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Visible Voices Changing Lives

Visible Voices Changing Lives

This film tells the story of the origins of Visible Voice as a small project working with remote village communities in Kyrgyzstan Central Asia. The film provides an insight into life in two remote communities in Kyrgyzstan and includes extracts from films made by villagers.

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The Minstrel

The Minstrel

This documentary has been created as part of the Digital Anthropology (MSc) program at UCL and has been nominated one of the three best films in the autumn/winter class in 2012.

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Emoji Translations

Emoji Translations

“Tech analysts estimate that over six billion emojis are sent each day.” It is safe to say that emojis have a big involvement in the way we visually communicate. Just as all language and communication requires a certain level of translation and interpretation this is also true for emojis. I have a fun story to illustrate how I first became aware of this reality.

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Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class

Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class

In this book I bring together visual work on urban communities that I had been doing long before I had even heard of Visual Sociology, as well as after my encounters with the International Visual Sociology Association. As John Grady might have phrased it — almost 50 years of doing urban sociology visually.

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News/updates

Our virtual conference begins Monday July 5th at 9:00 am EDT!

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Here we have details of how to log into the conference itself along with a promo video.

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New Anticolonialism & Antiracism (ACAR) Awards Program

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The IVSA is pleased to announce a new awards program for outstanding work in advancing Anticolonial & Antiracist (ACAR) goals and principles. The new program will offer two related awards: one for progressive advocacy and visual research (PAVR) and one for visual activism (VA). The ACAR awards are in addition to existing Rieger and Prosser award programs that are also administered by the IVSA.

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  • 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

  • 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

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

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

    Lisa Kristine

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

    Steve Harp

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

    Steve Harp

  • 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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    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

  • 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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    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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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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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