IVSA Elections

On behalf of the IVSA, I would like to thank everyone who stood for a position in our recent elections to the IVSA Board. Although not everyone could be successful, we very much appreciate the commitment that members have shown towards the work of the IVSA. We also want to thank all our members who took the time to vote.

IVSA Montreal Conference Survey Report

Here is a short summary of the survey we circulated among the 2017 conference participants along with some reflections. Thanks to all those who found the time to respond to the survey. We are taking this very useful feedback into account in the planning of our next conference – co-hosted by the University of Paris-Saclay and the University of Evry, in France, June 25-28, 2018.

We’re surrounded by images. What do they mean?

In a society exploding with new media and constant communication, visuals are often able to say more than words.

The field of visual sociology researches and dissects the effect of images. From June 19 to 22, some 300 scholars from around the world will be coming to Concordia for the 35th International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) Conference.

  • If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.

    Salman Rushdie

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    Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

    William S. Burroughs

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    If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.

    James Reston

  • You try your hardest to give people their space, but at moments you know you’re capturing their image in ways they may or may not be okay with. It’s that rocking back and forth between respect and betrayal that I feel like is at the heart of the film.

    Kirsten Johnson

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    The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

    Pierre Bourdieu

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    Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

    Bertolt Brecht

  • So it is my firm belief, that if you want nowadays, to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words.

    Vilém Flusser

  • I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

    Errol Morris

  • Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way

    Howard Becker

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    One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.

    Lisa Kristine

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    There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.

    Werner Herzog

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    The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

    Zygmunt Bauman

  • We never really know what’s around the corner when we’re filming – what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

    Barbara Kopple

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    For any picture, ask yourself what question or questions it might be answering. Since the picture could answer many, questions, we can decide what question we are interested in.

    Howard Becker

  • Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t develop an adequate language for adequate images.

    Werner Herzog

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    Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

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    Every photograph promises more than it delivers and delivers more than it intended.

    Steve Harp

  • Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

    George Lucas

  • Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

    Henry Rollins

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