Gaby David

Gaby David
IVSA Board Member

I am a researcher and university lecturer. I hold a PhD in visual sociology from the Center for Art History and Theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (EHESS), a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Paris 8 and Master’s degree in teaching English as a Foreign Language (ToEFL).

As a researcher, I am an active member of the “Mobile Creation” group from IRCAV, Institute for Film and Audiovisual Research at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Additionally, as an anglisist, I am affiliated to TransCrit, Transferts critiques anglophones, University of Paris 8. And, after so many years in IVSA, I am now very happy to be part of the executive board.

I have participated in several international conferences, contributed to numerous books and published articles in specialised academic journals both in English and French. I have been teaching for more than 20 years (in the private sector) and for more than 10 years in various departments and universities in Paris.

My courses are participatory and interdisciplinary ones, and they deal with topics intrinsic to visuality and pop culture. With an approach at the intersection of sociology of culture and mobile culture, I study and analyze the construction of meaning mainly through the vernacular uses and practices of online images.

I have lived in Uruguay, USA, Israel and France; been an artist, an English teacher, a ceramist and therefore define myself as multidisciplinary, polyglot and multiculturalist open person.

Find more about my research.

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  • 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

  • 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

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

    Lisa Kristine

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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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    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

  • 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

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

    Bertolt Brecht

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

    William S. Burroughs

  • 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

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

    Steve Harp

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

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