Matrimony

This observational ethnographic film (“ethnografilm”) chronicles the daily lives of Diablo Steve and Sapphire Pam, a homeless and heroin-dependent married couple.

Conscious Sports Fan

ERIC SENCINDIVER With an emphasis on versatility, this collection of t-shirts has been designed to be All-purpose for any and every sports fan. Today’s sports fan is an interesting character as they relate to today’s globally connected world. Fans create alliances with certain sports clubs/teams for a wide variety of reasons.

Loud and Proud. Listening to the English Defence League

Over the last 2 years, Hilary Pilkington has been conducting (overt) ethnographic research with a number of divisions of the English Defence League under the auspices of the MYPLACE project. As part of this research she and the filmmaker – Dmitry Omelchenko obtained a visual material completed into film.

Hear Every Voice

Hear Every Voice: NYC and the National Park Service, documentary by Stephen Ogumah was created in summer of 2009. This film documents a civic engagement project produced in partnership with Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and Gateway National Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service.

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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

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

    Steve Harp

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

    James Reston

  • 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

  • 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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    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

  • 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

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

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

    Lisa Kristine

  • 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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    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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    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

  • 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

#Visualsociology

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