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The Art of Not Freaking Out

The Art of Not Freaking Out

On the first Friday of every month the American Media goes nuts! What they do is as predictable as clock work and just about as insightful. Their exercise in panic wouldn’t be such a big deal except that it tends to freak out Wall Street and unnecessarily confuses the American public.

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Teaching Urban Documentaries, Part II

Teaching Urban Documentaries, Part II

In Part I, I discussed documentary pedagogy and Richard Broadman’s Brownsville Black and White (2000) and offered that we consider the strengths and weaknesses of the medium and individual products. This part concerns Bullfrog Films four-part environmental series Edens Lost and Found, Biophilic Design, and I.M. PEI: Building China Modern.

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Seeing How Black Lives Matter in a Super-Gentrified Neighborhood

Seeing How Black Lives Matter in a Super-Gentrified Neighborhood

Although there are many ways that neighborhoods such as my own, often described as Super-, or otherwise Gentrified (Halasz 2018). the fact remains that many of its residents fall on the liberal and left-leaning spectrum of American politics. It is also a place that has been an area accurately described as exhibiting Super Diversity (Vertovec 2007). Although the area is “diverse,” People of Color, mostly a diverse collection of Latino residents, tend to dominate in sections that are slowly undergoing displacement pressures as the rapid construction of high-rise “luxury” apartments continues unabated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Youth of Mahachkala

Youth of Mahachkala

This film was made in frames of the sociological research project (Russian Scientific Foundation) “Fields of positive interethnic interactions and youth cultural scenes in the Russian cities”.

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News/updates

Call for Expressions of Interest in Conducting Regional Visual Ethics Workshops

Application deadline: March 31

The International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) is launching an open-ended selection procedure to create a network of regional workshops or discussion groups that will become an arena for exchanging thoughts and ideas on research ethics in visual studies, which will ideally set the path toward a revised Code of Research Ethics, originally drawn up in 2009.

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IVSA Elections 2023

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.
We can now reveal the results of the vote.

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  • 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

  • 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

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

  • 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

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

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

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

    Bertolt Brecht

  • 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

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

    James Reston

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

    Lisa Kristine

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