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Created: March 6, 2004
Latest Update: March 6, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Analysis and Use of Visual Data

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, March 2004.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This piece was prompted by an article in the Forward by Michael Bronski: Searching for Couches Real and Metaphoric Bronski tells the story of a young Jewish woman, Pearl Gluck, who has grown away from the orthodox Jewish roots of her family's past and finds that a barrier to her present relationship with her father.

It's not enough to just see the objects and "things" with which we live. We need to find ways to put them into arrangements in which they can bring our memories and our dreams into frequent awareness, for these are the infrastructure of support on which we depend when the people we love and who love us are not near enough to make that support evident and ever-present.

This, for me, is what visual sociology is about. Pearl went in search of and found the couch her father remembered. But she also found a way to use the video camera her father had given her before she left for Hungary to search for the couch. Bronski describes her video thus:

"Gluck has structured the film around two trips to Hungary: The first is her search for the divan and her quest to meet, for the first time, her parents' relatives who survived the Holocaust; the second is a pilgrimage she takes with her father a year later to visit the burial sites of the founders of chasidism ("twenty grave sites, thousands of miles, seven days"). It is on this frame (to stretch the metaphor thin) that Gluck adds the cloth textures and the cushions of interviews with friends — women and men who left chasidic communities and are now in the process of creating lives that fuse aspects of their past with interests that sustain their current spiritual and psychic growth."

Could you look around your own family and locate furnishings that provide history and links from your family's past to the present? Could you send each other photos and stories even if you can't cart the furniture around for memories?

We are so accustomed to see history as a story in a text, that we neglect to recognize the visual history all around us.

Discussion Questions

1. Look around the place where you live, even if that's under a bridge. Find something that brings alive memories you have of this place and its location in your life history.

   Example: I live under a bridge. I built a cardboard house and covered it with bright colored cloth. It's warm, even hot, here all the time. The house under the bridge always has a breeze, and there's no one there to tell me that I have to smile all the time. The ocean is near; the breeze is good, I smile to myself. I will always remember the freedom of my house under the bridge, and that it was mine, something I made, something that protected me, something that let me be me.

   Now that's a fictional account. But "things" do have an importance for us. I couldn't resist making color and making things part of my fictional memory. But that tells you much about me, doesn't it? I'll bet if you could see my house under the bridge, you would know something of me.