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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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Luban

Luban

The film will tell about several search teams currently working in the Leningrad region, whose purpose is to find, identify and further bury the remains of WWII combatants.

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Symbology of Interculturalism. Urban Performance

Symbology of Interculturalism. Urban Performance

Symbology of Interculturalism is a performance that takes place in the city of Guayaquil in an attempt to construct knowledge together with its people.

The performance is supported by Intercultural Cardboard Press, Community Art Practices Lab with the intention to conduct interdisciplinary research upon interculturalism as a research topic.

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Visual Methods at the Crossroads

Visual Methods at the Crossroads

Visual methods are at the crossroads. They can remain in a niche or move into the mainstream by also addressing all people using visual materials. In the social sciences, visual methods encompass photography, video, and graphic representations.

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News/updates

VISUAL STUDIES AGAINST RACISM COVER IMAGES

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Image aligned to the rightThe Visual Studies Editorial Team and the International Visual Sociology Association strongly condemn and oppose systems, institutions, and organisations that maintain or extend any and all forms of white supremacy and colonial and racist violence. As part of our commitment to take action, we recently held an open call for cover image submissions on the theme of Anti-Racism. We received many powerful and thoughtful images, and it was very difficult for the Editorial Team to make a final decision. We are delighted to announce that Olivia Howitt’s “BLM LDN DAY 1, 2020” will feature on the cover of the next issue of Visual Studies.

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IVSA ELECTIONS: CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

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The IVSA is governed by its Executive Board, which consists of President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Technology Advisor, Visual Studies Editor, Graduate Student Representative, and nine elected Board Members. The Editor, Technology Advisor, and Graduate Student Representative are nominated by the President and ratified by the Executive Board.

The following IVSA Executive Board positions are now open for nominations:

President
Vice President
3 Board members, regular term (3 years)

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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

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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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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

    Bertolt Brecht

  • 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

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

    James Reston

  • 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

  • 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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    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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    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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    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

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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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#Visualsociology

IVSA

Written on

IVSA elections coming up! Nominations and self-nominations accepted until 16 October 2020. Find more info on: visualsociology.org/?p=6219 #visualsociology @the_u_p_a @social_visual @DrKarenOBrien @drejmilne @Mikkong1 @gabydavid

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