Wiles shows her living alone in a modest rural dwelling that sits by itself in the bare landscape; her family has scattered. Wiles places her near her modest home, and we wonder at what it would mean to live alone in the windswept Wyoming landscape. In these and other similar images there is not a hint of romance, rather we see life as lived. A visual ethnography of the taken for granted. Had Wiles been satisfied with compelling portraits she would have extended the tradition begun by Curtis. But the portraits are a part of her visual mosaic and, as such, they are generally environmental portraits, placing a person in contexts she says are missing or misrepresented in the art photos of Native Americans that popular culture produces and consumes. The first of the two books, Arapaho Journeys, published in 2011, features more portraits of elders and family life, especially with those she was close to. Her second book, The Arapaho Way, published in 2019, focuses more on rituals, ceremonies and shared life. For example, she photographed “giveaways” where a family honored a deceased relative a year after her or his death, by giving special members of the community gifts they had saved for months to accumulate. The “giveaway” consists of people sitting patiently or speaking from a podium. The photos show people shaking hands in thanks with heads bowed in respect. In one photo, made in 1994, a nephew of the deceased is pictured stirring the pots of boiling meat for the memorial feast for his uncle with a shovel. Wiles also photographed and described naming ceremonies, where a name is given to a child, passed on from a living relative. Here, as well, the images portray the postures and expressions of respect that participants offer each other, often while cradling a child who will be named. Wiles also photographed the continuation of old skills and crafts such as dress and quilt making, working with beads and butchering wild game (she did not accompany hunters and photograph the killing of wild game).Women and men both butcher in the same manner as the meat is cut into small, thin pieces and hung on lines for weeks to dry. There are strips of meat hanging from outside porches, drying, in the backgrounds of several portraits. Wiles photographed powwows, cooking frybead as reservation fast food, playing handgames, making music and dancing. She sometimes positions herself behind Indians who

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Visual ethnography 79 Figure 2.17 Arapaho elder Josephine Redman did not expect to have to her picture taken on New Year’s Day, 1986. She was all dressed up in one of the many hand-sewn dresses she had made for herself (and always wore), a scarf around her head tied under her chin and her favorite Pendleton blanket around her shoulders—an elder Arapaho woman’s idea of getting all dressed up. She and her sister, Mary, were headed for the community hall at Ethete, Wyoming for the New Year’s Day dances when I showed up at her home. Josephine’s daughter and I had arranged, without telling her, for me to stop by with my camera just as she was getting ready to leave. Anxious to get to the dances, Josephine wasn’t very happy about the situation. Mary disappeared into another room. But with assurances it would only take few minutes, Josephine relaxed a little and I quickly snapped one roll of 35 mm film. Then we all went to the community hall. Thirteen years later, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (now the Buffalo Bill Center of the West) in Cody, Wyoming, used this photograph of Josephine as the primary publicity photo for an exhibit of my photographs. During the Center’s annual powwow, a traditional honor dance was held to honor Josephine and the role her photograph had played in the exhibit. She herself was there for the honoring. Now ninety-six years old, she was pushed around the dance arena in her wheelchair. A framed copy of this photograph was carried around the dance arena by members of Josephine’s family—a common practice in an Indian-country honoring. Having known nothing about all this in advance, I felt as if the photograph was no longer mine but had taken on a life of its own. Source: Photograph and caption © Sara Wiles, Courtesy of the artist

are themselves watching the activity. In these photos, instead of concentrating on the action such as musicians playing their music, we see them through a ring of Indians watching each other perform.The topic of the photos become not the entertainment but the how native culture is watched and experienced by their peers and occasionally by outsiders. She also photographs cultural revitalization projects in Arapaho language schools and traditional dance and music performed in fairs and other public events, with participants wearing headdresses and Indian jewelry. She photographed pilgrimages to the site of the Sand Creek Massacre of Arapaho and Cheyenne in Colorado that led to forced relocation of the Arapaho to their Wyoming reservation in the nineteenth century, a reenactment of a deep cultural trauma, since, as several Indians noted, this history was not taught until recently. Among the more hopeful events photographed and described is a ceremony where white kids from the oddly named Arapahoe High School outside Denver and teens from the Arapaho reservation honor the naming of the non-Indian school with the tribal identity. Here Wiles veers into the personal story of Buffalo Soldier Wolf, who, from 2002 to 2006, left the reservation and relocated to Colorado to attend and graduate from the white school named after her people. With this and other similar passages Wiles contextualizes powerful photos of a confident and accomplished native person. Wiles’ photos are integrated into the community life, hung in the reservation institutions and homes. She notes that this is part of a larger pattern, where historic, decontextualized photos such as those of Mary Agnes (Curtis’ photo of the Arapaho Water Girl) taken in her teen years are being identified, recontextualized, and given new meaning … [they are] copied and hung on walls … symbolic of the past and a confirmation of contemporary identity. Photos, including my own, are used to educate younger generations about the individuals, history and traditional culture of the Arapaho tribe.36

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Figure 2.18 Footrace, Arapaho Language and Culture Camp, 1989. Between 1988 and 1992, the Arapaho Language and Culture Commission, a tribally sanctioned committee promoting Arapaho language and culture, held annual week-long day camps along the Little Wind River in the heart of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Each year, several hundred people gathered at the remote site, including children of all ages who were bussed from reservation communities. Back then, many elders who were fluent speakers of the Arapaho language and carriers of the old ways were still living.This was an opportunity for them to gather, speak their native language and tell stories, both old and new, to each other and to the youth. Activities included craft classes, storytelling, language classes, footraces and swimming in the river. The setting was a photographer’s dream—one bank of the beautiful river was lined with tipis (used as classrooms) set back among the trees. Clusters of both children and adults interacted with each other in a variety of both casual and structured ways. It was a privilege to be able to hang out for a week and snap as many photos as I wanted of what turned out to be one of the last demonstrations of pre-reservation camp life. There was, for myself at least, an occasional feeling of being transported back to an earlier time. Since 1992, schools and other organization on the Reservation have sponsored smaller language and culture camps in other, less beautiful locations. People still talk about the wonderful large villages that were created along the banks of the Little Wind River for a week each summer back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In this photo: LaDawn Smith won a footrace during the 1989 camp. Other runners included her brother Tyson (far left). Nolita Wallowing Bull is cheering her on, and camp counselor Darlene Whiting-Conrad is watching. Source: Photograph and caption © Sara Wiles, Courtesy of the artist

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Figure 2.19 Cheyenne Frontier Days is a large community heritage event held in Cheyenne, Wyoming for nine days each July. It features rodeo events, parades, music and dance performances, and military air displays. Since its beginnings in the 1890s as a sort of stationary wild west show, Native American performers have played a prominent role; since 2007, the Little Sun Dance and Drum Group of Ethete, Wyoming have been the performers. Organized by sister-cousins Sandra Iron Cloud and Aleta Moss, Little Sun consists primarily of family members, with other non-family performers added as needed. Sandra and Aleta are close relatives of mine—I was adopted into their family in the mid-1970s. In both 2010 and 2013, I took advantage of these close family ties to spend a few days with them in the Indian Village, a private living area with tipis (for sleeping) and cooking and bathing facilities within the Cheyenne Frontier Days park. One evening as we rode in a people-mover (a wagon pulled by a tractor driven by a Frontier Days volunteer) to the large arena for a pre-rodeo performance, five-year old Amya Her Many Horses was casually pointing at—perhaps counting—all people in the wagon. Anyone not familiar with the context of this photo could easily interpret it as an unfriendly gesture, some kind of confrontation with an outsider who didn’t belong. Despite knowing the full context in which the photo was taken, I myself am a little disconcerted by the photograph: the strong, steady serious gaze of a young girl boldly confronting the camera, looking right into my eyes as I snapped the photograph, surrounded by the deep evening shadows. “What do you think you are doing here?” she seems to be saying. Others visible in the photo include Rebecca Iron Cloud in the lower left, in front of her daughter Cassandra Iron Cloud, and Jaci Iron Cloud standing at the back left. Source: Photograph and caption © Sara Wiles, Courtesy of the artist

82 Visual ethnography In the beginning of this massive project her focus was on the private lives of a few families; one she grew so close to that they gave her an Arapaho name, Hono’usei, or Sky Woman. In the second book she explores the experiences of sojourners who moved between reservation life and the world beyond its boundaries. In these essays she includes photos made by the subjects themselves. She also includes photos spanning almost 100 years of American Indian life on or near the reservation. Wiles calls her work “mosaic ethnography” that does not pretend to be a definitive account. She is a champion of the people she has spent her adult life getting to know and befriend.Yet the reservation has deep social problems, beginning with poverty, lack of job opportunities and alcoholism, which has a public face in border towns such as Riverton. As an ethnographer, she needed to address these issues. She chose not to be present where alcohol was used and did not photograph its effects. She decries negative stereotypes of American Indians as “dehumanized, a conquered people disappearing from history … nameless winos lying in the streets of reservation border towns,”37 and chose not to contribute to them. Instead, people affected by the social problems speak. Their stories and surrounding images sometimes include accounts of the destruction caused by alcoholism. She approaches the topic by describing the shooting of two Arapaho men sleeping in a detox center in Riverton, by a white resident who acted in full awareness of his actions and gave himself up immediately. One victim, James Goggles, Jr, though shot in the head, survived and lives in a disabled state, the other perished. Wiles photographed Goggles in a wheelchair, waiting for a dinner in his honor, and she also photographed a well-attended rally and march in the town where the violence took place. As a result, instead of reinforcing our existing stereotypes by photographing public inebriation, we see the culture dealing with tragedy spinning out of addiction, racism and violence and reaching out for peace and understanding. It is a remarkable way to photograph a very complex idea. Wiles portrays a culture that is poorly understood and often treated with condescension, racism and willful ignorance. Her two books argue convincingly for the power and grace of visual ethnography. We learn a history of a culture that has been previously photographed as one of tragic, romantic heroes, and then powerless victims of colonial repression. Rather, she speaks of the preservation and celebration of old traditions and meanings, and writes: “For many Arapahos living on the Wind River Indian Reservation today, it is still possible to live ni’iihi’—in a good way.”

Recent visual ethnography In the decade since the first edition of this book was published visual ethnography has had a growth spurt. In addition to books previously mentioned, and articles and photo essays in established journals in visual anthropology, a new interdisciplinary and experimental digital journal, Visual Ethnography,38 has become the center of debates and experiments that could not have been imagined only a few years ago. For many of us who harken from the sociological side of the fence, this has felt like a godsend. As a project that is not connected to an organization or an established publisher, the project has the freedom to define itself as it finds useful, and to make its work available to a wide audience with or without dues or subscriptions. To begin, a digital journal of visual ethnography eliminates the expense and difficulty of publishing visual imagery, and an arbitrary article or even journal length disappears. It now becomes possible to include video and active links to digital resources. This is an

Visual ethnography 83 obvious point and well understood; we are not new to virtual publishing, after all. But its match to visual ethnography is particularly apt. The journal, edited and published at the University of Basilicata in southern Italy, has appeared twice a year since 2011. A cursory examination shows a vast range of topics set in a vast range of places and situations.There is a strong sense of the discipline welcoming new faces, ideas and teaching and research settings, most outside the global north. Since about half the publications are open access and the individual subscription fees are extremely low, some of the work is easy to study.The publishing project thus welcomes those who do not belong to a university, and faculties of universities whose libraries do not subscribe. I separated the published articles and videos into four general categories.These include in-depth study of significant new or recent visual ethnographic films, reconsiderations of important studies in the history of visual ethnography, self-contained visual essays and longer visual ethnographies (this is most of what is published), and discussions of visual ethnography itself.This final category includes new forms of research collaboration, the merging of teaching and research and entirely new methods in visual ethnography, including drawing and participatory filmmaking which will be discussed in Chapter 3, on Research Collaboration. Examples from the journal Visual Ethnography In an early issue of the journal, Jasmine Pisapia (2013, 2:1)39 reinterpreted Ernersto De Martino’s classical visual ethnography of tarantism, an uncontrolled frenetic dance ritual believed to be caused by the bite of a tarantula, published in English as The Land of Remorse in the early 1960s. De Martino’s study was the first ethnographic study in Italy, and De Martino, working with a psychologist, ethnomusicologist and a filmmaker, relied on photography and film. As result the study is also regarded as the seminal Italian visual ethnography. Pisapia’s study fills in background information on the multi-disciplinary character of the research and specifically the role of film and photography. Sam Peck (2012, 1:2) offered a similar reexamination of an important moment in visual ethnographic history, Sol Worth and John Adair’s 1960s Navajo film project, Through Navajo Eyes. Peck examines original field notes and other “backstage” writing, but he makes a point not to include materials that were not meant for publication as he examines debates and disagreements within the research team. As a result, he provides a sense, as Pisapia did with her study, of the messy character of research, but he stays away from unnecessary drama. The project was the beginning of what came to be known as photovoice—that is, teaching those who would normally be the subjects of ethnographic films to make their own images and films. This was a vastly important moment in visual ethnography, and it is useful to know its full story while being fair to those who worked more than fifty years ago, in a climate of different political sensitivities. This larger framework led me, and others, I am sure, to see the project realistically, both in what it claimed to have done and what it did accomplish. By publishing these and other similar studies the journal reinvigorates and refines the history of the subdiscipline. We see the studies as humanly constructed and open to re interpretation, elaboration, and more realistic appreciation. The journal also looks deeply at significant ethnographic films. These include Rosella Ragazzi’s 2012 (1:1) overview of her film Firekeepers (made with collaborators, two of whom were subjects of the film) which focuses on “joik” singing as a form of native

84 Visual ethnography activism in Lapland, and Francesco Marano’s analysis of Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s experimental film Leviathan. Both Firekeepers and Leviathan are unorthodox ethnographic films, Firekeepers because it openly advocates for the preservation of the cultural form it records (the haunting chant singing of the Sami of northern Scandinavia, the product of a language with only a few hundred remaining speakers) and Leviathan because it follows no rules of ethnographic cinema. Both of the films represent the “ontological turn” in visual ethnography. Ragazzi writes: “We did not only wish to pursue an archival quest to document contemporary joik, but we wanted to render through film how joik is a vehicle for existential revelations of the self to one’s community, to imagined communities, to former and future images of self as a Saami subject.” In the case of Leviathan, the film is largely shot with GoPro cameras, often mounted on drones that hover over North Atlantic fishing boats crashing through high waves, recording seemingly another reality altogether. There are no actors per se, though we see hulking workers grunting one-syllable commands to each other in the dangerous environment of the fishing boat as they butcher alive the fish we consume. The waterscape in which they exist reminds one of an LSD-induced hallucination with flocks of gulls lit by the bright lights of the boat sometimes seen flying upside-down against the black skies. Whether or not the film is ethnography it is unforgettable, as is Ragazzi’s presentation of joik singing, which seeks to transport the viewer to another reality rather than explain it. These studies are useful to both teachers and students. In fact, the articles inspired my own interest in both films, which I easily located (Firekeepers due to the kindness of Ragazzi, who responded to my email, another example of the spirit of community that seems pervasive in the journal; and Leviathan through a one-view rental on YouTube). In this way the journal seems like a living extension of the discipline, informal and inviting. Photo essays and self-contained visual ethnographies The bulk of the journal’s publications are self-contained photo and video ethnographies. The briefer are called photo essays and generally feature more images than text and the longer studies are full article length visual ethnographies. There were more than fifty of these published in the decade of the journal’s existence, and rather than summarize them all I will suggest how particular visual ethnographies show the range of both topics and photographic styles in visual ethnography. This is also a nod to those I find particularly moving, powerful and otherwise compelling. Sabina Cuneo’s photo essay is on the “La Madonna delle Galline” (2012, 1:2), an annual Easter ritual lasting several days in a small town near Naples in which hens are symbolically offered to the Virgin Mary.This is a visually rich and even exotic ritual, with hundreds of participants dancing, playing music, walking in processions in which flower petals are thrown and fireworks are blown up. Cuneo works close to the action and takes the viewer into the flow of activity. The essay includes more than fifty black-and-white images. This is visual ethnography, though it records the surface of the culture. We do not know how the participants define the experience. The photos are from 1999 and it would be interesting to re-photograph the event to see if it has become, like other Italian communal rituals, a tourist event. The visual essay is visually compelling but limited. It tells us what images can do alone, and that a great deal. But perhaps the essay suggests a distinction between purely documentary expression and what we expect from visual ethnography.

Visual ethnography 85 Raj Sekhar Aich’s recent study (2021, 10:1) of the human/animal interaction in a large reserve known as the Sundarban in West Bengal and India is a multi-dimensional visual essay. The Sundarban is the largest mangrove forest in the world, the estuary of the holy river Ganges, inhabited by Bengal tigers, river crocodiles and sharks, called kamots. Men who enter the mangrove forests to hunt and gather are often attacked, killed and eaten by the tigers, while others fall victim to the river crocodiles. Both of these species are ritualized in puja, which are public acts of worship in local celebrations, complete with iconic figures representing the predatory creatures. The sharks often swim upriver in the brown waters and attack and often kill women, who are wading in the river, working in the prawn larva industry. Aich notes that these shark attacks are largely left out of the public consciousness, while tigers and crocodiles become iconic objects of worship and public address. The author says this is unfortunate for two reasons: the lack of understanding and sympathy for what is happening to the victimized women, and because it limits the understanding of the human/shark ecosystem, which threatens the sharks. He brought attention to this human-animal conflict by designing a kamot icon (a large symbolic statue designed by his artist brother) for the local Ganga Devi, or river worship rituals that are elaborate and pervasive (Figure 2.20). He writes:

Figure 2.20 I reached Gosaba to help in the final phase of building and painting the idol.The smell of the muddy flowers beckoned; each pond smells and looks different because of their flowers and leaves. I was going to meet the idol for the first time. Her skin was of clay and she was sitting on a plinth with her child on her left and beneath her, her shark. The artisan was getting her ready to be painted. She was ready the next morning. I went and sat with my shark made out of clay, her cold skin still wet to the touch swimming beneath the waves of her mother, the Ganga. She was not a monster, she preceded us by millions of years, and she symbolized power and balance of the natural world around us. Source: Caption and photograph by Raj Sekhar Aich

86 Visual ethnography For a while I struggled with the traditional dictum of the passive observant anthropologist in the field, and not to cross the line between activism and ethnography. As I was pondering this, my friend (anthropologist and artist) Soosan Lucas reminded me—my job there at that time was to tell stories of the women and the sharks who have not been heard before, my sense of identity was less relevant than the work at hand, and this endeavour was too important a task, not to support. Aich photographed all aspects of this story: the gruesome injuries women endure from shark attacks when they are not fatal, making the kamot icon and the elaborate public ritual/celebration that followed.The study’s multi-dimensionality explores a cultural phenomenon (a human/animal interaction with terrible consequences for both) simultaneously with the anthropologist’s attempt to intervene through the creation of a cultural form that fits into parallel rites and rituals. In this example reflexivity itself becomes a visible story. It was for me an inspiring example of how anthropology can work in the world, and how visual ethnography can tell a multi-level cultural story. Other examples of visual ethnographic essays with vivid visuality are Mary Lopez Yuste’s exploration (2013, 2:2) of representation and identity represented in clothing worn by Burmese women living in Thailand; and Narayan Kaudinya’s essay (2014, 3:2) “Winter Highways:The Wait of Baltistan,” which portrays life on the high border between India and Pakistan. This is a contested region where life is extremely harsh, yet the essay communicates a slow pace of existence where various pieces oddly fit well together. These are two of at least ten similar essays that argue for a visual style done in a documentary or even artistic manner. Several other papers and essays use imagery in different ways for different reasons. Often in these instances the imagery is neither dramatic, pictorial nor interesting in and of itself, yet it add a layer of meaning that could not be achieved by words alone. I will briefly discuss two examples, Florine Ballif ’s “Portraying the Divide City: Photographing the Belfast Peacelines” (2014, 3:1) and Elena Kilina’s “Cubicle Shelter: Public Space for Private Use?” (2012, 1:2) which explores “the intersection of new urban spaces and new modalities of ‘homelessness’ in Japanese cities.” Ballif, a French political scientist, was interested in physical walls and boundaries, between fifty and a hundred in number, that divide Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast. Originally erected in the 1970s in an era of great conflict, they represent how “security tool[s] … were also elements of urban space.” She is interested in “different rationales of various stakeholders” involved in an ongoing adaption of these barriers in the city that do not appear on maps but strongly influence how life is lived in a divided city. The walls, however, do not “compartmentalize” the city, rather they “seemed to be markers of contested space and conflict.” Some are highly visible and others recede into the urban landscape. From her anecdotal encounters with children during her photo explorations, these boundaries define where one goes and where ones does not. They have gone from physical boundaries to mental constructs that define what people do or do not do together. Her goal as visual researcher was to inventory what came to be known as peacelines. She sought to photograph in a “clinical and exhaustive fashion” to record details rather to offer than interpretations. In a reference to Barthes’ distinction between “stadium” and “punctum” (photos that catalogue; photos that move us, said simply), she suggests that photos by the former may belong more to art and journalism and the latter to academic research. To illustrate she compares her cool and scientific images with those of

Visual ethnography 87 photographer Frankie Quinn, who photographed the same urban walls from a humanist documentary tradition and whose images “grab the viewer’s attention with an architectural detail or the presence of a person.” She includes examples from Quinn’s work in her paper to contrast her own and to make a case that a scientific, empiricist version of visual ethnography works well for her purposes. Kilina’s research on “cubicle shelter” in modern Japan (2012, 1:2) also uses photography in an informational way, though her work has a limited scope. Her research explores how several categories of precarious citizens and visitors in Japanese cities use manga cafés, that is, cafés where visitors have access to hundreds of volumes of manga (graphic novels, for the uninitiated), video games, internet-connected computers, vending machines and snack food, and in some instances cubicles where it is possible to sleep. Those using manga cafés as temporary housing range from salarymen who miss their trains home or backpacking travelers who need the cheapest place to spend the night, to unemployed or under-employed who cannot afford conventional housing, teens who have moved out of their family homes and people suffering mental illness. Nearly all are male and of several age-based categories. She studies cafés that serve people, called nanmin, or refugees, who use the cafés as an alternative to homelessness. Kilina briefly interviewed several manga café owners and spoke to several people who stay in these the cafés and made photos that conveyed the atmosphere and concrete reality of these clean and bare spaces. While this is a fascinating phenomenon and an interesting start on what could be a deep visual ethnography, we are left with several questions. The residents must have some resources to rent the 6-foot square rooms, and that poses the question of what happens to those entirely without resources. Her photos do not show beds in the cubicle, only a chair and computer table, and this infers how they sleep but does not show it. She shows where visitors can purchase ramen noodles or rice, but here are no toilets or showers shown in any of the photos, yet she mentions that in some cafés they are available.The photos, perhaps made with an inexpensive cell phone (the research was completed at least twelve years ago), show interior spaces and men abstracted into shapes several feet away, when they appear at all. We see clean linoleum surfaces and shelves with neatly arranged comics. Lighting is harsh and the sleeping surface is an upright chair. The subjective aura of the space is entirely anonymous, yet this is a reading of the images without input from those who stay there. In a more extensive study, we might gain more understanding of the meanings of these spaces, whether there are communities of manga enthusiasts, whether various users interact, whether there are norms of appearance and behavior that define the acceptable in these communal spaces and what the author’s own experiences in these spaces were. In other words, to be a visual ethnography we should expect an analysis of culture as well as the spaces where it is performed. The essay does one thing well, that is to visually overview the physical space. It is not fair to criticize a study for not being what it did not say it was (in this case a reflexive, interview-based study), rather I am imagining that as a follow up to this work. My last example shows that photography can serve as both a mirror of the self and a path toward healing. In this sense it can be referred to as “radical reflexivity” and it differs from the articles and essays discussed above. I am referring to Jason Yuk-Fai’s visual autoethnography, “Making Depression Visible: A Decade of Self-Portraits” (2021, 10:1), which includes thirty-three self-portraits, often digitally manipulated or constructed. Autoethnography—the merging of ethnography and autobiography—has been a small movement within ethnography for several decades, but, according to Yuk-Fai, until now it

88 Visual ethnography has excluded self-portraiture. For his work to make sense as visual ethnography we must accept, first, that study of the self is also a study of the social dimension, a central tenant of autoethnography and implied in reflexivity in general. He cites relevant arguments in anthropology, familiar since at least the 1970s. Since Yuk-Fai’s autobiography explores his decades-long struggle with chronic depression, including the contemplation of suicide, we are seeing mental illness is in part an individual phenomenon, and in part social, which draws us all the way back to Émile Durkheim’s classic study of the sociological basis of suicide. What is remarkable about Yuk-Fai’s project of self-portraiture, lasting over a decade, is his recognition of anthropology as “a method of hope, which urges anthropologists to go beyond simply producing knowledge about the world, but also respond and move forward with it optimistically to build more progressive futures.” He turns to the idea that through “remaking—the reimagining, re-creation, reinterpreting of past images and photographs in my case” one confronts despair and creates hope, whether on the personal or political level. Since most of the self-portraits in his article are digitally constructed as well as created though the posing and arrangements of physical contexts, he sees his own actions as healing. He writes that “what I do know is that my practice in creating visual traumas [self-portraits of depression] may have played a large role in preventing me from physically practicing self harm or attempting suicide,” and that specifically the creative act

Figure 2.21 Self-portrait from “Making Depression Visible: A Decade of Self-Portraits,” by Jason Yuk-Fai.

Visual ethnography 89 of photography, including digital manipulation, “can … generate new and unexpected meanings and insights.” Finally, “the act of remaking and re-creating also holds the power of reimagining different kinds of social realities and futures, while acknowledging and giving closure to pains of the past.” My own thoughts about this essay included admiration that he summoned the courage to write and share, and that it represents a welcoming perspective on what visual ethnography is and what it can become. Finally, it offers an unprecedented and quite extraordinary use of visual metaphors made creatively from constructed images, to communicate his ideas. This pocket review of an imaginative new journal is an invitation to read and participate.The editors have done their best to invite experimental approaches to their platform, to keep up with the latest in participatory ethnography practices, and to refine the memories of the subdiscipline. It seems from my immersion in the articles and films to be a fittingly adaptable platform, accessible (generally), visual and in color when appropriate, and intellectually eclectic.

Filmic sociology and visual ethnography Sociology lives next door to anthropology. We are good neighbors, but retain strong fences. Film has been part of anthropology almost since its formative decades but there have not been sociological films, that is films made by sociologists for research purposes, until recently.There are great debates in visual anthropology, great films and great experimentation, dating to the 1930s.There are also several books and journals on visual anthropology, academic societies and film festivals. This history, interesting as it is, goes beyond the scope of this book. Visual sociology has always included film, but it has been a small movement. In the following I briefly discuss films in which one can consider visual ethnography by sociologists Molly Merriman, Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, Greg Scott, Alexandra Tillman, Jim Ault, and John Grady, who are all professional sociologists. I do this by suggesting how film has communicated sociological ideas in ways words and images cannot. This topic is covered in Sebag and Durand’s text on what they call “filmic sociology,”40 so I recommend that book from seasoned filmmaker/ sociologists for far greater depth. Many of the films I mention are available on YouTube or Vimeo, free or for modest rental fees, so I also recommend that you pursue this topic further by watching the films themselves. My comments are meant as an antipasti at best. What distinguishes sociological and filmic visual ethnography from its anthropological cousin? To generalize, anthropology began with culture at the center of attention and early anthropology treated culture as knowable through the tools of science. Recall the critiques of Balinese Character in the 1940s as not measuring up to scientific expectations. During the 1960s the postmodern turn introduced reflexivity into the discussion of fieldwork of all sorts. Film did not lose its focus on culture, but it was now seen as created by humans, producing statements rather than scientific records. In recent decades interest in ontology in anthropological film has offered the idea that knowledge is not necessarily transferable from one culture to another. This has led to a rich history of competing claims and intellectually figured strategies in anthropological film. It is a complex story, well told in several books, and not to be repeated here. Sociological film comes from a discipline with an underdeveloped interest in culture, and few arguments about how film operates as a method or subject. There is freedom in

90 Visual ethnography the lack of tradition and it shows in the films I mention. At times, the connection to visual ethnography may be a bit of a stretch. The early films of John Grady41 and Jim Ault,42 dating to the 1970s, were essentially documentary films covering partly cultural topics. These films explored working-class politics and community, but had more influence outside sociology than within. The discipline largely treated film as a curiosity in this era, interesting but, at best, on the edge of the discipline. An exception was the previously mentioned 2010 film epilogue to Mitch Duneier’s Sidewalk (previously discussed), which filled a huge auditorium at the annual American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting. For a moment it seemed there might be a recognition that film could extend and expand sociology in a revolutionary manner, but that possibility is only now gaining momentum. It is also true that many sociologists turned to documentary film in their teaching, for example, using Frederic Wiseman’s films of institutions in courses that explored parallel themes, but few had the training or resources to venture into research activities that demanded a huge commitment and were not taken seriously by the discipline. My first film, co-directed and produced with Steve Papson, Ernie’s Sawmill, a 23-minute color 16 mm documentary, was shown in a handful of conferences and seen as a curiosity rather than serious research by my own department. The current generation of filmic sociologists arrived with the digital revolution (see Chapter 6) and thus their work is unfettered by the punishing costs of earlier moviemaking. Because it exists largely in its own world adjacent to sociology it has come to life with a wild freedom, producing extraordinarily creative, occasionally unpolished films that do sociology in a new way. In the end, rather than summarizing each filmmaker’s work, which could quickly become its own monograph, I comment on why and how I see this work as visual ethnography. Immersion in the subject. Filmic sociology, especially with modern technology, makes ethnography more direct, vivid and immersive. This is true for all of the filmmakers listed above, but for me best represented in Greg Scott’s films about heroin injectors, who live in largely invisible homeless communities in Chicago’s tough back corners. Scott’s characters are often jagged from shooting up. Their arguments flare up and threaten to become violent; their logic is fuzzed from the drugs. Old deals are sometimes sorted out. Because of the hand-held camera, jump cut editing, grainy exposures and imperfect sound recording the viewer feels a part of this precarious way of life. By immersing us in the culture of addiction and precarious living we make these people human. The film Matrimony43 portrays a wedding ceremony between two people in love, who negotiate the rough life of hustling and getting high in the context of their years-long commitment to each other. It brings the realization that being a drug addict is but one aspect of their lives. In fact it is the central feature, but not the only one. Seeing and hearing them go through what all of us have makes the tragedy of their addictions even more poignant. Words spoken in their human contexts. In the first of several of Jim Ault’s ethnographic films about fundamentalist religion, Born Again, we listen to the main character who calls himself “the Preacher” speak directly to the camera, to parishioners looking for solutions to their problems and to congregations as he performs from the pulpit. These are Goffmanesque moments where various presentations of self are performed. Watching and hearing Preacher speak adds levels of meaning to his identity. Is he a conman who has convinced himself of the truth of what he communicates? He seems to question how he could have come into so much power and influence. His strong patriarchy mixes into wild

Visual ethnography 91 anti-science, where he insists, to a large congregation, that the world was made in six days, and scientists know it, too. Without hearing how the words are spoken, without watching the sweat glisten off his brow, seeing the muscles in his jaws tighten as he grips the podium and leans toward the congregation, we would understand little of his charisma. Seeing all the non-verbal nuances in Preacher’s presentation of self makes the film succeed. Embodying, not describing material culture. Sociologist/filmmaker Molly Merriman is well known for her films about social justice, paying homage to homeless victims of sexual abuse, queer culture and transitions from long-term prison terms to the outside world.44 But one films stands out as a study of the cultural meanings of material culture. This is the film County Crush, which shows rural Midwesterners rescuing agricultural combines from junkyards, fashioning them into movable beasts and competing with other similarly compelled farm folk to get these behemoths running for one last glorious gladiatorial confrontation before cheering crowds at the annual county fair.The film shows wintering farmers with some time on their hands welding, fashioning, forming, rebuilding these rusted, neglected hulks to prepare to crash into each other, trying to break pieces off until they are unable to move. The last one moving is the winner. The machines are twice the height of a big car and as wide as a truck, like huge dinosaurs made from erector sets. The topic films well because of its sheer materiality and because the stories that accompany the making of the machines are delivered in Midwestern deadpan. Dueling combines feel quintessentially American: purposeless, fun, mechanically challenging and oddly engaging. It speaks to a male and rural culture that uses tools and engineering skills for enjoyment. It seems like a colossal waste of resources and time, but the machines are junk to begin with and fixing them involves creative problem solving. In the end it is great fun to see these huge machines crash into each other, and it is difficult to know why. The film offers lessons about rural society, leisure time and improvised intelligence. A written ethnography could tell a version of this story, but it would never take us inside the material reality of this odd and endearing part of rural life. It is also worth noting, I think, that there is a great deal of talk about how communities and cultures need to produce their own film and written records, that at best sociologists and anthropologists should facilitate the self-production of ethnography. It is true that projects such as collaborative filmmaking and photovoice bring vast new knowledge to the discipline and to the communities from which they emerge. But Merriman’s film demonstrates that a person of decidedly different background and interests can enter the culture, listen and learn, and craft an extraordinary filmic statement. Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand’s 1991 film Rêves de chain (Dreams on the Assembly Line) also crosses cultural boundaries, from France to a Toyota truck assembly line in California. There are two competing narratives, visual and spoken. The assembly line is an actor in the film, always moving, commanding the actions of workers who together assemble one truck after another. It is a startling juxtaposition of human action routinized and adapted to a never-ending parade of trucks awaiting tiny contributions from a small army of workers. The assembly itself almost seems relaxed and mesmerizing and the actions are extraordinarily simple: pick up a nut, insert it into a powered driver, zing it onto a waiting bolt. Presto, a truck rolls off the end of the line. The second narrative consists of interviews with workers, team leaders, group leaders and a union representative. For sociologists who grew up reading Donald Roy’s studies of the mind-numbing, physically destructive and authoritarian assembly line jobs in the 1950s,45 the Japanese model is revolutionary. Workers learn several jobs and rotate among them.Team leaders (in this case, most were women) speak of their preference for working

92 Visual ethnography with people and how they solve problems that spring from individual idiosyncrasies or engineering problems in the assembly line process itself. The company pays for educational leave; worker salaries are high and medical and vacation benefits are progressive. The film is edited to juxtapose the interviews with the work, rolling by on the line. Moving back and forth from short interview segments to the line leads the viewer to compare what people are saying with what they are doing. There are more questions asked than answered. It is an enlightened version of an assembly line, but humans still would rather not do it. Sociological and visual studies of culture also take on global issues. From this perspective I will briefly examine Alexandra Tillman film’s Cadence and David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s Girl Model. Tillman received her Ph.D. in sociology under the guidance of Sebag and Durand, in one of the first (if not the first) Ph.D. dissertations in sociology that was equal parts film and text. Tillman’s film, Cadence, like several films made by the team of sociologist David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, often explores the cultural side of global economic and cultural forces. Tillman examines a father/son relationship in a postindustrial town in northwest France. The postindustrial ruins have become a site for rave parties and art installations, and the younger generation in a low employment region seems lost. The father, who had worked in the factory, is a world apart from the son, who searches for a meaningful life where work is scarce.The film, like several by Redmon and Sabin,46 connect the micro to the macro. Redmon and Sabin’s most provocative example is their feature documentary, Girl Model (2011), winner of many awards and seen by international audiences, which traces the experiences of a thirteen-year-old girl from Siberia who is scouted by the film’s anti-hero to become a fashion model in Japan. Child modeling bumps up against other forms of child exploitation, including prostitution. The film itself flirts at being pornographic, portraying young girls in near nudity parading before “judges” who publicly objectify them.The filmmakers, in several interviews, stress that they were not attempting to create a documentary exposé, but rather to describe the routines of the girl models’ lives, moving from country to country where they often do not understand the languages of those with whom they deal, as they become a commodity in an international industry where a certain appearance has been defined as saleable and seductive. If film can do visual ethnography so creatively, why have so few sociologists have pursued filmmaking? I imagine among the answers is the thorny issue of academic respectability. Film makes an argument and documentaries are often referred to as having a “point of view.” Sociology is supposed to be scientific, or at least to open about what role bias has played in qualitative research of all types. Films are successful when they stir our sentiments and are seldom assessed by the strength of their logic. In other words, on the surface, they seem to be the opposite of academic sociology, which claims to be theorydriven and without an emotional component. There is tension in these two positions, although they are much more complex than I am suggesting, especially several decades into a postmodern revolution that challenged the “scientific” basis of social science knowledge and ever more pointed commitment to reflexivity. Compared to a book a film is a small communication, potentially powerful in its impact but seldom more than two hours in length. The number of words spoken in a typical film are startlingly few in comparison to a book. The words that make up a book would take several hours to read and perform; thus there is the possibility of nuance that is not possible in film. However, a film can wedge itself into our memory in ways that

Visual ethnography 93 seemingly no other communication form can achieve, and even a film of a few minutes’ length can cover an extraordinary range of events and sentiments. I am thinking of Greg Scott’s short film of Paul McCartney introducing Ringo Starr at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, “Behind the Scenes with Paul, Ringo and Friends.” Here are two old friends playing themselves as graceful elders; Ringo dancing gracefully as he performs as an unremarkable singer, and Paul showing off sixty-year-old bass lines from a song performed on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964 as though he is a teenager at a party. Mostly we see the two of them as a couple of old friends who seem to have snagged a personal filmmaker. I do not expect to forget several of these scenes. Film has arrived as a vital part of visual ethnography and visual sociology more generally. It may become the most influential form of our discipline in the years to come.

Summary I have hoped to show that visual ethnography is vital in the era of digital photography and filmmaking. It is integral to visual sociology and, while essentially an offshoot of anthropological visual ethnography, I would vote that it is distinctive. Others see no difference between anthropological and sociological visual ethnography, photographic or film-based, worth arguing about. Perhaps I will change my vote and agree with them. No matter the brand, it is in my view the most creative social science, and the most humanistic. It crosses boundaries few academics even approach, drawing the researcher in deeply. We see into worlds of others, often controversial and problematical. It moves our hearts as it appeals to our logic. There are few blueprints and fewer rules, except that we tell the truth as we come to know it.

Notes 1 https://visualsociology.org/ Issues relating to ethics in visual research are discussed in depth in Chapter 6. 2 Danforth, Loring and Alexander Tsiaras. 1982. Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 3 Knowles, Caroline and Douglas Harper. 2009. Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 4 Mead, Margaret and Gregory Bateson. 1942. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. 5 The racism at the basis of the Holocaust was often argued in visual terms. In occupied France Jews were made to fit a stereotype of the vilified Eastern European Jew by restricting their access to razors, soap and new clothes, and were made to wear the yellow star that reminded all of their religion and culture. Reports of the times show how Parisians came to see Jews as different because they were made visually different through Nazi policies. 6 See Edwards, Elizabeth, ed. 1992. Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. New Haven: Yale University Press. 7 Charlton, Noel. 2008. Understanding Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth. Albany: SUNY Press, p. 79. 8 Mead, Margaret. 1995 (1972). Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: Kodansha America, p. 234. 9 Mead and Bateson, Balinese Character, p. 50. 10 Mead and Bateson, Balinese Character, p. 46. 11 Mead and Bateson, Balinese Character, p. xv.

94 Visual ethnography 12 Collier, John and Malcolm. 1986. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Second edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, p. 210. 13 Murphy, Lois Barclay and Gardner Murphy. 1943. Reviewed work(s): Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead; American Anthropologist, New Series, 45 (4), Part 1 (Oct.–Dec.): 618. 14 Murphy and Murphy, Reviewed work(s), pp. 617–618. 15 An introduction to visual anthropology as embodied in ethnographic filmmaking is found in the work of Jay Ruby, especially his essay “Better Straw than Concrete: A Critique of Bill Nichols’View of Ethnographic Film,” which is found on his website, http://astro.temple.edu/ ~ruby/ruby/. Jay Ruby’s ideas lead to an examination of standard texts such as: Heider, Karl. 2006. Ethnographic Film. Revised edition. Austin: University of Texas Press; Grimshaw, Anna. 2001. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The postmodern critique, as voiced in: Marcus, George and M. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Marcus, George and James Clifford. 1986. Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. As Jay Ruby notes, the critique initiated in these and other of the first-generation postmodern voices on ethnography had been around for decades. For example, Del Hymes’ Reinventing Anthropology (Second edition, 1999, University of Michigan Press, first edition in the late 1960s) was crucial in helping me figure out how to do and write ethnography in graduate school; in fact, Del Hymes was the outside reader for my dissertation. In any case, one can easily see that ethnographic film is a complex affair with a great deal of contrary intellectual energy driving it on. 16 Sorenson, E. Richard. 1976. The Edge of the Forest: Land, Childhood and Change in a New Guinea Protoagricultural Society. Foreword by Margaret Mead. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press. 17 Danforth and Tsiaras, Death Rituals of Rural Greece. 18 Cancian, Frank. 1974. Another Place. San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press. 19 Keil, Charles and Angeliki and Dick Blau. 2002. Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 20 Feld, Steven. 2012. Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five MusicalYears in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 21 The book was a peculiar life event, sailing on uncharted waters. Brandeis University, where I got my Ph.D., supported unorthodox research, which my project was. However, there were no models in sociology for what I wanted to publish. After 17 rejections and three revisions (the last under the stern mentorship of Bruce Jackson) the book was published by the University of Chicago Press due to the support of Howard Becker and the visionary commitment of Doug Mitchell, the new sociology editor at the Press. The book was nationally reviewed, leading to appearances on Good Morning America and an hour interview on Studs Terkel’s NPR radio program, and it was the first visual ethnography published in sociology. It subsequently was translated to French and Italian and is still in print in its third edition. See Harper, Douglas. 1982. Good Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Translations: Good Company: Un sociologo tra I vagabondi. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1999 in Italian; Les Vagabonds du Nord-Ouest Américain. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998 in French. 22 Spradley, James. 1970. You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads. Boston: Little, Brown. 23 Harper, Douglas. 1982. Good Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 24 For an extended discussion, see Harper, Douglas. 1993. “On the Authority of the Image:Visual Sociology at the Crossroads” In Denzin, Norman and Yvonna Lincoln, eds. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 403–412.

Visual ethnography 95 25 I was editor of a book series, Visual Studies of Society and Culture, for several years and attended several SPE meetings to solicit projects and found much interesting photography, but very little visual ethnography or documentary. 26 Gillian Rose. 2001. Visual Methodologies. London: Sage, p. 130. This quote is from the first edition of her book and in subsequent editions she has expanded her discussion of reflexivity, using it as a way to evaluate each visual research method she examines. 27 Pink, Sarah. 2003. “Interdisciplinary Agendas in Visual Research: Re-situating Visual Anthropology.” Visual Studies 18 (2): 187. 28 Bourgeois, Philippe and Jeff Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press. 29 Bourgeois and Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend, p. 11. 30 Duneier, Mitchell and Ovie Carter. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux. 31 The film can be freely accessed at www.imdb.com/title/tt1553312/ 32 Wiles, Sara. 2011. Arapaho Journeys: Photographs and Stories from the Wind River Reservation. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press; Wiles, Sara. 2019. Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on The Wind River Reservation. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press. 33 These are: “Main Street Wyoming: Photography of Sara Wiles” (www.pbs.org/video/main-str eet-wyoming-photography-of-sara-wiles/), “With a Cup of Tea: Sara Wiles” (www.youtube. com/watch?v=MKOqtvu6YWI www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKOqtvu6YWI) and “CSPAN Cities Tour—Casper: Sara Wiles ‘Arapho Journeys’.” (www.youtube.com/watch?v= Abn6sFt6XH0). 34 Wiles, Arapaho Way, p. 20. 35 Wiles, Arapaho Journeys, p. 11. 36 Wiles, Arapaho Journeys, p. 20. 37 Wiles, Arapaho Journeys, p. 17. 38 www.vejour nal.org/index.php/vejour nal. The journal announces itself: “VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to researches on 1) the production and use of images and audio-visual media in the socio-cultural practices; 2) digital cultures; 3) contemporary art and anthropology; 4) anthropology of art; 5) vision and gaze; 6) senses and culture; 7) objects, design, architecture and anthropology; 8) bodies and places in an anthropological perspective; 9) theories and methods in anthropology. “The topics of VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY cross visual anthropology, anthropology of media, digital and visual cultures, museography, contemporary art, photography, film studies, cultural studies, anthropology of the senses, anthropological theory” (from the journal website). 39 Most of the articles are unpaginated so I reference them by date, volume and issue number (there are generally two issues per year). 40 Sebag, Joyce and Jean-Pierre Durand. 2022. Filmic Sociology:Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave. 41 The two most well-known films to which Grady contributed were Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston (1978) directed by Richard Broadman and produced by Broadman and John Grady (et. al.), distributed by CINE Research Associates, and Down the Project: The Crisis of Public Housing (1982) also directed by Broadman and produced in part by Grady. 42 Jim Ault’s films are listed on his website: http://jamesault.com/ 43 Greg Scott’s films are listed on his website “Sawbuck Productions” (www.sawbuckproductions. org/) and many are available on YouTube. 44 Her films, many of which are available on YouTube, are listed on her Vimeo website https:// vimeo.com/mollymerryman 45 Roy, Donald F. 1959. “Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction”. Human Organization 18 (4): 158–168. 46 Their films are listed on the website of their film production organization, Carnivalesque Films: www.car nivalesquefilms.com/

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3

Visual research collaboration Douglas Harper and Karijn Kakebeeke

Overview Collaboration in visual sociology research boils down to people using images to learn something together. In the most common example researchers take photos in fieldwork settings and talk about them with people they photographed (photo elicitation); at other times researchers give cameras or movie cameras to people and encourage them to photograph their own worlds (photovoice). This chapter focuses primarily on photo elicitation (written by Harper) and photovoice (Kakebeeke and Harper), with references to emerging practices and experiments.

Photo elicitation Photo elicitation (PE) was defined in the first text on visual anthropology, published in the late 1950s by John Collier, describing the work he did as a photographer on an ethnographic research team in Mexico.1 The term photovoice (PV) is claimed by Caroline Wang and her colleagues in reference to their work in China in the early 1990s, though John Adair, Sol Worth and their colleagues had previously worked with Navajo Indians to produce the first movies made from within the culture looking out, and there were other examples of collaborative research dating back several decades, as I shall note later. In the first edition of this book, I catalogued and analyzed every example of PE and PV research I could locate, about 200 articles and several books. In the past ten years there has been a rapid increase in the use of these methods in sociology and anthropology and many other disciplines, along with new forms of collaboration based on sharing film and video production, collaborative sociologically relevant mapmaking via CIS, collaborative museum curating and website construction, to name a few. Instead of brief comments on hundreds of examples I will use a case-study approach, looking in depth at a few examples.While I have worked in photo elicitation, I have never experienced photovoice, so I was pleased to come across the work of Karijn Kakebeeke, an old student, now a colleague, who had spent much of her career doing photovoice. It seemed natural to collaborate with her on this chapter.We recorded several hours of discussion of her work via zoom and have edited these into an overview based on her experience. Willie’s working knowledge Many years ago I had finished my book about railroad tramps and was casting about for a new project. I was then living in a neighborhood of farmers in northern New York with DOI: 10.4324/9781003251835-4

Visual research collaboration 97 my young family, several miles from the university community where I taught. As I got to know my neighbors, I began to question the prevailing wisdoms of rural sociology, which I was called upon to teach. The rural sociological canon celebrated agricultural modernization and economic development; human capital was measured in the formal education of farmers and Big Agriculture was the unquestioned Holy Grail. Not that there was necessarily anything wrong with modernization and change, but I felt that the old intelligence tucked into the nooks and crannies of the North Country, the old social norms and patterns of social exchange, seemed worth studying in their own right. Though this was clear to me early on, it took me a long time to find a way to figure out a way to proceed. About 5 miles past our farmhouse lived Willie, who I later referred to as a “Zen master of junk.” His shop was an irresistible place for a photographer, full of old machines rusting away or sinking into the landscape and a cast of regulars who were as tattered as the scene they inhabited. The first time I had met Willie I had pulled into his shop after closing time, gasoline pouring out of the carburetor of my old Saab, threatening to turn my car into a torch. After a brief conversation he invited me to use his tools to take the offending pieces off the engine and then he performed a quick and simple fix on the improperly designed part, before handing me back the tools and telling me to “button it up.” In lieu of payment he invited me back for the evening to play guitars together, as he had seen mine in the back of the Saab.That night playing music and sipping ginger brandy was the first of many. I began spending a lot of time in the shop, fixing the old cars we drove and restoring our 100-year-old farmhouse. Willie and I had become friends, and he saw me through the rejections and rewrites of my first book. But as I began to get serious about studying Willie’s work, I realized I needed a new approach. On the tramp project there were obvious subjects to photograph, boxcars, hobo jungles, missions and Skid Rows; ways to ride trains, get drunk and find food; and cultural categories such as kinds of tramps and train workers.The visual ethnography had been relatively uncomplicated, although that is not to say that it had been easy. In Willie’s shop the visual culture was more elusive. I was at that time teaching my first courses in visual sociology and had read John Collier’s 1967 text Visual Anthropology. I was in struck by his description of what he called photo interviewing, which meant inserting a photograph made by the ethnographer into a research interview. It is a simple yet revolutionary idea. A typical interview is a conversation where each party responds to what they think the other person means by what he or she says. But while this may accurately describe conversations between people who know each other well, many sociological interviews, especially when they come from different cultural worlds, are very different. Most social scientists have done interviews where prepackaged questions have little or no meaning to the person being interviewed. This is satirized in Wayne Wang’s 1982 film Chan is Missing, when the two Chinese characters are interviewed by a social worker speaking in social science jargon that leaves them both dumbfounded. It is funny, but in a painful way for social scientists.The incomprehension can also work in the other direction: researchers often find themselves speaking to people whose vocabulary, syntax or inflection make their talk seem like a foreign language. The PE interview radically redefines the sociological interview because it centers on themes, people, actions or objects that both parties are looking at and trying to make sense of. Often neither party understands the limits of the other’s comprehension or, more often, incomprehension. Usually, the researcher asks the subject to identify, explain

98 Visual research collaboration or reflect on elements in a photograph that the researcher has made during the research process or found in an archive, but this can be done several ways. After using photo elicitation several times I have come to believe that the simplest questions often lead to the most detailed answers. I also think that the more elaborate the question, usually the briefer (and more superficial) the answer. In the case of the study of Willie’s shop, after some false starts, my questions were usually a variation on these themes: Who is this? (Does he come here often? Does he have a job? Does he pay you for work you do for him? Is he good at mechanical work? Do you like having him around?) What is this? (Where did you get it? Did you buy it; find it; did someone give it to you? Why did you use it in the repair? What are you going to do with it?) What are you doing in this photo? (Where did you learn to do this? Is it difficult? What are the particular challenges of this job? Can you describe what you see, feel or sense about the materials you are working with? Do you enjoy this? Why or why not?) How do you work for neighbors and others? (What labor do you charge for and what do you give for free? How do you figure what to charge? How and what do you trade? What goes well and not so well in these dealings?) If the PE interview goes well, the person being interviewed sees him or herself as the expert, as the researcher becomes the student. The photo becomes a bridge between people who may not even understand the extent to which they see the world differently. That was exactly what happened with Willie and me; one of the first things we learned was how little I understood about what he took totally for granted. Collier first used photo elicitation in the early 1950s when he was a photographer attached to a Cornell University research team studying mental health in changing communities in the Maritime Provinces in Canada. He was asked to help researchers agree on rating system for the housing they defined as “dilapidated” or “above average” and so on, as it was clear there were no commonly shared definitions. To solve this problem Collier photographed 200 houses and the teams then studied the photos to agree on which elements in the photos would mean one rating or another (this was as simple as defining a porch that was crooked as indicating a particular social class standing). This is a remarkable idea seldom used in social science interviewing: creating a concrete referent to a statement or a rating on a questionnaire. Collier’s method worked so well that they decided to integrate photos into the research interviews themselves. To test their method, they did both elicitation and conventional interviews with the same families, which Collier described: The material obtained with photographs was precise and at times even encyclopedic; the control interviews were less structured, rambling, and freer in association. Statements in the photo-interviews were in direct response to the graphic probes … [whereas] the control interviews seemed to be governed by the mood of the informants. Collier further noted that “the pictures elicited longer and more comprehensive interviews but at the same time helped subjects overcome the fatigue and repetition of conventional interviews ,” that the photos had the capacity to “prod latent memory, to stimulate and release emotional statements about the informant’s life.”2

Visual research collaboration 99 The elicitation interviews demonstrate that the meanings of images are not fixed but emerge in conversations and dialogues. The meanings vary from one viewer to another. A photographer points a camera and exposes a frame, but the choices that led to the creation of that image may have had little or nothing to do with cultural meanings inside the image, and as a result the photos may not mean much to people outside the immediate culture. That was evident as Willie and I began discussing photos I made of his shop. They contained interesting shapes and patterns of light and shadow; and they likely had some relationship to my social science thinking: here was craftwork; here was a negotiated relationship. But Willie knew the history of every piece of metal and every machine, building or person who appeared in the frame, and how these histories were intertwined in long patterns of buying and selling, trading or giving things away. One could say there were layers of meaning in an image, from the literal object they described, to the social processes behind events they appeared in, to the values that were represented in the actions that surrounded the object. Willie may have been the perfect research partner: intelligent and interested and in a world that was rich for visual study. He took the interviewing seriously; we worked on evenings when his wife Pauline was off playing bingo, and he even turned off his CB radio,3 his single link to the world, so we would not be interrupted. We eventually taped more than thirty hours of interviews and we had many other conversations while working on projects in the shop, bowling on Wednesday nights, or just hanging out, and I wrote many of these into extended field notes. I came to believe that the photo elicitation interviews did more than stimulate deeper and sharper memory, as John Collier noted above. Rather, our conversations created what Max Weber called verstehen, loosely translated as understanding, and usually interpreted as capturing the point of view of the other. As I listened to our interviews, I learned to put aside my assumptions, and to see Willie’s reflections as a window into his world. This was a profound experience for me personally, way beyond what research is supposed to be. It is easy to get enthusiastic about photo elicitation, and I was an early convert. However, I quickly realized that there are no guidelines for any given project. How many photos should one use in a typical interview? What should guide the photography used in interviews? Who should take the photos? Should people be interviewed alone, or in discussion groups? How do you put a study together from the massive amount of information that the interviews produced? How much of the interview material should be presented intact, and how much could or should be summarized? How do you keep the PE interview from becoming a routine conversation about common issues? There are no simple answers for any of these questions, but from the onset of the project I realized I needed a big canvas to experiment; a book rather than articles.4 In my experience, photo elicitation produces something resembling documentary film, where there is a conversation running under a series of images, and the design of the book is key to its success. Others have approached the task in very different ways, publishing articles that mostly describe what was done rather than showing what was produced or learned. I will show how a PE interview works with an excerpt of a discussion of a tractor repair, which is adapted from the ethnography I wrote about Willie’s shop.5 The passage begins with an introductory essay that places the repair in a larger context. It reads: The tractor had been part of the landscape around Willie’s shop for seven years. He had taken it from a neighboring farmer as partial payment for a welding job.When Willie got the tractor it

100 Visual research collaboration lacked a starter, a three-point hitch, a number of control parts, and rear wheels. When the deal was made small tractors were not much in demand, and the farmer probably regarded it as a convenient way to get rid of a machine that had been allowed to deteriorate beyond usefulness. For Willie the tractor would be handy in the woods as well as around the shop. It has been towed to Willie’s on borrowed wheels and then sat beached on some elm logs, looking more and more like a permanent part of the landscape as the years went by. Parts and materials began to pile up around and on top of the machine, nearly hiding it. “Tractor still in there?” Raymond would needle Willie as he walked past. “Yup, and it’s going into the shop just as soon as I get the ________ [any number of jobs that went in and out over the years] out of there.” … In the meantime Willie came across a set of used truck wheels that he converted for the tractor, solving a major problem in the restoration project. Then one day a berth was cleared in the shop and the tractor was towed inside, its rear wheels skidding along because the engine and clutch had seized up in the years since it had been moved. The seized engine and clutch would mean an additional and perhaps expensive addition to what Willie had expected to be a straightforward restoration. I said it was too bad, but Willie answered: “What do you expect— you leave metal alone—metal rusts!” … [the engine was rebuilt with the help of a man often at the shop] and … A few repairs remained.The grille protecting the radiator had rusted away so the radiator was exposed to brush and low branches in the woods. The thirty-five-year-old radiator was extremely delicate and would be hard to replace if it was ruined. A month later, on a Saturday morning, Willie’s son Skip was telling Willie over coffee that they ought to do something about the front of the tractor. Willie had other ideas about his day, but Skip was unusually persistent and Willie finally agreed that the repair ought to be done. I worked alongside on a project of my own, pausing to photograph their work. Our discussion … occurred a few months later. [In the book, I segued from descriptive passages such as these, that were set in italics as above, to the interview itself. The segment of the interview follows]: (looking at the stack of photos): That looks like a Ford tractor. I remember that Ford tractor being here eight years ago. It sat inside for … It sat outside for five years. Inside two. I took that on a bill from Roger McLaughlin because I wanted a tractor. Hundred ninety-seven dollars. DOUG: Why did Roger give up on it? WILLIE: Well, he took the starter over to BOCES [an agricultural/vocational high school]—one of the boys that worked for him part time went to BOCES. He took the starter over to rebuild it. Never got it back. Got kinda disgusted with it. That’s how I got it. It sat in his barn for three months, right in the free stalls. It got eat up with the acids from the cow manure—oh, that’s bad on a machine. It was just like it had gone through a fire. That’s why it rusted out. DOUG: You saw it as worth a lot of money fixed up? WILLIE: At that time you could get them pretty reasonable. But you can’t now. I figured that if I put wheels on it, got a starter for it, and got it running I could use it for woods work—which is what I’m doing. The wheels are off a big truck—twenty-two inch. I had to cut the Ford wheels down to mount them on, to weld them in. And the front wheels are cut down to thirteen inches. I turned the cast iron hubs down to fit a thirteen-inch rim. The drawbar was missing; we built that out of parts.The throttle control was all rusted off, and the generator was missing. The radiator bottom was broke right off, so WILLIE: DOUG: WILLIE:

Visual research collaboration 101 we took it off and rebuilt it. Soldered it back on. Gas tank was full of rust. Took that all off, cleaned it, blew it out. Cleaned all the manure out from in between the radiator and the hood—it was really full of manure. Changed the distributor over to where I had an exterior rather than an interior coil. Usually when it gets to be rainy weather they don’t want to start with the other type of coil, and they burn out too easy. And I changed it over so that I’m using an eight-volt battery instead of a six. Starts in the wintertime now just like it does in the summer. The other day Ray Dean didn’t think it would start—it was zero—but it started right up. Usually they say a Ford tractor won’t start up after the first frost in the fall. We had to put a bumper on the tractor because Skip was using it too rough in the woods [laughs]. We were using it to get wood out, and he was driving it over little trees and everything with no bumper and no grille—he was going to spoil the radiator! We’re getting ready to cut the parts for the grille. Skip got the metal and stuff ready and hunted up some of the pieces to use. I’m lighting the torch … They had the old mailbox out there—that old overgrown mailbox—and they were cleaning that down to paint it. Julie and Sheila [Willie’s daughters, but only Sheila is in the photograph]. Sheila looks a little sour, but it’s more or less that she’s watching what I’m doing. She got full interest in what’s going on … and Christopher’s [Willie’s grandson] looking at that flame. In fact, all those eyes are coming down to that flame. Mine too. I’m setting it, adjusting it.You’re supposed to use a Rosebud torch for heating, but if you use a Rosebud on light metal it’s just a waste of heat. And there’s the ring [a seventeen-inch piece of metal behind Willie, outside the shop; right side of photo, middle] that we used for the bumper—the arch … You could have fixed the old piece but you would have spent more time on it than it was worth. There’s about three inches gone off the bottom—it was eat right into the crank hole, so bad it wouldn’t hold a true form to work from.You would have had to do a lot of building back, adjusting, measuring— because there are little pins that come out of each top corner that sets up into the top of the hood to hold it in place—they’d have to line up just right for it to work. DOUG: I always wonder what you see through the helmet when you’re welding. Can you see the details pretty well? WILLIE: Perfect. I wear the lens that lets you see all your melting metal and everything. If you can’t see what’s melting, what’s blending together—that is where a lot of people run into problems. They don’t blend their metals together—they don’t flow ’em. And that’s why a weld doesn’t hold.You’ve got to be able to see that flow of metal. You’ve got to be able to see it. There are different lenses for the helmets—they go by number, a code that tells how dark it will be. I use one of the darkest ones they’ve got. If you get too light a lens you can’t see the full flow of your metal—it’s just like not wearing any at all when you’re braising.You can’t see what you’re doing—you can’t study it. The glow is too bright—it’s like looking at the sun, almost … but you know, you can photograph more than you can see. Sometimes I think the photograph shows more than I see.” DOUG: When I look at these photographs I see you close down, studying. WILLIE: You’ve got to be. If you don’t see your metals and know how they’re flowing you haven’t got a weld. You get what I told you before—bubblegum weld—if

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Figure 3.1 Lighting up the Rosebud.

Figure 3.2 Welding the new bumper to the tractor.

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Figure 3.3 Willie cuts an arch from the metal ring.

you don’t flow it. It just bubbles on and it doesn’t penetrate to hold your metals together … you’ve seen bubbles in metal on some welds—well, that’s what they call a bubblegum weld. WILLIE: [If we’d used our first design] we’d have cut down a lot of wind—air to keep the radiator cool. If you cover the radiator too much with metal when the tractor’s working hard it’ll overheat. So we came up with idea of putting the arch over it—that’s when we came up with the idea of the ring. The ring was off an old stack flue—you can see it laying in the background in the first photograph. DOUG: Stack flu? WILLIE: Smokestack from Brasher Iron Works. A fella picked it up at Clotman’s, a junk dealer up in Massena. He was going to make a furnace out of it, but he got discouraged in the middle of the job and bought one instead. He gave it to me and I made a furnace out of it, but I had to cut some pieces off of it.That was one of the pieces I cut off … [And] That’s the furnace in the back of the shop—at least part of it. I had to cut more off when I put the hot water unit on the top. It’s heavy, a quarter-inch, regular old smokestack … WILLIE: I’m trimming it off the same thickness all around, more or less for looks. It was all rough—the way they cut if at the junkyard. I wanted to straighten it out; make it better than it was. … Now I’ve got a tractor to use in the woods. I’ve used it a lot since it’s been on there—an awful lot, for moving cars in and out. … It’s better than the original—you couldn’t push a car with the original because it had a hitch on

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Figure 3.4 Willie trims the arch to match the width of the bumper.

the front. I’ll put the hitch back on, but I’ll make it so I can snap it on and off. And the fact that it’s solid all the way up there makes it work beautifully for pushing wagons or anything… This passage, shortened from the original and including fewer images, can be expanded into a larger story of Willie’s shop as we see the tractor in action, a crucial part of Willie’s life. For photo elicitation to produce a convincing narrative the paper or book must balance text and words, and this is challenging because there is more talk about some images than others. The design must work aesthetically as well as intellectually. There are now several software programs where the photographer/writer can

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Figure 3.5 Three years later, Willie using the tractor to gather firewood. His daughter frolics in the snow.

create a mockup of a manuscript, with photos in place. In my experience, making the book mockups has resembled editing a documentary film, arranging and editing text and images to communicate an idea and to make it flow. In the end the filmmaker wants to make a film people will watch, and visual sociologists want to produce a book people will read. In the passage from Working Knowledge, the conversation and photos delve into how and what Willie sees. Few of us have looked at molten metal through welder lenses, and Willie gives us a sense of what he sees and how it directs his work. We understand how de-industrialization—closing down a factory—leads to the recycling of junk that skillful people reuse. He describes exchanging things and money in an arrangement where values are not fixed.What, indeed, is the value of an old tractor that has been left in a manure pit to the point where important parts have rusted into oblivion? We also imagine the points of view of others who Willie deals with. The tractor came from a farmer who was known for poor attention to detail (and farmers’ reputations came in part from the state of their equipment) who let a small tractor deteriorate and he pays his debt off by giving it to Willie; another person fails at building a woodstove from the smokestack and contributes his failed effort to what he owes. Willie uses his engineering savvy, his talent as a welder and his knowledge of tractor mechanics to rebuild and upgrade a tractor while adapting it to his needs, increasing its value several times over in the process. But it was clear from Willie’s words that he did not rejuvenate and redesign the tractor as an investment; he needed it for his shop to push stuff around, and to work in the woods, where he and his son harvested firewood and trees that were sawed for lumber.

106 Visual research collaboration Finally, the exchange shows how interviewer and subject do not come to the interview with the same knowledge or information. He says, “stack flue” and I interrupt, “Stack flue?” which leads him to tell me, yes, it is a smokestack from an old factory, which existed when the town was an important industrial center. When I remember these interviews, I remember a friendship evolving through deepening mutual understanding. We both looked forward to our PE interviews. Willie liked explaining things to me and I suppose he liked having his working knowledge taken seriously. He also liked explaining how his skills were sold or bartered in a poor neighborhood, where they were sought after but impossible to demand. He worked for whom he wanted to, under his terms, and not surprisingly he did not mind the reputation that came from that. Our interviews flowed from one topic to another, as did his work and life. Occasionally more difficult topics came to the surface. I was showing Willie a photo of a 6-foot maple syrup tray that I had convinced my neighbor to bring to Willie for repair. My neighbor, a pillar of the community whose farm dated to the Scottish settlement in the mid-nineteenth century, had been hesitant to bring the tray to Willie’s shop, and when we arrived Willie was uncharacteristically abrupt; glanced at it and said he could not fix it. It was a delicate job, soldering delicate copper flues, but I suspected he could do it, and I was startled by his reaction. When I pushed a bit he went to work silently, fixed the huge tray and charged substantially more than I would have expected. When my neighbor gave Willie the cash he turned away without speaking and began another job, literally giving the neighbor (and me) the cold shoulder. When I later showed Willie a photo of the repair and asked what had been going on, he told me that years ago the farmer had killed his dog. Willie was a poor man and his dog was “just a mutt,” and the farmer, in the fanciest farmhouse in the neighborhood, had a pedigreed Collie. The farmer had said his dog was “messing” with his, and he shot it. “That farmer knew I’d never work for him,” Willie explained, “and I wouldn’t have if you had not brought him over here. I’m surprised he even came.” I had always thought of my neighbor as kindly and I was startled by the story. Still, it made sense; there was a class dimension in the farm neighborhood, and sad and upsetting as was the event I could have imagined it taking place. I understood, but I certainly did not forgive my neighbor. My naive actions had momentarily disrupted the social fabric that Willie wove around the shop. The research showed me the deep and elusive the meaning of photos.They could even become a way Willie expressed himself, as I discovered when I found a photo on a contact sheet that Willie had made of me. He had picked up my camera, turned on the strobe, and shot a photo me cutting a thick piece of metal with a hand saw with a scowl on my face. I had not even noticed. The cut was not going well. When I showed the photo to Willie, he said: “You were frustrated because you weren’t doing it right.” I said the saw was dull. He just shook his head. The photos illuminated the nooks and crannies of our friendship as well as his work. Their meanings came from Willie’s explanations and they were layers deep, there for the asking. I used black-and-white film, which I developed and printed in my home darkroom, and we studied the eight- by ten-inch enlargements carefully. I chose black-and-white film for practical and aesthetic reasons as there would have been no reasonable way to enlarge color film even if I wanted to.

Visual research collaboration 107 I mention this because when I surveyed eight-some PE studies for the first edition of this book I discovered that the approach I used—taking my own photos and taking them seriously—was unusual. Most photographers used their cameras to make visual inventories that were seldom included in the publications. These were very different research experiences. I was committed to an in-depth ethnography. I made images that moved me and I hoped would move others, and the PE worked because Willie found the photos interesting. It all came together over several years we worked on the project that included many interviews, several hundred pages of transcribed interviews and a few thousand photos. I also came to realize that few researchers had the time or willingness to take on a project of this magnitude, done without funding or a publishing contract. Studying farmers The photo elicitation study of Willie’s work and life told an authentic story about a taken for granted part of rural life but a few years later, when I tried to apply PE to my emerging study of dairy farming, it did not at first go well. Looking back, I realize I took for granted that interviewing with photos opened doors of perception. I later realized that the success of the first project was largely due to Willie’s intelligence, interest in the project and the topic itself. At the time I felt that farmers would respond as Willie had to my photos of their work, which was not the case. I had begun the farm research by volunteering as an unpaid worker for a neighbor farmer for six weeks during the spring work, after my classes had finished. I knew how to drive tractors and that is mostly what I did: tilling fields, picking up rocks, fertilizing and planting. I became proficient at shoveling manure out of calf stalls, a job nobody wanted and thus a way to earn my welcome. Milking cows was off limits because if the cows got spooked by a stranger their milk production could drop, so I just watched that part of the operation. I had a camera with me and photographed the work I was part of. I worked with a family of immediate neighbors with ten kids, and we got on well. I was satisfied with what I was learning and photographing but when I returned with the photos to interview the discussions fell flat. The photos showed the obvious aspects of farm work (my neighbors said they looked just like those in their farm magazines, only in black and white, too bad I could not afford color film) and my questions were forced and the answers were awkward. I wanted to explore how farmers saw the land they farmed and the animals they raised, milked and butchered. What environmental issues were they concerned with? Did they share labor with other farmers? Did they see themselves as a vital and responsible part of the community? I pulled back from the project, until a few years later when I discovered an historical archive that led me to the discussions I was after. My neighbors had grown up with a system called “changing works,” where for more than a month each harvest season they traded labor, ate in each other’s homes when they worked together and farmed more collectively than individually. The farms had been about the same size, and the farmers used essentially the same machines. The old system had been in place in one form or another from the late nineteenth century until a period of rapid technological advancement after WWII. By the late 1950s the old system was largely gone, and by the time I studied the neighborhood it had one foot firmly in the future, and the other groping around in the past. I wanted to know how farmers felt about the changes they had experienced; and whether they felt the new system was creating a viable future for the dairy farmer and for rural communities.

108 Visual research collaboration Photo elicitation research with archives I came across a photo archive that portrayed the shared agriculture my farm neighbors had experienced in their first years. It was the Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ) photo archive, which had documented American culture between 1941 and 1953. I mention this archive in a discussion of gender and documentary expression in Chapter 1 and Chapter 4, and here I provide additional background. The photos had been made on behest of Standard Oil as a public relations project to improve the image of the company, which had made deals with German companies prior to WWII that appeared nearly treasonous once the war began. The company felt it necessary to show how oil was integral to society, and that Standard Oil was a patriotic company doing its part to preserve the American way of life. With that broad mandate about ten photographers (at any given time) were hired to photograph the use of petroleum, which was, even then, ubiquitous, giving the photographers a wide latitude subject-wise. The photos were used to illustrate Standard Oil’s corporate magazine, and some found their way into high school texts, but they had little use or influence beyond those minimal outlets. Several years after the several million-dollar project was completed, the negatives were nearly thrown away, saved at the last minute by the University of Louisville, where they are archived and made available to researchers. I spent a week exploring the 67,000 photos to find about 200 that depicted the daily life on family dairy farms in neighborhoods geographically close to those I studied in the 1980s, and these became the basis of the photo elicitation project I had long sought. The director of the project, Roy Stryker, had also directed the Farm Security Administration project in the 1930s, and had been a close colleague and friend of Robert and Helen Lynd, sociologists who had written the Middleton studies in the 1920s and 1930s. Stryker had developed the idea of visual ethnography from his association with the Lynds. The SONJ photographers were encouraged to record daily work, home life, community activities and other aspects of life that, as Stryker noted, were not of particular interest then, but would be of interest fifty years down the road. For example, I had asked many dairy farmers if they had photographed the dinners they shared during the harvests, but they were surprised by the question. Why would someone photograph what was so unremarkable? They showed me grainy black-and-white photos from their family albums: here is my new tractor in 1953; here is a cow that produced 14,000 gallons of milk; here are my kids taking their livestock to 4-H. There was sociology in their photos, but not the sociology I was looking for. The SONJ photos were different than the family photographs, and they led to deep examinations of the past.The photographers used medium-format cameras and the detail in the images was vastly better than snapshots farmers (or anyone, for that matter) were used to seeing. I made eight- by ten-inch prints for the interviews and the size and detail encouraged the farmers to study them seriously. But the key reason they worked in the PE interviews was because they recorded aspects of farm lives that were so taken for granted that they had not been deemed worthy of a photograph, and as such they lived only in the memories of the elderly famers I spoke with. As I began this stage of the project Willie became an informal research assistant, as he had been a farm laborer as a young man and knew about that era of agriculture from fixing farm machinery. He sat in on several of the interviews, often with old friends who were old or retired farmers, often directing an interview in subtle ways. For example:

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Figure 3.6 Gathering corn for ensilage, Brooklea Farm, Kanona, New York, September 1945. A small boy steers a tractor as a “changing works” crew hauls six- to seven-foot stalks of cut corn to throw onto the wagon, which will be taken to the silo, chopped and shot into the tall, circular structure. Source: Photograph by Charlotte Brooks © Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville Library WILLIE [STUDYING THE PHOTO]:

You didn’t have any time to bullshit! Especially on those

corn deals. When I was about sixteen or seventeen I went over to Delbert Johnson’s to pitch corn. The cornfield started right there and went back, you know? And he had corn at least as high as this ceiling. And bundles that big [spreads arms]. I think I was about seventeen and Jesus it was hot that day. One of them days in the fall when the old sun was beatin’ right down. There was two of us pitchin’ and three wagons. Two pitchin’ and three wagons.

MASON [WILLIE’S FRIEND, A RETIRED FARMER]:

110 Visual research collaboration WILLIE: That’s a killer. MASON: Guy Moore and

me was pitchin’. Well, we filled that goddamned silo full and about four o’clock we was all done.We had ’er full.Yes sir! And me and Guy come up and, of course, your clothes was just soppin’ wet, the sweat run right off ya’. And, of course, I had a pack of cigarettes and book matches. I pulled out them book matches and they were just solid; the sulfur had just dripped off. Delbert smoked a pipe and he had them farmer’s matches. So, [he] come around there—oh, Jesus, this made me mad—I said to him: “You got a match, Delbert?” He says, “What do you want a match for?”—“I want to smoke.” He says, “You’re too young to be smoking.”— “Well,” I said, “I ain’t too young to pitch your goddamned corn though, am I?” Never again. Never helped him again! I went home and I says to the old man, “If that fella ever wants to ‘change works’ again—don’t send me; you go.” “Why?” he said, “What happened?” he asked. Of course, I didn’t dare tell ’im about the smokin’, you know. ’Cause he didn’t know I smoked. But I told him about pitchin’ corn. Mister, I never put in such a day in my life, I’ll tell you. Along about three o’clock you pick up a bundle of corn of the fork and the tassles’d drag right on the ground. Honest to Christ, mister, heavy! Guy Moore says to me, “Mister, you ever see me back here again, you bring the shotgun and shoot me right between the eyes!”

The photo shows what was then a modern tractor, driven by a boy 8 or 9 years old (the tractor is moving slowly; he is mostly steering and, occasionally, with a big stretch of his left leg, pushing in the clutch to stop the machine). The four grown men are pitching bundles of corn onto the wagon; shadows suggest it is late afternoon. The photo tells a story of neighborhood cooperation, and it may offer an idealized version; with Mason’s story it becomes a bit more complicated. People take advantage of each other, not seeing things the same way. The boy in the photo is smiling, likely proud to be in the photo, but it also possible that the day on the tractor was trying for a pre-teen. In addition to studying the changing harvest activities I studied the gendered work roles in the neighborhood. Though men normally worked in the fields and the barns and women in the homes, the roles were not set. A local farm woman widowed in her early thirties not only raised three sons but worked in the barns, in the changing work crews, and also produced a feast (“a full turkey dinner, pies and everything”) for the crews when they rotated to her house. “I don’t know how she did it,” her son, then in his fifties, said. The following exchange between Carmen and Marian, a farm couple, was stimulated by Figure 3.7. Carmen appeared to respect Marian’s contributions to the farm operation, but Marian had to correct the history to get credit for all she did. This is a startling example of an image with clear evidence—three women working alongside men in a job that took considerable physical strength—guided two partners in life to look at their own divisions of labor, and it seemed from this and other interviews that their memories did not entirely match. I milked cows for twenty-nine years here. Some women are not involved at all—some do the book work, and then some do the same work as the men and some milk … DOUG: Other people have told me that you used to work right alongside with Carmen. CARMEN: She used to help milk … MARIAN: I did, too … MARIAN:

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Figure 3.7 Threshing wheat at Beajon Farm, Endicott, New York, 1945. While men often assumed that the fieldwork, and the hard work in general, was done by them, evidence points otherwise. In this photo the hard work of hauling the bags of wheat to a wagon and tying them shut is being done by two middle-aged women and a teenage girl. Source: Photograph by Charlotte Brooks © Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville Library

She used to help milk … about the only thing you ever done was you helped with the chores in the morning, and the milk; the morning chores, like before we feed the cows and we done the milking and that was it. Then at night she’d go back out again, but you never had to do any of the cleaning of the barn, or that sort of stuff. MARIAN: But I baled hay for many years. One year, I baled all the hay. CARMEN: Yes, in the summertime, whenever we got the hay in, she always helped with the hay.

CARMEN:

112 Visual research collaboration MARIAN: And I helped you with the grain … CARMEN: When? MARIAN: I remember riding in the back of the binder … CARMEN: With the guy on the tractor and that old rain binder,

yes, I guess you did—a few times—but that only lasted one year. Well she done her share out in the barn, no question about that. MARIAN. And I had all those little ones … [their ten children]. CARMEN: But some of them, some of the women, hell, they used to go out to the barn after breakfast to do the chores, but you never had to do that, so far as doing the chores or washing the milkers, I always did that. MARIAN: I always washed the milking parlor down in the morning. CARMEN: Well, we didn’t always have a milking parlor. Then she helped nights with the milking and haying, and helped nights with the chores. But cleaning the barn and all that stuff, why some of the women—they still do go out, not a lot of them, but I would say about half of them maybe, and not so much right around here, but in a lot of places they are working there, feeding the cows and all. But the kids were all small and we had them to look after. We’d come in and they would be up ramming around and getting into hell-raising. MARIAN: We were up earlier, because I always had to get back in to get them ready for school. But once they got into junior high, they were almost always gone by the time I got in.6

I had not been able to learn a great deal from my taciturn neighbors when I photographed and interviewed them with the photos I was making of their then current farm work.The images from the SONJ archive (see also Figures 1.8, 1.9 and 1.10) and the small segments of interviews showed how the images were windows into nearly buried memories. A farmer, Jim Fisher, called me the day after an interview to tell me that he and his wife Emily had spoken for hours about the scenes depicted in the images I had brought to the house; it was like being visited by ghosts, he said, from harvests past. Now Jim and Emily and all the other farmers I interviewed are gone, as is their way of life, but their cultural memory remains to consider as we continue to remake farming and rural communities on an industrial model. For historical PE to work there must be an archive that covers the sought-after material, though each archive will always contain a point of view. As noted above, the SONJ archive was directed by Roy Stryker, influenced by Robert and Helen Lynd, sociologists whose studies of American communities were progressive and attuned to ethnographic detail. In this way the archive was ideologically sociological; the photographers were tuned to see as sociologists, and as a result they were particularly useful to a researcher interested in such things as informal work organization, gender and work, body language and proxemics, human/animal interactions and changing technology.The themes explored in the archive were simply a fortuitous accident that I took advantage of. The people who are interviewed must be old enough to have experienced what is in the photos but young enough to remember it clearly. Colter Harper’s research on race and jazz in Pittsburgh7 uses about 200 photos from the several thousand images made by African American photographer Teenie Harris in his elicitation interviews; in this instance his subjects were elderly and many struggled to remember the details in the images. Without the photos the interviews would have been impossible.

Visual research collaboration 113 Colter Harper’s research also shows the benefit of finding the right archive for a research project.The photos used in his project are the work of one of the most accomplished African American photographers of the twentieth century, whose photos describe African American neighborhoods, including jazz clubs and their adjacent institutions.The jazz photos show the performers; the clubs as places in which races mixed and people dressed to be on display; the interaction among members of the bands, and between the bands and the audience. Because Harris used a large negative camera and a strobe his photos have remarkable detail and clarity, which catches the attention of people studying them carefully. The other example I am aware of that uses archive-based photo elicitation is Carol Payne’s study of Canadian National Film Board photos in interviews among Inuit peoples of northern Canada.8 Her point was to repatriate visual memory among people who were objects of a paternalistic Canadian imperialism. As in the example of Colter Harper’s research, the project begins with identification, but in this instance the individuals depicted are not well-known musicians but Inuit citizens who were unnamed when the photos were made in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Naming them connected generations of families and showed the structures of communities. The interviewers, university students, also used the images to create oral histories.These oral histories tell stories that sometimes surprised Payne, a Caucasian researcher. Payne implies that she expected an account of an Inuit school for English language instruction to be read by the Inuit as forced assimilation, but instead the Inuit defined the school in positive ways, as a place of discovery. Payne cites Elizabeth Edwards’ critique of photo elicitation9 as “largely a one-way flow from informant to ethnographer,” and she suggests that the interviews done in the Inuit studies were different because they were initiated by the Inuit and were done in close collaboration, often across two or three generations of the same family. One young researcher described the process: It was so exciting showing these Elders the pictures—it was almost like taking them back to the days when they were young. When I clicked on each picture, I watched their eyes. As they recognized an individual, they would have a big smile on their faces. They acted as if these pictures were taken just yesterday … Before now, I had not talked much with Elders. This experience was new to me, and I really enjoyed it. Each time they named a person in the picture, it made me want to go back to the time that they remembered.10 Edwards’ comment also did not resonate with PE projects I have organized. Returning to Collier’s observations on the first use of photo elicitation in the 1950s, the interviews were not only efficient, but they were deeper, more specific and more from the heart. Payne describes a joy of discovery, reflecting on a photo allows a person to explain, “yes, this is how it was …” and in the process interviews become a connection between people rather than a floundering intrusion. Photo elicitation in cross-cultural research To some extent all photo elicitation research is cross-cultural; the person with the pictures is interested in what the other person sees. At times this becomes complex, where photos made in one place (in this case, Italy) are interpreted by the Italian audience they are

114 Visual research collaboration intended for (women shoppers) and then, in second interviews, by American counterparts, who have not been to Italy. The context of the study is the performance of gender in public display ads which has been studied in depth, at first in the US several decades ago. All three of these cultural contexts are at play in a project Patrizia Faccioli and I completed some years ago.11 I had been to Bologna several time in the 1990s and had begun photographing public display ads as I found them rather startling. As Patrizia and I discussed the photos it was clear that we interpreted them differently, and as a result we decided to do a small research project to investigate these interpretations further. For background we turned to Erving Goffman’s study of gender in print advertisements in the 1970s.12 Goffman had done the seminal study of magazine ads, found primarily in magazines. He worked scientifically, coding, comparing and analyzing the contents of hundreds of ads. He concluded that there were strong patterns in how men and women presented themselves and interacted. For example, women touched in a restrained, ritualistic way, while men touched in a more utilitarian way. Women appear to guide daughters into adulthood; boys fought their way there. He found differences not only in gesture and presentation of self, but rooms where social life took place were organized in symbolic patterns, with lower levels assigned to ritually polluting tasks (storing dirty laundry, being walked on) and beds being a space where women’s gestures and postures appeared to communicate their sexual availability. Women’s postures more often included elements such as knee bends that suggest subordination, psychological removal and dependence on men. Goffman studied what he called the physical grammar of subordination in these and many additional examples. There were many follow-up studies using Goffman’s method, but it was not clear what people thought of these presentations of reality. In particular, did women, who were presented in ads as subservient and passive, accept these definitions of themselves? Patrizia Faccioli and I decided to explore how the people portrayed in the ads (in this case the women only) defined their meaning. We decided to compare the ideas of Italian women, for whom they were intended, to American counterparts, roughly, in age and social class background using simple photo elicitation interviews. The visual themes were seduction, flirtation, male domination, sexuality and beauty. In the following I offer a brief summary of our research with three images from the study. For example, in reaction to Figure 3.8 an American woman commented: “The ad does not work for me. I would not buy the product advertised. The relationship between the man and woman is purely sexual, based on physical appearance. The man has greater power. He is taller and looks stronger than the woman and he is looking at her in a very sexual way … I hope I am never viewed like this.” Another American woman commented in reference to this ad: “The ad makes me a little angry: The woman is in her underwear: the man is dressed. Her only power is sex. He can’t think clearly, only because the woman is undressed.” The Italian women viewed the ad much differently. One said: “The ad does not challenge my identity at all. It makes me glad to be a woman, knowing or feeling that we have the potential to be alluring.” Another Italian woman commented: The message is: if you would like to be appreciated, wear this stuff. All people love to be admired, the men too. They are playing and enjoying. Maybe the bananas give

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Figure 3.8 Man with bananas, Bologna, Italy.

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Figure 3.9 American women were all strongly offended by the ad; considering it a mockery of violence and a glorification of male domination. One viewer noted the figure from the 1940s in the foreground and recalled the gender roles that the ad seemed to be idealizing. Italian women tended to see the aggression as connected to passion, and the ad itself as symbolizing the violence and uncertainty of the modern moment. The Italian women spoke approvingly of visual construction of the ad itself, finding it ironic and powerful; American women were personally insulted by the threat it implied. Ad from Bologna, Italy.

Figure 3.10 The photo shows two ads; on the right a swimsuit and on the left is a personal ad by an individual who presents himself as a transvestite, offering sexual services, which is not illegal in Italy. American women did not see a connection between the two ads and were amazed in a negative way that sexual services, deviant or otherwise, could be advertised. The Italian viewers saw the ads in relation to each other; the transvestite as “brave and honest” and the swimsuit as a callous manipulation of women to attempt to achieve an impossible physical ideal. Ad from Bologna, Italy.

Visual research collaboration 117 a touch of originality and define the relationship as a game. The message suggests she is the winner and he is seduced: I think it’s an equal relationship. The bananas remind me of the natives of any lost island, so it confirms the message: He seems to be a slave to passion. He’s a primitive, who doesn’t resist his impulses. She looks like a self-confident woman, not afraid to show herself; she’s brilliant. The slogan puts the passive and the active together: To be admired is passive, but to love to be admired is active. The reactions to our photos followed these themes; Americans saw the gendered interactions as threatening and demeaning and the Italians saw them as mutually seductive and often funny.There were ads in which men appeared to be threatening; Americans were upset by the implied message whereby the Italian women tended to see physical power as integral to sex. Finally, one photo showed a billboard in which a transvestite sex worker posed in lingerie and listed her phone number, and this large poster was framed alongside the bikini ad next to it. The Italian women saw the sex worker as heroic; the American women could hardly believe such sexual forwardness existed and were put off by it. We interviewed about ten women in each country with these and similar ads, which would be appropriate as a pilot study. The responses of the Italian and American women were remarkably consistent.While we tried to match the people we interviewed (all were university educated and middle class in both the US and Italy), the cultural settings were quite different. Pittsburgh is a regional city with a strong working-class identity; Bologna is a sophisticated center of fashion and culture. That may have influenced the Italian responses to the ads; to whom it seemed “cool” to see sex and violence as linked. Finally, Patrizia interviewed the Italian women; she is Italian, of course, and the same gender. However, I interviewed the American women and felt uncomfortable doing so. The women should have been interviewed by a female in both instances. With these qualifications in mind we felt it was an interesting first step and a novel use of photo elicitation. We planned a follow-up study in more depth but were startled to notice that the visual universe of Italian public display ads changed quickly. In the 1990s, when I began visiting Bologna, there was a quirky eccentricity to typical public display ads. In the meantime Bologna has become fancier and the public display ads are now largely for the same products sold by the same international firms in New York and Paris. The ads are dramatic and stylish and often feature male and female physical sexiness, but they are not particular, as were most of the ads we worked with. As in the case of the historical archive depicting farm life, the world caught in the ads study has moved on. Of several recent PE studies that specifically address themes of crossing cultures, two recent examples caught my eye. The first, by Kei Yan Leung,13 is a study of the reaction of farmers in an isolated and depopulating area of northern Japan to artistic renderings of their environments, and especially those that interpret the spiritual connection of farmers to the land. Leung is a non-Japanese Asian and described his own “invisible outsider” status and the confusion that created. The project required several rethinkings and produced insight across cultures that inform and delight. The second, an edited collection by Michael Boucher,14 is intended as providing a “working knowledge of the procedures, challenges, and benefits of using photo methods” for teachers that include both PE and PV. The unusually strong examples include studies of bullying, cross-cultural teaching experiences in Kenya, finding ways to discuss race in heterogeneous classrooms, understanding sustainability in the Philippines and communicating across the worlds of deafness. The book offers blueprints and encouragement and demonstrates the viability of PE in crossing cultures in a meaningful way.

118 Visual research collaboration Who should take the photos? In most of the work discussed thus far professional photographers or sociologists with a strong interest and at least informal training made the photos used in the research. Is their skill as photographers or even a strong interest and informal training a necessary part of the PE process? Can a case be made that elicitation interviews probe more deeply when they are based on photographs that go “beyond” casual snapshots? For example, Sol Libsohn’s photograph of the changing works dinner (Figure 1.10) is visually remarkable and ethnographically rich because of how skillfully it was seen and made. He framed the image from above, probably standing on a chair, which allowed the 80 mm lens on his Rolleiflex to record the whole table and much of the room. It is not a wide-angle lens, seeing about what a single eye sees, but he pushed it to its maximum. He used a flash held to the side to create light that was brighter than would have been in the room, but it appears almost natural (until you look carefully) because it comes from the side rather than the front. The bright flash allowed him to shoot at a small aperture (likely f 22) which created sufficient depth of field to put the entire room in focus. He had to know where to set the point of focus to take advantage of the depth of field afforded by the small aperture, which would have been midway down the length of the table. He knew that that the 120 cm negative would produce exceptional detail and, working without a light meter in the camera, he was able to expose the image correctly.The photo appears to have been made by an invisible photographer; this was Libsohn’s success at getting the farmers to ignore him and his cumbersome equipment and carry on as though they are actors in their own dramas. He obviously knew how to walk into the kitchen of farmers and win them over. The photo worked well in interviews with farmers, both male and female, who imagined themselves in the frame and even guessed at the conversations they were having, given their expressions. None of this is inconsequential, and none can be assumed. Doing all of them well produces a photograph that tells an historical story. This is also the case of Teenie Harris’ photos used in Colter Harper’s research on the Pittsburgh jazz scene in the mid-twentieth century: Harris saw the local community as an insider, and he was treated as in insider by those he photographed. He photographed common street scenes, as well as out of the ordinary events such as a nationally famous musician appearing on a local stage. He worked close to people and reportedly sometimes made faces and fooled around to get people’s reactions, but more often simply seemed to be an invisible observer. His 4 × 5 inch camera produced approximately nine times the information than the 35 mm cameras that were then coming into use, so his photos are highly detailed and have grayscale gradations that only a large negative film camera can produce. His equipment was especially effective at night when his flash increased the detail and drama of his photos. His photos seem like a window into the past because the people pictured are doing what they would normally be doing: dancing, playing music, giving haircuts or just lounging against their cars in the then current fashions.15 The result is a vivid verisimilitude, far beyond a casual snapshot. From my perspective, taking photography seriously leads to images that people are more likely to find interesting in interviews. They may be drawn to something they are seeing in a new way. I felt that with photos such as Figure 3.11 and Figure 3.12 that highlighted details and perspectives that Willie had never seen before, and he enjoyed talking about them for this reason. In phenomenological terms, these photos helped Willie “bracket” his perception.

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Figure 3.11 Balancing light from the strobe with natural light in Willie’s shop.

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Figure 3.12 Willie’s fingers and chainsaw teeth.

In some cases, a middle ground may be the answer. In the late 1980s, for example, my students at the University of Amsterdam16 used community-produced photos to study social life in a multi-cultural urban neighborhood in some distress. It was a remarkable way to study the neighborhood that with some variation has been used many times since. The researchers wanted to understand how residents of a neighborhood named Schilderswijk, in the city of Den Haag, thought of their neighborhood and each other. Schilderswijk was then the most economically depressed and poorly maintained neighborhood in Holland, and populated by a majority of non-native Dutch from Turkey, Morocco, Surinam and other former Dutch colonies, but as well, a sizeable percentage of “old Dutch” (e.g., white) inhabitants. Some residents had spoken of the neighborhood as filthy, violent and hopeless, “as bad as an American slum.” Other perceptions of the neighborhood were that it had an energetic street life where residents of various backgrounds mingled freely; where local pubs were meeting points for families and friends of many backgrounds; and where people watched out for each other. What was the best definition of the neighborhood? As the student/authors wrote: “We knew that somewhere in these sets of images lies the reality, or, better, the realities of Schilderswijk. We hoped, with a method tuned to gain an in-depth view of the subjects, to contribute a fresh view of the neighborhood.”17 The Dutch research team worked closely with the community members, but they remained responsible for taking the photos. To this end they asked their research partners to “show us places and subjects in the quarter which they found to be important to them … to look through the lens of the camera to help … determine the angle which best created their desired photograph. Occasionally they took a photo themselves.Throughout we stressed to our informants (and to ourselves) that our photographs were not taken for their aesthetic value but to provide information.”18

Visual research collaboration 121 The five researchers identified five subjects who had lived in the neighborhood for at least three years, and who represented differences in age and ethnicity that characterized the quarter. In initial interviews they discovered that their subjects had a clear idea of what they wanted to photograph and knew how framing would influence what the photos looked like. They also discovered that each person saw the neighborhood in a different way. The initial interviews were followed by neighborhood walks as the researchers made the photos that the residents helped them frame, with the use of tripods. The students then developed and printed the film and ad organized the photos for interviews, where the community member told them why they photographed the subjects as they had.They also discussed what ideas could not be photographed. Each community member then examined and interpreted the images made by the other four. As a result, each resident began to understand how their common social space was defined by people they may never have spoken to, or even, in the case of the elderly ethnic Dutch woman, a person (a Moroccan youth) who represented a category she was afraid of. Creating five visual interpretations of the same reality made the point that each one of us sees from a cultural point of view; that neighbors from different cultural backgrounds see their shared urban spaces in different ways. The interviews were coded to topics such as “social uses of the material environment,” “pollution of the street appearance,” “ethnic integration” and “social interaction.” The coding led to the layout of the eventual article that was sixty-four pages in length and could easily have become a research monograph. Including many of the photos in the research report invited the reader to experience the research process. The researchers became friendly with their subjects and at the end of the project they all gathered at a party; for some, it was the first time they had crossed those social boundaries of ethnicity, age and gender. The researchers had thought a great deal about how to make photos to capture a point of view or to express an idea. They mostly used tripods, which allowed them to study the exact framing with their community member, sometimes changing lenses or angles of view. The images were the result of a great deal of planning; all parties took it seriously. They represent a middle road in the collaborative model, in which the photographic expertise of the researchers is melded with the visions of the community members, which are partly developed through the discussions made during the research itself. Summary I have had several reactions to recent PE research. I have come to feel even more strongly that qualitative collaborative methods are more craft than science, without consistent rules and procedures.The studies that work best for me include images, interviews and analysis, crafted into longer articles or books. Often article-length research publications give little of the real flavor of what was experienced or the subtlety of the knowledge gained.This is a challenge faced by all qualitative research when it is squeezed into the same publication format used for quantitative research, but is especially disappointing when the knowledge is the result of the interplay between images and people in conversations, where the communication is easily more artful and literary than scientific.

Photovoice: Introduction In some sense photovoice is a close cousin to photo elicitation, but in another it is quite different. In PE the researcher images the research and takes the photos; in PV the

122 Visual research collaboration community typically (but not always) imagines issues they want to explore and they take the images, with the researcher being the facilitator. For many who are involved with these research techniques the two approaches are mutually exclusive: you can either do research, as elicitation researchers do, and hope it positively influences those you study (or produces “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”) or you can help a community identify problems and solve them, which is often the central theme of photovoice. For me, the line between these methods is softer, but we will delve into these deeper forms of research collaboration in their own terms, and through the voice and experience of my colleague Karijn Kakebeeke, who has spent much of her career as a photovoice researcher. Most researchers immersed in the collaborative model, as PV and its related forms are known, trace their work to Sol Worth and John Adair’s project Through Navajo Eyes,19 based on research completed in the late 1960s. Worth and Adair trained several Navajo Native Americans to operate silent 16 mm film cameras, and to edit their footage into short films. The films introduce the viewer to the Navajo experience of time, the organization of tasks and a distinctive appreciation for a relationship between ends and means. For example, Navajo filmmaker Susie Benally’s weaver spends most of the film walking slowly through the terrain, looking for natural elements to use as dyes, and taking care of sheep which she will eventually shear for the wool to be made into the rugs. It is fifteen minutes into the twenty-minute film before she begins to weave, and then cutaways return to the care of the sheep, now the responsibility of her little brother. The film is a remarkable teaching tool because it locks the viewer into a reality that most middle-class North Americans have not experienced, and this is different from reading about the cultural definition of time and task management. About a decade after the publication of Worth and Adair’s work,Wendy Ewald’s Portrait and Dreams applied the same approach to projects using still photography.20 Ewald had done postgraduate studies in photography at MIT under Minor White, and she was to become a teacher in the Appalachian region of Kentucky. Modest grants allowed her to build darkrooms in several schools, and over time Ewald developed a curriculum where children photographed, developed and printed their photos, and reflected on what the photos meant. Eventually Ewald and Katie Hyde (and their colleagues) developed this method further at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.21 In the initial project Ewald asked her students to photograph their dreams; their understandings of nature and the environment; and the closeness of their families (the list of topics explored in typical assignments is now much larger). The photographs made by the Appalachian children in Ewald’s first study at first confirm common stereotypes of Appalachian poverty, including social isolation and material deprivation. In context with the students’ thoughts and words, however, they describe deep connections to the physical environment and kin, vivid imaginations and poetic story telling. In the meantime, Ewald completed several imaginative projects that she regards as art rather than sociology. The inspiration to put cameras in the hands of subject-collaborators, however, had taken form, and since then the method has grown and branched into several forms. While Worth and Adair and Wendy Ewald were both important inspirations, Caroline Wang provided the name “photovoice” to research in which the subjects of the study (in the language of the prior research) now take the photos which become key to new cultural understandings. Photovoice has, in fact, blossomed into a cross-discipline intellectual movement. The most common theme in photovoice is that the research must arise from a community and address community needs, and that the desired result is the

Visual research collaboration 123 empowerment of those who use photos to demystify their social circumstances.Wang and others trace their inspiration to Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire encouraged what he termed critical consciousness, that is, developing an understanding and willingness to act on the economic, social and political forces that affect one’s life, and the issues of their communities. The first use of photovoice was Wang and Burris’ project intended to encourage Chinese village women to identify aspects of their community and public health that they wanted to change.22 In this initial project, Wang and Burris defined photovoice as a method through which knowledge would be generated by people who were normally passive objects in the research process. In Wang and Burris’ words, photovoice was intended to motivate people to “record and reflect their community’s strengths and concerns … to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important issues through large and small group discussion of photographs, and … to reach policymakers.”23 In the twenty-seven years since their first project, the use of photovoice has skyrocketed. In addition to sociology and anthropology, photovoice research has appeared in journals on AIDs education, public health, nursing, community psychology, disability, health education, adolescent mental health, interprofessional care, human services, special needs, dementia and various aspects of education and management. Many of the authors teach and research in medical or public health schools, social work graduate programs or graduate studies of education. The assumption that photovoice is empowering is based on the idea that photographing one’s world leads to greater awareness of both assets and problems of communities or research situations. This perspective reflects an unstated assumption that a photograph of a surface reality—what the camera sees—reveals its structural underpinnings, and it will lead to an enlarged understanding, a sociological decoding of the world pictured.The idea of empowerment also assumes that to photograph one’s world is to advance one’s mastery of it.The collective work in photovoice projects includes the teaching of the method, and the photography itself is assumed to raise an awareness that could ignite the creation of social change. How do researchers teach where to aim the camera, and what questions to ask about the images made? In several studies participants followed a sequence of questions referred by the acronym SHOWED (briefly stated: what do you SEE here; what is really HAPPENING here; how does this relate to OUR lives; WHY does this situation exist; how can we become EMPOWERED by our new social understanding; what can we DO to address these issues?) that have become part of the photovoice canon. All but one author of articles I found using this approach accepted its usefulness uncritically. The exception was Alice Mcintyre, who studied Catholic women in Northern Ireland, and noted that the women she worked with over several months were frustrated by the SHOWeD protocol. One participant, Lucy, is quoted as saying: “The questions are preventin’ me from thinkin’ about the photos without havin’ to have an answer to them.” Another participant, Winnie, agreed, stating that she just wanted to “write and not have to stop and see if it all fits into those questions ’cause I don’t think my photos do really. Not the way the questions are listed there.”24 In other words, while SHOWeD emphasizes the activist orientation of photovoice, it is seen by some as overly directive and inimical to more natural discussions of images. Two researchers used what Theo van Leeuwen termed the iconographic approach to analyze photos made during the research, which begins with questions of representation (“What do the images represent and how?”) and proceeds to the “hidden meanings” of

124 Visual research collaboration images (“What ideas and values do the people, places and things represented in images stand for?”).25 Van Leeuwen’s interest is in imagery found throughout society (popular culture, fine arts, scientific documentation and others) so the point of the research is less in making images to deconstruct the world as deconstructing the world as it is represented in images. The typical photovoice experience begins with discussions of ethics, followed by photography instruction, photo assignments and analysis. Typically, this takes place over a one- or two-week workshop, though there are many variations. For example, Heather Castleden and her colleagues used photovoice in an in-depth study of community concerns among First Nation people in Western Canada: Wang’s approach to PV was initially planned for the Huu-ay-aht study. However, it quickly became apparent that the “classic” Photovoice approach was similar to the academic trend of doing “parachute” research in Indigenous communities. In previous Photovoice studies, data were often collected in a few weeks, whereas the data collection for this study extended for six months. This prolonged immersion in the field served to establish rapport and build trust.26 A key point was that discussions about the photos influenced subsequent image making. Photovoice researchers follow the theoretical groundwork as laid out by Wang, who draws inspiration and connections to feminist methods. For example, Wang, Burris and Ping identify feminist methods as “an appreciation of women’s subjective experience; a recognition of the significance of that experience, and political commitment.”27 Feminist methods are defined in several ways; most suggest that they are a key to understanding how women should photograph other women, but the ideas also led researchers to show increased sensitivity toward the portrayal of disabled men, immigrant children and the homeless of both sexes that were the focus of other studies. Carol Smart’s consideration of new methods that draw on the insights of feminism28 focuses on “giving greater priority to hearing and understanding the ways in which ordinary people interpret and define social interaction,” which she takes to include the understanding of emotions and feelings. Recognizing that people often do not express themselves in a straightforward way leads her to consider elicitation methods grounded in the understanding of the material world. Smart’s article is an invitation to open ourselves up to learning more in research, in part through the visual method. The essay itself is a model for expressing ourselves in a different way, almost literary in quality, and admitting to complexity and even contradiction. There seem to be two types of photos made by participants in photovoice projects. Most are images of objects that are special because of their role in the lives being documented. An aisle in a drugstore too narrow for a wheelchair is important if you are wheelchair bound. An empty lot turned into a trash heap is important to those identifying the assets and needs of their communities. A photo of paint peeling from the ceiling of a school shows the neglect of the community that students are reminded of as their gazes drift upward. Photos made by children of signs in grocery store windows reading “foot stamps welcome” or of a homeless veteran carrying a sign “job wanted” are important for their literal meanings. The photographers also visualized metaphors, sentiments and emotions. A tree bare of leaves might represent a state of dormancy, part of a healing process. Images of friends might represent a secure social existence. Parents holding hands may represent hope for

Visual research collaboration 125 the future. A photo of a flower bud may indicate the state of unfolding in a young athlete’s life, and so on. The photovoice model, building on straightforward assumptions and techniques, has spread like wildfire across academic disciplines and geographic boundaries. In putting image-making into the hands of those who were the subject of research has had a revolutionary impact on visual methods generally and on ethnography in particular. New participatory methods In the meantime, new collaborative research directions have emerged. There is digital storytelling, which resembles auto-ethnography done digitally with images, and other media elements. Participatory film and video are as they sound, making videos that come from community concerns and are made collaboratively. Collaborative documentary film has a long history, dating to Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s 1965 Chronicle of a Summer, which took advantage of newly developed portable sound sync cameras to explore working class lives in Paris from the inside out. Most contemporary uses of the method are located in communities and cultural lives that do not normally have access to movie-making, including villagers in rural Africa, migrant youth, asylum seekers and others. For example, Martin Gruber, who has done extensive work in this tradition, defines the purpose of his work in Angola, Namibia and Botswana to “give the participants the possibility to shape their own media image and generate new forms of collaborative knowledge.”29 Another new form of participatory visual research draws upon geographic information systems.The idea, simply put, is that maps hold social power. If you are disabled, for example, you cannot trust that the information provided by your GPS will facilitate your use of a particular physical environment. Participatory Mapping enables communities to define the physical world of which they are part. This work has immediate and direct influence on those who navigate worlds that pose physical challenges, and they provide for others with more typical physical capabilities an understanding of the experience of communities that physically differ from their own. This understanding can then provide a basis for changing the physical design of environments to facilitate use by a wider range of people.30 Finally, there is a call for “participatory curating,” in which communities or groups who are typically the subject of museum exhibitions or websites create their own archives and exhibitions via the web.31 In one example, anthropologist Catherine Besteman, who had extensive research and advocacy experience among the Somalian Bantu, oversaw the development of an art exhibition “Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks, Pathways,” shown at several museums and represented in a website “The Somali Bantu Experience: From East Africa to Maine”32 that provides an historical timeline of the Somalian Bantu in Africa in the contexts of war, forced migrations, deep tragedies and migration to Lewiston, Maine. Most of these collaborations rely in one way or another on the digital world. On the other hand, research collaboration also embraced the lowest level of technology, that is drawing, illustrating, teaching observation through collective art practices in ethnographic research.33 This briefest of introductions shows how research collaboration is taking place in several visual fields. Rather than offer an encyclopedia that shows every variation of each new and emerging version of participatory research, I refer the reader to two recent books34 that describe what has become a discipline in and of itself.

126 Visual research collaboration In the meantime, we will shift to an in-depth discussion of photovoice, which remains one of the two primary trunks of the collaborative tree. Doing PhotoVoice: A conversation between Karijn Kakebeeke and Douglas Harper Karijn Kakebeeke had been a student in the last edition of four immersive courses on visual ethnography I taught at the University of Amsterdam in the early 1990s.We recently reconnected via the good luck of professional accidents, and I asked for her help, given her deep experience using photovoice. The following are excerpts from several recorded zoom conversations that took place in March and April 2022. I had been doing photovoice workshops for the purpose of evaluation for a couple of years and never ceased to be awed by how powerfully photographs made by participants communicate. Although not everyone can become a photographer, clearly everyone is able to express themselves through pictures. The photographs coming from the workshops I supervised were literal insights into participants’ points of view but the value of the workshops was also far greater for the sponsoring organizations than they had imagined. They learned more, and different things than they expected. Participants in a photovoice workshop go off on their own and come back with photographs that answer research questions. Participants are given the time and space to think about their answers to these questions and to imagine how to visualize it. In other words, participants become active respondents, unlike when you react to a question with an immediate answer. The method allows for related associations to come into play and become part of the visual expression. DOUG: You are a photographer with several years’ experience.You have a photographer’s “eye” as I know from looking at the book you gave me of your work. Was it difficult for you to suddenly lose control of the photography in these projects? KARIJN: No, actually I found it rewarding. In my photojournalistic journey, for example, I made a book, in 2011, on displaced migrants. And as I was asking for subsidies to make the book, one of the comments I received, and I agreed with them, was that photography itself was not enough to tell the whole story.You’ll need an extra layer. I heard that very often, if I entered the photojournalistic world with just my pictures they would say it’s too arty, and if I tried to take it to the art world they would say it’s too journalistic. I realized I needed more tools at my disposal. If my toolbox was more complete, I’d have more freedom to tell stories in a more experimental way. So, actually, I felt I was becoming enriched [by the photovoice experience] rather than something was taken away from me. DOUG: How did you get started in photovoice? KARIJN: I became involved in photovoice when my career as a photojournalist became a casualty of the digital revolution. For several years I was a photojournalist, traveling, for example, to eastern Siberia to photograph and write about a new manifestation of Jesus Christ, to Afghanistan to do a story to see how Afghans who were denied permanent asylum in the Netherlands, were settling back in their country after a seven-year wait in the Netherlands, or to Congo to document the stories of men and women who were victims of rape as a weapon of war. I was generally loving my work and supporting myself. With the rise of the internet, the market for photojournalism imploded and budgets became much tighter. As a result, newspapers KARIJN:

Visual research collaboration 127 become smaller in size which meant there was less space available for photography. There also was a tendency to move away from serious reportage and photojournalism. “Lifestyle” reporting was competing with photojournalistic reportage and actually kind of won.To be able to survive as a photojournalist became more difficult, and many of my colleagues and I moved into more commercial assignments to be able to make ends meet. But I just didn’t enjoy that. Commercial work was about the image as the final goal, not the story that the image carries. For me photography is a way to tell stories. To understand the world better. I was trying to resolve this crisis when a friend of mine, who was working for Rutgers Organization, organized the program that eventually sent me to Malawi to do conduct my first photovoice training. She had heard of Photovoice and she discussed it with me: “I’d really love to introduce this idea into the organization … would you like to be the person executing it?” It was basically that she was saying out loud what I was thinking even though I didn’t really know what I was thinking yet. That was how the ball started rolling. Rutgers is a “knowledge institute,” as we say in Holland, an institute that distributes knowledge on sexuality; on sexual reproductive health care. And they do this in the Netherlands as well as internationally. In the Netherlands they have all these fun and quirky ads and journalistic series to educate children around sexuality; they’ve been around forever. They are like a traditional NGO working on sexuality issues. It’s great … they have this famous book on sexual reproductive organs, and if you open it, like this [gestures] there’s a huge fold-out penis that pops up! [Laughing.] They really know how to do it with a sense of humor. So it’s easy to discuss things. Project 1: Malawi DOUG: Can you talk about that first project, in Malawi? KARIJN: Rutgers was considering photovoice for their

organization. They thought it was a very interesting method, but they didn’t know if it would fit their organization, so they asked me, as an anthropologist and photographer, to pilot it for them in Malawi. And the question we were asking was whether the work of peer educators was working for Rutgers. In Malawi a lot of young adults, between about eighteen and twenty-seven years old, can learn extra skills by becoming peer educators … they are not really paid as such, it’s like an internship. Here they are trained by Rutgers and their partner, the local Family Planning Association, and these peer educators became key figures in talking about protecting yourself from unwanted pregnancies, from unwanted diseases, making sure that young people who wanted condoms could get them, or if you have an unwanted pregnancy where to get counseling without anyone knowing, or even how to get a safe abortion. They are the ones disseminating the knowledge. Rutgers knew that was working, but what they didn’t know was what it meant for these young adults to be peer educators. We brought along little digital photo cameras with an SD card. The first two days we talked about visual literacy, photography, composition, technique, about how you use lighting, and we gave them different exercises to play around with. We discussed the research question. I don’t remember it exactly, but it must have been something

128 Visual research collaboration like “how has being a peer educator affected your life.”We did exercises, and rephrased the question so they knew what we were interested in. We tried to make it both our and their question, so they took ownership in it. We were interested in the meaning of being a peer educator. Whether it had any greater meaning than the whole sexuality education issue. What did it do for them to have this role in the community? Rutgers and the Family Planning Association knew that it was being successful, but they didn’t know the greater impact on those involved. This is what we explained to the peer educators. After two days of preparation there were two days out in the field, taking photos. After the first day we met and discussed what they had done, see if they had any questions … if everything had gone well; if there were any technical issues.Then they would go back the next day to take more images. On day five and six we worked as a group to select and categorize the photos and arrange them as narratives. Working together they decided which images really answered the research question. Then the narratives belonging to the images could be altered; expanded a little. But only if the photographer agreed. DOUG: How one’s job or position affects one’s life is an abstract question. I’m imagining being involved and thinking, “what I would have photographed?” I know 2014, when you began this work, is a long time ago, but do you remember any of the photographs? KARIJN: One participant showed a photograph of a teacher speaking to a classroom full of children (Figure 3.13). She explained that she was training to become a teacher and noticed that fellow teachers didn’t dare to talk about sexuality. They were nervous to do so. Since this was what she did in her work as a peer educator, she gave the teachers tips and tricks on how to provide this information. The opportunity for participants to formulate and visualize their answers in time and space of their own gave them the chance to include topics with no direct link to their work for Rutgers. Instead of merely answering a question, they told their own story. Vincent’s picture was an image of several women simply standing in a row [Figure 3.14]. And the caption stresses the importance of school attendance. What was happening in many of those communities was that when the girls got their periods and maybe they didn’t have enough funds to use sanitary pads so normally they would stay home. This is one week a month so their education would lag far behind boys … The practical implications of simply being a sexual being are huge. Sexual and reproductive health being valued and supported in the community was one of the themes … there was a photograph of a religious leader [in this case a Muslim religious leader] sitting with young children [Figure 3.15], saying that thanks to their work religious leaders have become much more open to talk about sexuality; not trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Also being able to discuss condoms among youngsters. There is a picture of a young boy holding a condom and the peer educator discussing it with the boys in the field. Sharing the idea that the increase in sexual and reproductive health and family planning leads to improved economic conditions. Through family planning women don’t continually have children, and they have fewer children, so they can contribute economically to their families, so there is more prosperity. They would photograph families who only had two children. Or there was a photograph of a boy with a bicycle showing that because after learning life skills he purchased a bike and started a small transportation business. In

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Figure 3.13 Everess shows a teacher she will work with on teaching sex education. Source: Photo by Everess, Courtesy of Karijn Kakebeeke

Figure 3.14 “Young teachers stand in a row. These role models empower girls to continue their education.” Source: Photo by Vincent, Courtesy of Karijn Kakebeeke

another photo you see a woman with her pots and pans; she has a small business by herself. “Because of family planning the woman is able to do more than just be a mother … she has started her business as a charcoal burner.” DOUG: What did the peer educators think about the process? KARIJN: They loved it! They were completely enthusiastic. DOUG: Why were they enthusiastic? KARIJN: I think because it was about them. It wasn’t about their role as a peer educator… it wasn’t technical, how many pamphlets they distributed … it was really about their experience. They were the ones deciding what needed to be told.

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Figure 3.15 Religious leader and kids talk about sexuality. Source: Photo by Charles, Courtesy of Karijn Kakebeeke

I think it was empowering … and I think there was a lot of learning for the organization as well. For example, there was a peer educator’s photograph by Eric of women standing in front of a dispenser [Figure 3.16] in a pharmacy that came into existence due to his work and through this event the young man is becoming a person of some standing in the village and the community. So maybe Rutgers and the Family Planning Association had trained them in this way, but these youngsters are such eager learners that they do so much more with all their knowledge … they initiate and implement these things. The spinoff is far larger. It was clear what was being asked of me, and what I liked so much about working on these assignments is that the outcome was completely open. They asked me to help discover: what do people think; what do people experience? And that’s what I like because you don’t know what’s going to come out. I can only facilitate the process. DOUG: How long did you have to get to know them? KARIJN: In that sense it’s “in and out.” You could call it an old-fashioned business trip. Let’s not make it too idealistic. You can also call it colonial. Three white ladies from the west travel all this way to Malawi to give a workshop. At the same time we were of course working alongside of the people of the organization. In the end of the day, it’s also that. It’s not that we stay in a five-star resort or anything even close, but it’s still us bringing our knowledge, but we hope to do it in the most participatory way possible … DOUG: After the week was over, what happened? KARIJN: We left the cameras with them because they wanted to continue photovoice for their own organization.We ended the week with an exhibition, which was simple but effective. We had a small printer and a laminating machine, so on day six we printed through the whole night … we printed the images with the captions on A4 photo sheets and we laminated them.We had people go to the market; who bought washing line and pins; we found a nice place and hung them up.

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Figure 3.16 “This is one of my greatest achievements as I am involved in the new FDR program. The chief requested that I write a proposal for a health facility. The Swedish accepted the proposal; they provided the funding and now we use the facility for outreach activities and long-term objectives.” Source: Photo by Eric, Courtesy of Karijn Kakebeeke

Figure 3.17 Exhibition of project results. Source: © Karijn Kakebeeke, Courtesy of the artist

Did you keep in touch with any of them? Do you know the long-term effects of this? KARIJN: No. DOUG: Is that OK? KARIJN: Yup, that’s OK. DOUG: What was the effect in your life? Did you find yourself moving from one kind of photographer to another? DOUG:

132 Visual research collaboration I think it did several things. I discovered something I maybe could be good at. If you put me in front of a group I can really engage with them. I can make my enthusiasm contagious. I can ask questions that create a response … I can get an energy rolling. At least from my perspective I’m able to put something together that is positive. So this is very rewarding. It’s just a great experience. DOUG: Can you talk about the collaboration? How was it rewarding? Was It ever frustrating? KARIJN: I teach photography as well. I’ve done it for a long time, much longer than I’ve done photovoice. And what I noticed here is that even though the approach is not the same the effect is similar. Through photography you give people a way to express themselves. If that will stick to them or if they will use it in the future, obviously I don’t know. But I do think that for that moment I have facilitated a means of expression and a means of expression which they can share easily. That’s what’s so great about photography. It’s not defined. Words have definitions. Pictures have associations. They invite you into a reflective mode. KARIJN:

Project 2: Holland, point of view I was impressed by the power of photography used in this way and at the same time the debate in Holland around migration and the failing integration ignited into a big topic again … I felt a little bit frustrated because I can be idealistic, and I felt that if I wasn’t part of the solution I was part of the problem. I felt that either through photojournalism or photovoice I had to do something proactive to contribute. And then I thought of photovoice where you hand over the camera to participants who have something in common, so they can talk about their common issues, and then I thought, well, wait a minute what if I give cameras to different people who still share something in common, namely the area or the neighborhood they live in.They maybe don’t realize they have something in common, because they’re actually living on their own island. Suddenly it came to me that photovoice could be a way to get people to become aware of their preconceptions, and if they would become more aware, it would also be easier to open up to someone who is a stranger to you. I started talking to a couple of people, brainstorming about the idea, and through these conversations it went from an idea to a plan. I thought I would need a group of “newcomers” [the name we give to refugees who have been given a residency permit], ex-refugees new to the Netherlands, and then their neighbors who were already there, I thought it would be important to disseminate my plan through the media so a larger group of people would be involved. And I thought it would also be important to exhibit the work. To make it more attractive for people to participate and to give it a kind of standing, to say “if this actually hangs in a museum it is something worth looking at.”These are stories that need to have their audience, so to speak. Something we need to listen to and to hear. I spoke to many people working for different municipalities and working for different departments of the refugee councils to test my hypothesis. I got a lot of feedback, and that was the start of it. There is a lot of research that says refugees—or, rather, people who came here as refugees—like to integrate with Dutch people but they find it difficult … they don’t get beyond the “hi-bye” contact with the Dutch. The Dutch are friendly, but they also keep to themselves.

KARIJN:

Visual research collaboration 133 So based on these conversations and this research I wrote a grant proposal which at first was denied, but then, the refugee crisis developed and this bad luck became my good luck. The war in Syria and the politically tense situation in Eritrea meant thousands of refugees came into Europe at the same time and when I resubmitted my grant proposal the money came flowing in. It was suddenly a hot topic. That’s how it went. I did this with my colleague Martha who also had experience with photovoice, and even more experience working with groups as a trainer, and was also an avid photographer. We made flyers, hung posters, we knocked on doors of local radio stations so we could talk about what was coming, to make the buzz go around. To have people sign up we went to the local refugee council departments and spoke to different groups in training sessions and workshops. We went to different language courses, “Dutch language for foreigners.” This was basically how we recruited our participants. We insisted that half of the participants be non-Dutch, or “newcomers,” and half would be Dutch participants, and we thought that if we were two facilitators, we could work with twenty-four people max. We could do some work for the whole group in the plenary, but then we could split the group in two and have each facilitator work with a group of twelve, half newcomers and half old Dutch. The Dutch participants were between forty and fifty-five years old; the newcomers slightly younger, some as young as thirty. The refugees came from many countries: Syria, Iraq, Eritrea, Congo, Sudan,Yemen and Burundi. Since most of the newcomers had only been in the Netherlands for a relatively short period of time, we enlisted the help of interpreters. This meant discussions took extra time but meant that language differences didn’t interfere with our discussions. All were heard. Our themes developed around the following questions: What do you need to have a sense of belonging? What are the things that catch your attention in the public space around you? What do you tell someone beloved in a country far away about the place where you live? What is the most important lesson your parents taught you? What items are so precious to you, that you would like to keep them “under your pillow” to keep them safe? Each program took an average of three to six months. During our first meeting we explained our aims and set up of the program. We used ice breaker and photography exercises to get people acquainted with one another.We talked about the ethics around picture taking and gave them an introduction photography technique and composition. During the following months we convened as a group every two weeks. After each session participants were sent home with a question they were asked to answer in photographs. They would email the photographs a couple of days prior to the next session so when they arrived at the meeting we had everything ready. In general terms, the photographs allowed two things to happen. Where images and the stories showed resemblance, people felt recognition and a sense of kinship. At the same time the photographs showing differing perceptions allowed for greater understanding. Both were important in shaping a feeling of reciprocal affinity and in removing the concept of “othering.”

134 Visual research collaboration What also allowed for a more profound understanding was the fact that though the pictures could provoke they were not intended as provocations. This allowed for the frankness necessary for everyone to feel evenly matched to one another. The role of the interpreters was indispensable to get to this point. They allowed newcomers to express themselves freely and not be limited by any foreign language aptitude. One aim of the program was to create (a sense of) connection between newcomers and Dutch people. We therefore felt it was important to share the photographs and stories with a larger audience. But we also faced practical issues when designing the exhibitions. “OK now how are we going to showcase all these photographs; how are we going to show the narratives? How are we going to engage our audience in the best way possible? How are we going to make sure they are not just walking through saying ‘Ah huh, ah huh, ah huh … very nice,’ but also going to ask them questions like, ‘what do you think?’” So we made it as interactive as possible. I like the exhibition design process (which we do in collaboration with professional designers) very much because then I get to mix the research part of me and the creative part. I like to feed both sides of myself, you know? But I think it’s still a thin way to show what had been going on in the photovoice process because the most interesting things happened in the discussions that were not recorded. And I would love to find ways to record and share these discussions for people who are not participants themselves. The pictures I’m showing you are a mix of those three editions, all I think are remarkable for one reason or another. There are many other photos I could show you. DOUG: Was there anyone who was highly judgmental about the other culture? Who expressed themselves in a negative, even racist way? KARIJN: Ahhhh … no. Actually no. I think that when we started off we imagined that we would bring in all these different people with all these different points of view, and we would maybe convince them that refugees aren’t bad, you know something like that, very idealistic. But the people who actually signed up were already open to meet refugees, and the refugees were pleased to actually to have the opportunity to talk to the Dutch. It was not that they had the same idea of course but they were not strongly opposed … which doesn’t mean they didn’t raise issues that weren’t provocative. Not because they meant to provoke, but the issues they were raising were provocative themselves. There was for example, one man who showed a photograph of an Orthodox Jew and this photograph caused a lot of discussion because … he didn’t say it directly, but he said, “it’s because of the Muslims in the Netherlands, or in Amsterdam, that we do not see this kind of scene on the streets anymore.” This represents a Dutch integration problem. We used to have lots of problems with Moroccan immigrant youth who feel like they are treated as second class citizens and act as “angry young men”; I think that’s probably the biggest problem if you imagine having problems with Judaism. And to a lesser extent with young Turkish immigrants. But the Muslims who took part in the “Point of View” were coming from Syria, or Iraq, or Yemen, or even from Eritrea … many living in countries where of course they have their own problems with minority religions are under pressure. So what started out being a heated became a discussion about … how would I say it properly … whereby everybody was trying to do their best … not all twenty-four were taking part in this conversation; some were listening, but they were trying to

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Figure 3.18 by Fred, Netherlands. “You don’t see this anymore in Amsterdam: an orthodox Jewish man. Aggression against Jews has caused this image to disappear from our streets. This picture was taken in Maastricht. It’s Friday afternoon and these are groceries for Sabbat. I find this man very brave, that he shows what religion he belongs to by dressing this way in public.” Source: Photo made by Fred for the Picture Bridge Foundation

say that when someone cannot express themselves freely in their religion it causes suffering. They all agreed on that. It took a while to get there but it became a kind of unifying statement. DOUG: I think of Holland as a society that welcomed the Jews who were expelled from England in the fourteenth century. And then to flash forward to see this photo of this man preparing for his Friday services to be told that given the immigration issues this is a rarity; this is a startling image. So this “normal” image represents a complicated reality. KARIJN: I must honestly say that I didn’t grow up in the Netherlands so I don’t know how ordinary this scene was in comparison to how unusual it is now. But in my time, studying in Amsterdam, I don’t have any recollection of seeing Orthodox Jews. It’s not that I have not seen Orthodox Jews, but to say that it was a normal thing to see them on Friday dressed in their religious attire, I don’t have any recollection. DOUG: Let’s go to another photo. [Karijn shows two photos of a park in urban Holland with a manicured pond, and a bench and small trash bin, painted red, mounted discretely.] KARIJN: Here are two images that are saying the exact same story, made by two people coming from different countries, pointing out something about the Netherlands that we are not aware of at all, but which, judging from the pictures and the discussion, is something generically felt about the Netherlands by people coming from abroad. DOUG: What was the response was to these two photos? KARIJN: I would describe it as laughter while blushing. Feeling confronted with your own culture and recognizing the point that is being made … there are beautiful benches everywhere, and you ask yourself “how often do I actually sit on such a bench?” And you feel a little bit embarrassed. And you have to laugh about it, ha, ha! So a little light-hearted and a little embarrassed. DOUG: The Dutch weren’t defensive, or argumentative?

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Figure 3.19 by Feras, Iraq. “Everything is beautiful, except for this empty bench! Where are the lovers who like to sit here? I miss the people and liveness in the streets that I know from where I come from.” Source: Photo made by Feras for the Picture Bridge Foundation

Oh, no, not at all. We laughed a lot. We laughed an amazing amount together. I think that’s what made it so nice, the discovery that we could really laugh about ourselves and at each other. DOUG: What about the fact that the trees are so trimmed in this photo [Figure 3.20]? KARIJN: Not so much in this image, but I do have images in which everything is neatly arranged. The newcomers come and they say “the organizational emphasis in this country is just madness!” KARIJN: Yes, this one made by a Dutch lady [Figure 3.21] and this one [Figure 3.22] made by a Congolese man. I also thought that’s what many of the conversations did for the Dutch, which is to reassess and re-value what we have. The Dutch lady, the way she told the story she was … really like, psssst! Oh god look at us being such goody goody citizens, putting all these waste bins in such a neat order … she was kind of laughing about it … not putting any value to it. And then Claude came, with this story and she says, “oh god, I never really thought of what really is the value of the rubbish being collected.” And I think that happened often. Through the eyes of the newcomers the Dutch are able to look at their own society … and things they were complaining about before, like “oh, there’s too much bureaucracy, there’s too many rules, there’s too much regulation … there’s too much this and there’s too much that …” and then they actually realize that the fact that we have all those things gives us freedom and peace of mind, that actually means that we have such a carefree life and such a safe environment … that happened often. DOUG: What you’re saying is that there is a mutual education going on … KARIJN: Totally. DOUG: What did the Dutch say when Claude, the Congolese man, spoke so critically about Africa? About everybody throwing trash everywhere?

KARIJN:

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Figure 3.20 by Adbulkhalig, Syria. “The Netherlands has so many spots to enjoy a beautiful view, but the strange thing is, nobody sits there. The only thing you see are ducks. No lovers or couples, everything stays quiet. In summertime there is also no one to be seen. People, come and go outside!” Source: Photo made by Abdulkhalig for the Picture Bridge Foundation

Figure 3.21 by Nicole, Netherlands. “Waste-bin day. Here they are, standing neatly in a row. I find that so remarkable, how neatly we all keep to the rules.” Source: Photo made by Nicole for the Picture Bridge Foundation

I think that … maybe … the Dutch felt slightly superior? They already knew that in Africa things were not arranged so well? They weren’t surprised.They felt a little bit, maybe, confronted with their plushness by not recognizing the value of these wastebins, and rubbish collection … and that in Africa things are badly organized, and that there’s a lot of rubbish, and a lot of poverty, this is something the Dutch already know. [If we go to this image (street sign with couple) … an interesting conversation came forward.]

KARIJN:

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Figure 3.22 by Claude, Congo. “The Netherlands is very clean. Everything is tidy, and nothing is really dirty. The dirty things are waiting in wastebins until they are collected. We don’t have this in Africa.You just throw your stuff out on the street, everywhere. Sometimes you bring it away to places where few people live and where now and again the municipality burns it. But this can take a couple of months. In the meantime, children play in between the rubbish.” Source: Photo made by Claude for the Picture Bridge Foundation

Carin went all the way to Utrecht to take this photograph to say how positive she feels that we have “gay tolerance.” And there we were sitting with a group of men from many different countries, most from Muslim countries. Then many of the Muslim men became a little bit quiet. They already know, of course, that the Dutch think about homosexuality in such a way … and they were kind of quiet. In certain circumstances they would be eager to engage in conversations. But here they became subdued and quiet. But Claude, from Congo, was kind of saying “this is not something we know in our country. This is something we do not have. This is your problem and not ours. This is not a problem I recognize.” And then the Dutch were reacting to him in a way, “of course, that’s how you would react … but we know that it’s happening in your country.” I felt they were kind of being … how do you call it, armchair anthropologists? Taking on this position, like they were knowing it better? Everybody assumed their own stereotype; everybody took their own role. DOUG: So how did that work? Did the Dutch feel the Africans were homophobic … did it confirm their views of them as undesirable? Or did it make them feel that “well, we don’t agree about this but it doesn’t mean we can’t get along?” What were the concluding thoughts about it? KARIJN: I think we took what one person said and balanced it against what the other person said. I’m not quite what I thought at that moment. I did have a conversation afterwards with a good friend of mine who is homosexual, and I thought it was interesting what he was saying. He basically said, that yes, he’s for immigration, but he also said that it’s problematical, that with increasing immigrants in the country there are people entering the country who have far less tolerant views of homosexuality. And being homosexual; he feels less free to just be as he is in public because of

KARIJN:

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Figure 3.23 by Carin, Netherlands. “This is the only traffic light in the Netherlands that shows two women or two men. And that is precisely what it is about: That you also have pairs of women and men. It’s an initiative of Groenlinks [Dutch political party] in the municipality of Utrecht, I went there on purpose to take this picture. For me it shows something very positive because I believe that everyone, regardless of the way in which they live, has the right to be.” Source: Photo made by Carin for the Picture Bridge Foundation

immigrants. And he finds it difficult; something that should be remembered. In the Netherlands we fought for this right and this should be addressed and clearly stated. DOUG: What you’ve done is to create a dialogue between people who in some cases have quite different definitions of the same thing. What would the conversation be if this photo were of two men, or two women holding hands, rather than the symbolism of it on the streetlight? The street crossing sign abstracts it. KARIJN: It abstracts it but it also institutionalizes it. And I think that is the strength of this image. Symbolically it is talking about the same thing but there is more power in it because we are saying “we even show this in our traffic lights. This is not some private event.” DOUG: The person who is looking at that light may be from a society in which this is illegal and punished with severity. Look at the light too, perfect, structured so cleanly. Only in Holland would the light match the color of the bank behind it. [Laughs.] Here is the power of the state telling us that our own opinions are our own business, but this is where you are living now. KARIJN: Yes, in that way I find it to be a powerful image. I often thought in hindsight of what could I have done differently in the conversation, what could I have done better, and I’m still not entirely sure, because I think that I also believe that you are not trying to be evangelical.There’s no reason to expect to change a person’s view on a spur of the moment. I think it’s much more powerful to enter a dialogue, and you can hope that people learn something from each other. KARIJN: This is a man who discovered what photography could do for him through this project. We lent him a camera and after the project ended he bought a camera of his own, and made the most amazing photographs. But it also showed how lonely and

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Figure 3.24 by Bassam, Syria. “Since I’m in the Netherlands, everything I see is different than what I’m used to. Only see new things while I want to see things I recognize. But I don’t see things I recognize, so you could say that my eyes have changed. This is a can, I photographed through the holes in one of them because it had the shape of an eye. It symbolizes the eyes I used to have. I want to go back to the eyes I used to have. I want to go back to the things I’m used to; I want to recognize things again.” Source: Photo made by Bassam for the Picture Bridge Foundation

disoriented he felt. Like he’d landed in outer space. He had a way of making beautiful, poetic images and at the same time it was also clear he was still very unhappy, not feeling at home, having no sense of belonging yet, at all. And then you just hope that taking images and sharing the stories and being in a group could do something for him. KARIJN: [continues] On the other hand there was this image [Figure 3.26]. Kumait was Alawite, which is the same Muslim minority as Bashar Al-Assad is [the President of Syria], and during one meeting apparently something was said about this. And then Bassam, who took the picture through the can, what was he … I think a Sunni Muslim, kind of accused him of being on Assad’s side. And he became very angry because he didn’t agree with that at all. The conversation became heated, between Kumait and Bassam, all taking place in Arabic, actually in a different room than where I was at that moment. I came over and heard a heated conversation in a language I didn’t understand, and Bassam took off … I think this was the last, or the meeting before last, and he didn’t rejoin. It also showed, again, my naivete. DOUG: I think what you are saying is that you were trying to do something that is extraordinarily difficult. Sometimes it is successful in demonstrating the point of view of the migrant and also the people who become their new neighbors, and in other cases all it does is to re-enacts conflict from where they came. KARIJN: Yup. DOUG: Did Bassam come to the exhibit then? KARIJN: As we’re speaking about it, I’m thinking he did, but it’s too long ago. It was 2016. I can check it for you. DOUG: Did you ever communicate with him?

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Figure 3.25 by Kumait, Syria. “I was raised in a liberal, modern thinking environment, surrounded by a large family, friends and foreigners. People wearing the clothes they want, who do and think as they like even though there are things we cannot say out loud and there are things we have to keep quiet about. So when I came here, I didn’t find many things strange except for the way society is structured. This is a place where I fit in easily. But if you fit somewhere easily, it doesn’t mean you also belong there.” Source: Photo made by Kumait for the Picture Bridge Foundation

Figure 3.26 by Rami, Syria. “I feel good when it’s nice weather, and I see the birds.You have them in Syria too. The weather is always beautiful there and you have real seasons. Here you have four seasons in one day.” Source: Photo made by Rami for the Picture Bridge Foundation

Yes, we tried. Because Kumait also wanted to drop out. I called Kumait and spoke with him, and asked him if he would consider rejoining, and he did. And Martha, my colleague, did the same with Bassam, but he didn’t. He did come to the opening, though, I checked the pictures from that moment.

KARIJN:

142 Visual research collaboration Do you think the photovoice experience was too difficult for these men? That it opened up things that were too difficult to handle? KARIJN: Well, with my “kitchen table psychology” I would say that I’m not surprised that Kumait did rejoin and Bassam didn’t. I look at the images that Bassam made throughout the course and they all seem similar. He’s feeling caged, disconnected and lonely, and apparently Kumait, coming from the Muslim minority which is “belonging to the enemy” was too much for him; it was too much in his face.That’s how I read it. DOUG: I’m struck by what an unprecedented event this is. How this could be a path to many unanticipated consequences, mostly positive. Not that you snap your fingers and expect to achieve mutual understanding. And always there are some who fall by the wayside. And others who go back to the comforts of their prejudices. KARIJN: Kumait, he’s young, I think he was thirty when this project took place, and he talks about how when he arrived in the Netherlands, that he really missed meeting people his own age. That all the Dutch he met, who were helping him with his paperwork, and with his immigration papers or his health documents, or getting a house, these were all older Dutch people. And finally he was invited by his coach from the refugee council for dinner, at the house of the coach, and the daughter of the coach was there as well. The daughter was exactly the same age as he was. He was really happy about meeting someone his own age. At the end of the dinner he actually realized that he felt much closer to the coach than to the girl who was his age. And he also realized that this was because the coach had also fought for his own freedoms, had demonstrated, gone into action to fight for new rights, etc., whereas the daughter was … all things were settled for her already. There was nothing she really had to fight for. He was fighting for … that would be the 60s in Europe. The Cyclops of the 60s, you know … DOUG: Did the old Dutch respond when Bassam was showing his photos of loneliness? KARIJN: I think everyone responded to it. Well, first of all he got a lot of praise and compliments for his photography. People were impressed by it. Did they respond to it? Yes they did respond, but it was not a conversation starter. It was more they were saying: “We hear you; we feel for you.” More that kind of response. I think it was clear that everybody wanted him to be in a different spot. And that they felt, not sorry for him as in “you’re a victim,” but sorry for him that he had to feel that way. DOUG: In that sense it would seem to be a success. If people can empathize with another person’s experience that they don’t have and can’t really imagine it seems to be what you hope to achieve. And all this because they suddenly have images that communicate something that is mysterious. The photographer describes feelings that go with the images and people get it. KARIJN: I think it really did that. I think it really worked that way. And I think both ways. There are so many more pictures from this “Point of View” I could show you. There was one question we asked, “What was the one lesson you received from your parents from your home that you aways carry with you? That has also become your wisdom.” And you would have these identical images … like the bench in the park … and the message the Syrian boy got from his parents was “always make sure you finish your plate because you never will know when you won’t have food,” and this is also what the Dutch people photographed, “be sure your plate is completely clean.” So you had people photograph exactly the same thing with the same meaning … it connected us. People really felt a bond that way. It was also why I selected this one. DOUG:

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Figure 3.27 by Corine, Netherlands. “I lived pleasantly abroad for five years. But every time I was back in the Netherlands, and I would hear the geese and see the river Lek, my heart would bleed of homesickness. The sounds of home. I still get a lump in my throat when I hear the geese.” Source: Photo made by Corine for the Picture Bridge Foundation

This image [Figure 3.27] is made by a Dutch person with a professional camera, that’s why you see this difference in quality in the images. She started photography school after this course. But the sound of the geese, whenever she hears that, she’s just home. The sight and sound is for her … the place where she belongs and where she comes from. And here Rami is saying the same [Figure 3.26] “whenever I see these birds I close my eyes and I am home.” So again, it’s the birds flying and the sounds of the birds bringing you home. To share those images that have exactly the same symbol of belonging was very powerful. As a last statement, there’s one thing I found interesting, that was about the last meeting of all of us coming together.We laid out all the images and we asked them to group them in common themes. Most people agreed on almost everything but there was a group of images that were left over. They were all images that had to do with something institutional.The municipality building, or the entry gates to enter the train station. They had to do with bureaucracy, institutions, official stuff. Administration. It was clear that they all belonged together, but then came the question of “what shall we name this group?” There was one person who said “it should be called power.” And then someone said, “no, power is too specific, that doesn’t fit.” Then the discussion evolved around the Dutch versus the non-Dutch, and the Dutch were saying “it should be control,” and the non-Dutch said, “no, it should be about rules.” They were arguing back and forth, “control-rules, rules-control …” And then a Syrian participant said, “it should not be control because if you control, that control is for the sake of controlling. Through these rules maybe you are being controlled, but actually these rules provide you more space, and more possibilities, and more freedom.Where compared to our country there is control just to control. That is absolutely not the case here in the Netherlands.” It was so beautiful to be able to have this conversation! And to be able to mutually exchange those thoughts. It’s such a lighthearted way to enter into dialogue.

KARIJN:

144 Visual research collaboration Postscript Earlier in the chapter I trace photovoice back to Through Navajo Eyes, which was the first time researchers gave the cameras to the people being studied. But I think it was Caroline Wang who used the term for the first time. She would go into a situation in which people, women, were in oppressive circumstances and have them explore their circumstances with the hope that this would lead somewhere. At times I thought the claims of empowerment were overstated, but I’m beginning to see that differently through your work. I think if I show up in 1600 and give the peasants cameras to photograph the landlord/peasant relationships and they take photos of the fat landlords in the manor as they are living in the barn with the animals … they talk about that, and they leave! The peasants are still living in the barn with the animals and the landlords are still living in the manor on the top of the hill. And nothing has changed when the study is over; I’ll be cynical, nothing has changed except that the researchers have published a couple of articles! KARIJN: Yeah … DOUG: I read every article and book written about PV when I was writing the first edition of the book; more than 100, as I remember, and I saw the pattern of quickly done research and quite likely good outcomes, but often claims for how lives were changed. I remember a book that described a project where minority kids were given cameras and asked to photograph their school. As I remember the kids were young teenagers and they used the photos (sometimes) to humiliate their teachers … “this woman is too fat to be a gym teacher …” for example. The research experience was brief, a handful of days, but claims were made that this experience made the kids aware of “the structural nature of inequality …” or something similar. It seemed a bit much to me. After being exposed to your research I’m realizing my view is one-sided. In Malawi the PV project assessed how a role created for them as peer educators affected them personally. They said the projects had had a positive effect on them because the projects they had helped create or oversee had had a positive effect on the community. I don’t think the photovoice process empowered them, but it reinforced them, I’m sure. The PV process works; go in for a week and get it done.There isn’t any claim there that you transformed peoples’ lives with this process. KARIJN: I think that’s important to emphasize … the term empowerment is confusing. What do we mean when we use the word? We obviously know the definition of the word but are we actually expecting to have empowered someone? It’s also quite a claim to make on behalf of someone else’s development … non-empowerment before; empowerment after. A transformative process, so to speak. It has … a lot of … how to say it? Weight, to use that word? I would much rather say that the process of photovoice could stimulate critical discussion and reflection, and that may do something with your awareness. But whether it’s just a momentary thing or whether it roots itself somewhere … how do I know? DOUG: I appreciate that you have these views as someone who uses photovoice. I’m looking in from the outside, by reading academic publications, which likely do not tell the story very well. Research publications especially in applied areas like public health, are succinct, and written in standard scientific form. It is hard to get the essence of a qualitative research project from these publications.

DOUG:

Visual research collaboration 145 If you don’t mind, we can go back to talk about the Point of View project a bit more. It’s quite extraordinary that each project was several months long. This makes me think about how these twenty-four people came to know each other. How did that influence what was going on? What kinds of changes took place within those groups? KARIJN: [pause] … that’s a good question … I’m wondering if I can answer that question specifically. I think what happened is that a feeling of bonding, empathy, closeness … was created. And I think that this bonding; this closeness was more a group thing, so within the group friendships developed. DOUG: Do you have any sense of those friendships continued after it was over? KARIJN: Yeah, I think so. Because I still have a connection on and off with some people. Facebook and stuff like that. I know there are people who still occasionally see one another. I know that, for example, Kumait became good friends with Houda, who was another Syrian lady who participated, but they had met before so maybe they just came to know each other in a different way through the project. Perhaps their friendship would have developed without the project, but they had a good “click.” Both of them became friends with several Dutch; they would meet every now and again. And also Kumait and Josette. If Kumait had a question; if he needed help he might call Josette, so that kind of friendship developed. doug: It struck me that it would be cool to make a documentary film about this project. Film as it is getting started; follow some of them when they photograph; what they are thinking about; the discussions in class and ending with the exhibition. It could be a powerful process to depict in a film. By the way I like how you designed an exhibition that encouraged the involvement of those involved.That you brought professional designers into the process. If you filmed all that and made a film, it becomes the message of your project shared with a potentially huge audience. I liked, also, from our first conversation, the sense that not everything gets resolved. KARIJN: No! DOUG: Deeply ingrained thoughts about homosexuality, for example, do not change. We expect so much. KARIJN: I think it’s also very important to remember that it’s very easy for us to feel we are on the moral highground. We’ve gone through the Renaissance, and we have this tolerance … but on the other hand if you ask us to change our view on something we feel strongly about we’re not gonna do that overnight, either. So it’s a little bit odd to expect that of someone else, even if you disagree strongly with them. If you would take away the content of what we are talking about and place ourselves in their positions, we would think, “Come on, what were you expecting?” DOUG: That’s one of the things I wrote out as a question: What would happen if we reversed roles completely? And if we found ourselves in Syria, and we were being invited by them to live in their culture because our own had become dangerous or otherwise untenable and thus to adapt to their culture … and then to access our cultural experience of adaptation? It strikes me that what Holland is trying to do is impossible to do completely, which is to bring people together who have fundamentally different orientations to the world, at least on the surface. I do think that Muslim and Christian religions have fundamental similarities, especially of the background values of humility, generosity, empathy for the poor. Of course the differences rather than the similarities are

146 Visual research collaboration emphasized in people’s minds. But to integrate people successfully from these vastly different cultures … wow. Protestants and Catholics have not exactly had an harmonic history in Europe! KARIJN: And keeping to the topic, there are also many Dutch who are very conservative, who think homosexuality, for example, is maybe something for the neighbors, but not for them. Who are also not open about it, either. I think we try to pretend the intolerance is only with them, the newcomers. DOUG: What I find in your message is that the point is not to change people, but to introduce them to each other and maybe there is some affection, for the lack of a better word, that grows up among people who are extremely different. And they are never going to change. But they like each other as human beings … KARIJN: I think that when we spoke to each other about how we looked at things, everyone became persons in 3D, rather than 2D. Before it was just: “they’re Eritrean,’” or “they’re refugees,” or “they’re Iraqi,” or “they’re Dutch,” they were just an avatar, not really a person of flesh and blood. I think that by just engaging in conversation with each other everyone became much more layered. And in those layers we discovered there was always a point where you found recognition. “Oh, I have that too!” It could be as simple as laughing about the same jokes. Or it could be as profound as completely making the same photographs, choosing the same symbolic representation because of having the same experience. And discovering that the Dutch and the Syrian mothers each told their sons to clean their plates because they didn’t know when hunger would return and discovering that while working together other makes you feel less the stranger. It opens the possibility that indeed you do feel affection for each other. DOUG: The bigger context is not to be forgotten, which is to see how refugees adapt to Dutch society. And how the Dutch adapt to having new kinds of neighbors. It’s sort of loaded: “Can you learn to get along with us? We were nice enough to invite you!” [Laughs.] KARIJN: I think it was really funny that when we did the last edition we finished off by everybody bringing in some food, and we made a long table, and we were having a lovely dinner together, and there was this funny thing. There was one type of pastry which one person from Syria, and one person from the Netherlands made.The Syrian one had an Arabic name and the Dutch one had a Dutch name. And they were typical, local dishes … and they were exactly the same! DOUG: Did they enjoy that? KARIJN: Yeah, they really enjoyed it. Claiming it, “Oh, this is really Dutch! Or, no this is my grandmother’s recipe from Syria!” DOUG: “Oh, that’s mine!” How funny. [Both laughing.] Were there among the seventy-some people you worked with, people whose photos  particularly stood out? Or did everyone pretty much do equivalent photographic work? I find myself thinking that these are not as much scientific studies as much as they are craft based. Both speaking about photography, if we are thinking about photovoice, or as interviewees, if we are speaking about photo elicitation. That some people are more insightful, artistic, interested in photography, interested in the project, or whatever, that the studies are not comprised of equal participants. KARIJN: There were definitely standouts. People who were particularly gifted, imaginative. They got the assignments right every time or they had an original angle on

Visual research collaboration 147 things. Or the lighting was beautiful … everything worked. One was Bassam, who made the photo through the can. What happened more often is that if you would look at all the pictures there would be single images that would stand out. DOUG: Did any of the Dutch become like a “stranger in a strange land,” meaning that they suddenly found their taken for granted reality peculiar, even unrecognizable? KARIJN: I don’t think I can answer that question because I didn’t stay in such close contact with them. I do know that after the project a couple of people made a career change and became photographers or took training to become photographers. Maybe they had decided to become a photographer already and the project fit into the beginning of that path or it was a way to consider their decision. DOUG: So, no existential crisis; no sudden new take on being Dutch? KARIJN: Although we did get comments from people saying, “Wow, this is so amazing, this is what I wish everyone in Holland would experience.” DOUG: And why would they say that? What would they say is positive about it? KARIJN: I think—and this is my view only—that it took fear away. By taking away the distance between you and the stranger … the distance was there because this person was so strange, he’s a little bit scary, this stranger. I think it’s a kind of metaphorical fear that was taken away. DOUG: Wouldn’t that be a beautiful outcome if that were the case? KARIJN: It would be a beautiful outcome. I don’t think that … I can’t imagine that people would ever name it as such themselves, but maybe just the experience of working side by side. DOUG: There are probably things the Dutch were beginning to admire about the newcomers. And they wished they were more like them. So it goes both ways, I imagine. KARIJN: I think so, definitely. And what I think was a strength was that there was no particular attention given to the fact that they came to Holland as refugees.We used that as a marketing strategy to establish the groups but after that we were just people from different countries.

Conclusion [Harper] It is fitting, I think, that our chapter on visual research collaboration would take the form of a conversation inspired by photos and the means through which they came into being. It also reminds me that our view is often narrow, confined to the conventions that control what is said and how it is presented. Much better, I think, to have a cup of coffee and a conversation; the Dutch way.

Notes 1 Collier, John. 1967. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (second edition, co-authored with Malcolm Collier, 1986, UNM Press). 2 Collier, 1967, pp. 256–258. 3 The CB, or Citizen’s Band radio, functionally resembled the cell phones we now take for granted, but in a very limited way. CB radios were first used by long-distance truckers to communicate with each other, and each speaker had a nickname, or handle.Willie’s was “Nighthawk

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One.”They were also free, and Willie did not have a phone.Their downside was that the radios broadcast a constant crackling sound, whether or not a person was trying to get in touch with another. I quickly discovered that this sound effectively blotted out my tape recorder. Book-length PE studies in addition to Working Knowledge include: Barndt, Deborah. 2002. Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization of the Tomato Trail. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield; Barndt, Deborah. 1980. Education and Social Change: A Photographic Study of Peru. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall, Hunt; Harper, Douglas, ed. 1994. Cape Breton, 1952:The Photographic Vision of Timothy Asch. University of Southern California: Ethnographics Press; Harper, Douglas and Patrizia Faccioli. 2009. The Italian Way: Food and Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Schwartz, Dona. 1992. Waucoma Twilight: Generations of the Farm. Smithsonian Institution Press; Bunster, Ximena, Elsa Chaney and Ellan Young. 1989. Sellers and Servants:Working Women in Lima, Peru. New York: Bergin and Garvey. And apologies to those missed. See Harper, Douglas, 1987. Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 75–91 for the full passage. See Harper, Douglas. 2001. Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture. Chicago: University of Chicago press, p. 186 for the full interview. Colter Harper’s research is summarized in his Ph.D. dissertation, The Crossroads of the World: A Social and Cultural History of Jazz in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 1920–1970. University of Pittsburgh, 2011, and in his forthcoming book Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood, University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Payne, Carol. 2006. “Lessons with Leah: Re-reading the Photographic Archive of Nation in the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photographic Division.” Visual Studies 21 (1): 4–23. Edwards, Elizabeth. 2003. “Talking Visual Histories: An Introduction.” In Peers, Laura and Alison K. Brown, eds. Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. London: Routledge. Edwards is also editor and author of the definitive study of photography in the first decades of anthropology, Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. Mathewsie Ashevak quoted in Payne, Lessons with Leah, p. 16. Harper, Douglas and Patrizia Faccioli. 2000. “Small, Silly Insults, Mutual Seduction and Misogyny: The Interpretation of Italian Advertising Signs.” Visual Sociology 15 (1): 23–50. Goffman, Erving. 1976. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper and Row. Leung, Kei Yan. 2002. “Reflections on Doing Cross-Cultural Research through ads with Visual Methods.” In Franklin, A., ed. Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Boucher, Michael L., ed. 2018. Participant Empowerment Through Photo Elicitation in Ethnographic Education Research: New Research and Approaches. New York: Springer. An overview of Harris’ photography can be seen in: Couch, Stanley and Deborah Willis. 2002. One Shot Harris:The Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Van der Does, Patricia, Sonja Edelaar, Imke Gooskens, Margreet Liefting and Marije van Mierlo. 1992. “Reading Images: A Study of a Dutch Neighborhood.” Visual Sociology 7 (1): 4–67. Van der Does et al., Reading Images, p. 7. Van der Does et al., Reading Images, p. 10. The book that describes this work was Worth, Sol and John Adair, 1972. Through Navajo Eyes. Indiana University Press (updated in second edition published by University of New Mexico Press by Richard Chalfen in 1997). See Sam Peck’s examination of the back stages of this research in: Peck, Sam, 2012. “Uniquely Navajo? The Navajo Film Project Reconsidered.” In Visual Ethnography 1 (2), internet journal, unpaginated. Ewald, Wendy. 1985. Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing. Perhaps the only pre-Ewald example of this research style was anthropologist Ximena Bunster’s 1978 article, “Talking

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Pictures: A Study of Proletarian Mothers in Lima, Peru,” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 5 (1): 37–55, which was later published as Bunster, Ximena, Elsa Chaney and Ellan Young, 1989. Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru. New York: Bergin and Garvey. The LTP method, described in more depth in Chapter 6 of this book is described in Ewald, Wendy, Katherine Hyde and Lisa Lord. 2011. Teaching Literacy and Justice with Photography: A Classroom Guide. New York: Teachers College Press. See Wang, C., M. Burria and Y.P. Xiang. 1996. “Chinese Village Women as Visual Anthropologists: A Participatory Approach to Reaching Policymakers.” Social Science and Medicine 42: 1391–1400. Wang, Caroline and Mary Ann Burris. 1997. “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment.” Health Education & Behavior 24 (3): 369–387. Mcintyre, Alice. 2003. “Through the Eyes of Women: Photovoice and Participatory Research as Tools for Reimagining Place.” Gender, Place and Culture 10 (1): 47–66. van Leeuwen, Theo and Carey Jewitt. 2002. Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage, p. 92. Castleden, Heather,Theresa Garvin and Huu-at-aht First Nation. 2008.“Modifying Photovoice for Community-Based Participatory Indigenous Research.” Social Science and Medicine 66 (6), p. 1401. Wang et al., “Chinese Village Women as Visual Anthropologists,” p. 1392. Smart, Carol. 2009. “Shifting Horizons: Reflections on Qualitative Methods.” Feminist Theory 10 (3): 295–308. Gruber, Martin. 2016. “Participatory Ethnographic Filmmaking:Transcultural Collaboration in Research and Filmmaking.” Visual Ethnography 5 (1), internet journal, unpaginated. See Kitchin, Rob, 2013. “Participatory Mapping of Disabled Access.” Cartographic Perspectives 42 (41): 44–54. This is one of many examples of collaborative research using GIS aiming for empowerment. Walton, Shireen. 2016. “The Anthropologist as Curator: Introducing a Digital Photography Exhibition as a collaborative and Participatory Fieldwork Method.” Visual Ethnography 5 (1), internet journal, unpaginated. https://web.colby.edu/somali-bantu Kuchnir, Karina. 2016. “Ethnographic Drawing: Eleven Benefits of Using a Sketchbox for Fieldwork.” Visual Ethnography 5 (1), internet journal, unpaginated. Also: Azevedo, Aina and Manuel João Ramos. 2016. “Drawing Close: On Visual Engagements in Fieldwork, Drawing Workshops and the Anthropological Imagination.” Visual Ethnography 5 (1), internet journal, unpaginated. Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene De Lange and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community and Policy. Los Angeles: Sage. Also Lassiter, Luke. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press.

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Visual facts

Overview My view in this chapter is that a great deal of sociology can be made visual. Concepts such as Durkheim’s “anomie,” Weber’s “rationalization” or Marx’s “sub proletariat” and so on emerge from and describe real life, and thus it should be possible to approach these ideas visually. We are used to the precision of words, for example, when we separate Weber’s forms of authority into discrete categories, while in the back of our minds we realize that the concepts are far more abstract. The worlds we see are messier but make our work as visual sociologists more challenging. Going from the other direction, cameras record social life, so images can be analyzed sociologically. Who is there; what are they doing alone and together; what are they wearing; how are they interacting? Each action has a history; each object we encounter has meaning, together it knits together a sociological narrative. I will show you how I see the workers in my house while I am writing this. Sociology looks beyond the immediate. All moments emerge from pervious social arrangements and individual actions. There is the history and meaning of the window; the dreams it meant to a schoolteacher (my dad) and a woman of several jobs (my mom) who scrimped and saved to build the house of their dreams. The thousands of hours they spent gazing through the second-story window toward a Minnesota lake. I came of age looking through the window, then left home as a young adult. Five years ago I returned to Minnesota and to restore the house; my parents long passed. After several years of repairing the rotting sill I’ve realized I must replace the window that faced fifty-eight Minnesota winters (Figure 4.1). The following pages are a potpourri, ranging from visualizing empirical evidence to exploring the phenomenological side of sociology. Please be patient. There is a reason to know about cows and their manure.

Comparing farm systems visually The comparative method is common in sociological studies of communities, neighborhoods and institutions. In the following I show how photography can become a part of this approach. I will show how perspective, in this case looking down from the top via aerial photography, shows new realities and also hides others. The point with this DOI: 10.4324/9781003251835-5

Visual facts 151

Figure 4.1 The crew was installing a window in the second story of my house. I watched and photographed how they worked together; who had authority and how it was expressed; how they organized particularly challenging jobs, like getting this window to the second floor. There are props worn on their bodies, tools, tool-belts in the proper state of wear and a flow of communication evident in gestures, postures and expressions. What role did humor play and how was it expressed? Who controlled the verbal exchanges? How was the pace of work controlled and how were complicated procedures organized?

exercise is to show that knowledge is partly a function of how you look at things; how being the actual angle in this instance. I am not the first to have discovered this. John Collier, pioneer of visual anthropology, used aerial photography to study agricultural practices in non-industrial societies, and when I came across this idea in his book it caught my interest. I was then studying an agricultural community1 and was frustrated by getting the “whole picture” of the farmsteads from eye level. As I studied the types of farm systems that had developed in the neighborhood, it seemed that the aerial perspective might yield new information, simply produced by a different perspective, to supplement what I was discovering by counting cows and comparing what farmers did with their manure. The rural settlement in the neighborhood I studied in the northern border of New York consisted of quarter section farms (240 acres of woods, pastures and fields) and they all used the same human-powered or horse-drawn tools and machines in the nineteenth-century settlement era. Innovations in the late nineteenth century included the internal combustion engine, which powered tractors that eventually replaced horses; threshers that replaced hand-powered techniques to remove the germ from the wheat or oak stalk; corn choppers that replaced hand cutting, to name a few. When I studied the

152 Visual facts farm neighborhood in the 1980s, a two-tier system had evolved that anticipated a full transformation of family dairy farming in New York and elsewhere. Farm technologies had evolved over 100 years, then jumped ahead during WWII. From there a newer, much more industrial farm system was coming into use in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was doing my study. In the prior system, cows were allowed to pasture, and they would often be kept for more than a decade. They were watched over by a farmer who knew them individually and took an active interest in their health and well-being. In the new system the cows were packed into freestall barns, milked hard for a year or two, and then rotated into hamburger in a continual effort to improve per cow milk production through rapid genetic change. The old system, which I called a craft system, maxed out at about eighty cows, which the original barns could accommodate, and a family, with a bit of hired help, could manage the work. The farms had a small tractor or two, and machines such as grain combines that were developed in the decades before and immediately after WWII. The more modern system, which I referred to as industrial, required new barns and milking systems, and they could be huge. At the time I did my study one farmer in the neighborhood milked 300 cows and now, several decades hence, there are several farms that milk 1,000 cows. These new farms require a great deal of hired labor, quantities of cow feed far beyond what their land could grow, and a way to deal with the massive amounts of manure produced by the huge herds. On the craft farms manure was mixed with straw, and spread daily on fields through the winter, replenishing nutrients and organic matter on the land that grew their cows’ food. On the industrial farms the manure was collected in pits or lagoons and spread only a few times a year, and this system is capable of polluting local water sources (especially the many small streams in the region) and stinking up the neighborhood when spread on the fields. I interviewed farmers on forty-eight contiguous farms that provided information on farm practices and farmers’ plans for their futures. I also interviewed farmers with photos made about fifty years earlier which provided the core of the eventual book. Some of these ideas were expanded in an essay2 that I draw from in these comments. Visual triangulation Triangulation in sociology refers to collecting data on a single research question with different methods, usually both qualitative and quantitative, and is considered a way to overcome personal or methodological bias. In the following I show how visual information—in this case aerial photos—can supplement the data I collected in surveys, ground-level photographs and in-depth interviews. I suggested above that the craft/industrial dichotomy could be represented by the technology used on different farms: craft farms had stanchion barns and solid manure systems; industrial farms had freestall barns and liquid manure systems. Behind these technologies were deep differences between how farmers treated animals and their fields and their nearby streams, and how they made sense of their lives and planned for the future. The farm system can be summarized in Table 4.1. These data suggest that the dichotomy makes sense; craft and industrial farms had different technologies, different numbers of workers and different sized herds which they treated differently. Often the farms had contrasting overall strategies and plans.

Visual facts 153 Table 4.1 Craft and industrial farms

Number of cows Mean number of cows Mean tillable cropland Liquid manure storage 3× a day milking Horsepower of farm equipment Full-time hired labor Possibility of expansion in 5 years

Craft (N = 35)

Industrial (N = 13)

14–106 46 205 acres 11% 6% 192 0.37 (1 per 125 cows) 16%

55–268 108 412 acres 54% 38% 502 1.7 (1 per 63 cows) 42%

Source: Adapted from Douglas Harper. 1997.Visualizing Structure: Reading Surfaces of Social Life. Qualitative Sociology 20 (1): 61

When I looked at these farms from the air, the model was more complicated. There were several variations of craft and industrial farms, and there were several farms with features of both. The aerial photos helped me tell this story. I will illustrate that with a small number of examples from more than twenty farms I studied with aerial photos. But first, there was the question of making the photos. I hired an old pilot who had a small plane and I flew over the farms for a few hours, seeing what I could see. I discovered that photographing between 1,500 and 2,500 feet with a 200 mm lens produced farm overviews that balanced detail and coverage. I worked in different seasons and discovered that the partially melted snow of late winter highlighted topographical or architectural outlines that were of interest but the contrast provided by the patches of snow also made photos hard to read. In summer months the foliage often hid the details of the farmsteads and the sun glinted brilliantly from metal roofs of farm buildings, also producing photos that were hard to read. The best light was a slight overcast; bright sun obliterated the features of the built environment in which I was interested. One of the most challenging parts of the project was simply keeping track of where I was while flying over the neighborhood and finding an angle that allowed me to frame the farmsteads as I wished. I would ask the pilot, an elderly ex-WWII fighter pilot, to bank the plane sharply to allow me to point the 200 mm lens out the window, which would cause us to lose altitude rapidly. The plane was bouncing in the air and I needed to change film after 36 exposures. There was much to keep track of but it worked. Seeing from above produced new knowledge. I will illustrate with a handful of examples. Figure 4.1 is a quintessential craft farm.The barn houses about forty milking cows and a small number of dry cows and calves. In front of the barn is a manure spreader pulled by a ten-year-old, forty hp tractor, small by the standards of the day. The original home is in the foreground and adjacent is an attached garage/shop.The family auto is parked outside. There are no buildings of consequence in addition to the original barn and shed. A small silo built in the 1940s or 1950s held the corn grown on a ten-acre field. The farm kept its expenses low by using WWII-era technologies. The farmers made breeding decisions cow by cow, often keeping an animal for a decade or more. As a result, their breeding decisions include the temperament of the animal as well as their milk production. The son’s home is a house trailer across the street from the farmstead. It has a covered entrance to store barn clothes in, and to keep out the frigid winter air and the aroma of the barn clothes. Next to the road is a small shed for equipment and a livestock trailer

154 Visual facts the farmer uses for a side business of hauling livestock to breed or auction. Both the housing—a modest trailer—and its proximity to the main house suggest important issues about the family’s plans for the future (the son will move to the main house when his father retires) and their immediate working relationship (the son is close at hand for all duties and responsibilities). The craft farm looks more like the public image of a family dairy farm than do industrial farms. These visual stereotypes include a hip roof barn (usually red), a two-story home with a porch, a separation of living spaces from workspaces, a sense of order and control represented in open spaces between living and working areas, and having buildings laid out in a rectangular pattern. The farm pictured in Figure 4.2 is a working operation without a lot of niceties; there is equipment parked outside, including the tractor/manure spreader, but it confirms the visual stereotypes. The barn is red! The aerial photo summarizes a great deal of information that is only partially visible from ground level. Seeing it from the air allows the viewer to see spatial arrangements that imply farming strategies, both short and long term. Seeing the placement and condition of housing, outbuildings, autos, implements and other miscellaneous material fills in editorial nuances about what it is like to be a craft farmer. The typology of craft and industrial implies that farms belong to one or the other of two types. Figure 4.3, however, shows how some farms combine elements of both systems. The farm has the look of a craft farm, with a well-preserved original red barn, with trimmed shrubs between the symmetrically positioned windows. The farm exudes a sense of order that is associated with a craft farm operation; additional buildings are placed at a parallel or ninety percent relationship to the original barn. The original house is well preserved, with a new shingle roof and a porch. It is surrounded by the original maple trees and several new plantings that will eventually replace dying trees. But the farm has adopted several industrial features. The barn has been transformed to a freestall operation and the cows are milked in a milking parlor rather than stanchions. These functions have been integrated into the new farm building adjacent to the original barn. It is, however, impossible to read this information from the aerial photo; we cannot see through the roof of the barn to the organization within! Equipment is kept in a Quonset hut perpendicular to the new barn and the modern, powerful tractor is parked near the country road. While the herd is typical of a craft farm (about eighty milking cows at the time of the study), the farmer has a liquid manure system, a defining attribute of the industrial model. The photo shows that the change from craft to industrial farms is often evolutionary, with overlapping systems and implied strategies. While this information would be understood from the data gathered from surveys, the photo explains what an example of the hybrid—in this example a craft farm with industrial features—looks like. The appearance belies an interesting logic, as the farm maintains an appearance that is not consistent with its functioning reality. There are several versions of the industrial model evident in the photos but hidden in the data. Figure 4.4 is a farm that milks about 200 cows at the date of the study, uses a manure pit (front left of photo) and relatively inexpensive Quonset-style buildings for a freestall barn and equipment shed. The original silo that stored the chopped corn from a 10-acre field has been supplemented by several modern silos designed to ferment chopped grasses. The original house is surrounded by machinery and vehicles, and perpendicular to the house is a trailer that houses the hired man.

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Figure 4.2 Craft farm.

Figure 4.3 Hybrid craft/industrial farm.

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Figure 4.4 Industrial farm.

This is an example of the industrial farm boiled down to its essence; a large, enclosed space where animals walk about ankle deep in their manure and a huge holding tank for their manure that is collected daily by a worker driving a small tractor with a blade through the building, pushing the manure to a pumping station where it is transferred to the pit. The farm felt like an industrial workspace with its various machines stored in the open, while animals that produced the milk were not allowed to pasture but rather left in their dreary, odorous space. The farm includes no visual niceties; buildings are utilitarian. The manure pit, one of the first in the neighborhood, is not visible from the road since the top is above eye level. The manure pit brought a qualitative change in the life in the neighborhood, however. On the days the farmer spread the manure there was a stench that permeated the surrounding area and the rural road was often covered with liquid manure that had slopped out of the huge portable tank as it was pulled from farm to field. This was the beginning of the qualitative change to life in the rural area that came with the industrialization of dairy farming. The two-part typology does not include those farms that evolved into different forms altogether. Figure 4.5 shows a prior farm operation that symbolizes a gracious and elegant past. This farm, a showpiece of local architecture, was part of the original 1830s Scottish settlement and for several generations had been a leading farm in the neighborhood. When the last farming generation retired in the 1980s, the homestead and barns were restored by a son who was not a farmer and the elderly farmer and his wife moved to the ranch house built for them on the adjoining lot (middle frame, right). The farmer and his aging farm truck are visible behind the new house. The swimming hole, used for decades by family and neighbors, is in the foreground. While the image suggests the transition

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Figure 4.5 Retired farm.

from farming into retirement, it does not, of course, communicate the emotional costs of retirement for the elderly farmer and his wife and the end of a long and successful history of farming. A year after this photo was taken the barns burned down, severing the farmstead completely from its agricultural past. In this case the aerial photo shows social and material transitions. Some elements are visible from ground level, but in a more fragmented way. The tiny elements seen in the aerial photo—for example, the retired farmer is still doing some farm work in the shadow of the gentrification of his previous abode—add a poignant aside. The liquid pit in this photo, a neighborhood swimming hole, contrasts in form and function from the manure pit in the Figure 4.4. Figure 4.6 documents another version of the post-farm transition, the deterioration of the original farmstead, the new use of the deteriorating farmstead by adjoining farms, and the transformation of an original housing site to housing for a family of the rural poor. The photograph shows the deterioration of the original buildings. As is visible in the image, the original barn was a “J” shape, with sections almost completely collapsed. The section on the right was roofed with metal but the job was not finished and the remaining roof has rotted, making further repair impossible. The photo shows how haphazard strategies lead to irrational decisions (insufficient investment to fix the problem, thus money wasted) and uncompleted tasks. The neighboring farmer purchased the farm, where he stores his round hay bales (visible in the upper left of the image) and keeps his cows not currently being milked in the pasture in the upper right. Next to the house (foreground right) is a dilapidated house trailer that is now rented for a modest amount to a family of the rural poor.The aerial perspective does not provide

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Figure 4.6 Abandoned farm.

all the relevant information on the status of the farm, but it reveals patterns, relationships and stages of several social processes. For example, the metal roof of the house hides the deterioration that can only be seen from the front. It is also interesting to compare the aerial photos with eye-level views. We ask, who are the people who inhabit the contrasting farm systems? Figure 4.7 shows Buck and Carmen, father and son, who together manage a craft farm (Figure 4.1). It is an “environmental portrait,” that is, the image includes people in an environment that both defines them and that they define with their presence. They stand by their barn and we can see that it has metal siding; they are making money.They are big men, accustomed to large meals and twelve or more hours of physical labor, seven days a week. Their work includes maintaining and using machines such as the tractor and front-end loader near them (they asked to be photographed in front of the tractor) as well as managing animals and the business end of the farm. Finally, their expressions are welcoming, as they were for the two days we spent together as I observed, shoveled manure from their calf stalls, photographed and talked. It is telling that none of the owners of the industrial farms agreed to be photographed. They were inside people, managing finances, schedules and labor and they were busy. We can extend the eye-level view to the interior of the barns, passing into spaces that are covered with roofs and walls. It is interesting that craft farmers welcomed me to photograph in their barns, because they were orderly and typically shared by both cows and humans, but the freestalls of the industrial barns were difficult to gain access to. I think this was primarily because few humans entered the freestall barns on foot (they drove small tractors through the barns to move manure into the pit) and the space is dominated

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Figure 4.7 Buck and Carmen.

by several 100-pound animals who appear to the eye to be trapped in an environment that is filthy from manure that is never completely removed. There are also surprises in the interior views.The craft barn is rationalized in the sense that each animal has an assigned place, and they are held in place with an apparatus called a stanchion.This seems to be constraining.Yet cows walk to their stanchions on their own, as they associate their position with feed and milking. They are at ease in their assigned spots; it is clean, there is straw to lie on and their manure is deposited into a small trench behind their place, mixed with straw and later moved outside to the manure spreader that is used almost daily in the winter. The freestall barns, with more cows per square foot, allow cows the freedom to wander but creates the problem of uncontrolled urine and manure. These issues are visible in the images; the stanchion barn is orderly and the freestall barn is crowded and always dirty.

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Figure 4.8 Freestall barn, industrial farm.

Figure 4.9 Stanchion barn interior, craft farm.

Visual facts 161 The aerial and eye level views can be seen as metaphors for theories that identify patterns of social life (functionalism; conflict theory) and those that examine the same reality from the inside (symbolic interaction; ethnography). In the aerial photos we see structure that implies human agency and action. The eye-level view shows the presentation of self and the organization of action within a specific setting. These examples are limited but they do show how visual exploration can contribute to theory-driven insights. Why aerial photos? Why photos at all? The essay on this project caught the critical eye of Emmison and Smith, authors of a text on visual methods in the social sciences. An overriding point of their book is that visual sociology should be centered on the act of seeing rather than photography, and to support this perspective they write: although these [my aerial photos] are helpful additions to his written text, they are not essential for the completion of his research. Harper could just as easily have observed the differences in the farm spatial layouts as he flew over them, noting pertinent features on a code-sheet and so on.The data which are essential for his research are the observed arrangements in the farm buildings, not the representation of these arrangements in a photographic image. The photographs are cosmetic.3 Emmison and Smith’s comments assume I knew what I was looking for when I made the photos, but details in the photos could only become data as I compared them to information gathered in other ways. I would not, for example, have thought about the significance of a rotting round bale of hay or a broken fence, visible from the air, prior to doing the research. Or, it was not necessarily the number of buildings, or the amount of horsepower that defined one farm type against another, but often how the buildings were placed that suggested their role in the farm, and hence their meaning. These spatial relationships were visible from the air, but not at ground level. Often I found new technologies were integrated with the technologies they were replacing. In these ways the photos led to an appreciation of small elements seen in their context. All of these were vastly complicated material realities that could easily take pages of words to describe, but were summed up in an immediately obvious way in a photo. In reference to the criticism by Emmison and Smith, even if I had known what to look for, it would have been impossible to skip the photography and get the same information by marking a code-sheet as I flew over the neighborhood. They would know this if they had tried to collect visual data from a tiny airplane bouncing around at 2,000 feet, but that is not really the point; the meanings of the photos were in their details and the perspective from which I saw them, and could not have been gathered just by looking. The aerial photos are an interesting example of being true because they contain information that I could verify with other data, and they are constructed in the sense of their unusual point of view. It is interesting to realize that it took airplanes or balloons to make that perspective available; a perspective we now take for granted, available at the click of our mouse via Google Earth.

162 Visual facts Using aerial photography to do a community study brings up an interesting point about privacy. Photography in the public space is, in the US, a first amendment right. Airspace in most parts of the United States is considered public space (there are exceptions primarily for security reasons), so photography from these spaces toward the ground is legal. Is it ethical? I found myself thinking about this as I showed these photos to farmers; I had sometimes photographed practices that were ecologically compromised (deep rutting from overly large tractors in wet fall harvests; the positioning of some manure pits; spreading manure at times of the year when runoff would endanger adjoining water sources) and the photos showed what was often invisible on the level. I also observed illegal activity that was much harder to see at ground level. Since marijuana matures after most other plants have died, and they are often seven or more feet tall when harvested, green marijuana crops nestled into the brown background of surrounding crops in back fields were easy to see from the air. Was I not but another element in the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance systems that oversee much of our lives? Practically speaking, could I even assume that the farmer knew about the marijuana plants growing on the edge of a distant field? The ever-improving mapping system of Google Earth means the top view of our realities is being recorded with ever-increasing accuracy, available to anyone with access to the internet. It is possible in Google Earth to move from a top view to a street view; to literally fly to ground and look around. As I wrote this essay in 2022 I returned to the farms I photographed in the 1980s via the satellite view of Google Earth. As it happens, I learned a great deal. Several of the farmers I studied in detail are out of business; barns are leveled (but manure pits remain); new industrial farms, one that is several times larger than the biggest I photographed, have sprouted where no farm existed before. But I also learned that the Google Earth data is inferior to the aerial photos I crafted from the tiny plane on days chosen to maximize what I could see. In the Google images some of the landscape is obscured by clouds. The images were made in late afternoon in August (as determined by the crops that were being harvested) and foliage obscured many of the details that I needed to complete my analysis. New farm operations are also hard to identify from the air; an industrial farm looks like several large buildings from the air, for all you can tell from the image it could be a box store. Adding photos made my typology of farms and my study of social change far less abstract. Here is a robust farmer and his son, not remnants of a dying history, rather quite happily making good food on a small farm that is ecologically responsible. The missing portrait of the harried industrial model farmer, too busy to pause for a photo, nearly too busy even to chat for a few minutes, tells as much. Here are images from when you were young farmers; what do you remember? What was it like to sit around a table with your neighbors after you had worked all day together, eating food they cooked, adapting to their peculiarities? A farmer grabbed that photo from my hand and studied it, and said: “We’re talking about politics. It’s the election season. Look at the serious expressions!” He paused, “Now I wave at my neighbor when I drive past him on the road. That’s as much as I see him in a year.” The aerial project shows the potential of freezing a view of social reality from a distance; from the odd perspective of looking straight down. Humans make patterns as we organize our social lives; these might be buildings on a farmstead; suburban housing on sidewalk-less streets or block patterns in cities. Archeologists use aerial photos to study the shapes of prior communities which remain as gentle hills, ridges, and gullies hundreds

Visual facts 163 of years after all evidence visible from the ground level has disappeared. Even where the historical artifacts are still visible, the aerial perspective offers new insights. If you doubt me, just ask Google to search “Hadrian’s Wall aerial photographs.”The social organization of the Roman frontier settlements and fortifications are revealed in the wall constructions, the castle forts at each Roman mile and the larger fortified settlements here and there along the 100-mile barrier that was the northernmost border of the Roman Empire. For nearly 2,000 years, since the wall and adjoining fortifications were built but before there was an aerial perspective, people understood how shapes seen at ground level reflected patterns of social life. They are understood in a fuller and better way, however, from an aerial perspective (for example, the social organization of defecation in the public latrines—it was not a private experience—can be seen in Google Earth photos). The aerial overviews reveal new aspects of the social organization of a small piece of the Roman empire, from the social organization of defecation to the bureaucratic organization of an occupying military force. The aerial perspective also shows disastrous and contradictory effects of human action on the land. There are many examples, but I am thinking in particular of Emmet Gowin’s aerial photos4 of nuclear bomb test sites, bomb disposal craters, off-road traffic patterns on the Great Salt Lake, weapons disposal trenches, copper mining and ore processing facilities, labyrinths of trenches left behind from uranium exploration, pivot irrigation and drainage ditches, aeration ponds in toxic water treatment facilities, and abandoned Minuteman missile silos through the American west. In Czechoslovakia Gowin photographed what he called the effects of Soviet Cold War bureaucracy: thirtykilometer-long strip mines several hundred feet deep, surely some of the most profound environmental havoc ever created; razed agricultural villages replaced by high-rise “micro-cities” for workers in a newly created industrial landscape that show the draconian character of decision-making in totalitarian societies. The aerial photos make social policies visible but on the surface of the planet: American pivot irrigation systems produce what are environmentally and economically irrational crops, but the photos do not show the depletion of groundwater these irrigation systems produce. Taken as a whole, Gowin’s photos show the ominous preparation for nuclear war, the aftermath of conventional war and the costs of agricultural policies expressed in erosion and water depletion. Finally, LaToya Frazier’s visual reflection on three generations of a matrilineal black family in the mostly postindustrial community of Braddock, Pennsylvania begins with a detailed aerial portrait of Braddock’s last functioning steel mill. The second aerial image shows what was the only hospital in the region; the caption reads “Braddock Hospital was our largest employer. Today our community does not have adequate health care, emergency care, or employment opportunities. UPMC demolished our historic six-story hospital and built a new hospital, UPMC East, in an affluent suburb that a majority of our community residents cannot reach.” A third aerial, near the end of the book, views the city from the eastern extreme, showing the Monongahela River, remaining industrial architecture, railroad bridges and empty lots. The caption reads: “A sewer … a drain … a place for throwing waste. Like W.E.B. DuBois, I too was born by a golden river, in the shadow of two great hills.” The three aerial photos provide a context for the intense story that unfolds within. We zoom back (up, in this case) to imagine lives lived in material circumstances that are themselves in flux.The steel mill continues in operation, the last in the region; the hospital

164 Visual facts is gone and the population of the black neighborhood continues to decline as the community itself disappears. The aerial perspective reminds us that what we see is a matter of how we look at it. Our knowledge, our values and our data are a product of seeing. When we radically change it, we come to new conclusions. Galileo’s view through the telescope forced him to abandon the view of a universe created by a Christian God and inhabited by his favorite creatures, us. He did not want the new knowledge because it challenged his religion as well as everybody else’s (not to mention getting him into a lot of hot water), but he could not deny it, either.

Comparing housing interiors Seeing inside the spaces we inhabit is a window into the sociology of private life. Many of the books reviewed in Chapter 1 visit this topic, but the only systematic and sociological examination of this topic is a remarkable study of the housing interiors of thirty-two families in several neighborhoods in Los Angeles published in 2012.5 The focus was on economically typical middle-class families, ethnically diverse, all with school-age children. All those who participated in the study are homeowners, thus in control of the design and use of their home spaces. The families agreed to welcome the social scientists and photographer into their lives for close study, which, given the intrusion, was not to be taken for granted. The photographer on the project, Enzo Ragazzini, worked in color in largely natural light, and he framed images with conventional lenses (that is, lenses, probably 35 or 50 mm, that see a bit less than our optical sight), and when the team decided a wider view was necessary, they overlapped images to create panoramas. Much of the focus is on details inside rooms: the vast accumulation of toys, folders, utensils, pictures on walls, often pasted there without frames (and sometimes walls of beautifully arranged framed photos that appear to show ancestors and extended family). Disorder and clutter abound. The four-year project included “family narrated video home tours” where each parent and child older of approximate school age guide the viewer through the space, telling how it is used; what the objects mean and how they feel about the clutter or perennial state of the unfinished projects. The authors note that many tours were brief and of little depth and others lasted almost an hour and provided “rich insights.” The families are described by occupation, specific location, ethnicity and income in a two-page spread that is itself an artful display of statistical and demographic information. The state of the home interiors reflects what the authors note had been “three decades of sustained consumer frenzy.” The objects photographed were coded and catalogued but not all the objects could be counted or categorized; there are simply too many and they are squeezed into closets, storage areas in the home and garages. I counted several hundred separate items in some photos. There are areas of the home where clutter is extreme; kids’ bedrooms often with hundreds of toys and kitchens among the most. Theirs is a comprehensive study of the material culture of a particular moment in history. Shelves hold hundreds of CD and video tapes, now largely obsolete technologies. One child’s bedroom wall holds a cubical shelf with more than 300 stuffed animals, categorized by type: penguins, puppies, Barbies. Other rooms have hundreds of Barbies lying about or perched like a race of mini and very skinny people.

Visual facts 165 Refrigerator exterior surfaces are galleries of family photos informally posed and fastened with improvised quickness. Inside are large plastic bottles of soft drinks or twelvepacks; mass-produced foods that are mostly preprepared.There are few books and reading is not listed as a leisure activity. In an era before the flatscreen technology, televisions and computers are huge boxes, intruding into rooms. The study shows a consistency in the styles of habitation among the thirty-two families. The use of color film catalogues the bright wall colors and the shiny plastic objects that are everywhere. The study itself goes well beyond the volume cited, with other reports and films. It is an unprecedented use of visual methods as an integral part of a study that opens the door to deep understanding of how we lived at a particular moment in a particular place. The study goes beyond cataloguing the objects, as was done expertly by Peter Manzel in his global study of the materiality of home life (see Chapter 1) or the documentary studies (see also Chapter 1) of specific classes in particular settings. Rather, it is rather a study of how people define and use all the stuff that is stuffed into their homes. The study demonstrates how photography expands the reach and depth of earlier nonvisual standards in the field, such as Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s classic study of the “meaning of things.”6

Comparing neighborhoods Caroline Knowles and I used a comparative visual approach in a study of migration in Hong Kong.7 Hong Kong changes from one urban reality to another more rapidly than any other city I have studied, and immigrants flow between these visual universes, depending on what they do and where they live. Because the city is so compact and the public transportation is so efficient, there is a social fluidness that was key to understanding how people live in the city. To visualize this I used lenses that recorded information in a distinctive way: Figures 4.10 and 4.11 were made with an extremely wide-angle lens (21 mm), aimed in the same direction, to show the slums of Mong Kok, almost adjacent to the gleaming high rises of international capitalism. After being unsatisfied with conventional photos of street life (the hustle and bustle of life was either too close when using conventional lenses or too abstracted by the optics of wide-angle lenses, where the center of the frame is moved away from the viewer and vertical lines are distorted) I began to use a rotating lens panoramic camera, which records the width of human vision (about 150 degrees) and with objects in the left, center and right in the same perspective an eye would see. The panoramic camera technology dates to the early nineteenth century and the cameras are awkward to use. It is also possible to knit adjacent images together digitally to create panoramas that have the optical quality of an image made by the rotating lens camera, except that the rotating lens camera captures what is happening in single moment. In any case our technique allowed us to compare neighborhoods on a visual basis in a way that approximated the way we saw these places through our eyes. In these examples I used the same camera and lenses to explore a theme in the same way in different places. I suppose one can go too far with this point, but I am struck by the fact that Robert Frank’s photos of American culture were all made with the same camera, same lens and same film, which meant that his point of view did not change (his 50 mm lens was about what one eye sees); his Leica was small and quiet, thus his ability to photograph without disrupting people was the same in all instances, and the grainy

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Figure 4.10 Hong Kong: high-rise slum.

Figure 4.11 Hong Kong: high-rise capitalism.

Visual facts 167 Tri-X film was consistent from image to image. In this way one could say that his photos were a technologically comparative study of various ideas such as the public demonstration of our politics; our racial tensions; the character of life in places like diners and cafés, and so forth.

The visual study of social life in a city My inspiration for this topic is William H. Whyte, a journalist in the 1950s who in 1969 joined the New York Planning commission and began sixteen years of research that led to his book, The City.8 Though he never used the term, he was a visual sociologist and showed in practical terms how to study the city with images. He directed research teams in New York made up of graduate students who observed and interviewed and photographed with still and movie cameras often mounted on construction scaffolds or positioned in rooms of deserted hotels across from research sites. They used time-lapse photography and film to record the street from above, and hand-held cameras to photograph at street level. They attempted to remain unobserved, hoping not to influence the behavior of the mass of humanity that was their subject. Their photographed observations were data; there was nothing artful about the images. The images recorded behavior to answer questions about urban life. The book contains 102 photos that are largely without captions, and they have no artistic pretentions. They represent a small percentage of images made and we do not know how the visual data were coded or analyzed. My guess is that it was straightforward: a problem was identified for study and images were made to evaluate it. With new digital technology the coding of visual material would be simpler, and probably more effective. The research teams began with questions such as: how many people used an urban space, and what seemed to influence the rate of use? Did people in public appear to accomplish what they intended to? There were also implied questions: were people having a good time? Did the city provide a positive, safe experience? Did it integrate people, entertain them, enlarge their sense of the possible? What policies created the opposite, that is, alienation of people from each other: boredom, or fearfulness and disgust? The teams counted pedestrians in different neighborhoods at different times of the day, the week and season. They measured sidewalk widths, mapped social interaction in plazas and parks, and hypothesized what shapes and sizes of spaces encouraged certain kinds of interactions. They categorized people and watched how they interacted. Some of this is outrageously politically incorrect thirty years later; for example, Whyte observed different types of “girl watchers”; both their behavior and the responses they received from women. They experimented by having the same female researcher dress “beautifully” and “unattractively” (their terms) at different times and noted that it appeared to be the clothes rather than the particular person who wore them that brought the reaction from males. Most of Whyte’s research examined practical questions: how many people could use a fourteen-foot sidewalk? How could a city encourage use of its expensive and extensive public spaces? Did street commerce (buying and selling on crowded sidewalks) encourage or discourage people from entering shops? Did restrictive policies keep “undesirables” (which Whyte defined as dope peddlers, muggers and others who preyed upon a public; not

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Figure 4.12 Hong Kong cosmopolitan neighborhood.

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Figure 4.13 Mong Kok market.

170 Visual facts the homeless or the eccentric) out of a public space? His answer was that it did not; if you restricted the use of a public space it would attract more of what they termed “undesirables,” not fewer.The way to discourage the destructive deviants was to make the space welcoming to all, and a high population density would tend to drive the deviants to other urban regions. In his obituary he was quoted as saying that the city “has always been a mess and always will be something of a mess,” but that was its charm. Clearly, he favored urban spaces where extremes met and interacted. He favored an urban block made up of many small shops and enterprises on the street level, on second floors and in small storefronts, and he noted that when they were replaced by an office tower or, worse, a wall, the city lost a part of its vitality and strength. He believed that density and mixture created the best urban spaces, and that many American cities were being redesigned for low-density use and the elimination of people from the urban scene. Cities such as Dallas, designed for cars rather than people, were singled out as the worst examples. The model Whyte saw emerging has indeed become the typical American city, largely with the outcomes he had predicted. He had enormous influence as editor of New York’s Master Plan, as redesign consultant of Bryant Park and as a frequent consultant in the urban redevelopment process in New York and other cities. Rarely has a sociologist had as much impact on the subject he studied. His use of visual images to study public life in the city, however, has yet to be emulated on a wide scale. Piazza Maggiore: studying a city center Whyte’s efforts in part inspired an ongoing study of the social life of an Italian city center, Piazza Maggiore, in Bologna. I first visited Bologna, an ancient university

Figure 4.14 Bologna, Sunday afternoon without motorized traffic, 1988.

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Figure 4.15 Neptune, Nereids and a tourist pose, 2019.

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Figure 4.16 Entering the piazza, 2005.

city in northeastern Italy, in 1988. I spent much of my five-day visit exploring and photographing and sporadically attending a conference that met far from the city’s core. In the center city I was struck by the contrast between the warren-like streets and their covered sidewalks—porticos—and the piazzas they led to. Some porticos were more than 1,000 years old and they protected pedestrians from the rain or direct sun and funneled them past fashionable shops and stores. The columns that formed the outer walls separated the pedestrians from the street traffic and created playful patterns of shadow and sun. On my first Sunday in Bologna I was startled to walk from my hotel to the central piazza, Piazza Maggiore, to an eerie and enticing soundtrack: no cars, no scooters, just the murmur of hundreds of conversations (Figure 4.14). I discovered that the leftist city

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government had closed the city center to motorized traffic on weekends and as a result I experienced the city the way it had been from Roman times until the early twentieth century. My first photos of the Piazza Maggiore were made that day and it made me think that making cities to nourish public interaction were second nature to Italian urbanists who had been designing cities for hundreds and hundreds of years. In the meantime I have returned to Bologna on more than thirty occasions, often for months at a time, and I have always photographed Piazza Maggiore. As a guest professor for two semesters at the University of Bologna in recent years I supervised projects centered on the piazza where students studied topics ranging from prostitution rings to buskers playing American blues and Armenian folk music to tourists drinking coffee. The university is a part of the pan European Erasmus network and normally half of

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Figure 4.17 A medieval parade, 2003.

Figure 4.18 Mimes busking, 2003.

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Figure 4.19 Kids playing, 2001.

Figure 4.20 Kids chasing pigeons, 2001.

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Figure 4.21 Class on the steps, 2005.

Figure 4.22 Grandparents explaining WWII to their grandkids, 2006.

my students were from outside Italy, and it was interesting to see how other Europeans compared their own urban centers. Often they felt the Italians had done it far better than they had, and the evidence was in how they experienced the piazza and how those they observed seemed to as well. There was always something new to see and photograph, and it was almost never without throngs of people. On the Saturday evening preceding Easter, a massive TV showed the Pope addressing the faithful. Before Christmas there was a skinny, drunk Santa

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Figure 4.23 Protesting the second Gulf War, 2005.

and a photographer offering to pose with children for a fee (during the time I watched none took the offer). For two years the steps in the front of the cathedral were blocked off from pedestrian use and police monitored everyone entering the piazza at a checkpoint set out in front of the doors as there had been terrorist threats to bomb the church because it contained a fourteenth-century fresco of Mohammad being tortured in hell. This changed the nature of the piazza and led to public outcry. In the intervening years the barriers were removed and now have all but gone. I have developed a special interest in the semiotic landscape of the city and its piazza; the meanings attached to the original buildings, some 1,000 years old, and the texts and sculptures found in hidden and predominant places. I have watched the semiotics of modern advertising creep toward the sacred old forms, then get pushed back. Mostly I have studied how people use the piazza. In the summer people seek shade; in the winter they move with the sun to seek its warmth. Children use the piazza as their playground, chasing pigeons, batting balloons or kicking soccer balls back and forth. In 2010 a rare snowfall left a foot of snow in the piazza and it became a temporary winter playground; I photographed a snowball fight that lasted for an hour. In the summer the piazza is taken over by a huge movie screen, hundreds of portable chairs are fastened together, and a projection room as large as a small cabin shows movies each evening. The seats were full for the evening screenings; an Italian tradition dating to the 1930s. During these months the social life of the piazza all but disappears, for it is hot and humid and the public stays home during the day. In the fall the trade fairs come to town and the piazza is often filled with booths of chocolate or other themes of the hour. There are political protests, demonstrations of poorly made wooden models of Pinocchio, and music, music, music. The piazza was filled to

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Figure 4.24 Tourists en route. Bologna is a major rail hub, connecting Venice, Milan, Florence and Rome. They arrive as a daily tide, have bicchiere di vino or un caffè, march through the piazza and depart for their next destination.

Figure 4.25 Girls with selfies, 2019.

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Figure 4.26 Tourist bus, 2019.

Figure 4.27 The mother pushes her kids through the waves of tourists and Neptune looms above.

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Figure 4.28 Tractor funding project. In October of 2012 I arrived in Bologna to witness the piazza as the staging area for a civic project. As the undisputed center of the city, it commands the attention of all. The project covered the piazza with white and blue plates in the shape of a tractor that were added as funding accumulated over the weekend from public contributions. The money was used to purchase a tractor to send to a village in Africa, and the following year photos were displayed in the piazza of the tractor arriving in Africa and being used by appreciative farmers. As it happened, the front of the basilica was being restored when the tractor project was underway and it was possible to enter the covered scaffolding and climb to the top, where the view was extraordinary.

welcome Mussolini in 1936 and for counter-culture demonstrations in the 1960s. In other words, the piazza is a living, breathing space, adapting itself over time to serve to one purpose after another. I also thought about how my feelings about the piazza evolved from that of an outsider to a seasoned visitor. Because Bologna was not until recently a common American tourist route (and like all of Italy tourism to Bologna shriveled to a trickle during Covid) it continued to feel special. As it has become a touristic destination it has adopted the glitz and glamor of more famous cities of Italy. This brief look at a yet unfinished project has been edited from several thousand photos and hundreds of pages of interviews and notes. I am interested in how the piazza is used and how it has changed. When I began visiting Bologna more than thirty years ago it was a place mostly inhabited by Italians living out their daily lives. Now it has become a place consumed by tourists. At least, that was my conclusion after my last trip to the piazza, a year before Covid, in 2019. I shall be going back soon to see how this is playing out.

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Figure 4.29 Jazz in the piazza, 2019. Until recently the many musicians who performed in the piazza worked out among themselves how that would happen. Now a musician must request permission from the city to perform by going to an office, filling out a form and then showing up to play when and where they were instructed to do so.

Figure 4.30 University students protesting, 2019. As long as there has been a piazza, it has been a site of public expression.

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Figure 4.31 Waiting in the rain, 2012.

Into the piazza When I began photographing the piazza I often wished I could hover in a balloon to see it from above. With the advent of Google Earth my problems were solved. The Google Earth view (just search for Piazza Maggiore, Bologna) allows us to see the physical relationship between the piazza and the city; the core from which streets radiate to the ancient wall, now a ring road. What is particularly useful is seeing an overview that reduces the piazza to a series of rectangles, some a bit out of square, joined where the piazza changes its identity and, one could say, its character. We enter from the northwest, leaving the busy Via Rizzoli for Piazza del Nettuno, which operates as a funnel into Piazza Maggiore. We walk past a wall dedicated to the memory of the more than 300 Bolognese partisans killed by the Nazis in the waning months of WWII. On the anniversary of the end of the war in Europe (May 8), the wall is decorated by wreaths and potted plants and visited by elderly Bolognese who studied the ceramic images that commemorate those killed more than fifty years before (Figure 4.22). We pass into Piazza Maggiore past the Fontana del Nettuno, a sexy Neptune with naked nereids sprouting water from their breasts. It is the meeting point in Bologna and a place where tourists often sit, reading guidebooks, and others just enjoy the vantage point. If you look at it from the correct angle Neptune’s hand appears as an erect penis, pointing at the church. There is a story there, of course, having to do with Papal politics and the end of an independent city state, as well as the sponsorship of sexy art, but you can look all that up. More important than arguments dating to the mid-sixteenth century is to recognize that Piazza del Nettuno is the secular-spiritual center of the city.

Visual facts 183 We enter the piazza. On the left is the Bar Vittorio Emmanuele, named after the first king of modern Italy.The photo (Figure 4.16), made in 2005 with a swing lens panoramic camera, captures the sense of this corner. A place to sit and watch the piazza. A place to take in the history if one knows each building and its role in the historical eras. To the upper right is the seat of medieval bureaucracy, the Palazzo dei Notai (the building of notaries). Across the piazza is the Basilica of San Petronio, one of the largest basilicas in the world and also one of the most ungainly, with its unfinished exterior and bulky lines. At this time the steps are open and you can see visitors sitting, watching, relaxing. Later these steps would be closed due to terrorist threats. Now, it is mostly the way it used to be. In the early years when I visited the piazza it was a place for local residents and university students. There were some tourists, of course, but they stayed to the edges. Inside the piazza children played, older men talked, families gathered, medieval parades unfolded, mimes performed and musicians played. This is what it looked like. During the early years I visited the piazza I photographed what I felt was a culture almost frozen in time. I felt like an unobserved observer, a fly on the wall, and a typical part of the environment. Occasionally people reacted to my presence, but not very often. Sometimes I playfully photographed students from an art class who were on assignment photographing, and they photographed me. There were tourists but they were mostly in the background, a minority that I was part of. I became a bit possessive of the piazza and unrealistic about the economic pressures modern Italy was undergoing as manufacture was shifting to Asia and tourism became more economically vital. I wanted it to remain as I had found it for many years; a selfish desire to be one of the few outsiders allowed to enter, where I would do my best to be unobtrusive. Change Since the publication of the first edition of the book in 2012 I have returned to Bologna several times. I felt change coming quickly to the piazza. During the preCovid era there was an increase in tourism to Bologna from within Italy, across Europe and from the rest of the world, especially America. Nonstop flights began from Boston, Philadelphia and other US locations and British tourists poured in from London on cheap flights. The airport was improved and transportation into the city was modernized. These tourists often fill the piazza, as they do in Rome and Florence, marching behind a guide holding a flag, often with matching shirts or hats so not to get lost. The old Bologna and the old piazza seemed to have gone missing as it filled with strangers, often marching through for a quick few hours before heading off on the next stop of a whirlwind tour. The semiotic landscape changed as well. Ads for Apple phones and Paris fashions were overlaid on the old symbols and signs and made it feel less distinctive. Global capitalism is, after all, global. What did I expect? Other visitors came with increasing frequency, including refugees from Africa and Asia. Public homelessness has become evident and the prosperity of the city, previously based on manufacturing and as a business conference center, declined as the “China phenomenon” took over. The turn to tourism was part of the stark realities of global Italy. The city responds by manufacturing a reality more attuned to the perceived wants and desires of the tourist trade. A small chain restaurant that reduces exquisite Bolognese cuisine to fast food, originating from Albania, is located on the edge of the

184 Visual facts piazza and via degli Orefici, the quintessential market street that led from the piazza toward the university has been transformed into a neighborhood of bars catering primarily to tourists, all with identical plates of Bolognese antipasti or tortellini, served with Prosecco in the summer and Sangiovese in cooler seasons. The tiny funky bars where I had known the bartenders for decades were closing and the city was becoming fancy, stylish and expensive. There was suddenly a double-decker tourist bus parked in the piazza which is legally off limits to auto traffic, to take tourists through the tiny streets that do not easily accommodate the red behemoth, and a miniature pretend train that looked as though it belonged in a kids’ amusement park that took tourists from the piazza all the way to the Sanctuary of Madonna di San Luca, six kilometers distant. Ah, Bologna! But still the piazza manages to squeeze in the Italians and its old ways. I am bringing this long project to a close by using the photos in conversations with citizens of Bologna. The sheer number of photos make traditional forms of photo elicitation impossible. I sought something more informal that would still draw on the collaborative character of PE. As an experiment I assembled PowerPoint slide shows on different themes from the piazza and then asked two or three Bolognese to scroll through them at their own speed, with the stipulation that they were not to say anything the first time through. Not so easy for Italians confronted with images of their beloved piazza! Then I asked them to return to the beginning and pick any photos to speak about and to say anything that crossed their minds. The topics flowed, creating rivers of information. I completed eight interviews on this model in the last two weeks I was in the city on my last visit, pre-Covid, and came home to transcribe, prepared to return the following year to do more. Suddenly the voices were there for the asking. Common views completely new to me; discussions and disagreements about what had happened when and what it meant, and experiences pulled out of the dormant RAM. Alas, Covid shut Italy down but Bologna will still be there when I return to photograph and to restart the interviews that will finally give this long project the voice of my Italian friends.

Further visual studies of social change My project on Piazza Maggiore has meant that I have studied how the piazza changed, as I note above, but this has been an impressionistic sense of change rather than a systematic study. What about going back further? How do we translate objects and photos from the past into interpretations of earlier sociological realities? A few years ago, visiting the Lake District in England I was struck by a water wheel from 1830 preserved in a local museum that visually summed up the origins of industrial revolution. It was a simple technology, where flowing water spun a wheel that turned a central drive that ran through an entire factory, providing the power for several machines. It was described in detail in Fredrich Engels’ treatise on the working class in Manchester in 1844.9 As Engels noted, this powerful shaft could not be disengaged, and when workers got tangled up in the belts that transferred the power to the machines they were crunched into mush. Later, on a path called Corpse Road, we came upon what looked to be a worn stone couch that a small plaque identified as a “coffin rest.” It was where pallbearers paused to rest coffins they were carrying several miles to a village with consecrated land, since their village had none. The ancient churchyard in the destination village was bordered by a stone wall that marked the consecrated land, and inside the fence the graves were so crowded they were nearly stacked upon each other. The

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Figure 4.32 Coffin rest, Lake District, UK.

Figure 4.33 Graveyard, northwestern UK.

186 Visual facts power of the church in the preindustrial period to publicly announce who would be welcome at the pearly gates was shown in these crowded burial spaces, now neglected and covered with moss. These were all visual traces of history at one stage, implicitly moving to another. The past is much with us, but it leaves messy visual records, and understanding them takes a great deal of effort, coincidence and luck. There are occasionally simple references: the coffin stone, worn smooth by hundreds of years of service, and the crowded graveyards are examples. We learn from other records that it was only in the 1830s, with the beginning of industrially based urbanism in England, that the church lost its monopoly over burial and thus much of its social power. The stone is a visual reminder that one can observe and photograph the past, but it takes some sociological sniffing about to ferret out the meanings of these visual traces. It should also be said that little sociology can be drawn from these visual traces if they are left to themselves.We can visit the ruins of a third-century Roman bar in Ostia Antica, but we do not know who drank there and what conversations or business would have taken place.We can admire the ornate architecture of a Venetian guild house, but to know what went on inside we need more and other kinds of information. But these visual traces found in old objects left to deteriorate in nature or preserved in museums are a starting point, an elemental way to use imagery to study social change. A means to study the past visually is to locate photos in an archive or collection and rephotograph them. But because photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, rephotography reaches back less than 200 years. However, there are great opportunities because there are vast numbers of archives and photo collections tucked into museums and websites, waiting for the attention of a sociologist interested in social change. For example, landscape photographers in the 1970s rephotographed sites throughout the American West that had been photographed by the US Geological Survey 100 years before.10 This was redone and expanded some twenty years later and republished as a third view in 2004.11 The original archive existed because the national government had been sufficiently interested in boundaries and new lands to make a record of the expanding nation. Photographers including Timothy O’Sullivan and Henry Jackson. The rephotography project completed in the 1970s recorded settlement and sprawl, as well as ecological change in water levels and patterns of plant growth. Most towns had grown and spread out; some had declined and disappeared. A viewer comes away with a particularly American sense of impermanence and change. It was not until the work of sociologist Jon Rieger12 that sociology had its first visual studies of social change. His decades-long study of an isolated region in northern Michigan has shown rapid and profound social change, and his methods have largely defined a method for visually studying social change. Sadly, Rieger, a stalwart supporter of visual sociology, recently passed away—a great friend to many of us— and his longitudinal visual study will come to an end unless others gain access to his resources and carry on. Rieger was a member of a research team from the University of Michigan as a graduate student in the late 1960s, studying why young people were leaving an isolated region in the Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan. The largest settlement in this region, Ontonagon, had at that time a population of just over 2,000 people, and the towns of the region were economically viable, with local businesses connected to mining, logging and farming. Rieger photographed about seventy sites in the research area using black-andwhite film. At that time, he writes, he did not expect to return. In the meantime, however,

Visual facts 187 his interests in social change and visual sociology led him to rephotograph the county several times. Among Rieger’s insights is the recognition that social change is not always visible, and the visual dimension of change does not always coincide with the actual change. An industrial plant may close and the visual outcomes might not register for five or more years. Some social change is not visual, and subtle visual indicators may indicate deep social changes. Finally, the steps in the process of change are as important as the beginning and end points. In many non-visual studies of change only the beginning and end are significant, but in visual studies of change it is understanding intermediate steps that often provides the most insight. Rieger argues for coordinated data collection, where images stimulate ideas, which lead to non-visual data collection, which in turn leads to additional photography.Though he does not name it as such, his method is visually grounded theory. Rieger’s research suggests a larger story of decline in rural American. His attention to methods makes his work especially useful. He revisited exact locations, placing similar cameras mounted on tripods in the same position, and waited for the light to approximate what he had photographed years before. Field notes and data from local archives supplement observations and photographs. An example follows. Camilo Jose Vergara, a Chilean sociologist living in the US, has produced a large body of work on social change in the American city, often by rephotographing sites just a few years apart.13 Vergara primarily uses a view camera mounted on a tripod and he works in color, so his images are extremely detailed. He photographs buildings “eye to eye,” often climbing on the roof of his (rented) auto, and he uses perspective-correcting cameras that appear to move the viewer to a position suspended in mid-air. Vergara has been an explorer of forgotten urban landscapes. He focuses on the cities and regions of cities (particularly Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Detroit, New York and Chicago) that have changed quickly in the past fifty years through abandonment, deterioration, boarding up, collapse and teardown. Many of the buildings Vergara photographed were spectacular examples of American architecture: the Corn Exchange Bank in Harlem, the Blackstone building in Gary, the Michigan Central Railroad Station to name a few. Vergara’s most well-known book, American Ruins, often presents three views of a building in advancing stages of deterioration, five to eight years apart, and then an empty lot after its teardown. He enters abandoned buildings and finds how they are used as squats, by artists who leave behind sculptures, murals and graffiti, and as marketplaces for drugs. Now and then he includes people in his photos, usually as small actors far off in the lost urban landscapes, seemingly more left-over debris in a larger landscape of abandonment. Occasionally he includes a story that interprets the change he records. He quotes the late Calvin Earle of 11th Street in Camden, who inhabited the last standing building in a neighborhood that had disappeared before his very eyes:“This used to be all houses around here.You had stores all around.Within five blocks you could buy everything you needed.”14 There are oddly beautiful images of nature reclaiming the deteriorating buildings. In the former Camden Free Library trees are growing; in summer leafed out; in winter barren and dormant; in fall beautiful with changing leaves.The surrounding building with a caved-in roof seems like a protective container for a delicate organism. Vergara explains that the abandoned cars he photographed in Los Angeles tell a more complicated story than they appear to. Poverty has its function: the old cars were used as extra rooms or rented to the homeless. He writes: “For those who knew the neighborhood when backyards were grassy lawns, this signals deterioration, but the car owners

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Figure 4.34 1970 Soo Line railroad, Ewen, Michigan. At the time of this photograph, the Soo’s trans-Upper Peninsula railroad still served as an important economic link between industry in this rural region and the outside world, especially for shipping wood out to mills and processing plants. The railroad passed through Ewen and all of the other communities in southern Ontonagon County—Merriweather, Bergland, Topaz, Matchwood, Bruce Crossing, Paynesville and Trout Creek. By 1970 some of these communities had declined to mere remnants of their former selves, but the railroad still maintained and staffed stations in Ewen and at least two other communities. Ewen was also the location for crew changes on trains that passed through, providing steady business to the hotel shown at left in the photo. Source: Photo by Jon Rieger, by courtesy of the photographer

regard the backyard vehicles with nostalgia. Not only are they reminders of happy times, but there is the ever-present hope of one day fixing them up and selling them for a lot of money.”15 His view could be ironic; serious or bitter; it is hard to tell: Declining cities could learn from the Middle Ages. Michigan Central Station and a few dozen surrounding acres of old parking lots and railroad tracks should be turned into an abbey or monastery. Government or foundation money would help a group of monks to stabilize the ruin and establish living quarters in it. I envision local farmers willingly cooperating, assisting the monks in setting up their farm, chicken coops, and barnyards. I see strawberries growing between the rails along the train tracks; I see lambs and cattle grazing on the overgrown parking lots and goats on the roof and staring out the windows. I cannot wait to eat Michigan Central brand eggs, butter, chicken, tomatoes, and strawberries. I would even expect an enterprising

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Figure 4.35 Abandoned railroad, Ewen, Michigan, 1990. By 1985, the Soo had discontinued its rail service through the central part of the Upper Peninsula. In 1990, when this photograph was taken, the ties and track were being salvaged from the roadbed and the railroad had relinquished the right-of-way to the State of Michigan. A similar scene of abandonment existed in each of the communities that the railroad had passed through across the southern part of Ontonagon County. In examining the visual changes in the scene, I noticed that the station, including the windows, had been painted and that a planter with a tree in it had been placed beside the building. Could this be an indication that it had been converted to a new, perhaps important, use? No such luck: after the closure of the railroad, the former station had also ended up in the hands of the state and was vacant and deteriorating. The building exterior had been spruced up and the planter positioned by local volunteers to keep the place from being too big an eyesore during Ewen’s 1989 Centennial Celebration. Source: Photo by Jon Rieger, by courtesy of the photographer

order of monks to set up a micro-brewery and market their own brand of jam. … Michigan Central would bring visitors from all over the world to Detroit. Motown would become the “city where the Middle Ages work.”16 Vergara’s visual sociology of American urban deterioration is summed up as seven unique features. He writes: “The form these take, the frequency with which they are found, and the manner in which they cluster together and reinforce each other, contribute to the distinctiveness of these urban spaces.” These elements are fortification (buildings are turned into fortresses by sealing the ground floor and the roof, and erecting fences, adding surveillance and guard dogs); ruins, which he defines as buildings left open for decay, and that are subsequently filled with discarded materials. Empty lots are the empty spaces left over after demolition. Social containers are the reuse of old structures such as hospitals,

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Figure 4.36 The same location as the previous two images, 2005. Now it is the site of the former Soo Line railroad and station, Ewen, Michigan. While there had been some discussion in the community about turning the old railroad station into a senior citizens’ center, nothing came of it and eventually the State of Michigan razed the building. The hotel by this time was out of business but a bar remained open on the ground floor in the part nearest the street. At the time of this photograph, the roadbed of the former railroad survives only as a hiking, biking, ATV and snowmobile trail. This is a fairly common pattern in this region where a number of railroads have ceased operations. Trail maintenance has been managed by volunteer groups. This saga is emblematic of the economic decline and population loss that has occurred across the breadth of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Source: Photo by Jon Rieger, by courtesy of the photographer

schools and hotels as caretaking facilities for the homeless, as drug treatment facilities and as shelters for the addicted and the sick. A visual language of art and advertisements are memorials made by residents to dead gang members and those caught in the crossfire of gang wars, the work of artists working independently and projects created by schools and civic organizations to improve the city. Public service billboards,Vergara says, “teach the ghetto residents how to live. The admonitions in these billboards are a contemporary equivalent of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac.” Finally,Vergara sees suburbanization coming to the inner cities in new developments, malls, big box retailers, entertainment centers and “new gated or fenced communities that introduce suburban construction and values” to inner cities.17

Visual facts 191 Vergara’s visual elements show an overall pattern of change that can be compared to other cities and circumstances.Vergara does not claim that all change is visual, or that he explains them completely. But he offers a visual vocabulary for understanding complex social phenomena, and it is one that can be developed further. Rephotography projects have also examined the lives of those who had become inadvertently famous in earlier documentary projects. Bill Ganzel was the first to seek people and places whose images had become cultural icons as part of the FSA and to rephotograph them nearly forty years later.18 The most famous image revisits Florence Thompson and her daughters, whom Dorothea Lange photographed in a migrant camp in 1936; then dirty, fearful and with her children hiding their faces. It had become an iconic image, in many people’s eyes, the Great Depression. Ganzel’s photograph in 1979 shows Thompson and three of her daughters prosperous, chubby, well scrubbed and thoroughly middle class. Journalist Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson completed a similar project, using Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as a model.19 Their focus is on cotton farming, the plight of tenant farmers and the poverty of rural Alabama. They also rephotographed many of the same people Evans photographed in the late 1930s, fifty years distant, and they recorded reactions and memories, not all favorable, about being the subject of such a famous project. The most touching, personal and sociological rephotography project has been done by Milton Rogovin, who died in 2009 at age 101. His four-part rephotography of several families in Buffalo’s low-income West Side was but one of his many projects that focused on the conditions of the poor and working classes in several parts of the world (an early project came on the invitation of Pablo Neruda and combined his photographs from southern Chile with Neruda’s poems). The rephotography project began in 1972 and was completed just a few years before Rogovin’s death.20 The more than thirty years that spanned these images seem to compress whole lifetimes; children become adults; couples almost merge into a single physical presence. Middle-aged couples begin to disappear in the last photos as new generations suddenly resemble the elders photographed earlier. What one takes from these images is the resilience of these families and the stability of their social locations. Not much has appeared to happen to them, speaking of social mobility, yet there they are, decade after decade, looking directly into Rogovin’s 6 × 6 Rolleiflex camera, obviously pleased to be at the center of the photographer’s attention. Rogovin has asked his subjects to place themselves where they want to be photographed, and we thus learn about the significance of things and places, and how those values evolve. In some later photographs his subjects have posed themselves alongside their prints from an earlier Rogovin session, and many of the later portraits are posed around family photos. They are quiet, respectful images, and the medium-format Rolleiflex, under Rogovin’s control, produces images of remarkable beauty. The quality of these photographs may result from Rogovin’s humility and his empathy with the poor; branded as a dangerous communist by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1952 (and his optometry practice essentially ruined as a result), he turned to photography to explore the condition of the poor and working classes. But these are more than touching portraits; they are a sustained visual ethnography of a single community. Finally, the film series Up examined the lives of fourteen English children, aged seven, from various social ranks, each born around 1957.21 Director Michael Apted revisited most of the original participants in seven-year cycles (the first film was called “Seven Up” and the series now has nine installments spanning fifty-six years) becoming what could

192 Visual facts be called “living rephotography.” Apted’s series has been popular in the UK and elsewhere, and has attracted sociological attention, including reviews by sociologists Mitch Duneier and Jon Wagner. The series inspired similar programs in Russia, South Africa, Japan, the US, Australia, France, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Germany and several other countries, and may be the most viewed example of unrecognized visual sociology to date. Interest in these programs may be due to the human preoccupation with knowing the end of our sociological and personal stories (Apted’s original goal was to see how social class played out in the lives of the children he interviewed) but the success may also derive from an audience’s feeling that they have come to know people who appear and reappear, telling their changing stories. The effect of being in the program is also intriguing: are these people trying to live to a higher standard as they anticipate the next round of filming? Are they able to, even if they try? In the meantime, sociologists and others have continued to rephotograph the past and attempt to understand social change based the new images they make. Sometimes this instinct leads to interesting coffee-table books that casual audiences find interesting. At times there are creative projects that use the format of images as part of how the contrasts are made; overlapping images, merging them; leading the viewer to actively engage. One of the most interesting, Magali Uhl’s recent “narrative rephotography” essay on the transformation of an industrial neighborhood in Vancouver, is a convincing, creative, multi-layered adaption of rephotography to the study of change in a Canadian city.22 What I have described thus far is a reading of the past that is specific and based on visual evidence, such as a coffin rest found on a hike through the hills of England, or produced by rephotographing people, objects, buildings or the land itself. How do we see the past more deeply? Gillian Rose provides a roadmap, drawing upon the ideas of Michel Foucault, which are referred to as discourse analysis. She summarizes discourse as “a particular knowledge about the world which shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it.”23 When we understand discourses, which normally include both text and visual information, we understand a stage of history as experienced by certain people in particular circumstances, and we see it through the lenses provided by the institutions that created the knowledge. It is perhaps better shown with an example. Rose refers to studies of late nineteenth-century East London that recorded and explained the persistent poverty. Her interest is in how the discourses about the situation were framed as well as what they recorded. Because the poor did not “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” they were blamed for their poverty. Discourse analysis is not a matter of simply seeing various points of view but understanding how these were constructed and used in power struggles between institutions or communities. For the historian, understanding discourses takes painstaking research and includes the visual. Rose suggests that the researcher study virtually all texts: contemporary newspapers … contemporary accounts of visits to the East End by journalists, clerics, philanthropists and others, which often take the form of travel diaries and could be published in pamphlet or book form as well as in newspapers; novels and, less often, poems; documents produced by various branches of government such as the census, reports by local medical officers of health and other sorts of government reports. Many of these written sources are illustrated with images—often engravings—or with maps, cartoons or other images. Almost all of these historians

Visual facts 193 also use photographs of the area, some taken by philanthropic institutions and some by journalists.24 Rose, via Foucault, suggests that the most effective way to understand the past is to study how people in the past saw, experienced and defined their worlds. It is necessary to abandon a perspective grounded in our time and place, and to create another. Discourse analysis creates a baseline; a deep definition of what was and how it was also defined and experienced, that can serve as a baseline for contemporary studies. Rose convincingly shows the breadth and intensity of this endeavor, when done correctly. Information from the past, including images, are often gathered in archives. We know from Allan Sekula’s essays25 that photographic archives embody institutional power because they organize knowledge. Sekula’s primary message is that an archive influences historical scholarship because it directs how a society comes to know and represent itself. In becoming part of an archive, a photo is taken from its original context and placed into another, where it becomes equivalent to other images found there. The organization of the archive defines and orders all aspects of life that it documents. Finally, archived photos gain legitimacy as documentary evidence because they are located there. Carol Payne’s research26 is an excellent example of Sekula’s insights applied to the politics of an important archive. For several years Payne worked with the Canadian National Film Board’s Still Photographic Division, which during the second half of the twentieth century produced thousands of photos and hundreds of documentary stories about Canada. About ten percent of this cultural production was about Inuit people, which, she notes, were categorized as Eskimo (a generic term that lumps many different groups together) by academics living in southern Canada. Her focus on the hidden stories of the archive suggests background narratives of nation building and a patronizing attitude toward Indigenous people. The text for a story, for example, describes the “childlike, yet rugged, simplicity of the Eskimo.”27 Payne calls her work visual repatriation, a process through which Native researchers use photographs to reclaim native memory, to name community members and historic figures, to question the imperialistic intrusion of southern Canadian society into Arctic communities and to encourage communication between generations. The researchers are generally younger Inuit who use National Film Board (NFB) images in interviews with Elders. Payne describes the photos as having strategic indexicality, which means that they really mean what they are supposed to; they identify people and as a result they give agency to people who recognize their nearly forgotten past. The interviews are a form of photo elicitation designed to produce oral histories. In any case, the research is a powerful example of deconstructing the power of the archive, turning it inside out to create new uses and meanings. Eric Margolis’ research on documentary archives also draws heavily on Sekula. In one study, Margolis analyzes four projects that documented Native American boarding schools from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Margolis begins: “It is essential to remember that the children subjected to the peculiar educational institution of the Indian boarding school were a conquered people … Defeated by the US Army, the Native Americans lost control not only over their land, but over the education of their children and in many respects the ability to reproduce their culture.”28 The photo archives document the cultural extinction reflected in photos of military-like discipline and order in the schools. The photos document natives before and after their removal from natural landscapes and their transition into white culture schools, where practical trades

194 Visual facts are taught and patriotic symbols abound. Portraits made over time show native clothes, hairstyles and postures replaced by Anglo postures, clothes and settings. As policies of cultural extermination gave way to more progressive policies, the photos highlighted educational principles, including “child-centered and active education, inquiry-based learning and the use of manipulatables … students involved in laboratory experiments, life drawing lessons, sculpture, shop and home economics; … nature study trips, and visits to museums and workshops.”29 Margolis is interested in what the photo archives communicate, as well as how the meaning of the archives has been defined. How, Margolis asks, “did Indian school photographs come to be seen as evidence of an oppressive system rather than progress in the civilization of savages?”30 Cultural genocide has been replaced by multiculturalism, while the open racism of the past has become more muted. Both Payne’s and Margolis’ publications include many images, and as a result we can evaluate their arguments by seeing what they are talking about as well as reading their arguments. Barbara Norfleet’s study of the post-WWII American culture31 relied on the archives of professional photographers who documented the daily lives of clients “rich enough to hire them.” Norfleet imagines a dialogue between her collected photos and those of Robert Frank (The Americans), a photographer of the same era whose images were commented critically on American culture. Norfleet’s American middle class is preoccupied with new suburbs, autos, cocktail parties, teen life, dances, swimming pools and public events. The photographers whose work she draws upon were not public historians; they were private photographers working for clients, and their large negative images portrayed subjects without grain, blurred movement or extreme contrast. By contrast, Robert Frank’s 35 mm photos “display a gritty, unappetizing man-made landscape and a sad, alienated people,” a view of America where “there is no energy, no hope.”32 What is remarkable in Norfleet’s eyes is that the two messages, made from different perspectives, different styles and even cameras, are so consistent, despite their different subject matter and editorial focus. Norfleet interprets the images from her own perspective as a young woman coming of age during the era, and with statements by social scientists including Robert Nisbet, C.Wright Mills,Vance Packard, David Riesman and Erik Erikson, and novelists including Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, William Styron and J.D. Salinger. The result is a collective self-portrait of a historical era that stresses its underlying tensions. Norfleet’s study can be favorably compared to the work of Michael Lesy, who has edited several books of photos chosen from both private and public archives. His most well-known project is his published dissertation, Wisconsin Death Trip,33 that presents 200 photographs of Wisconsin town photographer Charles Van Schaick (the original archive consisted of 30,000 glass plate negatives) made between 1890 and 1910. Lesy’s focus was on derangement, insanity, suicide, pyromania and other psychological manifestations that he says were a result of economic unrest, isolation and other dysfunctions of the frontier life. The photos (including Lesy’s collages) show children in coffins, women with wild hair and mad eyes, horses, old-fashioned advertisements and other images of rural life. Lesy’s book was controversial when published and there continues to be disagreement as to whether the photos are an eccentric collection, manipulated by the author, or whether they can be read as a viable interpretation of frontier culture. Robert Levine’s study of nineteenth-century South American culture34 is one of the few historical studies to draw almost exclusively on photography. Levine began

Visual facts 195 by examining a huge body of early photographic work in South America to see what social transformations, urban development and other processes looked like. The approach shows a great deal that was only implied previously. One of his main conclusions is the rather obvious point that you can only visually study what the photographers of the day photographed. As a result, his is a history of what was photographed, and, given the limited use of photography in that specific era, the focus is narrow. Patrizia Faccioli and I used historical photos to make several arguments about the evolution of the meaning of food in Italian culture.35 We visualized key ideas, including the mezzadria and the latifondi systems of land tenure, with photos we interpreted as visual ideal types. We struggled to find the right term for these photos given the appropriation of the term “iconic” by the discipline of semiotics and that our meaning was quite different. Weber used ideal types to understand a concept abstractly rather than to create a definition that fits all cases. To be successful, the photograph of the ideal type must shift attention from the details in an image, or the relationship between elements, to a conceptual generalization. In seeking to understand the historical roots of the poverty and retarded economic development in southern Italy, we spoke in detail about how the mezzadria system, the traditional feudal structure in northern Italy, balanced its exploitation of the Italian peasantry with security and, in periods of good harvests, a viable living. Figure 4.37 shows a communal meal on a farm in central Tuscany, near Chianti, where farmers have helped each other with their harvest. Eight workers crowd around a table, the lone woman in the frame ladling soup to bowl of one of the workers. The soup dish rests on top of another, suggesting there will be additional courses. The silverware matches and dishes are porcelain and unchipped. All the workers have washed and combed their hair and most are smiling. Two large bottles of wine are on the table and each worker has a half full water glass of wine waiting. There is a tablecloth and the room is bare but clean. It is startling to compare this photo to Figure 1.10, which shows a parallel scene in almost exactly the same year in the US. The food is different and there is no wine on the American table, but the expressions and sense of social solidarity among the farmers in both photos are remarkably similar. In the American example, however, the farmers are landowners, and in the Italian example they are likely part of a mezzadria system. Figures 4.38 and 4.39 portray the peasantry in southern Italy in roughly the same era, that is, before the post-WWII agricultural modernization.36 In Figure 4.39 the southern Italian peasants wear worn and ragged clothes, their matted hair covered by scarves or crude hats. They are carrying sacks slung over their shoulders; one assumes they are walking on their way to work in the fields. Unlike the mezzadria peasants, the latifondi peasants did not live in landlord housing, nor did they have land to grow their own crops. They hired themselves out at subsistence wages to do daily labor often several kilometers from the crude, crowded, dirty rooms, seldom with electricity, running water or indoor plumbing, where they lived together with their families. We used these and other historical photographs to analyze such concepts as peasant development, craftwork and political struggle around the edges of food systems. Often they add information that escapes written description. The looks on the faces of the peasants in the two systems, or their postures and clothes, fill out the understanding of more complex arguments. Having the images side by side encourages comparison. They become a visual constant for various readings of the history: a common locating point for a definition of a sociological and historical reality. In searching for historical photographs my intention was

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Figure 4.37 A communal meal on a farm in the village of Strada in central Tuscany, 1947, after helping each other with the harvest. This photo can be compared and contrasted not only to the northern Italian example in Figure 4.38, but also to Figure 1.10, which shows a parallel moment in almost the same year, among farmers in northern NewYork. Source: Photograph by Haywood Magee, Picture Post/Hulton Archive © Getty Images

to find images that would tell something new and perhaps surprising. Often this would consist of visual elements that were not unusual in and of themselves, but the uniformity of dress in one setting or another, or the posture or expression of those caught on film by the miscellaneous photographers whose work I was able to locate and secure, would catch my eye. There is a fundamental issue that contrasts the two peasant systems: in northern Italy the mezzadria peasants lived in a rudimentary but secure dwelling; they worked land that did not belong to them, but they were secure in that location. They retained half of what they grew and thus had a predictable, if scant, livelihood. In the south the peasant was in a system that dated to the Roman estates, where the workers were slaves.The modern peasant begging for a day’s labor is not much advanced over that 2,000-year-old system of exploitation, though the conditions of exploitation have changed. It is not simple to use photos made by various photographers, gathered into an archive, to make visual arguments. The archive images that Figures 4.37, 4.38 and 4.39 are drawn from, Getty, consists of millions of images gathered into a single (virtual) location and are available for sale. While there are brief identifying captions, we do not know the conditions under which the photos were made; we do not know if they are representative of the event or situation they portray. Perhaps the smiling peasant farmers in the communal lunch are an exception and the desperate peasants of the south are similarly untypical, but I do not think so. Our best defense is that as I looked through hundreds

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Figure 4.38 This photo from southern Italy in mid-twentieth century depicts the latifondi system of agriculture, where huge estates, grazed by millions of sheep, were serviced by day laborers who made a subsistence wage. The photo shows nine workers, most in unkempt clothes, waiting to be hired for a day’s labor. Behind is (presumably) their village built into a hill, without finished windows or probably other amenities. The men express resignation in their postures and expressions. Two men are better dressed, one with a suit and tie. Are they labor contractors? Source: Photograph by Ando Gilardi, Fototeca Gilardi © Getty Images

of examples, I studied images that challenged my assumptions as well as confirmed them. When I finally chose images, I was confident that they represented the main themes the archive communicated. The final example is perhaps the most ambitious use of visual imagery to understand social change. The study is John Grady’s analysis of the depictions of black Americans in LIFE magazine from 1936 to 2000, the final year of the magazine’s publication.37 He created a database by analyzing every advertisement in LIFE that pictured an African American, a total of 590 ads. These were coded using grounded theory, which involved working with the images chronologically and identifying each for variables that were assigned values. When new variables emerged, Grady returned to the first images and recoded the entire collection.While this sounds extremely tedious, Grady notes that most variables were discovered during the beginning of the coding and that few variables were subsequently added. The variables reflected attitudes toward racial segregation and integration. What is remarkable about the study is that Grady discovered that the ads mirror trends identified in national censuses and other attitude surveys, but they tell a more complete story than the surveys do. Grady points out that surveys indicate what people say they do, which often differs substantially from what people actually do. A survey often presents an

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Figure 4.39 Peasant women and children in southern Italy, mid-twentieth century. Their clothes are made from rough cloth; perhaps feed sacks. Source: Photograph by Kitti Bolognesi, Corbis Historical © Getty Images

imagined future and asks the respondent to indicate their imagined actions. Because there can be no check on these claims, Grady points out the disconnect between assertions and reported behavior. Grady’s analysis includes the topic of the advertisement; the specific actions taken by white and black figures within the ads, and their social desirability or attractiveness. Decoding the advertisements suggests that racial integration has moved ahead at a slower pace than the surveys indicate, yet Grady believes they suggest a stronger commitment to racial integration. The study also suggests that there are areas of social interaction where racial integration is less advanced than others. There are several admirable aspects to this study. The visual data both elaborate trends identified in questionnaire-based surveys, and also suggest different conclusions. The study uses a large but manageable data set, sufficient to answer the questions posed. The ads are visually complicated and rich with potential meaning, making their analysis a challenging but doable research activity. Seeing examples of the ads published in the article allows the viewer to analyze visual information in addition to evaluating written arguments. Grady’s work leads us to reflect on the issue of coding. Coding assumes that a researcher can uncover latent meanings through systematic, rational study. One of the best examples aside from Grady’s is Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins’ analysis of 600 photos published in the National Geographic magazine over three decades.38 Lutz and Collins claim to have

Visual facts 199 discovered a pattern of meaning implicit in the National Geographic photographic tradition, working from the assumption that content analysis and coding are scientific methods that uncover preexisting and more authentic meaning than casual looking does.This viewpoint is often uncritically accepted, yet it is important to remember that coding produces only another example of situated knowledge that reflects an historical moment and an institutional way of seeing. Even though academics often claim that our way of seeing interprets a more profound or correct vision, it is indeed just another argument for a point of view. While sociology draws heavily on history, there are only a handful of sociological studies of the past that draw primarily on imagery. Focusing on the visual leads us to archives of forgotten or otherwise unremarkable photographers—professionals who did their jobs well but never expected to be known outside their communities, who may have produced some of the most telling histories of the times. I remember the lone professional photographer from my Minnesota hometown who photographed all town and school events with his Hasselblad and big flash attachment. He was a technical master and used the best equipment money could buy to photograph Homecoming queens, 4th of July parades, school events and town rituals. His photos illustrated the weekly town newspaper and high school yearbooks, and his services were purchased by hundreds of people for weddings and other family events. He belonged to the era just after Norfleet’s project, when a small town still had a photographer who was highly skilled and photographed everything of interest. I learned with dismay that his negatives were thrown in a dumpster when he died. Now that even the newspapers are disappearing, this public record and its potential for sociological analysis will disappear as well.

Figure 4.40 Popular culture arrives in small town Minnesota: The Elites prepare to perform in the local theatre before the opening of the Beatles’ movie, A Hard Day’s Night, photograph by the town photographer George Johnson, Forest Lake, Minnesota, 1964. The author is on the extreme right.

200 Visual facts This is the only image that I have from the Johnson career. It shows a performance of a local rock band, The Elites, in 1964, opening at the local theatre (now derelict) for the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night. I recall how he set up studio lights and balanced them with the strobe attached to his Hasselblad and told us to start performing. We were alone in the theatre, waiting for our concert to begin and clearly having a good time.The photographer was stocky and wore a baggy suit that seemed to complement his flat top haircut. He was a town figure, well known and appreciated, but sadly not enough to have his negatives saved when he passed on.The photo print is wrinkled with time, as are those in the photo who are still with us. As these projects show, reading the past through images is complicated. Images mean something in their original context, and those meanings evolve as the images appear and reappear in new contexts. A sociological view is attentive to the way images contribute to discourses on power, but the topics are larger than that, as broad as sociology itself. It was exciting when Patrizia and I found images that corresponded to eras in Italian history that helped us understand the evolution of food culture in northern and southern Italy, but we were also cautious not to draw too much from tiny visual remnants from a vast and complex sociological reality.

Interpreting the subjective I earlier mentioned the idea one can express their subjective experiences via photos. I am not the first to come to such a conclusion; Alfred Steiglitz’s claim that the clouds he photographed in the 1930s were equivalents to his moods or emotions does not have a great deal of sociological cache, but his student Minor White’s stark photos, intended as a mirror of his emotions, suggest the alienation he felt as a closeted bisexual man. How have sociologists used images to explore the subjective side of social existence? There are at least three ways: by using images as visual metaphors; by recounting the details of experience; and by using photos as a bridge between researcher and subject. In the case of visual metaphor, Richard Quinney’s recent books39 describe his transformation from a critical criminologist to a philosophical wanderer, finally finding his way back to his home spaces of Wisconsin. His photographs depict landscapes and objects, often from or around his parents’ farm, where he grew up and which he left to become an intellectual. They depict mood and feelings grounded in the depiction of seasonal change, aging buildings and the land. His writings borrow from philosophy and literature, and reflect both his inner and outer journeys, and they offer a parallel to the images. The first of these books, published in 1991, was a radical departure for Quinney and for sociology. He is credited with introducing a Marxist approach to criminology and had authored several influential texts in that area. I was then editor of a book series on visual studies published at Temple University Press, and Quinney’s Journey to a Far Place was one of the first manuscripts we published. It was a revolutionary moment for both sociology and visual sociology; an intellectual pioneer-criminologist turning to the memoir form, illustrated with photos he had taken throughout his life. Quinney’s visually based autobiography led to a steady stream of his memoirs and philosophical reflections, often illustrated with his photographs and drawings, now more than twenty in number. His themes have been an examination of life’s purpose, and the importance of place in his identity, in all the connection between “biography, philosophy and spiritual life.” At one

Visual facts 201 point Quinney accepts an academic position close to his family landscape, without even a job interview, to rediscover and re-experience his roots.The job did not work out and the landscape initially lacked what he sought. Quinney’s work from that period tells of loneliness in an empty small town on the border of Wisconsin and Illinois, and an academic job he no longer wanted. As retirement led him back to the landscape he spent his life searching for, his images and texts gain a focus, as though winter has become once more spring. Indeed, his impressive flow of ideas and images in his seventh and eighth decades strains my imagination. Sociologists and others have also used images (usually photos, but also drawings, paintings, X-rays and other images) to show the insiders’ experience, especially during transitions that are difficult, traumatic or terrifying. One thinks immediately of the project of writer Dorothea Lynch and photographer Eugene Richards40 who together described the experience of cancer that eventually took Lynch’s life.The autobiography and photos documented her discovery of cancer, her hopeful experience of recovery and the terror of remission, as well as her experience in hospitals, clinics and other settings of the medical system. The transition from health to death is also told in the images and text of Jo Spence,41 mentioned in Chapter 1. Many writers have described the transitions that come with serious disease, but these projects use photos (in Lynch’s case, by her partner Eugene Richards) to show the view from the hospital bed looking outward, of the bodily assault that cancer represents and of the realigned sense of self that diseased-based change brings. The images show how the self is rooted in the body and how the experience of illness is mediated by institutions. They show the emotional labor of illness in the faces of participants, the performance of professional work and the experience of those who are left behind. Perhaps the strongest example of imagery used to detail identity and illness was done by sociologist Jon Prosser,42 well known for his visual studies of schools. Prosser suffered a nearly fatal bacterial infection of the heart, and a subsequent stroke that changed how he experienced and viewed the world, now as an impaired person in a several-year recovery process. He analyzed the experience of illness and recovery with narrative and imagery, which he refers to as mediating his experience of illness. Prosser’s memories of the first days after the stroke are mental movies that played as repeating film loops in his mind, showing mountain climbing experiences in which he was fearful and anxious. When his family finally reached him in the hospital, his daughter drew a picture in which Prosser was reduced from her memory as “big and strong” to small, vulnerable and “tied up to machines.” During the long recovery Prosser saw the world differently; normal images of brain scans became evil faces; groups of people were transformed into images of the brain. His visual apprehension came to reflect his inner torment. As he recovered he began to study the fine arts; in his life-drawing classes he drew women with “soft lines and relaxed bodies,” but men were “contorted, deformed or exploding.” In the publication of the article images are not captioned, because, as Prosser explains, “I saw the words as secondary and the visuals were there to explain the words even though the ‘reader’ would have to worker harder … the figures are for me far more important than the words ever were.”43 For this publication, given that I am limited to a short excerpt, I asked Prosser to add captions to two images (Figures 4.41 and 4.42). It took Prosser years to recapture his ability to lecture or write. He found a path back to higher cognitive functioning in part through mental mapping where he was able to

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Figure 4.41 X-ray with pacemaker. Using the objectivity of a medical image and its subjective interpretation in the process of self-healing. ‘When I was in hospital I became disillusioned with doctors’ narrow interpretation of visual evidence. So the image originally used for clinical purposes and selected for its objectivity/reality, is really fulfilling its role as healing device through my processing of it. I saw it initially as objective/medical data (the pacemaker as an alien device inside my body), then, face- to-face with my worst nightmare, I came to perceive it as something small and comical, eventually feeling “is that all?” Hence using the objectivity of a medical image and its subjective interpretation in the process of self-healing.’ Source: By Jon Prosser, courtesy of the artist

visualize ideas and their relationships.To write the article discussed here, Prosser produced a mind-map (Figure 4.42) that connects the paragraphs, images and narrative texts that became his unified expression. The mind map is in color, which is one dimension of the coding, unfortunately lost in the translation to black and white. Prosser experienced illness and recovery in part visually and found a way to communicate it that way. As a result, the reader and viewer understand the experience of illness more deeply than words alone would provide. On the other extreme, that is, the subjective character of routine life, Ricabeth Steiger used images to explore her one hour and six minute train ride from her home town of Basel, Switzerland, to Zurich, where she worked until recently, an event repeated several times a week for several years.44 Steiger writes:

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Figure 4.42 Using what remains functioning after a brain injury to aid healing: adopting mindmapping to encourage the development of ideas and provide a rationale and structure for an academic text. Source: By Jon Prosser, courtesy of the artist. The original is in color and different regions of the image are in different colors, which adds another dimension to the coding

photographs may reveal what we are normally unable to perceive, because our perception is too slow or because we are unable to focus on two things simultaneously. On the other hand, the photographs freeze moments that are meant to communicate the personal experience and a sense of the social space on the train. In this way the project is both an empirical record and an interpretation of social life on rails.45 Steiger made several hundred images over several months and then categorized them as “navigating through the crowd at the station,” “looking out of the train,” and “looking into the train.”The large windows of the train car provide a moving picture of Switzerland and allow passengers to disconnect from others and perhaps daydream. Looking into the train invites interaction with others. The analysis of images led to understanding norms surrounding how space is claimed and used. Categories of people photographed included “people only seen once,” “people seen regularly but not interacted with,” and “commuters she sits with and communicates with.” Most of those photographed were commuters she came to know, who became implicit co-conspirators in the project, acting out their routines for the camera. By using the same 20 mm lens (an extreme wide-angle) Steiger was able to capture people in their environments. Using the same lens, black-and-white film and

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Figure 4.43 Train journey, 1. Source: Photograph © Ricabeth Steiger, by courtesy of the artist

image development made the images equivalent in framing and perspective, giving the impression of the human eye drifting across the intimate landscape of the train. The project was presented in two ways: seventy-six black-and-white photos printed as thumbnails on three pages, and, in a first for visual sociology publication, as a CD, included with the journal that autoloaded into the then-current MAC or PC computer and played as a slideshow/movie.46 The experience of seeing seventy-six images blend into each other at twenty-second intervals lulled one into the subjectivity of the train experience. The silvery black-and-white reproductions made the experience dreamlike. The photos were presented without captions or conscious organization in the slideshow/movie and the excerpt offered here simply provides a sense of the larger project. Images have also been used to explore the subjective by bridging the worlds of the researcher and subject. A demonstration is Sarah Pink’s use of video and photography to record the mundane aspects of experiencing the world. She refers to the future of visual anthropology as vested in “engaging the senses,”47 attuned to human “place-making” in which people tell of their environments. An example of her method is found in her study of “walking with video” through a garden with two elderly people.48 They describe the experience as they walk, and later they reflect on the video Pink produced of the experience. The article describing the research includes a few excerpts from the video: a person in a small garden; an empty landscape; feet hitting the soil.

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Figure 4.44 Train journey, 2. Source: Photograph © Ricabeth Steiger, by courtesy of the artist

The images are not meaningful in and of themselves; rather they provide a way for person A to explain to person B what was experienced. Pink attempts to refigure anthropological ethnography to include the study of experience, and ethnography in this instance is based on sharing the lives of those studied. Sharing, in her view, means tasting, feeling, touching, walking; that is, being in the world of those one hopes to understand. In subsequent experiences with this method she walks with people through their homes to understand how they inhabit them.

Seeing and recording sight Perhaps a good way to sum up this conversation is with a reflection on the tools we see with and how they influence what we see, remember and analyze. After an entire book about photography, I am thinking about drawing. I first thought about drawing as a part of visual sociology when reading Richard M. Swiderski’s ethnography of the “African poetics of technology,”49 in which he used his pen to show urban Africans fixing machines in largely improvised ways. Some are standard repairs, a welder fabricating a mount beam for a disk harrow (p. 107); others show how the tasks of daily life are carried out (roasting maize on a grill) and others show how people adapt to machines always in trouble (p. 115: men pushing a disabled bus). I had the impression that the pictures also captured perspectives that Swiderski may have

206 Visual facts

Figure 4.45 Train journey, 3. Source: Photograph © Ricabeth Steiger, by courtesy of the artist

imagined rather than actually saw, and that this freedom allowed him to tell the best story of a moment or an event. In other words, the drawings seemed not to be just simplified photos; they seem to be visual interpretations that captured a new point of view through perspective shift or scale. When I was studying a small mechanic’s shop in the book Working Knowledge (see Chapter 3), I struggled with how much to tell about the machines Willie built, modified and fixed. It was easy to get lost in descriptions of the work because words easily create layers of meaning that only a technical expert could understand. Indeed, the technical design of a car transmission or a manure spreader was not my point. Yet I realized that to understand Willie’s work one needed to understand something about what he was working on. The photos served that purpose, especially when I used close-up lenses, and when I organized the photos in sequences. I came to realize, however, that they were not the only or best way to visually represent the world I was trying to describe. Drawings seemed to have several advantages over photographs. It is possible in a drawing to leave out information and to peel back a surface to see inside an object. The drawings could explain a photo sequence of a repair and in doing so offer an overview: one drawing showed the whole machine (a corn chopper), so Willie’s repair (and what he said about it) made much more sense. Seeing inside a repair allowed a viewer to better understand the engineering involved in routine repairs.They also made the skill demands of routine work more obvious. When drilling out a broken stud in a brake repair one must not destroy the

Visual facts 207

Figure 4.46 Seeing inside the repair of a silo blower and seeing it in action. Source: Drawing © Suzan Harper, courtesy of the artist

threads, or a larger repair will be needed. The artist, Suzan Harper, had to interview Willie to learn what to include in the drawings, and to talk to farmers about the farm machines she drew to understand how they worked. The drawings, artful and clean, also relieved the visual tedium of the black-and-white photos of often dark and cold workspaces and invited the reader/viewer to a higher level of understanding.

208 Visual facts Sociologists have also asked people to draw to understand their taken for granted perceptions and experiences. This began several decades ago with research in which people were asked to create maps of specific environments,50 and is similar to ethnomethodological studies of the routines of trip preparation.51 Sociologists have asked children to draw maps that trace their routes through the city; to show where they feel more or less safe, and to define the boundaries of ethnic identification,52 to record their definitions of their own spaces and to see how they negotiate the modern city. These examples are variations of what has recently been called visualization. Lev Manovich53 shows how visualization, an old idea, has been transformed by advanced programming and increased computer processing power. This has been Edward Tufte’s point for several years, and Manovich’s reference to the often-cited Charles Joseph Minard graphic showing Napoleon’s march on Moscow (1869) demonstrates that powerful computers are not required for visualization. Yet computers and advanced programming have changed the nature of visualization, leading to new ways to see much greater amounts of data. Manovich references an example entitled “Flight Patterns,” made in 2005 by Aaron Koblin, that creates an animated map of all commercial flights in the US over twenty-four hours, using flight schedules and trajectories of all planes in the air. Here we see the visual structure of a huge data set and how it changes. One of Manovich’s projects involves the creation of a single image made by shrinking and adjoining 4,553 covers of every issue of Time magazine published between 1923 and 2009. The resulting image is beautiful, and a piece of it adorns the cover of the journal where his work is published. Yet what do we learn from this graphic? The predominant message is that color saturation of covers increases and decreases over time; the example shows that the processes can produce trivial information as well as significant insights. Perhaps a better example appeared on art pieces the size of small billboards mounted at eye level which were on display in the spring of 2010 in Rome. There were several of these huge canvases on display near the tomb of Augustus, but the one that remains in my memory pictured life-size photos of all the cell phones thrown away in a single day in the US. The photo of hundreds of thousands of objects made a point about waste I had a hard time imagining in any other form. Another example of a stunning and intellectually satisfying visualization is the graphic representing the Web that illustrates the Wikipedia entry on the internet. The image, which looks like a cross between galactic formations and the nervous structure of an animal, was produced for the Opte Project by Barrett Lyon. The Wiki site notes that Lyon believes that what he calls network mapping “can be used to visualize sites of disasters in the world, citing the significant destruction of Internet capabilities after a disaster. Additionally it can be used as an important gauge for the growth of the Internet and the areas of growth.”54 The image is also visually stunning, attested to by its display at the Boston Museum of Science and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Summary There is much ground covered in this chapter, but it is a rather light dusting of snow. There are no definitive guidelines for using imagery in sociological research as there are in quantitative methods. An intuitive sense of visual understanding is a necessary starting point and the lesson of comparative study of “life at home” in Los Angeles is that what different people see under the same instructions varies deeply. Given the opportunity to

Visual facts 209 visualize life in one’s home inspires some and bores others. We can assume that the ability to see in creative and intellectually engaging ways, and to make those visualizations concrete via photography, film or drawing, is not to be taken for granted. It requires an active engagement of our intellectual as well as artistic capabilities and every project will draw on different combinations of ideas and strategies. The unifying idea in this chapter is to recognize that sociological ideas are grounded in world experiences and objects. Making a visual connection between ideas about society and what we see is a grand project, creative and unpredictable. Join the party if you are up for the ride!

Notes 1 Harper, Douglas. 2001. Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2 Harper, Douglas. 1997. “Visualizing Structure: Reading Surfaces of Social Life.” Qualitative Sociology 20 (1): 57–78. 3 Emmison, Michael and Philip Smith. 2000. Researching the Visual. London: Sage, p. 9. 4 Gowin, Emmet. 1992. Changing the Earth. New Haven:Yale University Press. 5 Arnold, Jeanne E., Anthony P. Graesch, Elinor Ochs and Enzo Ragazzini. 2012. Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archeology Press, UCLA. 6 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. 1981. The Meaning of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 7 Knowles, Caroline and Douglas Harper. 2009. Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 8 Whyte, William H. 1988. City: Rediscovering the Center. New York: Doubleday. 9 Engels, Frederich. 1844. The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester. Current edition (2006) by Penguin. 10 Klett, Mark, Ellen Manchester, and JoAnn Verburg. 1984. Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, was the first contemporary rephotography project. 11 Klett, Mark, Kyle Bajakian,William Fox, Michael Marshall,Toshi Ueshina and Byron Wolfe. 2004. Third Views, Second Sights, A Rephotographic Survey of the American West. Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Press. 12 Rieger, Jon. 1996. “Photographing Social Change.” Visual Sociology 11 (1): 5–49 and Rieger, Jon. 2003. A Retrospective Visual Study of Social Change: The Pulp-Logging Industry in an Upper Peninsula Michigan County. Visual Studies 18 (2): 157–178. 13 Vergara, Camilo José. 1999. American Ruins. New York: The Monacelli Press. 14 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 83. 15 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 133. 16 Vergara, American Ruins, pp. 57–58. 17 Vergara, www.amer icansuburbx.com/2009/11/theory-images-as-tool-of-discovery.html 18 Ganzel, Bill. 1984. Dust Bowl Descent. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press. 19 Maharidge, Dale and Michael Williamson. 1990. And their Children After Them:The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Pantheon. 20 Rogovin, Milton. 1985. The Forgotten Ones. Seattle: University of Washington Press contains the nearly complete rephotography series, though some couples were photographed for a fourth time when Rogovin was in his nineties. His photographic work is fully cited in the website www.miltonrogovin.com/. The film The Rich have their Own Photograhers (2009) and other shorter documentaries provide an overview of Rogovin’s work and a portrayal of how he worked.

210 Visual facts 21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_ser ies). The Wiki entry has interesting background on the intent of the directors, the backgrounds of the filmed participants and their subsequent lives. For a visual sociologist’s take on the project, see Jon Wagner. 2007.“Lives in Transaction:An Appreciation of Michael Apted’s UP Filmmaking Project.” Visual Studies 22 (3): 293–300. 22 Uhl, Magali. 2021. “Marshland Revival: A Narrative Rephotography Essay on the False Creek Flats Neighbourhood in Vancouver.” Visual Studies 36 (4–5): 326–347. 23 Rose, Gillian. 2016. Visual Methodologies. Fourth edition. London: Sage, p. 187. 24 Rose, Visual Methodologies, p. 194. 25 Sekula, Allan. 1983. “Photography Between Labour and Capital.” In Buchloh, H.D. and Robert Wilkie, eds. Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948–1968: A Selection from the Negative Archives of Shedden Studio, Glace Bay, Cape Breton. Halifax, HJ.S. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotial College of Art and Design. See also Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39: 3–64. 26 Payne, Carol. 2006. “Lessons with Leah: Re-reading the Photographic Archive of Nation in the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photographic Division.” Visual Studies 21 (1): 4–23. 27 Payne, Lessons with Leah, p. 11. 28 Margolis, Eric. 2004.“Looking at Discipline, Looking at Labour: Photographic Representations of Indian Boarding Schools.” Visual Studies 9 (1): 73. 29 Margolis, Looking at Discipline, p. 85. 30 Margolis, Looking at Discipline, p. 91. 31 Norfleet, Barbara. 2001. When We Liked Ike: Looking for Postwar America. New York: Norton. 32 Norfleet, When We Liked Ike, p. xx. 33 Michael Lesy. 1973. Wisconsin Death Trip. New York: Pantheon. His other historical collections include: Lesy, Michael. 2007. Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties. New York: W.W. Norton; Lesy, Michael. 2002. Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America. New York: Norton; Lesy, Michael. 1997. Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. New York:The New Press; Lesy, Michael. 1985. Bearing Witness:A Photographic Chronicle of American Life 1860–1945. New York: Doubleday; Lesy, Michael. 1976. Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties. New York: Random House. 34 Robert Levine. 1989. Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents. Durham: Duke University Press. 35 Harper, Douglas and Patrizia Faccioli. 2009. The Italian Way: Food and Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 36 The North/South differences are spoken about in many studies. I think the essence of the difference may be best captured in Larlo Levi’s 1945 memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli. It is a report of his experiences in a southern village as banishment for his political positions during the fascist era. The fact that the government used internal banishment to a southern village as an official punishment itself is rather remarkable. 37 Grady, John. 2007. “Advertising Images as Social Indicators: Depictions of Blacks in LIFE magazine, 1936–2000.” Visual Studies 22 (3): 211–239. 38 Lutz, Catherine and Jane Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 39 Examples of Quinney’s more than twenty memoirs and contemplations of interest to a visual sociologist include: Quinney, Richard. 1991. Journey to a Far Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Quinney, Richard. 1998. For the Time Being. Albany: State University Press of New York; Quinney, Richard. 2006. Where Yet the Sweet Birds Sing. Madison, WI: Borderland Books; Quinney, Richard. 2015. Diary of a Camera. Madison, WI: Borderland Books; Quinney, Richard. 2016. Sketchbook: A Childhood Remembered. Madison: Borderland Books; Quinney, Richard. 2018. On the Open Road. Madison, WI: Borderland Books. 40 Lynch, Dorothea and Eugene Richards. 1986. Exploding into Life. New York: Aperture. 41 Spence, Jo. 1986. Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press.

Visual facts 211 42 Prosser, Jon. 2007. “Visual Mediation of Critical Illness: An Autobiographical Account of Nearly Dying and Nearly Living.” Visual Studies 22 (2): 185–199. 43 Personal communication. 44 Steiger, Ricabeth. 2000. “En Route: An Interpretation through Images.” Visual Sociology 15 (1–2): 155–160. 45 Steiger, En Route, p. 155. 46 The CD was featured in an international conference, Beld voor Beld, in Amsterdam in 2005, and a traveling exhibition. The CD form of the photo essay changed it completely, making what would be a very long article (if the images were printed individually on a page) into a brief movie (the images automatically advanced at predetermined intervals) that communicated of the subjective dimension of the train ride better than did static photos on a page. 47 Pink, S. 2021. Doing Visual Ethnography: Engaging the Senses. Revised and expanded fourth edition. London: Sage. 48 Pink, Sarah. 2007. Walking with Video. Visual Studies 22 (3): 240–252. In addition to her many publications her Youtube lecture “Video in Anthropological Research” (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=k-BW1piP6Is) provides a succinct summary, with examples. 49 Swiderski, Richard M. 1995. Eldoret: An African Poetics of Technology. Tuscan: University of Arizona Press. 50 See Gould, Peter and Rodney White. 1974. Mental Maps. Baltimore: Penguin Books. See also: Kent, Susan. 1984. Analyzing Activity Areas: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of the Use of Space. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Kent studies how households are organized, relying on maps people draw of their home spaces, and her key idea is that memory often exaggerates or makes spaces smaller in their maps to show varying degrees of importance. 51 Psathas, George. 1979. “Organizational Feature of Direction Maps.” In Psathas, George, ed. Everyday Language. New York: Irvington Publishers, pp. 203–226. 52 Krase, Jerry. 2004. “Seeing Community in a Multicultural Society: Theory and Practice.” In Perspectives of Multiculturalism: Western and Transitional Countries. Zagreb: Croatian Commission for UNESCO, FF Press, pp. 151–177. 53 Manovich, Lev. 2011. “What is Visualization?” Visual Studies 26 (1): 36–49. 54 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opte_Project

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5

Visual symbols

The photo, punctum and studium I have referred to visual symbols throughout the book, but I want to draw this into a clean summary; let us see, what is a nice symbol for the topic of semiotics? Perhaps the new ice on my Minnesota lake in early November, when it is like glass and snow has not yet arrived. It is a time and space to explore a landscape that is inviting, before the long winter, but the ice is thin and dangerous. This is a connotative symbol, since you asked, speaking in the language of semiotics. The words ice on the lake create an image for Minnesotans, where winter is long but not without its beauty. It has nothing intrinsically to do with the concept I have asked it to symbolize but that is its power: it connotes, taking the properties of one reality and assigning them to another. I have regarded the photographs used throughout this book as indexical signs, that is, having a direct relationship with their referent, or the object they portray. Light fell on the negative or sensor and left a record. But saying it is an indexical relationship is not saying a photo captures the truth of the object it portrays. As has been said again and again, the photo is constructed by every choice the photographer makes and by the digital editor who decides to photoshop Uncle Ned’s antics out of the Thanksgiving dinner portrait. For our purposes in this chapter, if we think of the photo is an indexical sign it means that the information inside can be coded and analyzed. In Camera Lucida1 Roland Barthes offered the idea that the indexicality of the photographic image gave it a quality that reached far beyond the catalogue of its contents. There was something in the photo that escaped the catalogue of its contents. He yearned for his deceased mother and her photograph made her seem present yet utterly and irretrievably gone. Barthes wrote: “It was not she, and yet it was no one else.” So from Barthes’ view the photo is indexical plus. Barthes named this added quality the “punctum” of a photo. The prick of the thorn on the rose. With the beauty of the blossom comes the pain and the drop of blood. For Barthes the punctum can only be felt, it is beyond any cultural code and varies from one person to the next.The informational content of the photo, what he called the “studium,” is amenable to analysis, semiotic or other. There have been interminable arguments about this. It seems from my perspective to reduce to how one experiences the world. Seemingly, those who argue against the punctum do not experience it. Yesterday, I brought photos from fifty years ago to a committee of high school friends who are planning our class reunion. Some of those in the room poured over them, transfixed. Others gave them a glance. Clearly, there were two schools of thought regarding studium and punctum in that randomly selected sample. DOI: 10.4324/9781003251835-6

Visual symbols 213 I photograph to experience the world and to show how the world touches me. It is an engagement, a sentimental journey as well as an intellectual exercise, a cataloguing of what I am looking at. In this chapter much of my focus is on public art and I could have easily found images online of each of the pieces I analyze. But in visiting the art, actively looking and photographing, I began my analysis of their messages. I was not simply keeping records. I was moved by experiencing even inanimate objects so for me Barthes’ punctum is helpful. In fact, it is crucial to understanding how I have regarded photography throughout my career.

Overview My first topic in this chapter is a brief study of old cigarette ads, found in a stack of fiftyyear-old LIFE magazines.This exercise helps me explain how semiotics works, and it is an example of what a great deal of semiotic research focuses on: visual texts designed to convince us to buy or do something, or to think in a certain way.The ads were also interesting to study. They were designed by experts with big budgets and a great deal of imagination, and often, belonging to another era, they were “over the top” in terms of political incorrectness or simple outrageousness. An ad for Pall Mall cigarettes presents mini-skirted twin women lounging over a sports car; between them is a male model, looking pleased with himself. The ad reads: “You make out better at both ends: Big Tip Pal Mall Gold.” In this case seeing the ad would make the intended message clear: sex with beguiling twins comes with smoking a particular brand of cigarette, and the “big tip” is hard to overlook. But here also is what challenges me. Deconstructing ads for obvious or hidden messages seems almost too easy. There are occasional surprises, but most ads are about as subtle as a 10 pound hammer, clanging on an anvil. Still the messaging swirls around us in one form or another, and it is not innocent; it is ideological. Most simply, I define ideology as ideas formulated by the powerful to get the less powerful to do things and think things that are not in their interests. Much of the discipline of cultural studies addresses this idea in one way or another, through the strong interest in advertising and other forms of popular culture. Often the link between visual ads and ideology is vivid and undeniable. Now that ads in magazines or magazines themselves have much less relevance in our lives, scholars focus on other forms of advertising, multi-modality, the flood of ads that pop up on our computers, cued to our viewing habits, or the study of “branding” and other ever more sophisticated ploys to influence our thoughts and actions. The second topic of this chapter concerns public art. I find this interesting as a visual sociologist because public art comes into existence for a wide number of reasons and its purposes and actual accomplishments are hard precisely define. Public art is also amenable to study: it occurs in the spaces we inhabit and there are records that tell us about how and why individual examples were created. We can observe social life around public art; we can engage with it ourselves and reflect on what we experience. We can study the often-convoluted histories behind the creation of these bold statements that adorn our landscapes, and we can muse on their future. In several ways semiotic tools and perspectives aid us in our explorations. Signifier, signified, sign and smoking in LIFE As much as I am guided and instructed by semiotics, I am not wedded to the perspective. I find it both helpful and more complicated than it need be, and not always consistent (a point made by Gillian Rose and many others).2 It was created to study language,

214 Visual symbols which communicates symbolically far differently than do images.The term “referent,” for example, is straightforward in the study of language and less so when studying images. Semiotics can also feel dated because much semiotic analysis has been focused on what is now a largely obsolete phenomenon—magazine advertisements—while it is also true that current research takes on an extremely wide range of topics, settings and technologies. Finally, while the focus of semiotics has often been on how we are manipulated to consume products and otherwise act in the interests of powerful economic classes, through semiotics we can also study any symbolic system, no matter their intent or influence. The following list of semiotic terms and concepts is found everywhere fine theory books are sold, but is especially well summarized, again, by Gillian Rose.3 We begin with signifier, signified and sign. In brief: The signifier is the material object; the “form the sign takes.” In language (where semiotics originated), it is the sound of the spoken word or the letters on a page that is recognized as a sign. The signified is the mental construct connected to it; the concept it refers to; what the signifier makes us think about. The sign is comprised of the two elements together. There is no inherent relationship between the signifier and the signified; sometimes it is strong, sometimes weak, and often non-existent. Signs build upon other signs, when a completed sign becomes a signifier of a higher-level sign, creating ever more complex layers of meaning. There are several kinds of signs, depending on the relation between the signifier and signified. These include: Iconic. In an iconic sign the signifier represents the signified by looking like it, as with a painting or a photograph. It generally is thought to capture the essence of the signified: the Hamm’s beer signs I grew up seeing slowly revolved, endlessly rippling the sky-blue water. The sky-blue waters were an iconic sign of Minnesota, which has a lot of lakes and sunshine. If the relationship between the signified and the signifier is more general, it is called an analogical iconic sign, from analogy. The Beatles are considered an analogical sign of the 1960s, but I was thinking as I wrote this that I found it almost painful to encounter statues of the “fab four” in modern Liverpool, often next to a garishly painted VW Beetle or other iconic signs of past cultural moments. The signs were attempting to create the message that the counterculture was still alive and well and Liverpool’s central role for a brief moment shone on. Indexical. In an indexical sign, as the word implies, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is inherent. A squiggly line on a road sign (the signifier) brings a smile to my face when I am driving my old Miata. Bendy road (the signified) ahead. Symbolic. In symbolic signs the relationship between the signifier and the signified is entirely arbitrary. We do not love with our heart (an example of a connotative symbolic sign), but we have come to accept the heart as a signified representation of love. The denotative symbolic sign, based on an explicit, fact-based relationship between the signifier and signified, accepts the heart as a muscle, denoting the name of the organ. There are several other named types of signs, including syntagmatic signs, which take their meanings from surrounding signs.These are especially helpful in studying ads, where

Visual symbols 215 a great deal of meaning transfer takes place within signs as one borrows its signifier from another sign. In Gillian Rose’s example an ad shows a woman in a tight dress and a curvy car. The curves on the body, a signified indicator of sexiness, transfer to the curves on the car. It is not logical, but it works, at least given the particular car being advertised and the chosen female model. The model conveys the mood and allure Alfa Romeo wants to attach to its car. Syntagmatic signs also influence how I edit visual images in a book or edit a film. For example, in the following pages I present three photos that symbolically depict the relationship between the Vatican and the Italian fascist party in the late 1920s in Italy. The abstract images of square city blocks seen from above, or a wide boulevard built where there had been a medieval urban neighborhood, take on new meanings when placed alongside an image of a large bas relief sculpture, just across the Tiber River, of an angel flying into heaven cradling a fasces (the fascist symbol) in her arms. The first two signs are abstract, a connotative symbolic sign only if you know your history and architecture. When placed into the context of the angel with the fasces their collective meanings changes, suggesting complicated historical events and shifting politics that had huge consequences. Similarly, when editing film, every sequence connects to previous footage and leads to the next sequence (except for the beginning and ending, of course). The sequencing is referred to as connecting signs (here the proximity is linear) and thus it is a tool, as Rose points out, often used in the analysis of film. Finally, syntactic signs are also helpful in understanding the setting of public art. What other signs are referenced? Does it borrow signifiers from these signs? Just as a sign is made up of two parts, several signs found in the same semiotic environment combine to become a higher-level abstraction. Roland Barthes called these “stacked signs” a mythology.4 His famous example is of an African man in the 1950s, when the French colonial empire was collapsing, saluting proudly in a French uniform in a photo on the cover of a national newspaper. The various signs—colonized African man, uniform, expression, gesture and posture—create a myth of the continuing viability of the French Empire. When they are stacked on each other a sign (with its own signifier and signified) at one level becomes the signifier on the next, forming a pyramid of meaning. Or, to extend the example above, a fantasy about a sexual experience with a famous actress transfers to the imagined experience of driving a car known for speed and agility. It is unlikely you will encounter the actress, but you can buy the car. This transference of signified aspects of life moving from one signifier to another will be clear in the examples of cigarette ads below. Codes, described by Stuart Hall, include all the conventions of behavior, objects, appearances, expressions, colors—virtually all parts of the production of a semiotic universe—in his original example relating to television. Hall’s insights led to an approach to understanding how audience members decode messages and the role of their own socially produced interpretive mechanisms in that process. Hall’s view included “encoding”—that is, the creation of coded messages.Vast amounts of scholarship followed Hall’s lead, which falls beyond the purview of this book. As a sociologist I find Howard Becker’s study of Art Worlds5 useful. Becker pointed out that the codes, or conventions in sociological talk, are created by people “doing things together,” as Becker put it. Eventually coded behavior leads to more formal organizations and to institutions. As suggested above, semiotics are a way to study ideology, defined as ideas created by powerful interests that we internalize and thus act on, extending our domination through our own actions. It is assumed that when we buy into an ideology we internalize a view of

216 Visual symbols the world that is consistent with the interests of the powerful and often decidedly against our own. As Marx famously wrote in The German Ideology:“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”6 In all the cigarette ads analyzed below there is a single ideology, which is that it is desirable to smoke cigarettes and that smoking is a path to a particular identity, that is integral with one brand or another. All the tiny details of each ad, that is all the first-level signs, add together to make at least two levels of signs that compel us to do something that is highly against our interests. Smoking has nothing to do with any of the identities it is connected to in the ads below, and in some instances (for example, the countercultural figure Eve) it is inconsistent with the advertised identity. Competition for tobacco consumers was fierce, but the companies went further than claiming that their brands were superior to that of their competitors. Rather, they asserted in their ads that “if you smoke our brand you are this kind of person, with these habits, personalities, life-style possibilities and physical appearance.” To illustrate how this reasoning works I undertook a brief case study of cigarette ads in LIFE magazines I found in the attic of my parents’ house (Table 5.1). My informal data set included most issues of LIFE from 1968 and I copied about seventy photos of the mostly full-page ads from all the major brands I compared. This may seem like a haphazard way to gather data, and it was, but it is much like the way other semiotics researchers find their material. In this case it was a near-complete data set from a specific era and within cigarette brands the messages were remarkably consistent. This exercise is an excellent way to showcase classical semiotics because it showcases a frozen moment in powerful ad campaigns that extended over several decades. The “site” of the ads (using Gillian Rose’s terminology), LIFE magazine, had a circulation of almost nine million in the year I studied, when it was delivered to about twenty percent of middle-class American families.7 And just under half of the American adults smoked regularly when these ads were circulated. Table 5.1 Analyzing cigarette ads Signifier

Signified

A material thing that signifies; the The concept it refers form it takes that can be seen, to; what it makes us heard, touched tasted or smelled. think about; the mental construct. Objects portrayed (brands of cigarettes) Marlboro Horse and cowboy, standing or riding. Boots, spurs, leather vest, cowboy hat, determined look, cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Muscular, tough, a bit dirty. Barn, open range. Text: “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.”

What the objects represent

Sign The two elements combined. When you add many of these together you can speak of myths and ideologies (Barthes, Stuart Hall, etc). What it represents at a more general level

Manly men smoke We are living in a time of Marlboros. If you can conformity, suburbs, traffic handle the cowboy life jams, materialism. Smoke you can handle Marlboros. Marlboros as a way to You are alone.You are overcome the suffocation a bit rough around the of modern life. Be a man! edges.Your best friend, in Be a rugged individual! fact your only companion, Experience freedom! Our appears to be your horse. cigarettes have flavor that modern life has taken away.

Visual symbols 217 Table 5.1 (Cont.) Signifier

Signified

Salem The color green. The cigarette Green signifies nature, pack is green and ads are pure, desirable. Smoking predominately green. Generally is part of enjoying the the ads feature attractive couples outdoors or traveling to in their twenties and thirties. exotic places. Smoking is They appear in beautiful nature, a normal part of happy dipping feet in water, sitting on and cool heterosexual an old fence. Smiling, happy, relationships. Salems in love, fit, muted sexiness. are for both men and Text: “You can take Salem out of women. Salem smokers the country, but you can’t take are successful, healthy and the ‘country’ out of Salem.” attractive. Virginia Slims There are generally two images The historical photos are in in each ad. In the top of the black and white. Modern frame is an historical photo, life is shown in color. where women are portrayed Women are determined from the 1920s getting into to get the right to trouble for smoking. On the smoke. The Virginia bottom of the ad is a modern Slim smoker is cool woman on a white background, and confident. Woman’s wearing funky clothes, holding posture and clothes a cigarette, smiling, looking signify independence. directly at the camera, pencil Her thinness signifies thin. Text: “You’ve come a long that attractiveness equals way, baby.Virginia Slims.” thinness. The name of the brand repeats this theme and the body shape of the models and the shape of the cigarettes themselves. L and M The main model is generally a Women who base their lives woman in traditional role of on traditional domestic that era. She is alone at home roles have their own in the morning. Props include cigarette. Smoking is telephone, comfortable chair, consistent with being pet cat, big plants. Text: “This is a middle-class woman the L and M moment.” taking care of a family. Eve The pack features a 1960s style The expression of the pop-art painting of flowers model, her state of undress with a woman stuck in the and the setting in the middle, as in a field, unclothed field of flowers signifies from her shoulders up. The text innocence, nature and the reads: “Hello to Eve. The first counterculture, including truly feminine cigarette—it’s sexual liberation. The almost as pretty as you are. With individual signs together pretty filter tip. Pretty pack. signify the flower child. Rich, yet gentle flavor. Women The name Eve signifies have been feminine since Eve. being the first woman. Now cigarettes are feminine.”

Sign Smoking is consuming nature by being in it and by consuming a natural product, a plant.

Smoking for women is part of their cultural liberation. Smoking Virginia Slims indicates that you are part of the women’s liberation movement.You can be liberated but still fit the conventions of female attractiveness, notably thin and stylish.

Smoking is part of the wife identity in a middle-class life.

You can smoke and be feminine, innocently seductive and a part of the counterculture.

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Figure 5.1 Mixing signs: reflection of Piazza Maggiore in the Bologna Apple store.

Visual symbols 219 There are signs within signs (some researchers call the higher-level signs “meta-signs”) and overall signs includes iconic, indexical and symbolic elements. There are also numerous syntactic and analogical signs. Some examples: the standard ad for Eve cigarettes resembles a then-contemporary rock album cover; this is an iconic sign; there is nothing inherent in the relationship. The implied nakedness of Eve is an indexical sign, but her undress is ambiguous, with several possible meanings, including countercultural values such as sexual liberation. The Marlboro man ad includes many iconic signs: horses and leather clothes signal an era of American history where the ideological definition of “rugged individualism” emerged.There are vast numbers of syntactic signs in the details of his cowboy environment. The cowboy’s individualism indicates that being alone is part of frontier individualism, the mythic frame of the Hollywood western, which became popular in the 1930s. The ideologies developed by each brand become especially transparent when combined with gender: one brand (Virginia Slim) identifies a woman as part of women’s liberation; another makes her the countercultural flower child with the name of the primordial woman (Eve); and a third says it is fine for a stay-at-home mom to smoke (L and M). The ads all indicate that smoking is part of female roles, all within the middle class, however. There were no ads directed to the poor or to the wealthy and there were no generic brands: you must commit to an ideological position by choosing a cigarette and thus an identity. It is almost unthinkable for a Marlboro man to smoke an Eve cigarette or vice versa. I have not included the ads themselves in this analysis. For one thing, they are easily available via the web where they appear in color. If you search for the ads for each brand (“Virginia Slim Advertisements,” for example) you will find virtually every ad created for the campaign.You will also find variations and even blatant contradictions in some of the ads on the themes I have described above, including, to my surprise, ad campaigns for Marlboros that were aimed at women. I have also decided that it would be better to describe the ads to encourage the visual imagination of the reader. If you are of a certain generation these descriptions will immediately conjure their referent. If not, it would be interesting to imagine the image from the descriptions and then to find them on the web to see if your imaginations (or my descriptions!) were consistent with what you found. Cigarette ads in magazines are still a small part of the American social landscape, though they are banned in countries (including most of Europe) where public health is valued more than tobacco profits. Magazines themselves are far less common and advertising in general has switched to new forms. When you enter the web ads flow to your computer screen, tailored to your viewing habits. Many scholars are studying this digital advertising, now called multimodality, where all aspects of the communication sign are studied, including the audio and aural elements.Those interested in the sociology of consumption also study how brands themselves become a focus of their marketing. Apple products are sold in carefully designed stores, where every object and design choice reinforce a single message.When you enter the Apple store, you must convince yourself you are cool enough to be there; good enough to hand over your money. Perhaps you do so because you like the product, but you also may be saying, “I am the type kind of person who uses Apple computers. I am modern; I am international.” There is an Apple store across from my ancient piazza in Bologna, but what struck me is the play of signs; the Apple logos and objects suspended in the reflection of my centuries-old piazza, a sign I consume to enter history. The two signs play off each other, not in competition, but not entirely harmoniously either.

220 Visual symbols Figure 5.2 Mussolini on horseback with Italian history on his shoulders. Approximate height: ten meters. Found on the public entrance of an administrative building in EUR, a western suburb of Rome, imagined and largely built during the fascist era. There are numerous indexical signs in the bas relief sculpture; specific events and buildings depicted that tell of actual occurrences and people. There are also symbolic signs, myths about the founding of Rome (Romulus and Remus, twins being suckled by a she-wolf) or a Menorah that stands for Jews, who played an important part in Italian history. The positioning of the hundreds of specific signs on and around Mussolini signify the extraordinary claim that the whole of Italian history has rests on his shoulders. In this sense they are syntagmatic signs, Mussolini juxtaposed to the vast signs of Roman history, connected in a specific way, all of history flowing from a single person.

Do Italians see fascism in Roman buildings and art? In the following I describe a project where a colleague, Francesco Mattioli, and I studied how and if people identify a symbolic universe in the normal worlds they inhabit.8 Said more simply: we live in a universe of signs. Francesco and I wanted to ask: which do we see? What do we think of them? (Implicitly: how would or could they change our behavior?) We saw this as an applied form of social semiotics; studying how people living in one era defines signs that belong to another. These old signs were, in this case, discredited indicators of a controversial past, Italian fascism, which ruled Italy and built its buildings from 1923–1944. The signs of fascism were represented in sculptures, words on buildings, architectural styles and neighborhood designs. To make it more complicated, the style of fascism resembled other international styles (though the Italian style was distinctive) and it was followed by architectural styles, a generic modernism, that resembled styles created in the fascist past. My first startled recognition of this hidden semiotic landscape was coming across a thirty-foot-high bas relief in EUR, an upscale suburb of Rome. I recall admiring the carved images on the flat surface that placed the entire history of Italy on … whoops, is that Mussolini’s shoulders (Figure 5.2)? Indeed, there he was on his horse with his arm extended in a Roman salute, with adoring children honoring him below. I did not realize at the time that the setting of the sculpture and some of the most well-known modern buildings in Italy, especially the nearby Palazzo della Civiltà, was a neighborhood, EUR, that represented the fascist vision for Rome (Figure 5.3). I pursued this topic over a four-month teaching assignment in Rome, where I spent several days a week exploring and photographing neighborhoods, sports stadiums, parks, civic buildings, university campuses, churches (yes, churches!) and public housing built or created during the fascist era (1923–1944). I studied public art in mosaic surfaces at the Foro Italico, bas reliefs, freestanding sculptures, and, in what was a major find, extraordinary frescos adorning the inside courtyard of the Casa Madre dei Mutilati e Invalidi di Guerra, the Hospital for the Wounded Veterans (Figure 5.4). Once I began, I discovered fascism everywhere. It was intellectually sobering but wonderful topic to explore with a camera, and an experience made for a fieldwork-oriented visual sociologist. At the end of my semester I gave a presentation of my findings at the University of Rome, noting that the campus where we met was a fascist creation (Figure 5.5). I organized my images based on how vividly they portrayed fascism, using the semiotic terms of connotation and denotation. Fascism was denoted by portraits of Mussolini or his name; middle-range symbols included sculptures with fascist themes shared with other signs, or buildings that represented architectural styles developed in fascist Italy.

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Figure 5.3 Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (Square Coliseum), EUR, Rome.The palazzo was intended as an interpretation of the Roman coliseum, a combination of arches, or loggias, in a rationalist package. Around the base of the building are decorative statues. The loggias signify Roman gladiatorial glory; the square building signifies corporate organization of an idealized fascist social organization. Together they signify fascism drawing on a glorious past and improving it. After the fall of fascism the building was neglected, then restored, and is now rented to a fashion house.The phrase that runs along the top of the building is from Mussolini.

I found connotative symbolism of fascism in more subtle indicators of fascism: neighborhood design or even choices of materials used in routine construction that likely only students of architecture would identify. The reaction in the room at the end of my talk was one of startled surprise. Without exception an audience of social scientists had normalized the architecture they had grown up with. “My god,” an audience member said, “we don’t even see it; we’re all fascists!” This in turn led to an interesting discussion of when a sign is not a sign; when does it become an empty or a floating signifier? This now common term, introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss,9 describes signs in which there is no signified object; the signifiers float unrooted. Speaking of our study, if a sculpture of Mussolini is not recognized as such, or even if most people do not recognize his likeness at all, what is the problem of having a semiotic environment in Rome that refers to him and his world? We noted that at the end of WWII, Germany, Italy’s ally for most of the war, had erased most architectural and decorative traces of Nazism and had banned Adolf Hitler as a name

Visual symbols 223 (there are, to be fair, many other names banned as well, many for non-political reasons). This was not an attempt to erase the history of Nazism, as I discovered during a one-week visual sociology workshop I taught in Berlin on the embodied memories of the Nazism and the Holocaust. Indeed, the pan-European workshop members felt that Germany had done its work of remembering the war and the Holocaust quite well. There were huge and unmistakable monuments, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which occupies more than four acres in the middle of the city, and many smaller, profound and creative memorials throughout the city. Studying the public art references to the Holocaust encouraged a semiotic approach. For example, in what was previously the largest Jewish neighborhood in Berlin, where more than 200,000 Jews had lived before the war and 5,000 survived, there were now mock street signs as political art statements, about one meter across, fastened to light posts, out of reach to those who might deface them. On one side of the sign was a picture, for example, of a straight razor. On the other side of the sign was a quotation from an antisemitic law with the date it had been passed. The law quoted on the other side of the razor image stated something like: “As of June 1, 1936, Jews were no longer permitted to buy straight razors.” How was semiotics helpful in understanding this? Many Jews wore long beards, but many did not. By prohibiting them from buying razors, all were forced to share the visual identity of Jewishness. This, in turn, made their oppression easier, but it also marked them symbolically as different, and reinforced the Nazi ideology of antisemitic racism. The beard was the signifier; Jewishness was the signified. Together they became a sign of a savagely oppressed minority to some, and the opposite to others. Discussing the Berlin examples led my Italian colleagues to imagine that surely Italy could find a way to tell the story of its own role in this history. There was a sense that the first step would be to see whether the general population saw fascism in the objects I had photographed. Were they analogical signs, with diffused but potent meanings? Were images of Mussolini or his name indexical signs? And so on. To pursue this question we designed a “visual questionnaire” in which we attempted to establish a several point scale from denotive to connotative symbols of fascism. They followed my scheme above, where portraits of Mussolini or his name were treated as denoting fascism.The other extremes were building styles, neighborhood design and construction materials that suggested or connoted the regime. This could be considered, we felt, as an exercise in the study of social semiotics.10 Three of Mattioli’s intrepid graduate students interviewed 644 randomly chosen people on the streets of Rome with printed copies of our photos arranged from denotive to connotative. The student-researchers recorded their socio-economic backgrounds and registered their attitudes toward the “visual scale of fascism” with which they were presented. They also accessed their relative approval or disapproval of symbols they recognized as fascist. The results of all this work were rather shocking. Only about twelve percent of those interviewed saw any of the images as fascist, including those that depicted Mussolini or his name. To most they were simply old buildings, which was an interesting conclusion in an environment in which much of the architecture had 2,000-year histories. For the vast majority Mussolini was old news; in fact, he was not news at all. When he was recognized, predictably the political right approved of him and the political left did not. We felt that it established a baseline from which public education could be mobilized. We suggested the Museum of the Liberation of Rome (Museo storico della

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Visual symbols 225 Figure 5.4 This is a detail of dusty mural inside a veterans’ hospital (Casa Madre dei Mutilati e Invalidi di Guerra), built to accommodate the casualties from the invasion of Ethopia in 1936. The mural, eight feet high, depicts communism as a mad child destroying classical Rome. Broken statues are iconic signs, they resemble what they are. The mad child with a bloody weapon (the red blood is obviously not visible in the black-and-white photo) could be considered an analogical sign as the child signifies the immaturity of communism. The crudely inscribed hammer and sickle (a symbolic connotative sign) suggest what was then seen in Italy as a mythic struggle between the two great world systems: fascism and communism.

Liberazione – Roma) that occupies the site where Nazi occupiers imprisoned and tortured partisans, as a model. This is a detailed and highly effective museum, but it obscures the larger historical frame (that has faded in the minds of many Italians), which was that Italy was an ally of Nazi Germany until Sicily fell to British and American soldiers in 1943, and then claimed neutrality, to be occupied by the German army as an enemy. It was then that they captured Italians, tortured and killed them. This museum demonstrated that the Italians do on-site museums incredibly well, but they need to get the history right. As I photographed old buildings and art I also studied how they had come into being. As a sociologist it is natural to study histories and other documents to reconstruct the arrangements, arguments, bureaucratic decrees, institutions such as schools of architecture, political debates and everything else that affected the planning and execution of twenty years of urban redesign: tearing out, redesigning and rebuilding Rome on a fascist model. The deeper one goes, the more complicated the story. For me personally there was even a hero, the architect Giuseppe Pagano,11 who left the fascist movement when its orientation to Futurism and the promise of a rational architecture for housing, schools, hospitals and train stations gave way to grandiose monumentalism of the late 1930s. As a middle-aged man, Pagano quit the fascist party, joined the partisans and was captured; escaped, was captured again and died in a concentration camp a week before the war in Europe ended. There were other issues that deserved to be considered. Many of the fascist era buildings, no matter their original ideological orientation, are fully functional architectural gems. The central campus of the University of Rome, Sapienza (Figure 5.5), as mentioned above, is an example. Many train stations, schools, national insurance companies and social service agencies carry their largely unrecognized fascist identity. Many of the fascist walkway and wall panel designs were conceived and realized at the Ravenna mosaic school, which dates to the sixth century, and even though their messages were often odious it was worth exploring a way to preserve them. And so on. It seemed to me that all these mostly floating signifiers could be brought into the educational process, both for students and for tourists, to learn the full history of Italy in the twentieth century and that the useful lives of the buildings should continue. There were even specifically fascist interpretations of history found in the art (such as in Figure 5.6) which celebrates the preemptive invasion of Ethopia in 1936. I explored the symbolic conflagration of religion and politics by climbing inside the curved enclosed staircase at St. Peter’s Basilica to the cupola. From the top (Figure 5.7), looking south toward the Tiber, beyond Gian Bernini’s Piazza San Pietro (a circular piazza, that adjoins St. Peter’s), are rectangular city blocks, bisected by a wide street. When you descend to the ground and cross the gigantic piazza, you come upon this street,Via della Conciliazione (Figure 5.8), denoting the Lateran Accords of 1929, which made formal peace between the Vatican and the fascist state. As a result of this treaty the Vatican would

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Figure 5.5 Main building, University of Rome, Sapienza. While the university dates to the fourteenth century, the central campus in Rome was designed in 1935 by Marcello Piacentini, a leading architect in the fascist era. The architectural style presents severity, drama and rationalism. Later versions of urban architecture, after Mussolini’s pact with Hitler, turned toward monumentalism, typical of both Nazi Germany and communist USSR.

be recognized as the papal state and the church pledged to stay out of politics, unless requested by all parties to be involved.This gave Mussolini legitimacy that carried fascism forward for another thirteen years. To build the wide street and the surrounding buildings an ancient neighborhood, Al Spina del Borgo, had been razed. The wide street and square blocks that replaced the neighborhood are imposing, ordered, boring and alienating. The streetlights along this street, shaped like Egyptian obelisks, are almost comically overstated and repeat the style of the eighty-four-foot Egyptian obelisk (a sacred object in Egypt, integral to the worship of the sun god Re) that stands in the center of the piazza. It was brought to Italy as conquerors’ plunder in the Roman era to be used as decoration. For those who identify the obelisk as Italian it is magnificent; for Egyptians it signifies the theft of their country’s religious artifacts. Experiencing the fascist-designed blocks and the wide boulevard is startling when studied semiotically. The square buildings contrast in a dispiriting way with the winding medieval neighborhood that remains on the northern border, a reminder of what was torn down. Looking down at the neighborhood from St. Peter’s cupola shows the blending of

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Figure 5.6 Mosaics at Foro Italico. Fascism idealized athletics, and Mussolini’s large sports complex, Foro Mussolini, was a pride of the fascism regime. After the fall of fascism it was renamed Foro Italico, while the enormous obelisk inscribed with “Mussolini” and “Duce” still greet the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the stadium which now includes a new stadium for professional sports. To enter the stadium one walks over mosaics, such as this one, that proclaims “Live Mussolini!” Other mosaics and sculptures extol the mostly male athletic form, the invasion and subjugation of Ethiopia, the creation of an Italian empire and other claims of heroism, honor and greatness. For most politically aware Italians this is a difficult remainder of the fascist era.

the Vatican and the fascist-designed street and adjacent buildings indicate the merging that was in both of their interests, no matter how it is seen now. My Italian colleagues and I shared a concern that floating signifiers of fascism can find new signified objects and ideas. When Mussolini’s urban designers cleared slums from around monuments including the Coliseum, they intended to awe the population and to connect their regime to the glories of the past. Buildings with steamlined shapes, curved glass and sans serif fonts implied that their government was modern and progressive. Buildings or whole neighborhoods were only the first step; fascist designers added bas relief sculptures, mosaics or murals that defined the ideal family, the proper organization of rural life, the glories of athletics and military battle, the conflagration of fascism and Catholicism, Mussolini as the savior of Italy and the corporate organization of society itself. They did not tell how fascism extinguished democracy, how Italy launched a preemptive war against Ethiopia or how the fascist government signed the “Pact of Steel” with Hitler, assuring the onset of war. The smoldering fires of fascism could burst into flame on the jet fuel of all this largely forgotten symbolism. The fact that almost no contemporary Italians understand what

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Figure 5.7 View from St. Peter’s cupola toward the Tiber River. The square city blocks built in the rationalist style are clearly visible. Rationalism signifies order, bureaucratic logic and discipline. It is also worth noting that it is rare that there would be buses in the piazza.

they are seeing when they see the remnants of fascism does not mean that others in the future would not. The larger question concerns what collective memory will be preserved, and in what form, and what collective memory will be redefined or even eliminated. For example, Mussolini is currently buried with his family in his home village of Predappio, which has become a destination for hundreds of thousands of neo-fascists from the entirety of Europe; several politicians on the right (including his granddaughter, who carries the name Mussolini) have lobbied to have his tomb moved to Rome. The question of what to do with the past becomes largely a question of preserving or eliminating visual traces of collective memory. Symbols have power, floating or not.

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Figure 5.8 Via della Conciliazione. The main street that connects St. Peter’s to the Tiber. The “conciliation” the name refers to is between the Vatican and the Fascist Party in the 1929 Lateran Accords. The streetlight posts are copies of ancient obelisks that were taken from Egypt and represent the military might of ancient Rome, a tradition that Mussolini reenacted with the obelisk erected in his name (and still bearing his name) at Foro Italica.

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Figure 5.9 Angel carrying fasces. The fasces are the ancient symbol of legal authority in ancient Rome, adopted by the fascist party as its central emblem. Angels are God’s servants and messengers; here the two signs appearing together connect fascism to Christianity. The result is an example of a syntagmatic sign, separate signs that gain a collective symbolic reality due to their proximity.

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Figure 5.10 Man on the street gives me the Roman salute in Mussolini’s home town of Predappio, outside a fascist giftshop.

Figure 5.11 This celebration of the male human form, a durable theme of fascism, now sits under the bleachers in Foro Italico. It will soon be covered by the removable seating. The statue was, during the fascist era, part of Foro Mussolini (same place, different name). The statue under the bleachers reminds us of the practical considerations that the last question in our list implies: if we turn away from a piece of art, what do we do with it?

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Signs and myths in urban public art Thinking about Italian public semiotics led me to think about our own guilty symbols. The obvious examples are still-standing statues of Confederate generals and politicians that adorn public squares in small towns and cities and highly visible intersections in cities throughout the American south. The vast majority of these were built between 1890 and the 1920 (an era beginning thirty-five years after the end of the Civil War). This coincided with the onset of Jim Crow segregation, and these memorials glorified the leaders of the Confederacy, especially Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The memorials that were built during or after the Civil War (1865) were typically placed in cemeteries, and they honored fallen soldiers. There are roughly 700 Confederate monuments (with famous politicians or military figures) now standing in the town squares or other central urban locations in thirty-one states, while only eleven states comprised the Confederacy. In other words, it is generally accepted that the intended function of Confederate statues, because of their number and distribution beyond the Confederacy, was a reminder to African Americans of their Jim Crow discrimination: a legalized reinstitution of non-equality.12 The removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in 2017 led to a “Unite the Right” demonstration of neo-Nazis, KKK members and other “alt-right” groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, a recent example of the controversy that these symbols generate. It was a tragic event in which a white supremacist demonstrator intentionally drove his car into protestors, killing one. At its core was a semiotic battle. The statue of Robert E. Lee depicted a nineteenthcentury man in military dress on a horse. In semiotic language the sculpture can be thought of a signifier, a man in a nineteenth-century military uniform with specific symbols that identify him as a Confederate, on a horse. The sculpture signified a military leader of a breakaway republic and the sign differed depending on who was looking at it. To an African American whose relatives were slaves (according to those I spoke to) it is almost unbelievable that Lee would continue to be honored. The ideology he represents is racism, legalized and enforced through violence. To the alt right he represents the violent suppression of racial minorities, a cause they celebrate. Same signifier, different ideologies. We should not, however, limit ourselves to the study of “guilty symbols.” In recent years my students and I have discovered interesting public art on our university and college campuses, that often introduces ideas and themes relevant not only for the immediate communities and institutions where they are found, but for the surrounding semiotic forests of symbols in our cities and communities. Five themes in the study of public art In the following I propose a series of themes or guides for studying public art. It is in part reflected in my comments above that evolved during our study of fascist symbols in Italy. I draw upon Howard Becker’s previously cited research on how art, like all social accomplishments, is made through collective action as well as individual craft, skill and artistry. The collection action can be an informal social movement and sometimes is achieved in institutions such as galleries with formal gatekeepers, artistic visions and shared beliefs. To do public art generally but not always requires financial resources, permits, public hearings or dictatorial decrees. These are all amenable to study.

Visual symbols 233 It is often forgotten that public art freezes time and thus it manifests a consciousness that does not automatically remain. It may be highly controversial at the moment of its creation, and then grow into acceptance or even celebration. Or the original meanings may fade as the sculpture fades from importance, becoming just another piece of the taken-for-granted landscape, floating toward insignificance. Or the ideas it celebrated upon its creation may fall far out of favor, causing social and political confusion and strife. I have summarized this approach to studying public art as a series of questions: • • • •

•

What is the intended message and how it was achieved? (Location and design of art object; institutional purpose) How did it come into existence? (Sociological analysis) What hidden messages does it communicate? (Semiotic analysis) How do people experience the art? How have I experienced the art personally? (Is it ignored, celebrated for doing what it does, used as a prop, for example, a place to pose or relax, or is it defaced? Does it move me, upset me, leave me indifferent?) (Phenomenological analysis) What is its future? What will influence whether it remains in place? If not, where will it go?

These themes or questions would serve the study of any public art, though not all questions or themes are equally relevant to any art in particular. The question of hidden or latent meanings in the art is particularly relevant to our project in this chapter. Background on how public art blossoms into existence is the focus of the sociology of art, as is the matter of what to do with it when the public no longer approves of its message, part of the larger project of visual sociology. But the exploration of how images speak in society involves the analysis of themes that are both intended and hidden. Semiotics and sociology offer toolkits through which the analysis of these themes may be accomplished.

Case studies in public art I will examine three examples of public art using my questions/themes. These are the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; a sculpture of George Washington and Seneca chief Guyasuta in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and a memorial to those who died in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada while in the state of homelessness. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, completed in 1982, seemed at the time to reignite the domestic anger and discord that saturated the ten years of the American Vietnam war (roughly 1964–1974). It was a complicated semiotic achievement, devoted to remembering those who died in combat without glorifying war.The semiotic universe was both simple and many layered. The sociological story of the memorial is equally complex. It is the absence of glorification of the soldier (except for the addition of the larger-than-life sculpture of three soldiers, added to appease critics and not approved by the artist) or the war itself that makes this art so distinctive. The memorial is a vividly simple cut into the earth; a series of black granite panels etched with the names of the deceased soldiers that descends into the earth and then

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Figure 5.12 The memorial seen from across the fenced-off grassy space it faces.

rises up on the other side. One side of the form, which comes to a sharp point when it reaches the ground level, points to the Lincoln Memorial, the other to the Washington Memorial. Thus, as you walk along the wall you are walking out of a 10-foot depression toward the highly symbolic monuments to Lincoln and Washington. The black granite walls are devoid of messages except for the names of 58,000 American soldiers who died during combat in Vietnam. The general theme of the art was a memorialization of nearly 60,000 American military veterans who were killed in combat in the Vietnam War. The memorial was envisioned and overseen by Vietnam veterans, many of whom felt uncelebrated and left to deal alone with the tragic and painful memories of their suffering and the deaths of their comrades. Maya Lin, who designed the memorial, stated: In designing the wall I had to ask, what is a memorial’s purpose? Especially what is a memorial’s purpose in the twentieth century? All I was saying with this piece is that the cost of war is these individuals. We have to remember them first. So it’s really the people, not the politics which is what this piece is about. … And literally when you read a name; when you touch a name, the pain will come back. And I really did mean for people to cry. You can then, of your own power, turn around and walk back up into the light, into the present.13

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Figure 5.13 Most visitors were bent on walking, rather than looking for names to remember. This makes the point that remembering changes over forty years. Those who fought in Vietnam would be in their mid-seventies or older. Their parents are gone. Few left children behind to mourn them; they would have been babies when their fathers were drafted or enlisted. Brothers and friends were there to remember, but we were few in number.

Figure 5.14 A family pauses to look at the sea of names.

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Figure 5.15 Three larger-than-life soldiers, added to appease protests by veterans over the original design.

Regarding the design, she commented: We went to visit the site and I … imagined taking out a knife, cutting into the earth, opening it up, pointing one end to the Lincoln [Memorial], one end to the Washington, and have the names be chronological. One of us had sent out for a booklet [about the competition] and the booklet said the names must be on the memorial. And I said, “Perfect!” And that’s what the memorial would be. The names upon the black surface, the earth polished. To achieve this vision she first excavated a gentle depression about 250 feet long, with matching walls of black granite that begin at the earth’s surface and evenly extend to depth of just over ten feet where the two walls meet.The names of the American soldiers are organized in order of their deaths.The panels form two sides of a long triangle that slope down a gentle depression and meet in the center. The original monument consisted of the panels with names carved into the granite walls and little else, but pressure from veteran groups eventually led to the addition of a larger-than-life sculpture of three American servicemen that stands several yards from the sculpture, and eventually a sculpture that commemorates women who served, primarily as nurses in the war.The original design broke semiotic conventions of war memorials because it did not portray war as heroic or grand, and as a result it did not make political claims for the correctness of American’s involvement in this war. From Maya Lin’s perspective the struggle over the design, which was years long, bitter and public, was a continuing struggle over the meanings of the war itself.

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Figure 5.16 The sea of names, almost 60,000, each a simple sequence of letters and each signifying a violent and likely terrifying death. It is almost incomprehensibly powerful. I photographed it framed by the roses that were there that day, perhaps because it was Father’s Day, to soften the extraordinary sadness evoked by the names alone.

How did the memorial come into existence? The idea of a memorial came from Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran, who with several other veterans of the war created a corporation and began fundraising. The project is not funded by public monies, rather through almost 300,000 individual donations. It required an act of Congress to have it installed on the Washington Mall, and President Jimmy Carter provided that before he left office in 1980. The committee of veterans organized a committee of experts in art and architecture, including a humanities professor (all men) who solicited proposals from the general public. Maya Lin was then a twenty-year-old undergraduate daughter of immigrants of Chinese birth, working in a self-directed art class with a handful of students. She stated: “I sent it to the competition knowing full well it wouldn’t be chosen because it wasn’t a

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Figure 5.17 As evening approached the crowds thinned and contemplation became easier, though there was no place to sit or rest; no way to experience the memorial except by walking past the names on the wall. There is a palpable feeling of walking out of the depths of sadness toward the Lincoln Monument, still willing to offer itself as a beacon of hope in an imperfect world.

politically glorifying statement about war. That it focused only on the individual and the losses, the sacrifices.” Moving the project forward involved approval of Congressional and other political committees. Much of the dialogue was intense, often unkind and even racist, directed to the artist’s ethnicity, and some veterans interpreted the design as further insult. Tom Carhart, a veteran, said: When I came home I was literally spat upon. That spit hurt. It went through me like a spear. “Welcome home.” And when I saw the design … the winning design … I was truly stunned. I thought it was the most insulting and demeaning memorial to our Vietnam Veterans that was possible. I don’t care about artistic perceptions. I don’t care about the rationalizations that abound. One needs no artistic education to see that this memorial design for what it is: a black scar. Black. The universal color of sorrow and shame and degradation. In all races and all societies worldwide. In a hole, hidden as if out of shame. Jan Scruggs, the veteran who began the movement for the memorial, said: The first thing I thought [when I saw the proposal drawings] was that it looked like a bat. And then I imagined a boomerang. … people are going to say “this is a

Visual symbols 239 boomerang.” And make an analogy to Vietnam. “We try to throw it away but a boomerang always comes back.” … [people will say] “this is a black hole in the ground.” This is going to be a problem. This is a very unconventional memorial. It was up to us to accept it or reject it. The jurors convinced us this was not an ordinary work of art. … I believed in the design, I knew it was going to be a public relations problem, but I was totally willing to fight for it. Against what seemed like great odds the original design was used, with the addition of a sculpture of three servicemen several yards from the wall, not supported by Lin, to appease those who could not come to peace with the design as it was created (Figure 5.16). This summary only hints at the years’ long battle over the semiotic character of a public art object. As I thought about this, I imagined a committee of the fascist party in Italy, or Communist Russia or Nazi Germany (or any other totalitarian government) assigning the design of a public art object to an architect trained in ideologically certified schools of architecture and overseen by committees who made sure the expectations of the state were met. In the case of the Vietnam Memorial the process was messy, sometimes dishonest (one group leaking false information that committee members were communists, whatever that meant in 1980), and highly political. All Republican members of Congress at one point signed an official rejection of the design. But in the end, it came to a resolution that reflected a modified version of what veterans (some!) and those identified as experts created and selected. What hidden messages does it communicate (or how can we analyze it semiotically)? The names of deceased soldiers are indexical signs. It was critical to the architect that they be arranged according to the chronological order of their deaths, which became a second indexical sign because as the war evolved it changed and dying in different eras had different meanings. The sequential ordering of the deaths could also be seen as an analogical sign if we think of the memorial as a whole. Organizing the names by the dates of their deaths requires that a person who has come to mourn and remember must search for the name on a mounted reference book, and as a result the mourner is drawn in, involved, rather than passively observing. This was the stated intent of the designer. The black granite surface, according to Lin, is an iconic sign; earth polished to create a surface to write on. Placing the walls in a dug-out depression, a gentle hole in fact, is also a symbolic sign, that for those opposed the memorial indicated dishonor, but to those who approved, was an invitation to merge with the memorial in contemplation. The three soldiers added to appease the critics are connotative symbolic signs, because they resemble soldiers but magnify their size and the muck and disorder of their physical presence. In this way they create an expected iconic sign, that seeks the essence of the reality and magnifies it. What second level symbols, or ideology, was created by the layers of symbols? The experience of those who have visited the memorial by and large has been consistent with what was intended by the artist. Contemplation. Honoring of those killed without consideration of the politics that led to their deaths. An overwhelming sense of the vastness of the tragedy. In this there are few, if any, ideological contexts lurking in the shadows. The addition of the sculpture of three soldiers, as noted above, adds a second sign that I would regard as both iconic (it depicts actual soldiers, but they are not identified) and symbolic due to the connotative relationship between the signifier of the American

240 Visual symbols soldier in Vietnam, and the exaggerated features of the sculpture itself (heightened dirtiness, wariness, weapons, larger than life). Because this second semiotic sign adds to the original memorial it changes the overall sign, so now it does contain elements of ideology similar to most war memorials, that is, glorification. How do people experience the art? The designer indicated that her intent was to create a catharsis among the mourners, because “without tears there would be no redemption.” The popular media shows mourners at the wall, in a state of sorrow. It was my experience, visiting the wall just after it was completed, with my brother, a combat medic in Vietnam, who ran his hands over the etched names of many that tearful day. What will be its future? The memorial is sited on the National Mall, almost adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial and within sight of the White House. As such it will likely remain as long as does the nation. It is almost unthinkable to imagine it being replaced or removed. Given that its essential message is the grieving of death, aside from all commentary about why or how it occurred, it is likely to endure. It is possible that in some distant future we might memorialize all the victims of the war, including the vast majority who are civilians and had little to do with the political machinations that led to the conflicts. As I was completing this chapter in June of 2022 I returned to the memorial. I wanted to see how it was being experienced and I wanted to see how I experienced it myself. I traveled to DC for twenty-four hours, solely to experience the memorial. It was as perfect a day as June in Washington can deliver. I spent several hours at the memorial, taking notes and honoring my brother, a medic, wounded and traumatized by the war and forever unable to quiet the demons of ’Nam. I was struck by how the design of the sculpture created a flow of people moving along the full span of the memorial. On a Father’s Day Sunday there were many visitors but most walked past, occasionally glancing at the names, if at all.There were thousands of red roses placed along the base of the memorial, likely because it was Father’s Day. The path along the wall is about twelve feet wide and the outside is bordered by a fence, so it is impossible to move outside the path to rest, remember, meditate or even think. The pedestrian traffic flow carries you along unless you make a point to move closer to the wall. Over the hours I spent there the pedestrian traffic ebbed and flowed. I yearned for a place to sit to rest in the company of the names. I walked the length of the memorial a few times. At one point the foot traffic increased considerably and I stopped to photograph the visitors looking (Figure 5.14). It was an Asian family, parents in late their thirties or forties, stylish, the kids looking attentively at the wall, the adult woman looking aside, a child catching my gaze. It was a photo that spoke by what it did not reveal. Perhaps they were Vietnamese with their own story, somehow connected with the 58,000 names on the wall. George Washington/Guyasuta:Whitewash in bronze In 2006 the public sculpture “Point of View” was unveiled in Mount Washington, a working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh directly overlooking the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, where they join and become the Ohio.This important meeting place of native tribes and clans going back several centuries was a prize fought over by the French and English during the French and Indian wars, first the French Fort Duquesne, then the English Fort Pitt, and now the beautiful corner of downtown Pittsburgh simply known as The Point, or, when waxing poetical, the “Golden Triangle.”

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Figure 5.18 The sculpture and its setting. Looking east; to the right is the neighborhood of Mount Washington; behind the sculpture is the Point of Pittsburgh, where the two parties met in battle.

The theme of the art is a meeting that took place in 1770 between George Washington and Seneca leader Guyasuta. The meeting did not take place in the location of the sculpture but the sculpture overlooks where the two men had met twice in battle during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Most Native Americans, including the western Seneca, of which Guyasuta was a member, sided with the French, and George Washington was an officer in the British Army. Interestingly enough, in 1753 Guyasuta had guided Washington to the French fort of Le Boef, where he politely asked the French to leave the area. They demurred and Washington went home. A year later, Washington ambushed a small French scouting party near the point, killed ten, and started the French and Indian War. The intended message, according to the sculptor, James West, was to create an iconic piece with timeless relevance which truly embodies my “Art as Dialogue” vision statement. Both literally and figuratively, there is quite a lot happening in this piece. POINT OF VIEW memorializes a meeting between two prominent historical figures who fought on opposite sides of the French and Indian War—a worldwide conflict between two superpowers, England and France—and who put their differences aside for the greater good of all. As I created this sculpture, I intentionally wanted both figures to be viewed as equals. Their heads are at the same elevation. They are faced eye-to-eye. Guyasuta sits with his back against the west. Washington keeps his gaze toward that direction in deference to the westward push by colonists. They are listening to each other. They are having civil dialogue and putting their differences aside. That’s the story. That’s the lesson for us all, then and now.

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Figure 5.19 Detail, equivalence.

Figure 5.20 The public use of the sculpture.

Visual symbols 243 And, the sculptor continues, “It’s about … how they put down their weapons and had conversation at council fire. It’s an incredible story.This was a time of war, when men had been killed on each side and they put their differences aside.” These views were consistent with the interests of local politicians, especially the president of the local community development board, who was then researching a documentary film about the French and Indian War, and the city politicians blessed the project likely as a gesture to cross-cultural understanding. The location of the sculpture is significant. It assumes a predominant place on the most famous promenade in the city, and with Pittsburgh’s most spectacular view. It looks down upon the site where the two parties faced each other in battle. Had events been slightly different during the battle they could have killed each other. The site of the sculpture is crowded with tourists and the sculpture surely is seen by local politicians as enhancing the artistic and progressive identity of the city. The placement of the two figures shows the sculptor realizes the real issue at stake. Guyasuta sits with his back to the west; the land that is being stolen from his people, and Washington looks toward the west, to where illegal white settlement is taking place, often in armed conflict with Indians. The project was realized through donated effort and materials by the artist, several layers of city and state bureaucracies and local fundraising. Several newspaper articles detailed these efforts, which at a backward glance seem effortless. The sculptor, James West, a land developer and welder, is a self-trained artist who had not previously designed a public sculpture. He used a local Seneca man as a model for Guyasuta, and the unveiling was attended by several members of the Seneca nation, as well as local enactors in eighteenth-century dress who shot weapons authentic to the era at the gala event. No one was injured or killed. Hidden messages/meta signs and ideologies. The sculpted figures of Guyasuta and George Washington are iconic on one hand and indexical on another. We do not know what these two men looked like, though there are paintings of Washington. The sculptor matched them physically to argue for their equivalence.They stare eye to eye with intense expressions. They both have hands on weapons, though in a non-threatening way, a point made by the sculptor. If we take the entire sculpture as a sign of, in the sculptor’s words, “Point of View,” the ability to solve incredibly hard problems through dialogue, and the inherent ability of humans to, in his words, “put aside differences for the good of all,” we must resolve some difficult issues. If we treat the sculpture as a sign of what actually happened on the day they met in 1770, the history must be treated more carefully. It was a complicated historical era. Washington was an American-born, second-generation slave owner (who finally revealed his moral qualms about slavery in his will) but he was in the British army for twenty years before fighting it as a revolutionary against the British. Guyasuta, always a staunch defender of Indigenous rights, worked with people from several backgrounds over several decades. He was an ally of the French in the French and Indian War before becoming an ally of the British (his previous enemy) in the Revolutionary War, and then he worked closely with the American revolutionaries when their struggle against England was won. He was throughout his life an emissary to different Iroquois nations and to other Indigenous tribes, nations and groups, and between Indigenous and settler groups. When the Americans won the war he became a roving problem solver, even working

244 Visual symbols with settlers, traders and travelers. According to writing from the time, he was accepted as having integrity and dedication to preserving the Indigenous way of life. The struggle is to accept the sculpture as an iconic sign of problem solving through dialogue because problems were not solved at the meeting it depicts. The Treaty of Paris in 1763, that ended the French and Indian War, and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix both forbade European settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, on a line just past Pittsburgh to the west. Lines were drawn; there was no ambiguity. George Washington, who was trained as a surveyor, was at that time surveying land that belonged to native people in preparation for white settlement and was claiming a piece of it for himself when he met his old acquaintance Guyasuta. The Seneca leader had arrived with freshly killed bison to share with Washington’s party.The French and Indian War was five years past and the revolutionary war was six years from beginning; there was no talk of war, contrary to the claims the sculptor makes. Rather, Washington was reportedly telling Guyasuta that the treaties that guaranteed a boundary that would not be crossed were null and void. He was there to take a piece of the stolen land himself. There was no solving of problems, rather an announcement from one party that good faith agreements were no longer viable. Washington did not record the conversation in his diaries, though that would have been typical. So we must imagine the conversation, taking place where the sculpture now rests: I had you in my gunsight, Tall Hunter. I thought you had integrity, but you are like the rest. I should have pulled the trigger. WASHINGTON: It has nothing to do with me, Guyasuta. The settlers are coming. GUYASUTA:

What is not said on the bronze plaque near the sculpture, nor the local journalism that describes the events, is that Guyasuta became an alcoholic and died alone in a shack on the property of General James O’Hara a few miles north of Pittsburgh. His vision for a strong and independent Indigenous nation was dashed on the broken treaties with those he had dealt with honorably. Whether the events depicted in the sculpture set him on that track is, of course, impossible to know. He was given a Christian burial, a final insult as he had lived his life as a proud Iroquois, with his tomahawk, shotgun, knife and other personal items. The sculptural sign emerges from a signifier of two intense men interacting with strength and determination, and the signified outcome being mutual understanding, respect and a problem solved. The lower-level signs signify their equality: perfectly matched in physical stature, equally determined expressions, similarly charismatic auras, but dressed differently and carrying different weapons. There are several signifiers of respect and possibly friendship in body language and facial expressions but, given the actual circumstances, it is hard to imagine that taking place. The resulting myth from the visual signs, textual messages and name of the sculpture indicates that the struggles between settlers and Indigenous people could be solved through serious talk and goodwill. Indeed, the history teaches us that the more powerful party misrepresented circumstances when it wanted to, tore up treaties when convenient and eventually exterminated the weaker party, using alcohol as an addictive poison to hasten their demise. And the winners then erected public art that communicates their version of the history that will last as long as the bronze remains intact.

Visual symbols 245 How do people experience the art? I often visited the sculpture, as I lived in Pittsburgh when it was created and for several years after. It was a popular site used for posing (Figure 5.20), a decoration to be enjoyed. I looked for what might be called contemplative activity but it was not evident. It was hard not to feel that the casual use of the sculpture as a prop for selfies and portraits further desecrated its historical misrepresentation. What is the future of the sculpture? The sculpture attempts to address the 400-year history of European incursions into a land populated by long-established Indigenous groups. I have suggested that it misrepresents history, particularly through its naming and the explanative plaque that accompanies it. Because it is visually compelling it likely be a permanent addition to the visual landscape of an important American city and thus it will continue to perpetuate myths and ideologies that define history from the perspective of the dominant group, that is white society. Remembering those who die homeless on the streets of Edmonton Text by Douglas Harper; photos and reflection by Tara Milbrandt The final case study examines the Edmonton Homeless Memorial statue, situated in the epicenter of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The general theme of the art. The immediate theme of the memorial statue is a commemoration of homeless lives lost in Edmonton. An annual ritual of remembrance takes place in June where the names of those who have died in the past year are read in a public event at the statue.The statue is also a call for improved services for the homeless, and the provision of housing and associated services which will eliminate homelessness in Edmonton. The umbrella organization that oversaw the creation of the statue, and the designation of the surrounding area (about one third of a block deep and one block long) as the Homeless Memorial Plaza is the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, known by its acronym, ECOHH, created in 1986. The intended message and how it was achieved. The ECOHH commissioned the Homeless Memorial sculpture, which was installed and dedicated in November 2011. It was designed by Edmonton sculptors Keith Turnbull and Ritchie Velthius and assembled by steel fabricator Mike Turnbull. The statue is a 9-foot doorframe with an abstracted figure slumped forward on the steps. He is faceless; unidentified. The doorframe stands alone, a door into an empty space. The most significant element of the sculpture are forty-eight tiles made by twenty-two community artists that reflect on their experiences of homelessness. The artists made the tiles inside City Hall, working at tables on the main floor.The artists were paid for their work and extra tiles were retained for future repairs or to be used in other purposes. As a result of these arrangements the sculptors also became teachers. Turnbull commented, ECOHH recruited twenty-two potential artists, mainly from the inner city and Ritchie and I taught them to make tiles. The city gave us workspace in the main foyer of City Hall. We paid for every tile and ended up with more than we needed. We made sure every artist was represented with at least one of the forty-eight tiles

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Figure 5.21 The memorial from behind, looking toward City Hall (the glass pyramid). The central location of the memorial is for practical reasons; keeping those seeking shelter and housing and associated services close to where they are organized, and for symbolic purposes; to keep the social problems associated with housing crises in the public mind. Source: © Tara Milbrandt, courtesy of the artist

on the finished sculpture, and the remainder were chosen based on artistic merit. It was a powerful experience to work with the artists and hear their stories and passions as they created their tiles. My best memories are of working with these artists. Ritchie and I were standing by the sculpture after it was installed, and a homeless man stopped by, sat down, thanked us for giving him this sculpture, and told us that we got the posture right. This meant a lot to us, as it contradicted the naysayers who thought the money would be better spent on scarves and mitts. Velthius said, Every tile artist was paid an honorarium, very important as validation of the artwork they created. As a working artist, I am constantly reminded that we are all just a few unfortunate circumstances away from homelessness. We are all just people trying to find our place in the world, and the strength of our community can be measured by the support that we give our most vulnerable populations.14

Visual symbols 247 The statue and the Homeless Memorial Plaza are directly across from the Edmonton City Hall.Two blocks to the northeast is the newly housed Royal Alberta Museum (2018), the largest museum in western Canada. Four blocks to the northwest of the Homeless Memorial statue is Rogers Place, a $600 million hockey arena for the Edmonton Oilers, built in part with public funds and completed just as increasing homelessness brought the topic into greater public consciousness. The Homeless Memorial sculpture can be seen as a syntagmatic sign, drawing its meaning from its immediate juxtaposition to three significant institutions, political, economic and artistic. The juxtaposition of these syntagmatic signs is highly ironic given the social, economic and political power each represents in the context of a small and highly symbolic public sculpture commemorating more than 1,000 deaths related to homeless since the project began. How did it come into existence? The sculpture, as noted above, was commissioned by the ECOHH at the cost of $40,000. The funds were generated from public fundraising and a grant from the city. After the sculpture was completed, the ECOHH requested that the city set aside the immediate area surrounding the sculpture as a Homeless Memorial Plaza. A wider context for these events is the progressive nature of Canadian policies in general and the embrace of the goals of eliminating homeless through fundable and realistic programs. Keeping homeless people near the urban center as the city underwent massive development was a concern noted in public discussions, because the concentration of programs and resources available for those seeking housing and other services were concentrated in the center. What hidden messages does it communicate? As noted above, the location of the statue and the plaza (park) it rests on signifies the relative importance homelessness is given. The statue welcomes homeless people to congregate on prime real estate in full view of the political, cultural and economic elite, as well as passersby. That homeless people were artistic partners in the creation of the statue validates their voice. Rather than assuming what message would be preferred from the homeless, the statue states: “These are our feelings, our admonitions, our memories of lost brothers and sisters, our fears and hopes.” The tiles are themselves are each a sign, and they often contain several signs within. There is a happy dog wearing a placard that askes “please feed me.” The dog is an iconic sign, indicating an actual object but one that itself signifies loyalty, companionship and affection. Several panels include angels and other Christian and Indigenous symbols. In these signs the religious figures are offering comfort or transporting a soul to heaven.Two symbols of home—a tipi and a room with a couch, lamp and bookshelf—transform a routine object into a symbol of great power. There are several portraits, some indigenous and some Caucasian, and none wear smiles. One image, of a figure passed out on the street with a bottle, and another, holding a bottle, connote desperation. These are vivid and moving visual messages. Some show sophisticated artistry; others are almost childlike. The figure in the doorway sits with legs crossed, head bowed. All elements of the posture signify submission and defeat. The surface of the body resembles a figure from Pompeii, a corpse preserved accidentally by a volcanic eruption.Various signs are embedded in the sculpture: a doorway to nowhere, a person without an identity and forty-eight communications from within the homeless soul that communicate the message: this is us; we are alive; we have feelings; we yearn for home.

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Figure 5.22 Artist tiles, side panel. Source: © Tara Milbrandt, courtesy of the artist

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Figure 5.23 Bagpiper marks the event as a funeral. Source: © Tara Milbrandt, courtesy of the artist

The second-level meaning, mythology, is not about obscuring the manipulation we endure at the hands of the powerful; rather it refers to the possibility of crossing cultural boundaries and seeing a social crisis from the inside out. How do people experience the art? I visited the sculpture on several occasions, almost always in the winter, and noted that usually there were usually a few people who appeared to be homeless sitting on benches maybe thirty yards from the sculpture. I never found a way to enter into a conversation with these people aside from comments on the degree of freeze promised by the coming night. I did not see people interacting with the sculpture aside from what were maybe visitors studying the panels. While the sculpture is in the center of several urban pathways it did not draw tourists, which was likely due to the season I visited as much as the memorial itself. My subjective experience was that of an outsider entering sacred land. The sculpture and plaza are also the focus of rituals, meetings and celebrations. Once a year there is a memorial walk led by a bagpiper that ends at the sculpture, where the names are read of those who died in a homeless state in the past year. In June 2022 I asked my colleague and friend, visual sociologist Tara Milbrandt, if she might observe and photograph the annual memorial for this project.This was the first memorial in three years, due to Covid. Her observations and reflections follow.

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Figure 5.24 Artist tiles, detail. Source: © Tara Milbrandt, courtesy of the artist

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Figure 5.25 Amazing Grace. Source: © Tara Milbrandt, courtesy of the artist

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Figure 5.26 Indigenous group singing. Source: © Tara Milbrandt, courtesy of the artist

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Figure 5.27 Young man takes flower, moves toward sculpture. Source: © Tara Milbrandt, courtesy of the artist

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Figure 5.28 Hand extends flower to sculpture. Source: © Tara Milbrandt, courtesy of the artist

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On observing, participating, and photographing a sacred ritual Tara Milbrandt As I reflect on my experience of the homeless memorial sculpture, I remember how bitterly cold I felt being outside on that June afternoon, exposed to the wind and the cold, the spattering of rain and the whirling of motor vehicles and occasional city buses passing by. I came to the sculpture a couple of hours before the memorial was set to begin, so that I could refamiliarize myself with the work of art in its context, in a part of the city that I rarely see or think about. As I stood near the sculpture, taking it in, I kept moving between my own embodied feeling of coldness, and a feeling of deep empathy for the figure at the center of the piece—a faceless body, head slumped down, seemingly in a beleaguered state, hands positioned in a way that struck me as so devastatingly unassuming. He is simply there, and he will remain there. It seemed strange to feel empathy for a faceless sculpture. What is so striking and so strong about this piece to me is how this silent and assuming human figure kind of mirrors the experience of being near or next to it. However he positions or shifts his body, he will be exposed to the elements, from some direction, especially the wind and the wet. That is how I felt for some heavy moments as I stood shivering and watched him, in his eternal stillness, while knowing that warmth and comfort were available to me at any time. I noticed a few other people passing by: two women passing rushing along, a young man with a backpack waiting for the bus and a rugged-looking man carrying several plastic bags. I wondered how or if they saw the sculpture. I took my time taking in the different, intricate tiles that surrounded the figure. Each felt like a world unto itself, human stories connected through a shared plight, which the figure at the center seemed to encapsulate. The sculpture seemed small and even “out of place” at first, against the mostly dull and impersonal buildings situated in the vicinity around it. I was struck by its fixedness in this modest park, facing the street and the north side of City Hall, the building where decisions about new projects and resource allocation that shape people’s lives in the city are ongoingly made. I remembered the afternoon of the public “open house” at the nearby Rogers Place six years ago, when I watched and photographed the scene on the street of hockey fans and suited folks lining up to experience the shiny new space from the inside, being greeted by people connected with nearby Boyle Street Community Services, handing out community flyers and whose presence served to “remind” the crowd that this “new” space was situated in a preexisting neighborhood and its people. I thought about colonialism and reconciliation, capitalism and human precarity … The sculpture struck me a type of embodied conscience whose material presence opens up a space to dwell in the question of who the city and its spaces are for and how things might be otherwise, such that no person is left to perish without safe shelter. A couple of hours later, I returned to a changed scene, a few minutes before the memorial event began. The space around the sculpture felt, looked and was different now. It was surrounded by people and sounds and movement. There were ordinary people from different walks of life, as well as support workers, emergency workers and even a small group of assembled police officers. I noticed

256 Visual symbols the mayor, standing in the crowd like any other person. I wondered about people’s different histories with the sculpture and its connotations for them. There were some tables with refreshments available for those who wanted or needed them. The hundreds of inadequately housed Edmontonians who had died in the last three years were honored with stories, speeches, music and, above all else, human presence.The haunting sounds of a Scottish bagpipe permeated the scene at times, giving it a somber and funereal note. A slow and gentle performance of “Amazing Grace” was sung by a woman with a beautiful voice. The people gathered in a large and open circle were invited to contribute their voices to hers, in ways that created a feeling of unity and effervescence. The powerful sounds of Indigenous drummers and song felt like an ancient heartbeat. The stories shared told of struggles, sadnesses, bonds and feelings of affection. The personal and the public came together vividly. After the speeches and stories, all were invited to take a single flower from a large box and to place it, one by one, next to the memorial status. Each carnation symbolized a life lost in the city due to lack of affordable housing and things related. I watched for some time, from inside the scene. I noticed the delicate and highly particular ways that different people placed their flowers. The woman in front of me performed a silent ritual in which she closed her eyes and turned to face each of the four directions. She left a single cigarette along with her flower at the feet of the statue. I wondered who or what she was thinking about. She smiled at me. I could sense that this sculpture was surrounded with deep and very personal significance for the many who had come together on this rainy and windy June afternoon. I tried to capture the wider scene of assembled people around the sculpture, thinking about how differently it looked now, compared with earlier in the day, when it was left “alone.” I also focused on some of the more singular moments of human connection that were on display through my photographs, without wishing to impose my presence. As I reflect upon this scene and the memorial sculpture weeks later, my thoughts return to the bare human figure that sits at its center.

The future of the man in the doorway? The sculpture is valued for its artistry as well as its message and unless it becomes obsolete due to the end of homelessness I expect it will remain a part of the semiotic landscape of a Canadian city. I also suspect that its influence will reach far beyond the city where it resides. The sculpture and the park honor those whose lives were lost due to deep and structural social problems, combined sometimes with bad luck and other difficulties. The sculpture communicates what those without homes in the bitter winter of the Canadian prairie want to tell us; it is a message that is unvarnished and without false hope but it is offered with dignity. It also tells us that the city and the society cares and seeks solutions.

Summary In this chapter I define key semiotic terms, noting that the approach is rooted in the study of language and makes its transition to visual symbols with some difficulty. The visual

Visual symbols 257 universe is simply overstuffed with signs, some inside others, completed signs becoming the signifiers of new levels of meaning and so forth. I also note that semiotics are useful for understanding much more than advertisements or other institutionalized presentations of institutional power, where it is typically used in visual sociology. I studied four examples of symbols in the public realm, left-over Italian fascist architecture and art, the American Vietnam Veterans memorial, the Pittsburgh sculpture “Point of View,” and a sculpture and small park in Edmonton that remembers those who died homeless. I studied these examples of public art as sociological accomplishments, things made by people doing things together; as carriers of second level meanings, often called ideologies. I thought about them phenomenologically, with reflections of my own experiences observing and being in their company, and for the Edmonton sculpture, the thoughts and emotional reactions of a visual sociology colleague and friend, Tara Milbrandt. I also pondered the futures of these public scuptures, which of course is mostly speculation. My own reactions were often contradictory. The Italian fascists produced a uniform “look” in their public presentation of their ideological self, and I admired some of the buildings, fonts and materials. However, the ideological messages on the sculptures, murals and other artistic declarations are racist, sexist, militaristic and anti-democratic—fascist. The messages of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial to the Homeless did not strike me as ideological in the sense that ideology is often used, that is they are not trying to convince the less powerful to believe or do something that is not in their interests. Rather they intend to help resolve a social wound. George Washington and Guyasuta are seductive; a compelling image that we want to believe, but alas is false. George Washington represented the forces of history that both men realized would overwhelm the other. Dialogue would have little consequence and “points of view” were irrelevant. A better title would perhaps be: “Sorry, it’s over!” (or a more crude version comes to mind). But that would be a commitment to public art as truth-telling, and indeed the truth is constantly slipping into new forms and messages. Perhaps I am most interested in how the public (myself included) finds meaning in public art; how we experience what we see when we walk through, sit and observe. That, too, is an ever-moving target and each individual experiences each piece of art in their own way. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial reawakened my anger about the Vietnam war and as a result I revisited my brother’s suicide note written to his sons: “I am sorry … but the pain and demons have become too large. I cannot deal with them anymore. At times I have believed that the truly lucky were the ones who died in the ’Nam—but then I would not have been able to know and love you.” But the wall now mostly brings a quickly moving line of people who hardly glance at the names etched into black granite. The vets are old and their stories and those who remember them are fading into history.

Notes 1 Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang. 2 Rose, Gillian. 2016. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Fourth edition. London: Sage, pp. 142–146. 3 See Rose, Visual Methodologies, pp. 106–127. 4 Barthes, Roland. 1973. Mythologies. London: Paladin. 5 Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. California: University of California Press.

258 Visual symbols 6 The quote continues: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” Mark, Karl. 1970 [1867]. The German Ideology: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. London: Lawrence and Wishhart, pp. 64–65. 7 I base this estimate on the following: the US population in 1970 was approximately 200 million; average family size was 3.4, meaning there were about fifty million families, of which perhaps thirty-five million would be estimated to be middle class. LIFE was also circulated at news stands, and recirculated seemingly forever (I am still reading the stash I found upstairs). 8 Harper, Douglas and Francesco Mattioli. 2014. I Simboli del fascismo nella Roma del XXXI Secolo. Rome: Gruppo Editoriale Bonanno. 9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1950. Introduction to Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge. 10 The seminal and still durable introduction to social semiotics is: Hodge, Robert and Gunther Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 11 Marcello, Flavia. 2020. Giuseppe Pagano: Design for Social Change in Fascist Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 12 This has been written about extensively and studied in depth by the Southern Poverty Law Center. These notes are from the “History” website, in an article “How the US Got So Many Confederate Monuments” www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederatemonuments 13 Quotes are taken from a documentary film Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, 1994, by Freeda Lee Mock, American Film Foundation, on the early career of the memorial designer, Maya Lin. 14 Homeless Memorial, by Keith Turnbull and Richie Velthuis, City of Edmonton Public Art Collection (https://edmontonpublicart.ca/#!/details/214) and Annual Homeless Memorial www.ecohh.ca/homeless-memor ial

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Overview and contexts As I think about teaching visual sociology I remember student work that dates back … decades! Karen’s photo study of a single mother living in a homemade house in northern New York, growing her food, doing odd jobs for cash, proud and independent. Patricia and Marije hanging around a firehouse and photographing firefighters in a busy neighborhood of Amsterdam. Adjan moved into a monastery temporarily to see the monks’ lives from the inside out. My extraordinary student Rachel, who photographed the cystic fibrosis machine that keeps her alive, as she celebrates her life, dreams and family in a self-portraiture assignment.Ten Italian students in a two-week workshop in Bologna, first dubious, then excited as they visualized and photographed the elusive concept of social control. Recently, when teaching graduate students in an education department, a Somali woman photographing and interviewing in ethnic restaurants as she questioned gender roles in an African immigrant community in Minnesota. A mother and her daughter moving to a new city, using photographs of the transition to understand each other’s experience. I believe I could write a stream-of-conscious essay on student work in visual sociology that would go on far longer than anyone would be willing to read. But it is an encouraging story, perhaps, to those considering a new way to do sociology. These thoughts lead to the question of what I hoped my students would take from visual sociology that they did not learn and experience in conventional courses. First is a hope that abstract ideas can become more concrete when approached visually. Sociology originated in the nineteenth century and the language of early theorists, often translated from German, French, Italian, Polish and so on, is hard to understand. What did Durkheim see when he described “mechanical” and “organic” solidarity? Weber’s forms of authority? Marx’s dialectical materialism? One way to explore these questions is to look for visual references from the era in which these thinkers lived, to imagine what they were seeing as they analyzed their worlds. Doing so provides clues, always remembering that the concepts go far beneath the surface, and some cannot be visualized. Durkheim arrived at his theories of suicide by studying numbers, but the resulting theories most certainly had visual analogies. Said more directly, a photograph of a suicide itself would not be sociologically relevant, but photographs of what precisely he meant by “anomic” conditions in society are. As sociology evolved from male European and American consciousness to a consciousness reflecting all genders and from all parts of the world, the search for visual referents reaches out to documentary projects, archives, museum displays, fine arts, folk arts and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251835-7

260 Teaching visually other visual traces that are as diverse as the human experience itself. Across all gender experiences. All human societies. I have felt the euphoria of discovery embedded in student work. It can be empowering and is often interesting to their peers. Photography sometimes awakens artistic impulses as well, and I often suggest that is wonderful; value added as long as art does not compete with sociology. Enough introduction; here are thoughts about teaching, with examples. Mostly I focus on what I have experienced; it is a view of a subdiscipline that has many shades and shapes, many variations. I offer a potpourri and invite readers to pick and choose and adapt these brief examples to their own needs. As noted in several places there are now other texts on visual sociology; some focus on teaching, and many have a far different approach than I offer here. Please consult the Selected Bibliography. Learning to read photos I begin my visual sociology courses, which generally center on still photography, by encouraging students to examine photographs deeply, from a sociological perspective. I have done this exercise at the beginning of Chapter 1, with P.H. Emerson’s photo of reed harvesters, and Chapter 4, with my photo of carpenters installing a window. For this example, I chose a photo (Figure 6.1) for its historical details, semiotic complexity, interaction details and contested historical meanings. I provide historical background: This was one of the largest demonstrations against the Vietnam war in Minnesota, about a month after the Kent State demonstrations in May, 1970, when the National Guard opened fire on demonstrators, killing four. The result was a national moratorium against the war, and universities went on strike.This demonstration took place on Summit Avenue, a stately boulevard that runs between St. Paul and Minneapolis. We then examine the photograph to read its sociological meaning. Interpretations that emerge from our discussion generally include: The photograph shows a social movement of those who opposed the war in Vietnam. This demonstration was led by returned veterans, some gravely wounded. For years it had been assumed that soldiers and anti-war protestors were cultural poles apart, and this photo shows that as the war continued, this divide, for some, had ended. The demonstration required planning, money, and volunteers, all factors that led to well planned, orderly event. The photo also records a wide range of socially constructed identities: The veterans wear parts of their old uniforms, including worn fatigue jackets and floppy hats. Some wear uniform jackets with insignias and medals. Every veteran wears his military boots. Most of the uniforms are worn casually and are startling in the context of long hair, beards and anti-war insignias that connect the vets to other anti-war demonstrators. The identities seem to be full of contradiction; the returned soldiers look more like hippies, defined by the political Right as unpatriotic

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Figure 6.1 Vietnam Vets Against the War.

dopeheads. Historically returned soldiers appeared in public in crisp, clean uniforms, hair recently shorn, standing at attention. The photo is ripe with symbols and signs: The soldiers and protesters wear and carry combine familiar anti-war slogans: Bring the troops home NOW, with an unusual banner that carries the message: Death wins all wars. Some protestors carry American flags (this is notable since many politicians and citizens linked anti-war demonstrators with lack of patriotism), and others carry drawings of the peace dove, which was the symbol of anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign two years before. The leaders of the march carry a coffin with an American flag painted into its surface and they march alongside the figure of Death. None of these symbols were unusual in and of themselves, but their combination is. Eventually I share the circumstances of the photo: I was the photographer and at that moment an undergraduate student. My college, like most in the country, was on strike and I was unable to graduate. I was walking in the demonstration, and I left the crowd to run to the front so I could frame the demonstration moving toward me. I ask students: does knowing about how the photo came into being influence what you think about it? How do you think your father (or now, your grandfather!) who may have had a different view of the war would react to it?

262 Teaching visually Finally, we ask: How have the meanings of this photograph changed over the decades since it was made? It was published several times and has been seen by several audiences. Perhaps it will becomes an iconic symbol of that particular era, when the returned vets marched in the lead, displaying the effects of war on their compromised bodies. At times I have gone more deeply into this assignment. For example, I have had students analyze John Berger and Jean Mohr’s experimental ethnography, Another Way of Telling.1 The book begins with Berger’s comment: “We are far from wanting to mystify.Yet it is impossible for us to give a verbal key or storyline to this sequence of photographs.” There follows 150 of Mohr’s uncaptioned photos that suggest the life story of a peasant woman in the Alps who has lived through two world wars, worked as a domestic servant in the capital and returned to her village as an elderly woman, where she works on her farm during the day and knits in the evening. Berger asks us to imagine the narrative the photos suggest and that is the assignment I give my students: study the photos and the images and make up a story. Let your historical and sociological imagination run wild. For my students, who have seldom been to Europe and certainly never met the woman Berger and Mohr fictionalize, this a challenge. I often remind them that the sociological theories we study were usually born in different eras and in different societies, so our imagined biography of a European peasant woman invites us to see sociological ideas in contexts rather than frozen in time. How does the camera affect the message Understanding how a camera works, and how choices by the photographer influence what a photo says, helps us understand how photographs communicate. I compare identically framed photographs made with different lenses, shutter speeds, aperture settings and ISOs to show how these choices influence what the photograph communicates. We discuss points of view, framing (and lens choice) and the treatment of light, either natural or supplemental. A photographer such as Robert Frank, who did not use a strobe, can be compared to one who did, such as Jacob Riis or Diane Arbus, and the messages and meanings of their images can be compared on the basis of the simple issue of whether they used artificial light or not. I suggest that photography is about light and ideas, and that each camera sees differently and is thus able to make different kinds of statements. A good example is shown in the portraits made by Milton Rogovin,2 who worked with a double-lens Rolleiflex which hung on his chest, requiring that he hang his head forward and peer down into the top of the boxlike machine. His head was bowed and the camera looked slightly up at his subjects, lending them dignity. Diane Arbus, known for portraits that produced a jarring sense of reality and precarious sanity, also used a Rolleiflex, but she used a vivid flash generally fired directly into the eyes of her subjects.3 There is much discussion of how that camera and flash combination contributed to the look of her startling and often disturbing images. Though expensive cameras do certain things well, they are not necessary, and their superior resolution and clarity may even get in the way of making certain kinds of statements. For example, during the 1970s Nancy Rexroth adopted the plastic Diana cameras, which then sold for $1.98. Rexroth used the soft focus and inconsistent lenses to communicate the feelings of dreams and faded memories of childhood visits from the

Teaching visually 263 East Coast back to the Midwest. She writes: “The Diana’s made for feelings. Diana images are often something you might see faintly in the background of a photograph.”4 Mark Power suggested that the Diana images “describe subjective feelings, not facts. They are autobiographical vignettes, not environments, social landscapes, or documents. They deal with the interior reality of a little girl’s memories, not with the exterior appearance of things in time and space in front of a lens.”5 In this case, it was the camera reduced to a plastic version of its essentials that contributed to certain visual statement, and students should take Rexroth’s example as an inspiration to use whatever camera they have available to learn how to see in new ways. In fact, there are apps on iPhone cameras and controls in Lightroom that produce the “Diana effect” if that is your thing, but my strong recommendation is to find a Diana camera, expose film, make prints and explore a new way of seeing in a non-instant electronic manner. I conclude these thoughts with reference to a project by Janet Vertesi, “Seeing Like a Rover,”6 that explores how earth-based Mars explorers “see” the far-away planet based on machines and human choices. Vertesi explores how the eight cameras on the Rovers present visual information that is organized, edited and produced by teams of scientists who often have competing goals. Simply using the cameras to move the Rover over obstacle-filled terrain, when a single image takes seven minutes to move from Mars to the Earth, requires the subjective interpretation of vast amounts of data that are constantly changing. When I read this account it struck me that making photos is always “seeing like a Rover,” though we do not recognize it as such. To become a visual sociologist is to embrace the complexity of seeing which builds on cultural, gender, age-based and physical differences. And then we think about how our natural sight is editorialized via a machine into a photo. Ethics Visual sociology, which normally involves cameras, has special ethical concerns that must inform all teaching experiences. A comprehensive statement on ethics is posted on the IVSA website (visualsociology.org) under the Home banner, and I refer students to this document as a point of departure. The IVSA statement on ethics begins: “It has as its primary goal the welfare and protection of the individuals and groups with whom visual researchers work, while supporting the freedoms and integrity of research that uses visual media and images.” The general principles include an emphasis of competence; we need to master the tools we use. We pledge to be “honest, fair and respectful of others.” We recognize universal human rights and our visual representations should reflect this regard for “rights, dignity and diversity.” As social scientists, we pledge to furthering the “public good.” We recognize the right of confidentiality, but that “Confidentially is not required with respect to observations in public places, activities conducted in public, or other settings where no rules of privacy are provided by law or custom.” While the IVSA indicates that we need to obtain permission to photograph or record in private settings such as homes or in settings where photography is legally required, the guidelines also indicate that “IVSA recognizes that formal consent mechanisms are not feasible in all forms of visual research.” Finally, guidelines specify that “Various research methods do not require anonymity. Among these are: community/participatory research, and individual case studies involving individuals who consent to using identifying information (e.g. their own names and visual representations).”

264 Teaching visually Ethical research requires “informed consent” in many situations. The IVSA document describes the nuances of consent, stressing the need to protect the rights of those who may not understand the meaning of consent and circumstances in which it may not be required. The document leaves a great deal up to the researcher, including defining such concepts as “minimal harm” and even the justifiable use of deception in some circumstances. What this comes to is an understanding that visual researchers are both like and unlike other researchers. Much of our work involves making images where people are recognizable. The document provides flexibility and respects the unique character of our work. I think a bit more needs to be added, however. I suggest to students that they treat others as they wish themselves to be treated. Do not exploit suffering, while recognizing that people who are suffering may want to have that suffering known. Learn and follow the local customs and practices. While in the US the right to freedom of expression guarantees our right to photograph in public (and many of us cherish this freedom, seeing the protection of democracy embedded in its guarantee, at this writing being challenged by proposed laws in the state of Texas) this freedom to photograph in public is not accepted even in other modern democracies. Perhaps most important is to develop sensitivity to potential bullying, coercion and psychic warfare using photos. Images, especially for children and teenagers, have extraordinarily destructive power. Nothing we do can ever contribute to this new and potent form of symbolic violence. Make images that fairly represent people, not images that distort, mock, humiliate or degrade others. We need to explain ourselves, act responsibly and with kindness and use the ethical standards we have learned in our other professional associations to guide our use of the camera.

Courses on visual sociology: starting at the present, looking back Over the past five years, since I have retired from full-time university teaching, I have taught a four-week course intensive seminar on visual sociology in a Ph.D. program in an Education Department at St.Thomas University. My students are all adults who generally are teachers or teaching professionals, and they are interested in visual pedagogy. The class meets for eight hours a week as the course is a concentrated one-month immersion. This has led me to boil the course down to essentials, which are reflected in the structure of the revised edition of this book. The assignments are: • • • •

to photograph a cultural scene (visual ethnography); to do a photo elicitation interview with photos made on that (ideally) assignment (collaborative research); to photograph a symbolic landscape (semiotics); and to prepare a self-portraiture without self (phenomenology).

I have scaled back my expectations in terms of the length of the assignments and reminded my students that the point of the course is to experience these four approaches sufficiently to use them in future work and to adapt them to their own teaching. Several students have adopted ideas and methods from our course for their Ph.D. dissertations and the experience has led me to look backwards over my whole career to see how these ideas and approaches have developed.

Teaching visually 265 This has been an effective course, though we move very quickly, and while two texts are assigned (my Visual Sociology and Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies, fourth edition) the emphasis is on their completion of four projects in four weeks.This course model can be simply expanded to become a conventional semester-length course. As it is, it feels like a rollercoaster (especially in the two zoom versions during Covid) but I find it remarkable that the students, who are nearly all full-time employed (and with families) have been able to successfully take on these assignments. To add to the challenge, the one-month course takes place in a Minnesota January, where the temperatures are often −25° F. Public space has its own character in the deep freeze. Where it began Like most people who taught visual sociology at the beginning of the movement, in the 1970s and 1980s, I was knowledgeable about and experienced in documentary photography, skilled in the darkroom, experienced in field methods and interested in theory. The first visual sociology course I designed and taught was shared with a photography professor, Steve Sumner, at SUNY Potsdam, and situated in the art department where there were several working darkrooms. Our students worked in teams of two, hoping that art students would teach sociology students about photography, including how to develop film and photos, and sociology students would introduce rudiments of sociological thinking into their fieldwork assignments. Topics for semester-length projects drew on themes including gender roles, institutional and occupational cultures, counter-cultural communes, formal and informal economy (including farming, cutting wood, manufacturing cedar oil), making cheese and yogurt, studies of social change (students found historical photos in local museums or other sources and rephotographed them) and, in one I remember very well, the daily life of a high school senior. The team that did that work, Keith Millman and Randi Millman-Brown, according to a recent digital search, got married a few years later and have spent their lives doing photography in a series of interesting jobs and projects. Ha! Great students, I knew it would end well! At the end of the semester we had an exhibition in an art department gallery, and the community, including those the students had made the subjects of their projects, always attended. The high school senior Randi photographed attended the opening with her parents as did her prom date who also appeared in some of the photos. We had been worried that the family might look askance at a photo that showed the evening meal with everyone silent, looking down at their plates, with the father peering over their heads to the evening news on the television that was mounted on the wall. The caption read: “We’re not allowed to talk while dad watches the evening news.” In fact, they were all pleased with the photo, even the father as I recall. In our in-class critiques we encouraged students to ask their peers “what sociological idea are you exploring? What elements in these photos present your idea well and which do not? How could you explore the idea better?” In other words, the quest was not for a “good photo” but for photos with convincing sociological content.We said, however, that photos that engage viewers are desirable, just like well-written sociology is better than turgid, jargon-laden prose. For readings we worked from field method texts and studies of documentary photography, as well as the handful of articles being written by sociologists interested in the visual approach. It was the beginning of the movement and the very first essays and texts establishing visual sociology as a discipline were appearing.

266 Teaching visually In the beginning of the movement we adopted the default for documentary photography then operating, which was black-and-white film.We taught students to process film and to print photos as part of the experience. We made fewer images but looked at them very carefully. Rather than rushing through images on a computer screen, we held objects and put them on our walls. There is a lot to be said for the old system as well as the new, but it is important to remember what was good about certain forms that died out with technological change. This first course was ideal in many ways. Two professors from different backgrounds in a dialogue between sociology and photography. A handful of short assignments but mostly an in-depth project extending throughout the semester that led to a paper and exhibition.We had the facilities and tools to print photos and mount a show that brought the community and the small university together. Over the decades I have been able to collaborate with professors across disciplines on visually themed courses, most recently with Maggie Patterson, a journalist prof at Duquesne, as we spent two semesters making an ethnographic film about a recovery community7 in a postindustrial steel mill town. In the meantime I have many taught versions of that initial course and the emphasis has generally included some version of the four-part scheme above. Adding a visual dimension to conventional courses It is also possible to adapt visual sociology to existing courses. For example, suggested topics and projects from a visual course in the cultural study of work included: • • • • • •

the social interaction of work: this might include the interaction between workers, or the interaction between workers and clients or publics. Look for social interaction that moves across the lines of social class, gender and other sociological categories. rituals of work: think of rituals as repeated events that integrate groups. the role of gender in work: examine body language, status systems, comparative workspaces, deference, etc. human-machine or human-animal aspects of work. skill and de-skilling: hand work and other forms of visual work.What does this concept mean in the computer age? (Figure 6.2) work and identity: uniforms, gestures, postures, expressions.

I also added visual components to courses in rural sociology, self and society, sociology of the community and sociology of the environment. Not all topics in these courses could be studied visually and some were hybrid versions of the visual and conventional, but in general visual assignments led to greater interest, discussion and student involvement. Workshops The visual sociology movement in the US got a boost from Howard Becker’s previously cited article “Photography and Sociology” and subsequent summer workshops he offered at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York several decades ago. Becker’s weeklong workshops included lectures, photo assignments, darkroom work and final presentations. Several of the first IVSA members met each other at Becker’s workshops and became the nucleus of the organization. Becker’s workshop model has been in continual use since that time.

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Figure 6.2 This is Sidé, a working-class woman in Bologna, Italy, making sfoglia, the pasta that makes the tortellini, the signature dish of the region. I encourage students to photograph the most mundane work people do, and to use images in elicitation interviews with those they have photographed.

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Figure 6.3 Hanging the exhibition at Strasbourg. The School of Architecture is a glass walled cube that the students took advantage of by making two copies of their images, which they fastened together back-to-back, and mounted these inside the walls, to be viewed from the inside as well as the street.

I have had the opportunity to offer one-week workshops at about twenty universities, from Liverpool to Bordeaux, London to San Francisco. Normally, a theme is introduced on the first day during a full afternoon introduction to visual sociology, and a public lecture is offered midweek. I am available to meet with students during the week, and we have ongoing classes to view work in process. Students present their projects for an in-class critique on Friday and, at times, an exhibition of their projects. A particularly successful version took place at the University of Strasbourg School of Architecture a few years ago, jointly presented with Italian sociologist Irene Sartoretti. The students hung more than 200 large images mounted back-to-back on the glass walls of the school at the conclusion of a weeklong workshop (Figure 6.3). Irene and I, who had never met, participated in the workshop as well as teaching it and we hung our photos along those of the students. My midweek public lecture was well attended and at this moment it can still be accessed on YouTube.8 In these workshops students use and think about photography in new ways and with encouragement most of them seemed glad they had tried something they had not done before. This includes showing their work to a professor they had never met and to their peers and accepting critical commentary.

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Lectures Much has changed in the twelve years since I wrote the first edition of this book. At that time analogue film was still in use, though the digital revolution was in full swing. It is remarkable how far away that now seems; how nearly completely the digital has taken over. But because film communicates in a unique way, I am pleased to say that it remains in use as an appreciated craft for some photographers. The digital revolution is about far more than handier cameras, however. As is common knowledge, it has revolutionized how images are distributed and consumed as well as produced. Many of us begin courses in visual sociology with in-depth discussion of the image, what it is, how it is seen and distributed, and how its meanings change over time. It seems appropriate to preserve the history of how we worked before the advent of computerized photography, illustrating lectures with slides, or transparencies as they were known. We made the slides by photographing images found in books, magazines or original photos, with a camera mounted on a copy stand and lit with bright, even lights. There was a great deal of work involved; an afternoon easily disappeared making a few dozen images. The film was processed, analyzed and labeled by hand and stored in clear plastic boxes or special slide cabinets. The cost of a 36 exposure roll of film and development was about the same as an OK dinner in neighborhood restaurant. The slides could be used indefinitely, but they had to be kept track of and protected from dust and humidity. By the end of the film era, I had a library of several thousand slides all sorted, labeled and stored. Organizing the slides into lectures was hand work, made easier with a light table.You laid slides out on the table and moved them around into sequences; I always felt this part of the process was an example of visual thinking. Seeing the images in relation to each other and making sequences was a way to create ideas. The slides were inserted into a tray and were shown one image at a time unless you used multiple projectors. However, projecting images on a huge silvery screen created extraordinary presentations of finely detailed photos, far more impressive than digital display. To show more than one image simultaneously required having two or more slide projectors running simultaneously. It was possible to run two or three projectors at once, but complicated. The effect could be stunning. For a lecture on social stratification, for example, I compared the lives of the very wealthy in the US, the suburban middle class and the very poor, as represented by urban homeless and migrant agricultural workers. I made slides from the work of several photographers and organized the slides to be projected by three slide projectors onto three large screens. I began with housing, comparing an overview of a city block in East Harlem from Bruce Davidson’s E100 Street to an image from Bill Owens’ Suburbia that looked down upon a suburban cul-de-sac. The third image was through the gates of a manor-like home of the wealthy in a Chicago suburb from Mary Lloyd Estrin’s To the Manor Born. In all three images the viewer saw the community from the outside, and although the points of view were different there was enough in common to encourage comparison and contrast. What was the density of families in a particular social class setting? How did neighborhood designs encourage or discourage social interaction with neighbors? What was the estimated square footage of housing per person in each situation? A series on sleeping compared an image of a palatial bedroom from Estrin’s wealthy families, furnished with antiques, to a bed in a suburban box-like bedroom, furnished from the local box store in Owen’s suburbia. To picture sleeping for the poor I show a room of empty beds, a foot or

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Figure 6.4 Social structure, poverty and immigration.This is as close as one gets to an urban ghetto in Iceland. My guide Thor, an architect, noted the relative deterioration of the building and the poorly integrated green spaces in front of the building barely visible to an American. It is occupied by Polish families, who migrated to Iceland to work in the fish processing plants.

two apart, in a homeless shelter and a second image of a room in a camp of migrant workers shared by an entire family. I illustrated the category of water by comparing trim, young adults in elegant clothes on a sailboat in Nantucket (an image from Barbara Norfleet’s All the Right People) to middle-class suburbanites enjoying an above-ground swimming pool, with a tower from an electrical grid in the background, from Owen’s Suburbia. The image of water in the life of the poor showed a migrant farmworker washing her child in a river from LeRoy Emmet’s book Fruit Tramps. The mother is holding the child with one arm wrapped around her and the other grasping a tree branch in a rushing river that will wash her child. I created about twenty similar visual comparisons, and I found that the simpler the concept or the phenomena (transportation, dwelling, parties, schools, rites of passage, for example), the more visually provocative the comparison. The visual information led to discussions in which students questioned virtually all aspects of social stratification; often in ways that I had never imagined. Often the images led to second-level questions. For example, it is straightforward to show the work of a migrant worker who picks the fruit they enjoy, or a clerk in a bureaucracy, but what about the work of an executive? What is the most useful basis for definitions of social stratification? Income or assets? Job responsibilities? Honorific status? Ownership of the means of production? Seeing images of housing, transportation and luxury or privation may lead to more meaningful understandings of stratification than do numbers on a table, or they may work with graphic display to build a bigger and better understanding.

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Figure 6.5 Social structure and poverty, the rust belt: Main Street, Clairton, Pennsylvania. The town, like many of the former steel towns, has all but collapsed economically. The old main street (pictured) has almost no functioning businesses. This photo shows structural poverty; the effect of decisions made by steel executives, politicians and urban planners.

The examples cited above are now a few decades old but make the point that while styles of clothes and interior design evolve, very likely the realities behind the surfaces do not. I ask students to conceptualize earlier manifestations of social class, based on photos, portraits and fine arts paintings (and the web makes it very easy to explore these questions). Seeing class differences in the US leads students to investigate social class in other countries or eras. I have, for years, photographed extremes of poverty and wealth in many countries, and use these images as an introduction. Students are often startled to discover that the slums of Iceland (and some other countries) are very nice, indeed. This exercise allows us to connect images of migrant workers to the inexpensive food we take for granted (and this is easy to visualize with photos of tomatoes in a supermarket with the prices indexed to typical incomes of various social strata). Very often the most useful strategy is to ask students to compare visual with other data, numerical or otherwise. Doing so leads to the question of what can be visualized and how visualization changes how we define a concept. I recently visited a Polish neighborhood in Reykjavik, and the images provided new visual grist for my social stratification image collection. My friend Thor, an Icelandic architect, pointed out things I would have missed in the Polish neighborhood, such as minimal green spaces and the deteriorated building exteriors (hardly visible to an American living in the postindustrial Pittsburgh rustbelt) that set the immigrant neighborhood apart from working-class neighborhoods of native Icelanders. In a grocery store I photographed

272 Teaching visually imported Polish pickles, beets and cabbage, and fast food that Thor said would not suit most Icelandic tastes. In other words, visual clues about ethnicity and stratification were everywhere, if you knew how to see them. Photos need to be placed into their sociological context through the teaching experience. It is relatively easy to take photos of postindustrial America like the neighborhood shown in Figure 6.5. One finds several-story stone churches falling into ruin, tall parking lots empty at midday, derelict, abandoned houses and, eventually, urban wildernesses of weeds and refuse where there used to be neighborhoods. The issue, however, is how you interpret these images in lectures. “What do you see?” and “How do you explain this?” leads to a consideration of whether postindustrial blight is the result of choices made by residents (most of whose houses declined in value to almost nothing when the mills closed in the 1970s), or decisions by executives who closed mills instead of modernizing them, and politicians who organized tax breaks that facilitated those decisions.9 The same photos can be interpreted in several ways, and it is crucial to do that rather than simply displaying what has been referred to as “ruin porn.” A visual sociologist sees the world actively, and since it is now so easy to make photographs with the cameras we carry in our pockets, the challenge is to preserve and organize them for presentations, printing and publication.The arduous process of making slides in the old film world has been replaced with PowerPoint software, since Covid the default means to share visual and textual information in a lecture. How to categorize and keep track of visual images that are now so easy to find or create? Many of us use a program such as Lightroom where we attach key words to every photo that can be searched for alone or together. For example, to prepare a lecture on death memorials I searched the 85,000 photos in my Lightroom catalogue for key words to gather several hundred images of cemeteries in churchyards in England, statues of dead politicians, tattoos remembering slain gang members (or lovers, dear friends or family members), fascist glorifications of war, Mussolini’s family tomb, roadside crosses in the US, impromptu memorials in Rome, gangland graffiti memorials, to mention a few. Before Lightroom it would have taken hours to remember and locate all images relevant to such a search, and it would have been easy to forget many along the way. Gathering images can also stimulate ideas; in this case the question “how do we remember death, and what are its various social functions?” A quaint churchyard in rural England makes a pretty photo but its significance regarding social control in preindustrial society may only emerge when it is viewed in the context of a wide variety of other images on a similar topic. It is exciting to teach the use of these ways of searching for evidence, and refining ideas as they discover new visual evidence. Like so many changes, I miss the craft and care of the old way of doing things, but the digital world, with its added complexities, offers extraordinary potential. The digital world often plays directly into our lectures and discussions. I was teaching visual sociology via zoom in January 2021 when the class coincided with the invasion of the US Capitol. We spent the class photographing our computer screens, making images we studied during our next class, which, as it turns out, was on semiotics and power. None of this, including our zoomed class, would have been possible in the pre-digital world.

Assignments: the taken for granted Over the years I have encouraged students to stand back from their own experiences to see in a new way via photography. It can be a radical experience to aim the camera

Teaching visually 273 straight up or down or to tilt it crazily for the first time. Doing so makes students aware that they are used to a commonplace (visual) apprehension of the world, represented as a level universe seen at eye level, with objects at appropriate distances from each other. Here is an assignment from a recent course: You just landed from Mars and your earth skin is a bit tight from all that inflight junk food, darn! And despite the excellent Martian sociology classes that prepared you for this project, you’re quite amazed by what you see. Thank goodness you’ve got your Steeler’s jacket on, which hides several of your extra appendages and even allows you to tuck your Martian 200000-megapixel camera out of sight.You’ve done your homework, but it didn’t begin to prepare you for what you’re seeing. Your crazy Martian professor sent you here to study and photograph how Earthlings create culture. There seems to be some order to it, but it is hard to see in all the random actions, movements and communications. Are there patterns in all this chaos? Do Earthlings adorn themselves to identify themselves as part of one group or another? Do they follow their laws and rules, or do they make up their own ways of doing things? What’s it like to be a friend in this crazy planet? Is it possible to fall in love? You want to tell your friends back on Mars what this scene is like, so you try to get the best of your excitement and get down to work. I suggest that the students write their paper as a letter home to Mars; their lousy spaceship broke so they will be here for a while.They begin their letter: “All’s well on Earth. Invited to a Steeler’s game and after a few beers nobody seems to mind the extra appendages.” My students like being Martians. They find freedom in “knowing nothing.” Using a camera to state the obvious made them realize that nothing is obvious at all. In asking students to photograph the mundane world they are to become fish that can see the water they swim in. I recall a student who was an athlete who suddenly discovered grass and set about to photograph its manifestations on athletic fields (as plastic); manicured and chemically treated on suburban lawns; or as a neglected surface on forgotten urban parks. She saw it as a harvested feed for farm animals and pictured in landscapes. Suddenly, she reported, the whole world was grass and it was endlessly fascinating. It was a great project, though she mentioned that her parents had said: “We pay twenty-five thousand dollars a year tuition so you can photograph grass?” In another example a student photographed his dog’s perspective on their walk through the park. He fastened his camera to a monopod that he held upside down at the dog’s level, firing images with a long cable release. He used a lens that approximated the perspective of a dog’s vision, which he determined from veterinary textbooks. Because dogs see monochromatically, he photographed in black and white. He followed along with his dog and photographed the objects, including fire hydrants, and other dogs and people that the dog interacted with. With this example, the class began to see how they took for granted their visual perception of the world, which was created by height, a level horizon and the routine things they looked at as they began to see the world like a dog. I introduce the sociology of everyday life, the study of common-sense experience and naturally occurring social worlds by asking students to identify and photograph the “lifeworld” of weather. These ideas derive from phenomenology, but I kept it simple. I sought to make them aware of what they take for granted; to step out of their normal perceptions to see with new eyes. I suggested that it is hard to imagine winter on a sunny day in the

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Figure 6.6 Farming in a snowstorm.

Figure 6.7 Manure spreader in winter farm work.

Teaching visually 275 summer. In Figures 6.6 and 6.7 my neighbor, a dairy farmer, was doing what he did every day of the winter, which was to clean the barn and spread the manure from his cows on the fields. There was no question about whether or not he would do this work; the cows had been inside the barn eating, being milked and pooping, and the barn had to be cleaned. He manages the weather; it did not manage him. His body had adapted to the cold and his clothes were suited for what he had to do; my teeth were chattering with twice as many clothes as he wore. The extremes of weather are small events we retreat from; the farmer must make it routine. When we see the farmer squinting into the snowstorm we see ourselves in that storm, engaging, redefining, acting. The extent to which we celebrate escape from extremes of weather was made clear by the repose of my students in the Roman sunshine, who the day before had been in a Pittsburgh snowstorm.They stretched out on the cobblestones, heads on the sidewalk and I noted to them that it would be unusual for most of them to do the same thing in their home city. New weather offered new possibilities for the normal; a photograph of the altered mundane made them aware of how their new experience looked from the outside. I reminded my students to use the camera to explore new ways of seeing, as the Russian photographer Alexander Rodchenko did in the Russian revolutionary era. Seeing and photographing a horizontal plane was reproducing the old world of bourgeois perception: predictable and oppressive. Tilting the camera, looking up from under the subject’s chin or straight down and otherwise seeing them askew unsettled the viewer and the world s/he took for granted. Rodchenko’s goal was no less than using arts (to even a larger extent painting as well as photography) to create a utopian vision, driven by imagination and experimentation.

Figure 6.8 Students reclining on the streets of Rome.

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Figure 6.9 Nudging into traffic, Rome.

Figure 6.10 The transformation of two lanes to three, Rome.

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Figure 6.11 Creative merging, Rome. I was ably assisted by Suzan Harper on these photos. One of us was driving.

Rules, norms and norm violation are part of the taken-for-granted social existence and often they can be photographed. For example, it is hard to portray highways in the US as social spaces, even though they are full of rules, norms and violations of both. In Italy, however, this was easier to do because little makes sense to a newcomer. I made the following photographs outside Rome, holding my camera outside the car window or against the glass from the inside as my passenger steered from the passenger’s seat. Figure 6.7 shows how cars edge into the street, trying to force oncoming traffic to slow sufficiently so they can enter; Figure 6.8 shows the transformation of two lanes to three lanes; and Figure 6.9 the haphazard merging that takes place in unregulated intersections, where a driver has to become a member of an impromptu team made up of strangers organizing to survive the moment and advance their own interests as they coincidentally and accidentally advance the interests of the rest of us. Urban spaces On several occasions I taught what was called a “Spring BreakAway” class in Rome that took place over the week-long spring holiday. Since the students were generally motivated to make interesting photos of what was often the most exotic place they had visited, it was a wonderful opportunity to teach visual sociology. One of our day-long topics was the piazza. There are several in Rome, all very different physically and functionally.

278 Teaching visually I typically divided the class into teams of two and assigned them each a piazza. They were to observe, write field notes and photograph for a minimum of two hours on location. They were to note arrival and departure times and not to fudge, and I strongly encouraged them to stay longer. I also suggested that they return to “their” piazza on at least one more occasion. They were to first measure the piazza by pacing it off and describe its shape. Square, oblong, circular, irregular? How did the size and shape influence what went on in the piazza? What about regions of the piazza: was the interior used or just the edges? Was it a passageway through the city or a location? Were the surrounding establishments, usually bars and coffee shops, patronized by locals or tourists? Were there western fast-food restaurants on the border or nearby? A semiotic landscape of monuments, sculptures and other historical markers? What about advertising for modern products? What products and companies were advertised (Italian or international) and did this advertising affect your appreciation for the space? What could you buy there? Were their unlicensed merchants selling on the street? Street performers? Buskers? Were they making any money? Did you see evidence of illegal activities? Were there regions inside the piazza? Were there elevated places from which to observe public life and, if so, were people watching the scene? What about subjective aspects of the piazza: did you like being there? Would you return to simply be in the piazza? Did you feel safe? Do you think your feelings would change if you visited on different times of the day, week or season? Finally, if you were the czar of public life in Rome, would you change the piazza? If so, how? Students wrote papers, illustrated with their photos and presented them to the class. My students became nascent public sociologists, appreciating public urban space and imagining making it even better. Their projects were demonstrations of thinking guided by looking. They went back to America thinking about how they might take these ideas to their own cities. Read William Whyte’s book first, I said, and then get to work. And take lots of pictures. Culture shows itself in small examples, such as how cars weave through Roman traffic or how patriarchy is embedded in gestures of deference. When you find the small examples, they often point to larger issues. The point is to learn to look actively, to use a camera and to describe everything you see and how it is changing. The movie of the eye and brain, transformed through the hand into a film made of words. Semiotics The previous chapter has examined semiotics primarily in the context of public art. Here I describe a general approach for studying symbols and systems of symbols that we observe or participate in. Semiotic signs are all around us, in the environments we create, the public spaces we experience and in the messages we encounter on our cell phones from strangers and friends. Some questions that might guide student research: • •

When do visual signs direct you to act in a certain way? How do they do that? When are they ironic or critical? When do they lose their influence and become drained of the messages they once communicated?

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To what extent can we trace visual signs to what Roland Barthes called “myths?” (How do they combine to create an entire ideological system?) To what extent can we perceive social, economic and political manipulation in symbolic messages? How are the visual signs displayed? How much of their contextual environment is relevant to their message?

Assignments that draw on semiotics often lead students to interpret their worlds in new ways. For example, a student photographed a high school football game to highlight the event’s symbolic dimensions. She first realized that almost everyone in the stadium identified themselves through the clothes or objects they wore. Team players, of course, wore color-coded uniforms, usually with images of totems that identified with the town and school. The totems can be meaningless or offensive and they gain their meanings from histories and habits. The colors found on the team uniforms were repeated on clothes worn by fans, band members, cheerleaders and others, and they adorned signs, flags and other objects in the stadium. Students spoke about how strongly they were still attached to the colors of their high schools (noting that only certain colors were acceptable; no pastels!).The officials of the game were dressed in white pants and striped shirts, but the most highly ranked official wore a white hat and others wore black. Cheerleader uniforms seemed locked in the past, as were the uniforms of band members. The uniforms of the players were both utilitarian and stylized, and they mimicked the uniforms worn by professional teams. There were no modifications to any of the uniforms and no one wore the wrong uniform for the wrong activity, except that a muddy football player joined the school band to play for the half-time show. The reverse is impossible to imagine, that is, a band member could not wear his band uniform on the football team, for practical and symbolic reasons. For the football playing band member, his master status was clear. The student photographed rituals performed throughout the game based on symbols, including audience participation in singing, standing and placing one’s hand over one’s heart to sing sacred songs. At the beginning of the game the team, led by the team captain (indicated by special markings on his uniform), ran through a long tunnel of cheerleaders onto the field, bursting a huge paper barrier held by the cheerleaders that sealed off the end of the tunnel. Students mused over potential interpretations of this dramatic event. Other rituals involved synchronized or spontaneous cheering, but only for certain events or plays. It is sarcastic to cheer for routine plays, but it is done when a team or a player is doing poorly. Many symbols seem obvious, but students must be reminded that what is obvious to them would not be to their counterpart in Indonesia.They might note that the jeans they purchase are hip, not because of their cut, but because of the advertised image that goes along with it. Other symbols work for reasons that cannot be explained. Colors of clothes mean a great deal to gang or sorority members; sports logos and colors can also have a wide range of meanings. In Chicago I observed that African American men wear White Sox symbols and Caucasian men wear the colors and symbols of the Cubs (the two professional baseball teams that represent Chicago). I saw no exceptions, though I have no idea how and why this pattern exists. As noted in Chapter 5, in recent years I have studied public art. I have welcomed students to join me in this focus by photographing the public art and decoration of nearby spaces, including universities. At the university where I teach a sculpture outside the business school suggests heroic struggle and triumph, an idealized version of

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Figure 6.12 The piazza in front of the Pantheon. Be attentive for odd elements that often temporarily redefine a space.

the capitalist world they hope to enter. Inside one walks through a large, beautiful room with perhaps fifteen-foot ceilings, which seems to have little function aside from showcasing larger-than-life portraits of important donors to the School of Business. These are informal portraits of couples, who generally appear to be very young looking in their post-retirement age. They are, without exception, trim, fit and informal, standing in beautiful landscapes, in casual, subtly tailored and understated clothes. The male of the couple stands slightly behind the female (all couples have one man and one woman). The expressions are kind, sympathetic and satisfied. The portraits seemed to have several signs within signs—facial expressions that suggest that wealth is not inconsistent with generosity—and the very institution they are entering

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demonstrates this. The generosity of these donors is to an institution dedicated to the system they have succeeded in, without questioning whether worshipping material wealth is consistent with a Catholic university dedicated to serving the poor. As my students take their investigations to nearby colleges, universities and other institutions they find patterns and themes expressed in art, signs, portraits and even architectural styles. There are carefully constructed projections of institutional identity woven into the public art, and even in the architecture of some institutions. And much of what they found in the public art or architecture seems to say very little at all.

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Figure 6.13 Campo di Fiori with a class of Italian high school students. I encourage students to introduce themselves to those they wish to photograph, explain what they are doing and ask for their help.

One of the most interesting projects from my recent seminar was done by a team made up of a Swedish student and a student from Nigeria, new to America as well. They explored the city and photographed billboards and later interviewed each other to analyze what they had seen. Who were those men with beaming smiles or concerned expressions imploring them to call immediately if they had been injured in an accident? Much of what they saw was utterly mysterious, though they both spoke English well. Here indeed were floating signifiers, looking for meaning. Studying semiotics in real environments, in addition to those found in mass media, invites us to critically deconstruct the messages with which we are constantly barraged.

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The approach I used in Chapter 5 (looking for intended message; achieved message; social organization of the art production; hidden messages; the experience of the art and possible and probable futures of the art objects) can be used as a tool to explore the sociology of any example of public art. Social organization Social organization is all around us, in the roles we occupy in our jobs and in our interactions in public. We largely take the unspoken rules that guide all this for granted. We adapt to certain degrees of deviance, but that is also generally within limits that have tacit agreement. It is not legal to photograph the shopping cart traffic chaos on a

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Figure 6.14 Great surprises, often rare, often almost hidden in plain sight. Inside a neighborhood church in a working-class community near Pittsburgh are remarkable murals by Croatian immigrant Maxo Vanka, painted in 1937 and 1941. The murals weave traditional Christian themes into deep anxieties the upcoming war, the rise of fascism in Europe and the realities of industrial capitalism.

Teaching visually 285 Saturday in Costco but as a nascent visual sociologist we wish we could. The delicate social order, experienced but seldom “seen,” in this case shopping cart derby, chaos lurking just beneath the surface. It was this theme that I sent students home with over their Thanksgiving Day breaks. If their families agree, and of course this was not at all taken for granted, I encourage students to photograph how the division of labor that creates the Thanksgiving Day feast organized by gender, family role and age. I remind them to include who labors and who does not. They were then to move to the social organization of the feast, which also includes consuming the feast, and the norms that guide leisure activities that surround the event. The assignment instructs students to photograph as much of the labor that led to the Thanksgiving dinner as you can.This includes planning the meal, shopping for the food, preparing dishes and silverware, organizing and cleaning the house, buying wine or other beverages, cooking various dishes, cleaning the kitchen during and after cooking, setting the table, making table decorations, serving the food, replenishing the food, removing and storing leftover food. Regarding the organization of the meal itself, I ask students to photograph the spatial layout of the table to identify symbolic dimensions such as the head of the table, and to note who serves food and where they sit. They are asked to photograph the rituals, including prayer, carving the turkey and pouring the wine. Even the order of serving has sociological significance: who is served first and allowed to choose the choicest cuts of meat? I suggest they pay attention to clothes or outfits worn for the event, and any rituals unique to their family. Are there special stories told, actions performed or other events that indicate the special status of the day? What would happen if someone violated the rules of food combinations covering pumpkin pie with gravy or turkey with whipped cream? Or what if Uncle Ned insisted on having his pumpkin pie before the main course? Some things consumed are both dangerous and desired. Who is allowed to consume alcohol and under what circumstances? For example, do those who are cooking begin drinking before dinner? How about those who are not? If you are watching football games, can you drink wine or liquor, or only beer? Are women invited to the football viewing? Are kids or people below legal drinking age allowed to consume alcohol, and under what circumstances? What governs how it is consumed at the dinner? Are there special wines or other drinks that have ritual significance?

Teaching collaborative methods Photo elicitation and photovoice projects are challenging to oversee in an undergraduate class of twenty-five students. As a result I have rarely taught these methods in depth in undergraduate courses. I previously described my Dutch students’ study of a neighborhood, Schilderswijk in Den Haag (Chapter 3) which was a visionary and creative form of what became photovoice. Perhaps the key to that success was that they were five highly

286 Teaching visually motivated students from an exceptional class taught the year before, and they came to me to ask for supervision when I returned to Holland to teach. The project formed largely under their guiding hands. In the past four years, however, we have done photo elicitation interview projects in my graduate seminar, which have worked remarkably well, even at the breakneck speed of a one-month seminar. Interestingly, distance teaching via zoom has been a natural fit for teaching and experiencing photo elicitation, as I will show. I have come to think that the most important part of teaching photo elicitation is to experience both interviewing and being interviewed with photos. I am also becoming aware that it is not second nature to move from looking at photos to being able to guide an interview about the photos. Both sides of the interview must practice active seeing, where it is necessary to listen, look and imagine a subsequent question. My students were reading the first edition of this book and thus had been introduced to both photo elicitation and to Willie, the bricoleur of junk (Chapter 2). I asked each of them separately to join me in role playing; I would be Willie and they would be the young researcher. I flashed the photos on the screen with a PowerPoint and they asked me questions. I enjoyed being Willie. At first roleplaying was awkward with both their professor and with colleagues watching as zoom participants.Within a few minutes it seemed natural. Despite their experience as teachers and as graduate students, neither had done in-depth qualitative interviews, so these have been potent experiences. The point is to experience the photo- driven interview; to loosen up and learn to engage your research partner, discovering as you go. They then interviewed each other. The roles became a bit confused, as Mary Pat, for example, who had photographed the winter social landscape of a Lake Superior tourist town, busy in the summer and largely deserted in the winter, was interviewed by Teresa, a Minnesota native, who had an understanding of Mary Pat’s topic. Then Mary Pat interviewed Teresa, who had photographed how she was managing a Covid lockdown with several kids. Mary Pat had kids and grandkids, so there was shared background to draw upon. Unlike my example with Willie, their interviews did not have the researcher making photos of the subject’s world and then asking the subject to interpret them, but rather two colleagues interviewed each other about their photo assignments. As an observer of the interviews on zoom I was able to suggest questions and strategies from my real-time notes. My students used transcription programs to produce texts that were far easier to analyze than doing it longhand.They analyzed and coded the interviews and integrated them into a paper, all in a week. It had become a manageable project with modern technology and one that inspired them to use PE in future projects, perhaps in their dissertations. Having a seven-hour Saturday class session worked beautifully for this project as I broke it into several parts that flowed easily from one to the next. Literacy through photography Inspiration for a collaborative visual pedagogy can be found in a movement called Literacy Through Photography. LTP draws on several traditions, especially photovoice, and develops them in powerful ways.Thankfully, there is a book by the principal architects

Teaching visually 287 of the method10 that guides those who want to pursue this version of photo-inspired teaching/research. LTP places cameras in the hands of participants, generally in schools or other educational situations, and as such has become influential among those dedicated to educational reform and the redefinition of documentary photography. The core purpose of LTP is to train teachers who will apply its principles to their own needs and uses. The approach has a living character; rather than a doctrine, it is an invitation to teach from a perspective in which students are creative authors of their learning through photography. LTP workshops and training sessions have led to the introduction of the visual method in English, science, math, history, ecology, the arts and, in fact, in most courses in a normal curriculum. The LTP experience places students in charge of finding visual solutions to academic assignments. Working together to think through image making, students figure out how to visualize a mathematical concept; how to use imagery to learn simple vocabulary; how to use photography to link specifics to general ideas. For example, grade school students in Tanzania photographed farm animals to communicate principles of economy. Through LTP students learn to use photographs to explore their own expressions and feelings: how they touch, experience and define the world, including their dreams. In these ways LTP assignments are very much like assignments in a visual sociology course. Photography is combined with several forms of writing.This might include freewriting to brainstorm the visualization of a concept, or essays about identity, self, community and dreams that accompany photos. Both photography and writing are approached with concepts of framing, point of view, timing and symbols. Very often students write on photos with ink makers, creating a dialogue with the image, or mount photos on posters and caption them with texts written the borders. Literacy Through Photography has been developed in workshops, university courses and training centers, and demonstrates perhaps more than any comparative program how seeing can create a dialogue about culture that empowers those involved. The method draws upon photo elicitation because it takes the meaning of the photo as rooted in conversation, and photovoice because it uses photography as a part of social awakening. It has influenced educational systems in the developing world and is a vital part of the visual sociology movement in general. Self-portraiture without self Over the years I have taught visual sociology, I have struggled with a way to introduce reflexivity, that is, an awareness of how one’s own actions become part of one’s research story, and to go a step further, to use visual methods to interrogate oneself; in this case to see one’s sociological as well as personal identities. I tried a self-portrait assignment in an early course but among the first students was a woman who covered her body with shaving cream and had two assistants, one with a camera and the other with a hose, produce a startling sequence of images in which it appeared that her odd skin was melting off, until her human skin was revealed, completely. It was a powerful self-portrait and I had not prohibited nudity so I had to take the consequences, which were a bit unsettling to a new professor. My dean suggested I redesign the assignment, and so I did, leaving the

288 Teaching visually “self ” out of self-portraiture, in other words defining oneself without including images of one’s own corporeal reality. It has, in fact, produced a deep challenge for students to see oneself entirely as socially constructed and the results have often been remarkably powerful, deep and beautiful. There are four basic approaches to this assignment: 1. Photographs of objects that define you.Tools, jewelry, animals and pets, clothes, collections, medical machines, photographs, books, musical instruments, letters, make-up, toys, furniture. Anything. Find a way to photograph the objects or object to communicate how they tell us about you. Think about the distance to the subject, point of view, framing, focus, lighting and even the color of the light.You might want to make photos of objects as they are being used, or you may want to make photos of parts of objects. Please do more than visually listing objects, try to interpret their meanings. 2. Spaces and places where you are you! • A place in a dwelling, neighborhood or community that you feel has defined you. That may be changing in this era of your lives. • A place in a non-institutional setting, a position at a table, in a room. Do you have implied “ownership” of that place? • Is there a place in nature where you return normally? Is there a time in which this place is especially meaningful to your identity? • Do you occupy a place in an institution in such a way that creates your identity? (A place in a church where you pray? A seat in a stadium where you watch a sports event? A stool in a restaurant or bar that is “yours?” (The TV show Cheers got much mileage from this concept). Karl Marx wrote at the same desk in the same chair for years at the British Museum; I sat there once and sensed ghosts! • A place in your family’s home that is “yours?” Does your family occupy space in some collective way that you are a part of? What happens there that defines you then? Do other people occupy this space when you are absent? 3. People who make you who you are. How do you pose them to communicate their importance to your identity? What gestures, expressions, props do you assign to them? How do you assign them a place in an environment? 4. Ideas/values/emotions. This may be the most complex thing to photograph as you are trying to tell us about yourself by expressing yourself subjectively in visual metaphors, narratives and reflections. 5. Activities in which you become who you see yourself being. Can you find a way to photograph these activities looking from the inside out? You may wish to combine several of these themes, or to work with one. Or you may find an entirely different strategy for this assignment. The photos must be accompanied by an essay, which should tell us what your goals were as a photographer and what you think worked and what did not. Do you use color or black and white? Did you link images into a sequence to tell your story? Reflect on your struggles and what you think were your successes; describe specific photographs and whether or not they communicated the ideas you hoped they would.

Teaching visually 289 As I was preparing the first edition of this book twelve years ago, I received a letter from a student I had taught in the first visual ethnography course in Amsterdam, offered in the early 1990s. Jasmijn said she missed the course, completed twenty-some years before, and asked if she could do another assignment. I sent her the “self-portraiture without self ” assignment and she produced this essay, which she agreed to share for the book, and gladly shared it again.

Self-portraiture without self: a demonstration Jasmijn Antonisse Photography copyright Jasmijn Antonisse, courtesy of the author My first struggle in life was the fact that I had to face my dyslexia. I was seven or eight years old and still could not read or write, which made me insecure, and it still does. I became shy, introverted and timid. After a while I stopped talking altogether. 1. My mother brought me to a dance school where I found my love of dance, a way of expressing myself without words. This gave me confidence and determination and I became more positive in life. This power of seeing things, although at first seeming negative, can make you search for your own qualities and strong points. 2. Words in motion

Figure 6.15 Trapped in Words.

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Figure 6.16 Son dancing.

Figure 6.17 Son dancing.

Figure 6.18 Son dancing.

My mother was a powerful woman who had a big influence on me. If I had to make a decision I would ask her for advice. Our love of art, dance and opera linked us together. This very close relationship had also a down side, as I would experience later on in life. The sudden death of my mother had a big emotional impact on me. I was with her when she went into a septic shock. My life fell apart and stopped.The struggle to get over the guilty feeling of the death of my mother is horrible and it will never totally be gone. I had to make my own decisions now and had to learn to cope on my own. This was something I never had done before. I started relying on the wrong people and made a lot of mistakes. Luckily I started to believe in myself again and found myself in all the pain, sorrow and loneliness. It made me a stronger person. 3. A child was one of the wishes I had, but how? I waited for the right partner but they never came. So I had to make the biggest decision of my life and to do this on my own, because I was not getting any younger.

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Figure 6.19 Portrait in Leaves.

Figure 6.20 Light beyond.

Figure 6.21 Perseverance: artificial insemination.

The road to pregnancy was hard and an emotional rollercoaster. Every attempt hoping that this time it will work, and when it didn’t, trying to get over the loss. But not giving up is what I learned in my life so perseverance gave me a healthy baby boy. Now I had not only to make decisions for myself but also for another living person. I became a Mom. Again the struggle of hoping and trying to believe in myself paid off. I tried for a second child but had to make my second hardest decision in my life to stop pursuing that wish and let it go. At my age the chance that my second child would have medical problems made me think it was not fair to my son if his life would be put upside down. With pain in my heart I decided to give up my dream. Sometimes in life you have to let go and find love in the things you already have. Jasmijn described her work on the essay: My goals as a photographer was to show my transformation during my life, especially the things I learned.To embrace the positive things, learn and reflect on the bad things but to not let them ruin your life.

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Figure 6.22 Becoming Mom (original in color).

Figure 6.23 Transformation of past to present. (My son watches a slide of his grandmother.)

The photos tell the story of change and metamorphosis. I try to link words and emotions, and in other photos places and emotion to tell this story. I decided to shoot the first photos in black and white, because that is the part of the history of my youth that I will never be getting back. After my mom died there aren’t people any more who can tell me about my childhood. The second series is in color and resembles the period of growing up and starting my own life. It was difficult not to make the photos too sentimental and stay close to the emotions objectively. I have to say that it was an intense voyage for me. It brought me to places I have not gone to for a long time, and I looked at pictures I did not see in a long while. The cemetery is a place I visit every week. Now I had to walk the long road once more to this silent place. But this time it was different. It brought back memories of loneliness and pain but also let me see beyond that sorrow. Also the pictures of my mum in her younger years gave me an opening to start thinking of the relationship we had and the one that is now growing and developing with my own son. This assignment gave me the opportunity to see how I have developed into what I am today. Jasmijn and I have met since she wrote this powerful visual essay and I have watched her son mature on Facebook posts. Jasmijn is still dancing.

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Teaching theory with feature films It has become common to show feature films in sociology classes, as described in two ediitons of what editors Sutherland and Feltey call “Cinematic Sociology.”11 The contributors to both volumes (fifteen essays in the first edition and twenty-seven in the second) show how sociological themes are embedded in popular films. The sheer number of essays and references to courses in the area show it is a quiet but vital form of visual sociology, largely outside the IVSA and other visual sociology networks. The essays explore specific films sociologically, and the tone and orientation in general seem equally relevant to and interesting to those interested in cultural studies as they are to sociologists. I have only tried this model on one occasion, assuming responsibility temporarily for a social theory course that utilized films. I found that films sometimes helped students transform abstract and distant concepts into the real world. For example, students compared the social interaction among Amish farmers building a barn in the police drama Witness to the bureaucracy of the police station; two distinct worlds just a few miles apart. In Gladiator, the Russell Crowe character, Maximus Decimus Meridius, operated within traditional, bureaucratic and charismatic authority in different times throughout the film; organizing a well-coordinated army attack, acting within the accepted norms of power in the Roman political structure and becoming a charismatic hero in the gladiatorial ring. Finally, Modern Times presents a comic analysis of the contradictions of industrial capitalism, and the Charlie Chaplin character becomes an everyman for the otherwise faceless working class. The class experience suggests that core ideas in sociology have sufficient relevance to the human experience that they can be found in themes of internationally acclaimed cinema. However, I was not satisfied that I connected these films and the classic texts in sociology in a sufficiently deep way to develop the approach further. It was more successful to include a film series as part of a freshman course, Global Sociology, where I selected five films to accompany the five cultures that we studied during the semester. Other the several years I adopted this approach I used films such as Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001), which shows how love and betrayal interweave in the complexities of an Indian arranged marriage; Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005), which examines how two young Palestinian men choose or reject the decision to become suicide bombers; and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006), which investigates the operation of the East German Stasi secret police during a moment of national transformation. The freshmen students often had never seen a foreign, subtitled film, and typically had never regarded film as anything but entertainment. Even when the assigned films tested their patience, or explore topics beyond their comfort zone, the experience has been extremely positive. In large part this was also due to the exceptional text, Schneider and Silverman’s Global Sociology (in several editions) that offered case studies of five global societies that were exciting to pare with the films. Using feature films as texts It is also possible to teach courses that use feature films primarily as texts. An example is a course, “Italian Society through Film,” that I developed for a curriculum taught to North American students studying in Rome. We began with films that emerged from postWWII Italy, as Italy struggled with its fascist past and the extreme poverty and physical

294 Teaching visually destruction of the war. The movement, called Neorealism, used both local Italians and professional actors and and the films were shot on location. We study four or five films from this era, always beginning with Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece Rome: Open City (Roma Città aperta). The reversal of Italy’s fortunes in the 1950s led to films that critiqued the materialism and anomie of that era, such as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana), complex messages for students from a Catholic university to come to terms with. We ended with contemporary films that illuminated the modern social issues, such as the film version of Roberto Saviano’s important insider study of the contemporary Mafia, Gomorrah. The course worked well for several reasons. The films portrayed heady times and dramatic events: a world war where the country changed sides; the end of a fascist dictatorship and the beginning of democracy and the end of a centuries-long monarchy. The economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s produced decadence and working-class politics merged into north/south Italian differences, with organized crime lurking in the background. All of these interconnections of history, politics and film made fertile learning for an audience of American students discovering Italy for the first time. This is, however, a very particular example relevant to Italy, with its rich cinema traditions and its dramatic recent history.There are other national cultures that may have been translated well to film; I am thinking of Japan, for example. But to organize these courses requires a great deal of preparation, willingness to study film theory to introduce the topic of how films communicate, locating readings that will supplement what students are learning from films, and becoming adept at managing discussions among students who have not regarded film seriously before. Filming sociology: teaching sociology by teaching how to make films Just a few years ago a thirty-minute film good enough to broadcast cost at least $100,000 (I cite this figure from experience, having submitted several unsuccessful applications for funding). Now, with modern equipment as modest as the iPhone 13 that shoots in RAW format, it costs essentially nothing to make a film. Because until recently film was so expensive, it was hard to learn by doing. Filming, record sounding and editing required training and experience. Few sociologists have been to film school and even those sociologists who identify as filmmakers often are directors who hire professionals to film, record and edit their films. The technical revolutions in digital cameras and editing have led to an explosion of documentary/ethnographic films mostly done outside academic sociology, but also within. Wesley Shrum and Greg Scott term these more experimental forms “ethnografilm.” In addition to their own extensive accomplishment as filmmakers, their text Video Ethnography in Practice12 provides a teaching guide for beginning sociology student filmmakers, and they have also founded The Journal of Video Ethnography, an entirely video-based journal that is distributed virtually to subscribers. In addition to these pioneering efforts, they also established a yearly film festival, also entitled Ethnografilm, that since 2014 (except for two Covid years) invites more than 100 participants. After two years of Covid-cancellation Ethnografilm is at this moment convening in Paris (it is April, after all) and I wish I was there. One can visit the websites of past festivals to study the programs and hear interviews

Teaching visually 295 with Shrum and Scott, which communicates the energy and openness of the festival. It is specifically intended for film directors, who are defined as those who have had a film accepted to the conference, but all are welcomed.The catalogue of a recent festival (2019, the last before Covid) shows an extraordinary range of topics and origins.The films come from Ethiopia to Morocco, Thailand to Kazakhstan and, yes, from the US and Canada, and they vary in length from four minutes to more than an hour. Shrum and Scott make a point to cater to academic filmmakers (roughly speaking, people like themselves who include filmmaking as their research activity) but invite any and all to attend the festival, including non-directors. For Shrum and Scott the point is to create a new sociology of film and invite anyone to the table whose work is found interesting. The new technology makes hands-on learning the model, and their text and student film conferences show that it works. It is necessary, however, to face these issues in the concrete when you teach by making a film. For example, when my colleague Maggie Patterson, a journalism professor and I were co-teaching a class of six students bent on filming a long-term recovery community in Pittsburgh we wrestled mightily about how to transform thirty-some hours of footage into thirty-some minutes of movie. Eventually we treated the footage as a sociologist would treat any research data; we transcribed the interviews, analyzed them via coding and constructed the film around themes that had emerged from the people we had filmed over three years. At first students were drawn to tell war stories of street life but as we closely studied the data we shifted our focus to how the men experienced life in the recovery house; how they participated in meetings in which recovery was created and maintained and how they tried to reconnect to the world outside. As we studied the data we also discovered themes we had missed, for example, addicts owning up to their failure as fathers, the acceptance or relapse, and ritualized discussions emerging from the AA meetings. And we came to believe we had not seen deeply enough the quiet profundity of the staff, all recovered addicts, who rowed the boat every day. When we made the film we based it on what we had learned when we treated our footage like any interview data, whether we were doing investigative journalism or sociology. The film was an important research and teaching experience and easily equaled the effort required to write a short research monograph. However, when the film was completed and the CDs were distributed to the recovery house for their fundraising activities, and no offers came for distribution, the experience was over. As digital filmmaking becomes an accepted part of sociological teaching and research, the films will join our other publications in libraries, virtual or actual. That process has only begun.

The golden nugget I bring the discussion of teaching to an end as I finish the book, and I use the opportunity to remember one course where everything worked. In 1989 I met Rob Boonzajer Flaes, a Dutch filmmaker, ethnographer, musician and innovative teacher at the University of Amsterdam. He had designed an MA program in visual ethnography which concentrated on filmmaking, and his students had made films that were shown in festivals, conferences and even broadcast on European TV. Rob and I had one of those accidentally synchronized moments at a conference in Germany, where the same critic lambasted both his film and my presentation, and after a couple of beers later that evening Rob asked me to join his mad scheme in Amsterdam. For the next four years

296 Teaching visually

Figure 6.24 Margriet examines her just processed film. The class met four days of the week and on Thursday evenings we continued our discussions at a communal dinner, where this photo was taken.

I accepted the offer, adding a course on still photography and visual ethnography to their curriculum, while I lived with his family and became “Uncle (Oompa) Doug” to his kids. We agreed on a simple plan: I sent a reading list to Rob and he and his collaborator Ton Guiking discussed this material with ten to twelve students for two semesters, who would be my class when I arrived in the spring. My six-week contribution was full immersion; Rob had famously told them, “You have no life when Harper arrives.” And their enthusiasm was high. We scrubbed the darkroom on our hands and knees and then rebuilt shelves and tables and fixed the plumbing.Then I taught them to use it.The sign-up sheet on the darkroom door was full, 8 am till 6 pm, daily. Students working together taught each other, and I supervised. The quality of work, both technically and sociologically, was superior to any class I have taught. The students immersed themselves in a research setting, learned to write field notes, exposed rolls of film, printed images, had an exhibition and wrote final papers. As MA anthropology students they were attuned to theory and we were able to work with both ideas and images. They challenged me as well. Once, a delegation marched into my office and stared me down: “Harper, there is not enough time to do the work you’ve assigned us.”—“Time,” I said, “is a solution, not a problem. Now leave me alone and get to work!” But behind that kidding was the sense we both shared that we were committed. For several students the class began a life-long involvement with visual sociology. Karijn (Chapter 3) was in the last edition of the course. Jasmijn’s project on self-portraiture

Teaching visually 297

Figure 6.25 Students on a sail.

(described earlier) developed from her participation in the first. Several students published their projects in the IVSA journal: Adjan van Sleeuwen’s visual ethnography of life in a monastery, “The Rhythm of Religion”; Margriet Jansen’s study of the work of a museum conservator, “Better Little than Too Much”; and five students from the first class did a second project the following year, which led to the seventy-some page paper on a Dutch neighborhood, discussed previously. All of these papers were reviewed by professional sociologists. The course showed what could be done in an intensive workshop setting that had followed reading in theory. We all worked hard, and shared satisfaction over what we accomplished. Pure gold, for them and for me. At the end of the course Rob and I rented a fifty-five-foot antique sailboat and spent a day on the Ijsselmeer with the students. It was an ending and a beginning. So that is where I leave you.

Notes 1 Berger, John and Jean Mohr. 1982. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon. 2 Rogovin’s extraordinary series on aging and social change in multi-ethnic working-class Buffalo, NY is published in Rogovin, Milton. 1985. The Forgotten Ones. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Rogovin by reputation was quietly progressive, humble and serious, and the intense familiarity of the portraits is likely a combination of his personality as well as the camera he used.

298 Teaching visually 3 Diane Arbus’ photography remains highly controversial and influential. Speaking as a visual sociologist I find that her intense gaze humanized people often at the margins of society, and that the same intense gaze created an unsettling portrait of “the normal” among us. She photographed the masks we wear, literal or imagined. Her work remains unsettling but, for many of us, deeply sympathetic. 4 Rexroth, Nancy. 1976. Iowa. Rochester, NY:Violet Press, p. 2. 5 Mark Power in Rexroth, Iowa, p. 4. 6 Verstesi, Janet. 2015. Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 7 Maggie and I completed the film The Longest Journey Begins after the students graduated; a thirty-six-minute distillation of thirty-some hours of footage. 8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwtRUJIkwLw&t=2269s 9 This is summarized in Hoerr. John. 1988. And the Wolf Finally Came. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 10 Ewald, Wendy, Katherine Hyde and Lisa Lord. 2011. Teaching Literacy and Justice with Photography: A Classroom Guide. New York: Teachers College Press. 11 Sutherland, Jean-Anne and Katryn Feltey. 2010. Cinematic Sociology. Beverly Hills: Sage. Expanded in second edition, 2012. 12 Shrum,Wesley and Greg Scott. 2016. Video Ethnography in Practice: Planning, Shooting and Editing for Social Analysis. Beverly Hills: Sage.

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Theory and method Ali, Erkan. 2018. Interpreting Visual Ethnography: Texts, Photos and the Construction of Sociological Meanings. London: Routledge. Bajorek, Jennifer. 2021. Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa. Durham: Duke University Press. Banks, Marcus and Howard Morphy, eds. 1997. Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven: Yale University Press. Banks, Marcus and Jay Ruby, eds. 2011. Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barthes, Roland. 1973. Mythologies. London: Paladin. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang. Bolton, Richard, ed. 1989. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge: MIT Press. Boonzajer Flaes, Robert and Douglas Harper, eds. 1993. Eyes Across the Water, vol. II: Essays on Visual Sociology and Anthropology. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis Press. Boucher, Michael L., ed. 2018. Participant Empowerment Through Photo Elicitation in Ethnographic Education Research: New Research and Approaches. New York: Springer. Collier, John, Jr. 1967. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. NewYork: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Second edition by John and Malcolm Collier, 1986, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. During, Simon, ed. 1993. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Edwards, Elizabeth, ed. 1992. Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. New Haven: Yale University Press. Emmison, Michael and Philip Smith. 2000. Researching the Visual. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Evans, Jessica and Stuart Hall. 1999. Visual Studies:The Reader. London: Sage. Ewald, Wendy, Katherine Hyde and Lisa Lord. 2011. Teaching Literacy and Justice with Photography: A Classroom Guide. New York: Teachers College Press. Faccioli, Patrizia and Douglas Harper, eds. 1998. Mondi Da Vedere: Verso una sociologia piu visuale. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Goffman, Erving. 1976. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper and Row. Green, Jonathan, ed. 1974. The Snapshot. Millertown, New York: Aperture. Grimshaw, Anna. 2001. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gubrium, Aline and Krista Harper. 2013. Participatory Visual and Digital Methods. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Gubrium, Aline, Krista Harper and Marty O’Tanez, eds. 2015. Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Action. London: Routledge. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. 2007. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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300 Select bibliography Harper, Douglas. 2012. Visual Sociology. London: Routledge. Hockings, Paul, ed. 1977. Principles of Visual Anthropology. The Hague: Mouton. Hodge, Robert and Gunther Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Knowles, Caroline and Paul Sweetman, eds. 2004. Picturing the Social Landscape. London: Routledge. Lassiter, Luke. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press. MacDougall, David. 2006. The Corporeal Image—Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton/ Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press. Maddow, Ben. 1977. Faces: A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography. Boston: New York Graphic Society. Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene De Lange and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community and Policy. Los Angeles: Sage. Mukerji, Chandra and Michael Schudson. 1991. Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nichols, Bill. 1981. Ideology and the Image. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pauwels, Luc, ed. 2005. Visual Cultures of Science. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press. Pauwels, Luc. 2015. Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pink, Sarah. 2006. The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses. London/New York: Routledge. Pink, Sarah. 2021. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. Fourth edition. London: Sage. Prosser,Jon,ed.1998. Image-based Research:A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers.London:Falmer Press. Redmon, David. 2019. Video Ethnography:Theory, Methods and Ethics. London: Taylor and Francis. Rogers, Fiona. 2017. Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now. London: Thames and Hudson. Rony, S. 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: NC: Duke University Press. Rose, Gillian. 2016. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Fourth edition. London: Sage. Rosenblum, Naomi. 1989. AWorld History of Photography. Revised edition. NewYork:Abbeville Press. Rosenblum, Naomi. 1994. A History of Women Photographers. New York: Abbeville. Rosenblum, Walter and Naomi and Alan Trackenberg. 1977. American and Lewis Hine. Millerton, New York: Aperture. Sebag, Joyce and Jean-Pierre Durand. 2022. Filmic Sociology:Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave. Sekula, Alan. 1984. Photography Against the Grain. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Shrum, Wesley and Greg Scott. 2016. Video Ethnography in Practice: Planning, Shooting and Editing for Social Analysis. Beverly Hills: Sage. Sobeiszek, Robert. 1988. The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. 1991. Photography at the Dock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Hill and Wang. Sontag Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton. Sutherland, Jean-Anne and Kathryn M. Felty, eds. 2012. Cinematic Sociology: Social Life in Film, second edition. Beverly Hills: Sage. Szarkowski, John. 1978. Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski, John. 1988. Winogrand: Figments from the Real World. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Macmillan. van Leeuwen, Theo and Carey Jewitt, eds. 2002. Handbook of Visual Analysis. Beverly Hills: Sage.

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Select bibliography 301 Vannini, Phillip, ed. 2020. The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video. New York: Routledge. Wagner, Jon, ed. 1978. Images of Information: Still Photography in the Social Sciences. Beverly Hills: Sage. Wolf, Daniel, ed. 1983. The American Space: Meaning in Nineteenth Century Landscape Photography. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Case studies Arnold, Jeanne E., Anthony P. Graesch, Elinor Ochs and Enzo Ragazzini. 2012. Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archeology Press, UCLA. Barbash, Ilisa. 2016. Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barndt, Deborah. 1980. Education and Social Change: A Photographic Study of Peru. Dubuque, IA: Kendall, Hunt. Barndt, Deborah. 2002. Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization of the Tomato Trail. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead. 1942. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourgois, Philippe and Jeff Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brandt, Bill. 1936. The English at Home. London: B.T. Batsford. Brandt, Bill. 1938. A Night in London. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Bunster, Ximena, Elsa Chaney and Ellan Young. 1989. Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru. New York: Bergin and Garvey. Chalfen, Richard. 1987. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press. Chalfen, Richard. 1991. Turning Leaves: The Photograph Collections of Two Japanese American Families. Albquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Danforth, Loring and Alexander Tsiaras. 1982. Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Duneier, Mitchell and Ovie Carter. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux. Feld, Steven. 2012. Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gardner, Robert and Karl Heider. 1968. Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age. New York: Random House. Goffman, Erving. 1979. Gender Advertisements. New York: Macmillan. Goldman, Robert and Stephen Papson. 1993. Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscapes of Television Advertising. London: Guilford. Goldman, Robert and Stephen Papson. 1998. Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh. Beverly Hills: Sage. Hagaman, Dianne. 1996. How I Learned not to be a Photojournalist. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Harper, Colter. 2023. Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Harper, Douglas. 1982. Good Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Translations: Good Company: Un sociologo tra I vagabondi. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1999 in Italian; Les Vagabonds du Nord-Ouest Américain. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998 in French; second edition, revised, Good Company: A Tramp Life. Boulder: Paradigm, 2006; third edition, revised, Good Company: A Tramp Life. London: Routledge, 2015.

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302 Select bibliography Harper, Douglas. 1987. Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harper, Douglas, ed. 1994. Cape Breton, 1952: The Photographic Vision of Timothy Asch. University of Southern California: Ethnographics Press. Harper, Douglas. 2001. Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harper, Douglas and Patrizia Faccioli. 2009. The Italian Way: Food and Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harper, Douglas and Francesco Mattioli. 2014. I Simboli del fascismo nella Roma del XXXI Secolo. Rome: Gruppo Editoriale Bonanno. Keil, Charles and Angeliki and Dick Blau. 2002. Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Knowles, Caroline and Douglas Harper. 2009. Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno and Emilie Hermant. 1998. Paris ville invisible. Paris: La Découverte. Lê, An-Le and Dan Leers. 2020. An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain. New York: Aperture. Levine, Robert. 1989. Images of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lutz, Catherine and Jane Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcello, Flavia. 2020. Giuseppe Pagano: Design for Social Change in Fascist Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Norfleet, Barbara. 1979. Champion Pig: Great Moments in Everyday Life. Boston: David Godine.. Norfleet, Barbara. 1986. All the Right People. Boston: New York Graphic Society. Norfleet, Barbara. 1993. Looking at Death. Boston: Godine. Norfleet, Barbara. 2001. When We Liked Ike: Looking for Postwar America. New York: Norton. Norfleet, Barbara. 2012. Faith, Hope and Charity: Social Reform and Photography, 1885–1910. Boston: Godine. Nye, David. Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric. Cambridge: MIT Press. Quinney, Richard. 1991. Journey to a Far Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Quinney, Richard. 1998. For the Time Being. Albany: State University Press of New York. Quinney, Richard. 2001. Borderland: A Midwest Journal. Madison,WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Quinney, Richard. 2006. Where Yet the Sweet Birds Sing. Madison, WI: Borderland Books. Quinney, Richard. 2008. Things Once Seen. Madison, WI: Borderland Books. Redmon, David. 2014. Beads, Bodies and Trash: Public Sex, Global Labor, and the Disposability of Mardi Gras. London: Taylor and Francis. Robinson, Henry Peach. 1869. The Pictorial Effect in Photography. London: Piper and Carter. Schwalbe, Michael. 2011. Smoke Damage. Madison, WI: Borderland Books. Schwartz, Dona. 1992. Waucoma Twilight: Generations of the Farm. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Schwartz, Dona. 2009. In the Kitchen. Heidelberg:Verlag. Spence, Jo. 1988. Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography. Seattle: The Real Comet Press. Strassler, Karen. 2010. Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Swiderski, Richard M. 1995. Eldoret: An African Poetics of Technology. Tuscan: University of Arizona Press. Vergara, Camilo José. 1999. American Ruins. New York: The Monacelli Press. Vergara, Camilo José. 2004. Subway Memories. New York: The Monacelli Press. Whyte, William H. 1980. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. New York: Project for Public Spaces. Whyte, William H. 1989. City: Rediscovering the Center. New York: Doubleday. Wiles, Sara. 2011. Arapaho Journeys: Photographs and Stories from the Wind River Reservation. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press.

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Select bibliography 303 Wiles, Sara. 2019. Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on The Wind River Reservation. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press . Worth, Sol and John Adair. 1972. Through Navajo Eyes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Visual documentaries Adelman, Bob and Susan Hall. 1970. On and Off the Street. New York:Viking. Adelman, Bob and Michael Harrington. 1981. The Next America: The Decline and Rise of the United States. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Agee, James and Walker Evans. 1939. Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Alinder, James, ed. 1981. Roy DeCarava, Photographs. Carmen, CA: Friends of Photography. Anderson, Robert, ed. 1973. Voices from Wounded Knee. Rooseveltown, NY: Akwesasne Notes. Arbus, Diane. 1972. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. Millertown, NY: Aperture Press. Bacon, David. 2006. Communities without Borders. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bacon, David. 2016. In the Fields of the North. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berger, John and Jean Mohr. 1967. A Fortunate Man:The Story of a Country Doctor. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Berger, John and Jean Mohr. 1975. A Seventh Man: Migrant workers in Europe. New York:Viking. Berger, John and Jean Mohr. 1982. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon. Brandt, Bill. 1984. London in the Thirties. New York: Pantheon. Brodie, Mike. 2013. A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers. Burrows, Larry. 2002. Larry Burrow’s Vietnam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Introduction by David Halberstam. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1952. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon & Schuster. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1979. Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer. Boston: NewYork Graphic Society. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1991. America in Passing. Boston: Bullfinch Press, Little Brown and Company. Clark, Larry. 1971. Tulsa. New York: Lustrum Press. Clark, Larry. 1983. Teenage Lust. Larry Clark (self-published). Coles, Robert and Alex Harris. 1973. The Old Ones of New Mexico. New York: New York Graphic Society. Coles, Robert and Alex Harris. 1977. Last and First Eskimos. Boston: New York Graphic Society. Coles, Robert and Nicholas Nixon. 1998. School. Boston: Little Brown. Copeland, Alan, ed. 1969. People’s Park. New York: Ballantine Books. Couch, Stanley and Deborah Willis. 2002. One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Couderc, Jean-Marie. 1996. A Village in France: Louis Clergeau’s Photographic Portrait of Daily Life in Pontlevoy, 1902–1938. New York: Harry Abrams. Davidson, Bruce. 1970. E100 Street. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Davidson, Bruce. 1986. Subway. New York: Aperture Foundation. DeCarava, Roy and Langston Hughes. 1955. The Sweet Flypaper of Life. NewYork: Simon & Schuster. Estrin, Mary Lloyd. 1979. To the Manor Born. New York: New York Graphic Society. Ewald, Wendy. 1985. Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing. Ewald, Wendy. 1992. Magic Eyes: Scenes from an Andean Girlhood. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Ewald, Wendy. 1996. I Dreamed I had a Girl in my Pocket: The Story of an Indian Village. New York: DoubleTake Books. Ewald, Wendy. 2005. American Alphabets. Zurich: Scalo. Ewing, William, ed. 1989. America Worked:The 1950’s Photographs of Dan Weiner. New York: Abrams. Fenton, David. 1971. Shots: Photographs from the Underground Press. New York: Douglas Book Corporation. Fink, Larry. 1984. Social Graces. New York: Aperture. Frank, Robert. 1969 (originally published 1959). The Americans. New York: Aperture.

304

304 Select bibliography Frazier, Danny Wilcox. 2009. Driftless: Photographs from Iowa. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2014. The Notion of Family. New York: Aperture. Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2017. And from the Coaltips A Tree Will Rise. Belgium: MACS Grand Hornu. Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2020. The Last Cruze. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2022. Flint is Family in Three Acts. Göttingen: Steidl. Fulton, Marianne. 1988. Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America. Boston: New York Graphic Society. Ganzel, Bill. 1984. Dust Bowl Dissent. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Goldberg, Jim. 1985. Rich and Poor. New York: Random House. Gowin, Emmet. 1992. Changing the Earth. New Haven:Yale University Press. Greenfield, Lauren. 2002. Girl Culture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Griffiths, Philip Jones. 1971. Vietnam Inc. New York: Collier. Hansberry, Lorraine. 1964. The Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hare, Chauncey. 1984. This Was Corporate America. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art. Harrington, Michael and Bob Aldeman. 1981. The Next America: The Decline and Rise of the United States. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Heartfield, John. 1977. Photomontages of the Nazi Period. New York: Universe Books. Hecke, Roswitha. 1982. Love Life: Scenes with Irene. New York: Grove Press. Hedgepeth, William and Dennis Stock. 1970. The Alternative: Communal life in New America. New York: Collier. Holdt, Jacob. 1985. American Pictures. Copenhagen: American Pictures Foundation. Jackson, Bruce. 1977. Killing Time: Life in the Arkansas Penitentiary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jackson, Bruce. 2009. Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jackson, Bruce. 2013. Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons. University of Texas Press. Jackson, Bruce and Diane Christian. 2011. In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Jones, Michael Owen. 1975. The Homemade Object and its Maker. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kerry, John and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. 1971. The New Soldier. New York: Collier Books. Klett, Mark, Ellen Manchester and JoAnn Verburg. 1984. Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Klett, Mark, Kyle Bajakian, William Fox, Michael Marshall , Toshi Ueshina and Byron Wolfe. 2004. Third Views, Second Sights, A Rephotographic Survey of the American West. Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Press. Klich, Kent. 1089. The Book of Beth. Millertown, NY: Aperture. Kurland, Justine. 2020. Girl Pictures. New York: Aperture. Kurland, Justine, 2021. Highway Kind. New York: Aperture. Lange, Dorothea and Paul S. Taylor. 1969. An American Exodus. New Haven:Yale University Press. Lesy, Michael. 1973. Wisconsin Death Trip. New York: Pantheon. Lesy, Michael. 1976. Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties. New York: Random House. Lesy, Michael. 1985. Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life 1860–1945. New York: Doubleday. Lesy, Michael. 1997. Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. New York: The New Press. Lesy, Michael. 2002. Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America. New York: Norton. Lesy, Michael. 2007. Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties. New York: W.W. Norton. Letinsky, L. 2000. Venus Inferred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyman, Christopher M. 1982. The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis. New York: Pantheon.

305

Select bibliography 305 Lynch, Dorothea and Eugene Richards. 1986. Exploding into Life. New York: Aperture. Lyon, Danny. 1971. Conversations with the Dead. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Lyon, Danny. 1988. Merci Gonaives: A Photographer’s Account of Haiti and the February Revolution. New York: Bleak Beauty Books. Lyon, Danny. 1992. Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Durham: Duke University Press. Lyon, Danny. 2003 (1967). B. New York: Chronicle Books. Maharidge, Dale and Michael Williamson. 1985. Journey to Nowhere. New York: Doubleday. Maharidge, Dale and Michael Williamson. 1990. And their Children After Them:The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Pantheon. Maharidge, Dale and Michael Williamson. 2008. Denison, Iowa. 2008. New York: Free Press. Mark, Mary Ellen. 1970. Ward 81. New York: Simon & Schuster. Mark, Mary Ellen. 1981. Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay Road. New York: Knopf. Mark, Mary Ellen. 1988. Streetwise. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mark, Mary Ellen. 2012. Prom. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Mark, Mary Ellen. 2015. Tiny: Streetwise Revisited. Millertown, NY: Aperture. Meiselas, Susan. 1975. Carnival Strippers. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Meiselas, Susan. 1981. Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979. New York: Pantheon. Meiselas, Susan. 1997. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meiselas, Susan, with Women in Refuge. 2017. A Room of their Own.West Bromwich, UK: Multistory. Menzel, Peter and Faith D’Aluisio. 2005. Hungry World: What the World Eats. New York: Random House. Menzel, Peter and Charles Mann. 1995. Material World, A Global Family Portrait. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Newhall, Nancy. 1975. P.H. Emerson. Millertown, NY: Aperture. Norman, Dorothy. 1960. Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer. New York: Aperture. Owens, Bill. 1972. Suburbia. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press. Owens, Bill. 1975. Our Kind of People. New York: Simon & Schuster. Phu, Thy. 2022. Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Quinney, Richard. 2015. Diary of a Camera. Madison: Borderland Books. Quinney, Richard. 2016. Sketches: A Childhood Remembered. Madison: Borderland Books. Rankin, Tom, ed. 1995. “Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre” Photographs of a River Life, by Maggie Sayre. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Rexroth, Nancy. 1976. Iowa. Rochester, NY:Violet Press. Riboud, Marc and Philippe Devillers. 1970. Inside North Vietnam. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Richards, Eugene. 1978. Dorchester Days. Wollaston, MA: Many Voices Press. Richards, Eugene. 1994. Americans We. New York: Aperture. Richards, Eugene. 1994. Cocaine True Cocaine Blue. New York: Aperture. Riis, Jacob A. 1971 (1890). How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Dover. Rogovin, Milton. 1985. The Forgotten Ones. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Salgado, Sabastiao. 2000. Migrations: Humanity in Transitions. Millertown, NY: Aperture. Sanders, Norman. 1977. At Home. New York: Morgan and Morgan. Shudakov, Grigory, Olga Suslova and Lilya Ukhtomskaya. 1983. Pioneers of Soviet Photography. London: Thames and Hudson. Simon, Peter and Raymond Mungo. 1972. Moving On Standing Still. New York: Grossman. Smith, Eugene and Aileen Smith. 1975. Minamata. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Smith, Ming. 2020. An Aperture Monograph. New York: Aperture. Spence, Jo. 1986. Putting Myself in the Picture: A Personal and Pphotographic Autobiography. London: Comet Press. Stehle, Bernard F. 1985. Incurably Romantic. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Steichen, Edward. 1955. The Family of Man. New York: MOMA.

306

306 Select bibliography Stummer, Helen M. 1994. No Easy Walk: Newark, 1980–1993. Temple: Temple University Press. Stryker, Roy Emerson and Nancy Wood. 1973. In this Proud Land: America 1935–43 as Seen in the FSA Photographs. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society. Turzak, Charles. 1933. Abraham Lincoln: A Biography in Woodcuts. Chicago. Waplington, Nick. 1991. Living Room. New York: Aperture. Warburton, Nigel, ed. 1993. Bill Brandt: Selected Texts and Bibliography. Oxford, UK: Clio Press. Whelan, Richard. 1985. Robert Capa: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wilson, L. 2000. Hutterites of Montana. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Winningham, Geoff. 1979. Rites of Fall: High School Football in Texas.Austin: University of Texas Press. Winogrand, Gary. 1977. Public Relations. Boston: New York Graphic Society. Winogrand, Gary. 1980. Stock Photographs:The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Index

Adair, John and Sol Worth 82 advertisements 6; Goffman’s study of 114, 215–219; public art as advertisements for communism 20; John Grady’s research 199; semiotic study of 214–220, 257 aerial photography and visual comparison 152–164; in archeological studies 162–164; comparing farms 151–158; and Google Earth 162; as representations of theoretical ideas 161; and surveillance 162; in work of Latoya Ruby Frazier 44, 163 Aich, Raj Sekhar 85, 86 AIZ 18–19 All the Right People 49, 270 American Ruins 187 The Americans 26, 27, 32, 194 Amsterdam 134, 135, 259, 289, 295 Another Way of Telling 262 Antonisse, Jasmijn (self-portraiture without self) 289–292 Apple computer store as symbol 218–220 Apted, Michael 191–192 Arapaho 8, 58, 76, 77, 79–80, 82 Arapaho Language and Culture Camp 80 Arapaho Language and Culture Commission 80 Arbus, Diane 262 architecture: the experience of fascist architecture 257; modern examples of fascist architecture 223, 225; and monumentalism 227; photographing famous buildings in decline 187; postindustrial 163; schools of architecture in totalitarian regimes 239 architectural style 6 archives: as embodiment of institutional power 193, 194; FSA 25; Getty Images 196–197; using local archives 187; of local photographers 199; and participatory curating 125; use in research 108 art: art history 9; art openings 29; control of art by artist 41; as dialogue 241; by homeless artists in Edmonton 245; photographs as fine arts 11, 13; teaching with art professor 265;

visualization of discarded cell phones as art 208 art (public) of the American Confederacy 232 Art Worlds 11 art worlds 14 Ault, Jim 89, 90 Bacon, David 33 Bajorek, Jennifer 33 Balinese Character 54–58, 67, 89 Ballif, Florine 86 Barthes, Roland: indexicality 212, 213; mythology 213, 216, 279; studium and punctum 86 Bateson, Gregory 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 67 Beatles 199 Becker, Howard 1, 11, 12; early workshops in visual sociology 266; studying art worlds 215, 232 Berger, John 40, 262 Besteman, Catherine, 125 Bologna 53, 114, 115, 116, 117, 170, 172, 173. 180, 182, 183, 184, 218, 219, 267 Booth, Charles 13 Boucher, Michael 117 Bourgois, Philippe 73–74 Brandt, Bill 20–24 Bricoleur 286 Brodie, Mike 32 Brooks, Charlotte 34–36, 110, 111 Bubley, Esther 34, 35, 36 Burrows, Larry 28–29 Cadence 91, 92 camera: defining appearances 3, 4; Diana camera 263; framing with a camera to express an idea 76; impact of negative size on image 118; influence on ethnography 51; Leica camera 54, 59, 62, 165; making visual inventories 107; Rolliflex camera 118, 191, 262, 263; rotating lens panoramic cameras 164; seeing what the eye cannot 15; technology and seeing 262; as ubiquitous on

308

308 Index cell phones 5; use by rising English middle class 13; using cameras to challenge taken for granted perspectives 272–273; using a hidden camera 62; using particular cameras to make particular statements 24 Camera Lucida 212 Canadian National Film Board 113, 193 Carnival Strippers 40 Carter, Ovie 74–75 Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) 10, 29 Chan Is Missing 97 Chronicle of a Summer 125 cigarette ads, comparison 213–217 Clark, Larry 27 Clergeau, Louis 45 coding photographs 114, 121, 167, 197–199, 293 Coles, Robert 11 collaborative visual research 6, 96–150; see also participatory research; photo elicitation; photovoice Collier, John 58, 97; origins of photo elicitation 98; use of aerial photography 151 communism symbol 11, 12, 17, 20, 225 comparing material realities via photography: farms using aerial photography 151–160; house interiors 164–165; neighborhoods in Hong Kong 165–167 Confederate monuments in the American south 6, 232 connotation and denotation 220–221 Copeland, Alan 29 course templates for visual sociology 265 critical sociology 9; and critical consciousness 123; critical criminology 200 cultural gatekeepers 10 cultural studies 10, 38, 66, 213; and cinematic sociology 293 culture 5; of addiction 90; American culture 26, 165; Arapaho culture 79, 83; Balinese Character 54–58; carnival strippers 40; as categories 50; centrality to anthropology 89; challenges of photographing culture 73–74; and contrasting realities 50–51; counterculture 180; culture shock 193; depiction of American culture in SONJ project 198; destruction of culture 193; dialogue about culture as empowering 287; documentary as expression of culture 9; of driving in Italy 278; how Earthlings create culture 273; food in Italian culture 195, 200; frontier culture 194; Girl Culture 37; and global issues 92; impact of war on Vietnam culture 33; judgment 134; with no land 45; material culture 91, 164; making movies from within the culture looking out 97; perspective from one’s own culture 135; political culture

29; popular culture 18, 77, 124, 199, 213; prison culture 30–32; queer culture 91; and reflexivity 52; rural culture 91; of the street 75; surface of a culture 84; taxonomic analysis of 64; as things 51; tramp culture 60, 65; visual culture 7; visual culture of a shop 97; visual description of national culture 9; “whole culture family album” 41 Cuneo, Sabina 84 Curtis, Edward 76, 77 Danforth, Loring 52 Davidson, Bruce 26 Davis, Jefferson 232 De Martino, Ernesto 82 Death Rituals of Rural Greece 52, 58 digital revolution 5 discourse analysis 192, 193 Divorce Italian Style 294 documentary photography: and visual sociology 1, 6–46; essentialist view 9; constructionalist view 10, 32; and FSA 24–25; and gendered lens 33–37; contemporary women documentarians 37–47 Down and Out in Paris and London 60 drawn images and visual sociology 205–207 Dreams on the Assembly Line 91, 92 Duneier, Mitch 74–75, 90 Durkheim, Émile 88; making anomie visual 150, 259; “seeing” mechanical and organic solidarity 259 E100 Street 26, 269 Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness (ECOHH) 245, 247 Edmonton Homeless Memorial statue 245–251; experiencing annual memorial for those who died homeless 255–257 The English at Home 21 Emerson, P. H. 11–14, 260 Ernie’s Sawmill 90 Estrin, Mary Lloyd 27, 269 ethics, and visual ethnography 51; as defined by IVSA 263–264 ethnography 4; “mosaic” ethnography 82 Evans, Walker and James Agee 191 Ewald, Wendy 122 Faccioli, Patrizia 114, 195 fascism: 16, 17, 18; in old urban art and design 220; 222, 223, 224 226, 227, 228, 230, 231; social documentary as propaganda 19; see also Mussolini, Benito fascist architecture and public art 221–231; angel carrying fasces; communism as a mad child destroying Italian culture 234; as

309

Index 309 discarded homoerotic sculpture 231, 257; as mosaic depicting triumphant Italian soldiers in Ethiopia 227; Mussolini with Italian history on his shoulders 221; as square city blocks, as memorials to the plunder of ancient Egypt 229; the square coliseum 232 fascist salute 231 Fellini, Federico 294 Fenton, David, and Liberation News Service 29 Farrell, Nell 33 Ferranto, Donna 37 film: bystander movie 5; Ethnografilm film festival 294–295; feature films 293; Navajo film project 83; as newsreels 16; portable sound-sync cameras to film 52; and social media 10; syntagmatic signs and film editing 215; teaching students to make films 294–295; as texts 293; Up 191; and visual sociology 89, 90–93 Film and Photo League 24 Firekeepers 83 Flaes, Rob Boonzajer 295–297 floating signifiers 223, 225, 227–228 Floyd, George 5 Foucault, Michel 192, 193 Frank, Robert 9, 26, 32, 33, 165, 166, 194, 262 Frazier, Darnella 5 Frazier, LaToya Ruby 8, 39, 42–45, 46, 163–164 freedom of expression 264 Freire, Paulo 123 French and Indian War 241–243 FSA (Farm Security Administration) 24, 25, 37; rephotographing FSA subjects 191 Futurism 226 Galileo, Galilei 164 Ganzel, Bill 191 gendered interaction in study of Italian ads 117 gendered lens 8, 33–38 gendered work roles on dairy farm 110–111 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 125 George Washington and Guyasuta sculptures 240–245; Washington and Guyasuta as equivalents 242; as props for tourist photos 242 The German Ideology 216 Girl Culture 37 Girl Model 92 Goffman, Erving 114 Gomorrah 294 Good Company 58–73 Gowin, Emmit 163 Grady, John 89, 90, 197–198 Greenfield, Laura 37 Griffith, Philip Jones 28

Grosz, George 18 Guiking, Ton 296 guilty symbols 232 Hadrian’s Wall, understanding from aerial perspective 163 Hall, Stuart 215, 216 Hansberry, Lorraine 29 Hare, Chauncey 29 Harper, Colter 112–113, 118 Harper, Suzan 207–208 Harris, Alex 11 Harris, Teenie 112–113, 119 Heartfield, John 18–19 Hines, Lewis 12, 13, 14, 16 hobo jungle 72 Holocaust memorials and public art 223 Homeless Memorial Sculpture (Edmonton) 245–255 Hungry Planet 45 Hyde, Katherine 122 ideal type represented as historical photo 195–197 ideology 215–216; Nazi ideology 223, 232; as second–level symbols 239, 240, 243, 244, 257 indexical relationship between image and reality 9 indexical signs 212, 220, 223, 238 informed consent 264 Italian fascist symbols 220–232 IVSA (International Visual Sociology Association) 1, 3, 264, 266, 297 jackrollers 73 Jackson, Bruce 11; 30–32 Jim Crow laws and Confederate memorials 232 Journal of Video Ethnography Journey to a Far Place 200 juxtaposition 21, 28, 91, 247 Kakebeeke, Karijn 96; discussing photovoice 126–147 Kaudinya, Narayan 86 Kilina, Elena 86 Knowles, Caroline 52, 165 Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History 41 Kurland, Justine 37 La Dolce Vita 294 The Land of Remorse 82 Lange, Dorothea 9, 10, 24 Lateran Accords 225–226 latifondi system in southern Italy 195, 197 Lê, An-My 28, 33

310

310 Index Lee, Robert E. 232 Lesy, Michael 194 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 191 Leung, Kei Yan 117 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 222 Leviathan 84 Levine, Robert 194–195 Libsohn, Sol 36, 118 LIFE (magazine) 27, 28, 197–198, 213–218 Lin, Maya 234–239 Literacy through Photography 287 LUCE 17 Lutz, Catherine and Jane Collins 198–199 Lynd, Robert and Helen 24–25 Lyon, Danny 29 Maharidge, Dale and Michael Williamson 191 Manel, Peter 32 Manovich, Lev 208 mapping and subjective interpretations of environments 208 Margolis, Eric 193–194 Mark, Mary Ellen 37 Mars, seen through Rover’s eyes 263 Marx, Karl 9, 11, 150; ideology 216; “seeing” dialectical materialism 259 Mattioli, Francesco 220 Mead, Margaret 50, 54–58 medical images as healing device 202–203 Meiselas, Susan 29, 38–41, 45 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 223 mental mapping (also “mind mapping”) 202, 203 Merriman, Molly 89, 91 mezzadria system in northern Italy 195, 196 McCarthy, Eugene 262 Milbrandt, Tara 245, 248–257 Mitchell, Doug 66 Mohr, Jean 262 mosaics as fascist art 227 movie 10, 16, 17, 18, 31, 54, 57, 76, 96, 125, 167, 177; mental movie 201; 204, 295; see also film multimodality 219 Museum of the Liberation of Rome 223 Museum of Modern Art 25, 38, 208 Mussolini, Benito 17, 220, 222, 223, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 272 Napoleon’s March on Moscow (graphic) National Geographic (magazine) 198–199 Native American Boarding Schools 193 naturalism 13 Nazi symbols 223 neorealism 294 Neptune (fountain) 171, 182

newsreel 17–18 Nicaragua 40 Nicaraguan revolution, portrayal of 40–41 A Night in London 21 The Notion of Family 41–45 Norfleet, Barbara 39–40, 194, 270 ontological turn in ethnography 4; in ethnographic film 84 Owens, Bill 26–27 Pagano, Giuseppe 225 participatory methods: curating 125; digital storytelling 125; filmmaking 6, 7, 52, 53, 83, 89, 125; mapping 125 Payne, Carol, visual repatriation 193 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 123 A Period of Juvenile Prosperity 32, 33 perspective and photographic meaning 150–151, 155–161 phenomenology: experiencing fascist designed neighborhood 226; experiencing public art 245; 254–256, 257; making a photograph 262 Pictures from a Revolution 41 photo elicitation 6; bracketing perception in interviews 118; as craft or science 121; overview 96; role of photographic expertise 118–119; used in cross cultural research 117; used in study of Japanese farmers’ cultural knowledge 118; as used in Working Knowledge 96–107; using archival sources 108–113; used in study of a Dutch innercity neighborhood 121, 122 photograph: and bullying 264; evolution of meaning over time 262; influence of camera type 262–263; linked as narratives 262; organizing in a digital age 272; the right to photograph in public spaces 32, 51 photographic knowledge and institutional power 193 photographic meaning as true and constructed 161–162 photographing: cruelty and injustice 3; social control 259; subjectivity 263; taken-forgranted constructions of reality 203–205 photomontage 18–19 photovoice 6; in action research in Malawi 127–132; and empowerment 144; integration with feminist methods 124; kinds of photos made in photovoice research 124; origins in Through Navajo Eyes film project 83, 122; standardization of the method 123, 124; use in a range of disciplines 123; using to create understanding between immigrants and residents in Holland 132–147 Phu, Thy 33

31

Index 311 Piazza Maggiore 170–184 pictorialism 13 Pink, Sarah 67, 204 Point of View (sculpture) 240–245 politics of cultural extermination 194 Portraits and Dreams 122 postindustrial ruins 272 poverty: as part of African landscape 136; Appalachian 122; critique of photographing poverty 10; difficulty of photographing poverty 3; and discourse 192; Italian poverty after World War II 293; historical roots of Italian poverty 195; photographing across class lines 26; photographing Depressionera poverty 191; photographing poverty in early industrial cities 15–16; photographing poverty and wealth in London 21; photographing urban poverty 187, 192; and reservation life 82; and the rust belt 271 Prosser, Jon 202 public art: fascist mosaics 220; remembering the Holocaust 223; rewriting history with public art 241–244; social process behind creation 239, 257; strategies for studying 213, 233; and syntactic signs 215; on university campuses 232 “punctum” 80, 212, 213 Putting Myself in the Picture 38 Quinn, Frankie: humanist documentary tradition 86 Quinney, Richard 200–201 Ragazzi, Rosella 83 Ragazzini, Enzo 165 Rankin, Tom 10 rationalism 228 Redman, David and Ashley Sabin 89, 92 reflexivity 5, 52, 60, 58; as experienced in tramp research 66–68; and filmic ethnography 92, 287; in research on homelessness 73–74; 86, 87, 88 reliability and visual sociology 1 rephotography 186–191 Rexroth, Nancy 263–264 Richards, Eugene 26 Riefenstahl, Leni 37 Rieger, Jon 6, 186–187, 188–190 Righteous Dopefiend 73–74 Riis, Jacob 13; 14–16 Robinson, Henry Peach 13 Rodchenko, Alexander 275 Rogers, Fiona 37 Rogovin, Milton 191, 262 Rome: Open City 294 A Room of Their Own 41 Rose, Gillian 8, 66–67, 192, 193, 215, 216

Rosenblum, Naomi 9, 14, 37 Rosler, Martha 9, 10 Rossellini, Roberto 294 Rouch, Jean 52; with Edgar Morin 125 ruin porn 272 Sander, August 20 Sanders, Norman 26 Saviano, Roberto 294 Sayre, Maggie Lee 10 Sebag, Joyce and Jean-Paul Durand 89, 91–92 seeing: as socially constructed 3; like a Rover 263; seeing social theory 259 Sekula, Allan 193 self-portrait without self semiotics 213–257; analogical signs 239; codes 215; conventions of war memorials 236; iconic sign 214, 219, 239, 243; indexical sign 214, 219, 220, 239; meta signs 219; mixing signs 218; sign 214, 216, 217; signified 214, 216, 217; signifier 214, 216, 217; stacked signs and mythology 215, 239; symbolic sign 214, 215, 220, 239; syntagmatic sign 214, 215, 219, 220; teaching visual sociology through semiotics 279–282 Seven-Up 191–192 Schonberg, Jeff 73–74 Scott, Greg 89–91, 93, 294 Scruggs, Jan 237–239 shooting scripts 24–25 Shrum, Wesley 294 Sidewalk 74–75 Simon, Peter 27 Smith, Ming 38 Smith, W. Eugene 9, 29 social class 9; density of neighborhoods by social class 269; and individual change 192; juxtaposition in Bill Brandt photos 21, 24; photographing impact on interaction 266; seeing social class historically 273; shooting scripts 24, 25; visual indicators of 98; social class comparatively; visual studies of 27 social media 10 social movements 29 sociology: evolution from European and male to inclusive 259; and photography 1; as a progressive social movement 1 sociology of art 233, 225, 237–239; see also Howard Baker Soloman-Godeau, Abigail 9 SONJ (Standard Oil of New Jersey photo archive) 8, 35–37, 108 Sontag, Susan 9, 37 Spence, Jo 38 Spradley, Jim 50 “stadium” 213

312

312 Index Steichen, Edward “Family of Man” (photo exhibition and book) 26 Steiger, Ricabeth 202–206 Steiglitz, Alfred 200 Stein, Sally 9 Stryker, Roy 24–25, 34, 74, 108, 112 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 30 subjectivity, communicating with photographs 200–204 Suburbia 27 surrealism, and Bill Brandt 23 Swiderski, Richard 205–205 Through Navajo Eyes 82–83 Tillman, Alexandra 89 To the Manor Born 269 tramp 60, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 97 transitions from health to illness and death 201–202 Tsiaras, Alexander 52 Uhl, Magali and narrative rephotography 192 Unite the Right (alt right demonstration) 232 validity and visual sociology 1 Vergara, Camily Jose and rephotography 187–191 Vertesi, Janet 263 Vietnam Veterans Memorial 233–240 Vietnam Vets against the War (protest) 261 Vietnam War: portrayal 27–29; visual deconstruction of a protest photo 260–262 visual anthropology 54, 58, 67, 82, 89, 151, 204 Visual Anthropology 58, 97 visual comparison: neighborhoods 269–271; social stratification 271 visual data 6; from aerial photographs 153–158; from historical artifacts 184–186 visual ethnography 5; and visual sociology 50–95; of prisons 30–32; of rail tramps 58–73; of male homelessness 74; of itinerant used book sellers 74–76; of Arapaho reservation life 76–82; of Easter rituals near Naples 84; of human/animal interaction in a Ganges estuary 85–86; of clothes worn by Burmese women living in Thailand 86; of life in the border region between India and Pakistan 86; of physical walls and boundaries that divide Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast 86–87; of cubical shelters in Japan 87; of depression 87–89; and filmic sociology 89–93; of heroin injectors 90; and friendship in the research process 106; critiques of contemporary

studies 107; using archival photographs 108–113; studying public ads cross culturally 114–116; perceptions of sexuality 117; questions about photographic procedures 118–120; study of a Dutch inner city neighborhood 120–121 Visual Ethnography (journal) 83–89 visual ideal types 195–197 visual sociology: adding visual assignments to existing courses 267; as artistic expression 259; early history and use of film 266; impact of digital revolution 269; as an invitation to enlightened seeing 1; as a means of making research collaborative 6; organizing lectures visually 269; quantitative study of symbol recognition 223–224; relationship to documentary photography 8–49; self-portraiture without self 288–292; as study of symbols 6; teaching visual sociology, projects and assignments 264–266, 273; teaching by making a film 295; teaching photo elicitation via role playing 286; teaching students to photograph the obvious 285; teaching theory with feature films 293; using feature films as texts 293; workshops 267–268 Visual Studies Workshop 266 visual study of the social life of a city 167–170, 277–278 visual triangulation 152 visual questionnaire 223–225 visualization 208 Wang, Caroline 123–125 wealth: photographing extremes of poverty and wealth 271 Weber, Max, verstehen and photo elicitation 99; forms of authority 259; visualizing “rationalization” 150 Whyte, William H. 167–170 Wiles, Sara 8, 58, 76–82 Willie 103, 106–109, 118, 206, 207 Wisconsin Death Trip 194 Winogrand, Gary 29 Wiseman, Fred 90 women photographers 37–45; see also “the gendered lens” Working Knowledge 99–105, 206–207, 286 Worth Sol and John Adair 122 Yuk-Fai, Jason, visual autoethnography 87–89 Yuste, Mary Lopez 86 Zen master of junk 97 Zoom 4, 5