The Liquid Supermarket (Midden)

The video is a journey through Boeng Trabaek channel, a sewage and storm water drain which runs through south end of the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Filmed and edited by Dr Emit Snake-Beings over the two months spent crossing ‘stink canal’ on a daily basis, whilst staying in the city January – February 2019.

La sociologie comme elle s’apprend

La sociologie comme elle s’apprend” is the filmic narrative of a learning process—both of a discipline (with its scientific norms, analytic frames and methods) and of critical thinking on the social. Emphasizing the articulation between the international circulation of sociological theories and the localised reality of fieldwork in a provincial town in Russia, this documentary follows Russian students engaged in a French curriculum at the State Universities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg during a week of fieldwork internship. While most of these students never learned sociology or ethnography before, this internship, which is organised every year, is always very intensive. During a full week, we have meetings after meetings to talk about students’ difficulties in the field and help them formulating research questions. My job can also imply joining them in the field to support them and negotiate interviews if needed. And when they come back, late in the evening, after a day of observations and interviews, we talk about their results even if that is in the middle of the night. This is generally a 19/24h mentoring, as exhausting as it is stimulating.

My book was published in March 2019 by Palgrave MacMillan. The book includes photographs by myself, in addition to work from Ed Ruscha, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach, Roy Arden, Wout Berger, Mikael Levin. An eclectic book that will make a critical contribution to other disciplines beyond visual sociology.

Blooming sunflowers on stone walls, mosaic flowers and swimming carps on stairs, wing of lost angel next to a house—these beautiful pictures of Ihwa Mural Village initially lured me into visiting. On my actual visit, however, it was not the cute little paintings on the wall that greeted me but aggressive messages painted in a violent red color by an angry villager— “The Rights to Rest”; “We Are Not Monkeys in the Cage”.

‘Image making is often considered one
of the unique and quintessential competences
of Homo sapiens sapiens, differentiating
the subspecies, for example, from H. sapiens
neanderthalenis and from earlier hominds.’

From Whitney Davis’ paper ‘The Origins of Image Making’
[Davis, 1986, Jun., Vol. 27, No. 3, p. 193.]

The nineteenth-century is characterised by an energy for, and an enthusiasm about, the representational which has outstripped anything before, or indeed since, in its general range and basic inventiveness. During a handful of decades the representational was, to an unprecedented degree, mechanised, democratised, popularised, and humanised. For instance, the mechanisation of the representational is most readily pegged out between markers such as the discovery of photography in the 1830’s; the first recording of sound in 1877; and the invention of wireless and cinematography in the 1890’s.[i]

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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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

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

    Lisa Kristine

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

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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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    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

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

    Steve Harp

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

    Bertolt Brecht

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

    James Reston

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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

#Visualsociology

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