‘Domestic Space’ - Turner Sims Auditorium, 9.15am to 11.00am

Lydia Martens, Matt Watson

Doing the Dirty Work: Piloting Video Recording in the Kitchen

This paper reports on the use of video recording as part of an ethnographic investigation into practices and routines in domestic kitchens. There has been much speculation about declining standards in kitchen work, especially in the wake of food scares related to food poisoning in recent years, yet detailed evidence in support of these claims is hard to find. Generating such information is not straightforward, as domestic practices are mostly routine in character and those engaging in them do not think or talk about those activities readily. The research on which we draw in this paper aims to counter this reticence through an innovative ethnographic approach, using case studies of 6 households at different stages of the life course. The aim is to develop a comprehensive picture of kitchen activities situated within specific household contexts. Video recording has been piloted in this project as a technique for recording practices and as a tool for getting participants to talk about why and how they do kitchen activities.

In this paper, we shall reflect on the practical aspects of our video research and discuss the role of the video recorder & video recordings in the research process. At the time of writing this abstract, recording is about to commence, and we intend to use two recording technologies: a portable multimedia recorder and a CCTV set-up. This will allow different types of recordings to be made: footage generated by the participants, by the researcher and by the remote CCTV system. We shall report on how the 'dirty work' of recording scenes of a private domestic nature, where one of the central emphases is on cleaning and ordering activities, is received by those participating in the research. We report on the nature of researcher-participant interactions in relation to the three ways in which the video technology is used. We shall further comment on how footage generated by participants compares with footage generated by the researcher and the CCTV system.

Dona Schwartz

Someone's in the Kitchen with Dona: An Exploration of Domestic Continuity and Change

The kitchen is a singularly important locale in many homes.  In addition to functioning as the point of storage, production, distribution and often, of the consumption of food, it also provides a nexus point for familial interaction.  The kitchen can also be an important gathering place for family, friends and acquaintances.  This presentation offers a longitudinal case study of family activities occurring in the investigator’s kitchen, as seen through the lens of her own first-person depiction.  The images, produced over the course of the past 15 years, reveal intergenerational continuities and social changes as well as familial interpersonal dynamics. The study exemplifies a valuable methodological approach used by visual sociologists, visual researchers and artists alike.

Carol Revitt

‘Painting Out’ Others: The Appropriation and Consumption of Personal Space in the Home

The appropriation of space within the home plays an important role in the construction of identities, indeed the home can be perceived as an extension of the self. However the home is also the locus of intimate and familial relationships therefore this paper argues that there is also an emotional element to the appropriation of domestic space. It draws upon a case study of 40 different households from a variety of housing types. Consumption of domestic space is considered from the perspective of all the household members using analysis of photo-elicitation interviews or in the case of children their own drawings. The paper is concerned with the way that colonisation and appropriation of space is used to facilitate, reinforce and negotiate changes in significant relationships at different points in the lifecycle (defined by conjugal states and the presence or absence of children). For example the paper looks at the effect of partners joining or leaving the home and the impact of retirement. Its focus is therefore upon the emotional value rather than the identity value of the appropriation of domestic space.

Patrick Flynn

Visions of Architects and Visionary Architects

Why do architects present themselves visually as they do? As part of a construction team with engineers, quantity surveyors etc, all of whom dress like other professions such as accountants, architects seem to dress to differ. They also behave differently – there is a certain ‘artistic temperament’ in evidence in how they interact with others, discuss their work, and receive criticism, which is different to the rest of the team. In photographs of themselves, particularly in photographs with buildings which they have designed, they come across as thoughtful, intellectual, even moody. They appear more as rock stars than as professionals, and seem to have egos to match. I will consider photographs of architects (including myself) and compare them to those of others in the construction industry, such as quantity surveyors, to define how exactly architects represent themselves.

It is not just how architects present themselves that interest me, but why. As a lecturer in architecture I will evaluate the influence of the education system on how architects develop this artistic temperament and self-image, with particular reference to the star system. I will also suggest how the low wages of architects may lead to this artistic complex, as success in the field has to be measured by means other than monetary ones, and a different value system emerges, based on self-presentation and image.  

‘Methodological Issues I’ - Turner Sims Green Room, 9.15 am to 11.00 am

Juliette Hossenlopp

The Interface between Image-Makers and Social Anthropologists

French sociologists have been trying to deal with image-based material since the 1960's. The fact that sociologists are giving more and more importance to visual communication in their research necessarily implies that the storage of films is on the increase. The question of the technical ability of researchers and the legitimacy of taking pictures in the field of social studies is still pertinent. That is why attempts have been made to integrate the handling of recording tools into social science programmes in universities. It is the responsibility of authorities such as the CNC to plan and select the part of production devoted to preservation of images. In the digital age, the first processing step to preserve films is classification i.e. distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction films. So how can an image producer promote visual sociology? Television seems to encourage cooperation between specialists affiliated with both fields. The French film industry still exhibits and favours essays and especially formal essays. The integrity of social visual work could be valorised as a whole only in the image-bank applications. Would it not now be appropriate to focus on the resources of archives documents rather than participate to this spending of filmstrips? The production of data bases, their organisation and availability to potential users seems to us to be the only way to build up a real network of visual information and to improve quality. This would increase exchange and more accurate developments between users and producers on one hand and the authorities and sociologists on the other.

Suzan Harper

Visual Sociology and Multi-Media: Case Studies

This paper examines the use of multimedia in visual social science, arguing that the enormous promise of these continually developing technologies have been scantly realized. My paper focuses on CD or DVD based & ‘interactive’ (generally created through Director or similar authoring programs).  The paper is intended to inform visually oriented social scientists of growing

potential in multimedia, and to point out practical as well as theoretical challenges and opportunities. As a multimedia teacher and practitioner, my focus in on practical problem solving as well as design considerations relevant to visual social science.  I will use the following examples of multimedia visual sociology as case studies in my paper: a. The University of Southern California (Anthropology) CD production of Tim Asch and Napolean Chagnon's Ethnographic Film studies of the Yanomamo; b. Dianne Hagaman's visual hypertext which describes an interpersonal relationship; c. Jean Mohr's CD archive of his career as a documentary photographer; d. The Visual Sociology CD of Ricabeth Steiger's impressionistic ethnography of a train ride in Switzerland. The four case studies are meant

to show not only what can be done, but how it can be done. The paper describes challenges in such areas as software expertise, teamwork, project management and other nuts and bolts aspects of

multimedia development, and compares them to the production of other forms of media development; such as the illustrated book or video.

Heather Delday

Genescapes: Visualisation and Value Finding

This paper develops the understanding of visualization by locating art within a matrix of other disciplines. Using a particular methodology the artist extends our current understanding of visuality within genetics. This position is in relation to the making of scientific information ‘visible’ and, the use of information graphics to explain science to people requiring a consultation.

This paper argues that locating art practice within a specific social context (e.g. within genetics), art as a process of making visible, is understood as an exploration of human values.

The methodology is based on dialogue between the artist and a group of clinical geneticists centred around visual material (e.g. prints, drawings, photographs). The material is developmental in the sense that it is not finalised artwork, and is shaped through processes of exchange. For example a series of black and white photographs were made by the artist showing boxes placed in different physical locations. The boxes were made from autoradiograms - a form of DNA imaging (see for example ‘Genescape 3’, ‘Genescape 18’, ‘Genescape 21’).  The photographs evoked notions of pattern, repetition, scales, chiaroscuro and ambiguities of ‘real’ and ‘abstraction’. The artistic intention of showing these was to stimulate thought in terms of discovering specific individual interests within the field of genetics as well as seeing/hearing aesthetic preferences.

What became evident in the dialogue were the different professional and personal values of the individual (geneticist) as well as differences and synergies between clinical geneticists and artist. The next stage was to develop the artwork in response to what was revealed.

The understanding that visual thinking, or the images assigned to ideas have a reciprocal influence on the ideas themselves underpins the thinking in this method of working. The methodology – a shared exploration (between artist and scientist) of visual/verbal communication makes it possible to extend the language (tools and forms).

(This paper draws from a PhD study currently being undertaken by the author, Gray’s School of Art, 2001-)

‘Film’ - Murray Building 58 Room 4125, 9.30am to 10.00 am

Jean Phagoe

The Language of Music

Citizens of a Dutch town, unknown to each other but beautifully linked as they love making music.  Each one of them, from the violin player to the bouzouki player tells about his or her own heartfelt passion.  This simple openness, the various styles of music and the music instruments of these local musicians, together with different countries of origin contribute to a film full of lively expression.  Music connects; it is a language which is understood by anyone, in spite of the differences in culture!  In fact, a cultural variety of people harbour great potentials for social development.  What, then, are we waiting for?

Eleni Liarou

Reconstructing British Community? Representations of Immigrants in Post-War British Films

The years after the Second World War mark a crucial conjuncture between two increasingly important phenomena of the twentieth century: that of a mass culture principally created by the media and that of the development of a new consciousness among immigrants across different European countries. The intensive and multi-layered engagement of mass/media culture with issues of immigration and ethnicity during this period breaks new ground for social and media history. In this sense, the British case is interesting for two reasons; on the one hand, post-war British society had one of the highest rates of immigration movements among European countries. On the other hand, post-war British cinema, under the influence of other film industries (American, European) and in its defence against the predominance of television, seems to have been one of the first indicators of problems regarding ‘redefinition’ and ‘renewal’.

This paper examines the role of film in shaping responses to immigration into post-war Britain; by focusing on some films it traces the first attempts of the British film industry to come to terms with the changing social conditions as these were affected by the mass arrival of immigrants and refugees from Europe and the Commonwealth countries in Britain. Questions of inclusion and exclusion within a framework of ‘national imagined communities’ are considered in the textual analysis of these visual documents. Finally, this historical perspective is linked with the increasing participation of immigrants in contributing their own ‘social image’ to media representations.

Brian Stokoe

Picturesque Great Britain: Culture, Commerce and Ideology in the Work of E O Hoppe

For centuries worship and images have been intertwined in countries where Orthodoxy is the national faith. During the Communist regime, the Soviets used images to propagate communist ideology. Now, as western consumerism and values have poured into Eastern Europe, pictures of Western pop stars are everywhere. I will argue that a secular image can function like an icon when it represents something greater than the person/object it directly represents. My research focused on Ukrainian students in Kiev, where I lived for 10 months to conduct my fieldwork. I photographed students' living space and interviewed them about the pictures on their walls. This paper will present my research findings, the difficulties I encountered, and a glimpse of the shifting values and identities of post-Soviet youth in transition.

Ruth Rae

Visual Images of Meaning: Photographic Explorations of Homes and Gardens

This paper describes a photographic method used to investigate the meaning of built and natural environments.  In two separate studies conducted by this author, Polaroid photographs were taken by respondents to explore their feelings about their homes or gardens.  Photography was utilized to both document the physical environments and also as a research method to investigate the meaning and importance of the physical place to the respondents.

As a supplement to interviews, respondents were asked to take up to three instant photographs using a Polaroid camera.  The photographic method allowed respondents to focus specifically on the physical and aesthetic aspects of their environment.  The photographs captured the physical reality of a place in a different manner than words and depicted aspects of the physical environment that may not have been noted otherwise.

Although the photographic method used was the same in both studies, the research focus differed.  The first study was an investigation of the experience and meaning of cooperative home ownership to low income residents in New York City in buildings that had undergone extensive rehabilitation. The second study was an investigation of the meaning of Swedish Allotment gardens and cottages conducted in Stockholm.  In both studies the photographs taken depicted the importance of aesthetics, physical change and functionality. 

‘Representation Reconsidered’ - Turner Sims Green Room, 11.30 am to 12.45 pm

Mira Moshe

The Visual Effect of a Special Feature Front Page: Interpreting the Visual Messages in Front-Page Specials in the Israeli Press between 1992 - 1996

The aim of this study is to characterize the visual framing of the peace process in Israeli newspaper front-page specials between 1992-1996.  The study covers editions of two newspapers (Yedi’ot Aharonot and Ma’arive) that have devoted their front page to a single story, relegating other news to the inner pages.  The premise is that this format is a signal to the readers of the topic’s exceptional importance.

These editions emphasize the symbolic meaning of the reported event.  The method developed for examining them combines semiological analysis with analysis of metaphor and narrative, and posits two levels – overt and hidden.  At the overt level the story is traced in terms associated with myth – coronation, conquest, rivalry, disaster.  At the hidden level, the dimensions are semiotic and metaphorical.  Tracing the semiotic path includes decoding the pictures by type as signifier/signified, and as icon/index/symbol, as well as analysing their symbolic levels by the criteria of denotation/digenesis. Metaphors used in the metaphorical dimension are of place, character and time.

Since most the seventy-seven editions published between 1992-1996 deal with the peace process, the study should clarify the image of peace that Israel has moved away from since the outbreak of the El-Aqsa intifada.

Robin Lyndenberg

Visualising Migration

This paper explores some contemporary representations of the staggering effects of the Great Famine in Ireland--the deaths that emptied the countryside and the migration of survivors that followed for decades. I look at three contemporary artists' engagement with the image of the Irish stone cottage from its status as national icon to its indexical presence as material artefact of abandonment and loss. Archetypal elements of the Irish landscape, such as the thatched cottage, green hillside, or ancient monument have been put into circulation in a range of discourses from the Gaelic Revival and nationalist politics to the modern heritage and tourism industries. Some artists have begun to expose the distortions of those symbolic icons; in place of fixed stereotypes they seek out the indexical, the more direct physical traces of the land behind the landscape. Recognizing the land as process rather than fixed object or sign, seeing it as a continual cycle of decay and renewal and an interactive site where man and nature struggle for survival, these artists transform landscape into environment. Their aim is often to transform the viewer, as well, from passive consumer into active participant in the historical specificity and lived materiality of the land.

A "crisis of representation" transformed art practice in the 1970s as many artists turned away from iconic representation and toward a "grounding" of art in the physical immediacy of matter and place. This indexical turn has posed particular challenges for the practice of landscape art. In its most traditional form, this genre posits both artist and viewer as detached and distant observers of a scene already framed by a variety of stylistic conventions (picturesque, pastoral, sublime). The aesthetic goal of such traditional landscapes is to harmonize and unify all the natural and manmade elements of the scene. Alternative modes of landscape art abandon this illusion of a unified prospect to engage with the land itself as continually fragmented, intermittently accessible, and haunted by absence and loss. Dorothy Cross's video "Endarken," Kathy Herbert's site specific installations "Absent," "Shadow," and "Angel in the Hay," and Brian Tolle's design for the New York City Irish Famine Memorial grow out of this postmodern relationship with landscape. All three artists engage self-consciously with one of the most ubiquitous images of "Irishness"--the rural thatched roof stone cottage. These artists transform this familiar icon by situating it within an ongoing material history.

Terry Sefton

Video 'Transcripts': Making Research Visible

My doctoral research project is a study of the sociology of art and education, of the formation of the artist's identity through (and despite) university graduate Fine Art programs, and of the transition from student of art (object of pedagogy, subaltern of institutional knowledge) to artist (maker of art, art as meaning, artist as public intellectual).

My research questions the role of the institution and institutional practices, and explores those questions with the lived experiences of participants.  A central focus is on gender and sexuality, and how they are suppressed and expressed in the institutional culture.  In addition, I bring my own insider/outsider status as an artist/ musician/film maker into play, in producing a video documentary which will position itself at the intersection of pedagogy and art practices.

Using video to record interviews with student/artists while they work creates a visual record of the embodied work (labour) of the artwork.  It also points to the (popular) identification of the artist with the artwork, and the way in which the public reads the artwork through the artist, referencing and interpreting the work through the gendered, racialized, sexualized artist, located by nationality, politics, class and age, as much as by genre, theory, or medium.  What a written transcript leaves invisible, the video ‘transcript’ makes visible, while raising its own questions around framing, editing, and the ‘staging’ of the real.

‘Ethnicity, Race, Diaspora’ - Turner Sims Auditorium, 2.00 pm to 3.45 pm

John Grady

Imagining Integration: Advertisements as Social Indicators: The Depiction of African Americans in Life Magazine

Much of the sociological literature that studies how different social groups are depicted in advertising tends to focus on the role that these images play in reinforcing long standing institutionalised prejudices.  A close look at advertising images of African-Americans in Life Magazine from 1936 through the present suggest that social scientists might more usefully envision these images as moral tableaux that can serve as remarkably sensitive indicators of social change.  In particular, a comparison of trends in attitude surveys with trends in how African-Americans are depicted in advertisements reveals that not only are the trends similar for certain issues but that the images contain information that richly complement attitude surveys.  This analysis suggests that, for some purposes, images designed as moral tableaux may be profitably investigated as a proxy for attitude surveys.  The systematic study of trends in image content, therefore, can be utilized to ascertain popular opinion among populations that have not been surveyed, whether in the present or in the period before scientific surveying was first conducted in the 1930s.  This paper’s findings suggest that the content analysis of visual images should be incorporated into sociology instruction as a primary research method

Julie Matthews

Diaspora, Hybridity and (Eur)Asian Female Images

The recent arrival of stylish young fashion icons in Australian magazines and catalogues has been joined by women representing Australian economic success in a high-tech globally interconnected world. I argue that such images do not indicate the ultimate achievement of Australian multiculturalism, but serve as a model and a rebuke. They serve to model ideal-type femininity and the productivity of commerce and global capitalism and they serve to rebuke those who fail to succeed under these terms and conditions. Eurasian and Asian images circulate particular beliefs and assumptions, promote particular identities and identifications, and incite particular appeals and desires. While they are informed by different historical and cultural discourses, their hybrid ambivalence enables them to sustain forms of commodification that encourage spending and profit.

This paper explores the capacity of contemporary diaspora theory and notions of hybridity to illuminate the historical and cultural conditions by which meaning is visually circulated. I argue that postcolonial and cultural studies' understandings of diaspora and hybridity are useful because they enable us to identify the relationship of images to the historical, territorial, cultural, economic, political trajectories pertaining to identities and subjectivities. However, we need to move beyond preoccupations with origins, consciousness and anti-essentialism.

The diasporic hybridity of signs and symbols neatly accommodates profitable commodification and visual mobility to evoke old and new political possibilities and potentials. Acknowledgement of this suggests that the political struggle is not only about identifying the powerful cultural and economic impact of raced and sexed identities and identifications. It is also about deconstructing the capacity of the visual to secure complicity in proliferating the production and consumption of diasporic hybridity in relation to raced and sexed identities.

Lorna Roth

Technological 'Passing'

Bleaching and sunless tanning of skin with lotions and creams are not new phenomena. This transformative practice is undertaken for several reasons and is most often motivated by participants’ desires to undergo a racial identity-camouflage procedure for the purposes of boosting self-esteem or in a deliberate attempt to reposition themselves in socio-economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political power relations.  These are not naïve or innocent practices but are tainted with an informed effort to belong to a skin-colour reference group other than the one into which they were born.

Recently, another process around skin-colour shifting has become popular.  It is something I am calling technological “passing” – by which I mean that with the use of accessible media tools, such as the computer, to represent/distort our images, we can techno-modify our facial features and skin pigmentations on the screen without actually paying the material or personal costs of cosmetic intervention. Technological “passing” is easily facilitated through economic access to visual manipulation software programs such as Photoshop which offers racial identiplay features, and makes it reasonably simple to virtually resurface our natural pigmentation in order to present ourselves on the screen in our own imagined or ideal racial terms.  What are the potential socio-cultural consequences of creating a virtual public persona tailor-made to our imagined norms of personal skin aesthetics (our own avatars)?

This paper will identify the historical context and critical issues related to the industries of visual representation that facilitate “passing” and will raise the following questions, specifically focussed on the currently popular digital support for the practice:

Given the malleable digital context of race relations on the computer, how can virtual body colour design inform and dialogue with the more fixed representations of the racialized human body as configured into the other, less flexible technologies such as the single lens reflex camera shooting with colour film, and embedded with a specific and fixed range of chemical possibilities.

Will the current preoccupation with computer technology change any of the socio-cultural conditions of racisms/ ethnicisms which underlie and motivate these practices of illusion and deception?  Has the expansion of racial imagery and discourses into computer technology confounded questions of race relations as it transposes them from the political to the virtually personal, from imagery coded by others to that which can be coded by all of us? 

Yariv Alpher

Reading Jazz: Down Beat Magazine and the Emergence of a Consumer Identity

Down Beat magazine hit the stands in July 1934, selling for 10 cents a copy. The first American publication dedicated to jazz, Down Beat matured over the next few years from a Chicago-based trade publication geared at European American (white) musicians, into a national publication that appealed to a broad readership of musicians, music students and jazz fans.

Alison Nordstrom

Photographs in Photographs: A Journalistic Trope Considered

Stuart Price

Authority and Social Life: Visual and Discursive Representations of State Agency in Contemporary Television and Film

This illustrated paper makes a close study of the ambiguous way in which police officers, federal agents, secret service personnel, politicians and bureaucrats are presented within what Buxton calls narrative configurations (Buxton, 1980). The presentation begins with episodes from two police dramas (Homicide: Life on the Street and The Thin Blue Line) which portray conflict between on the one hand a 'moral community' of officers, and on the other neo-fascist organisations dedicated to attacks on 'minority' groups.

The repetition of near-identical visual codes, events and actions across a range of British and U.S. sources, suggests the existence of established themes (Barker, 1989) and the production of scenarios and narrative propositions which steer a course between approval for authoritarian methods, distrust of state and corporate power, and investment in myths of individual agency. Material will include excerpts from CSI, The Shield, The Bill, The Siege, Minority Report, Mercury Rising, Homicide: Life on the Street and The Thin Blue Line.

Patrizia Faccioli, Guiseppe (Pino) Losacco

Postcards from Italy

The presentation is about a visual research project based on the "native image making" method. The aim of the research was to explore the image that a group of American students, spending a semester in Italy have of the global and the local culture. The students were asked to take some pictures representing the visual signs of cultural similarities and differences between their country and Rome. The photos can be analysed following two directions. First: the visual indicators of globalism and localism, according the mental images of the students. Second: Such photographic task forced the students to reflect about the cultural differences, since they were also asked to write a caption, under each photo, explaining the reasons of their choice. So, on one hand, the researcher can obtain information on her/his own taken for granted culture, seen through the other's eye. On the other hand, the student author of the image can obtain -by her/his own choice - information about how she/he sees the other's culture. Some of the student's photo will be showed in the context of the presentation.

Chava Brownfield-Stein

‘Beautiful Group Portrait with a Gun': Representations of Women Soldiers in Israel Defense Force Albums 1948 – 58

The state of Israel is unique in that it conscripts women as well as men.  Therefore, visual representations of women soldiers are part of the Israeli cultural codex.  This research examines photographs of women soldiers that appear in official albums, published by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) in relation to photographs found in military archives for the period 1948 to 1958.  The albums contain the dominant discourse and self-image that the military establishment disseminated to the public.  An examination of the official albums reveals the hegemonic discourse with regard to women soldiers that prevailed during the first decade of Israel’s statehood, the formative years when Israel launched and institutionalised the frames of though, moulds of behaviour and cultural codes that are associated with it to this day.

‘Film’ - Murray Building 58, Room 4125, 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm

Georgia Johnson, Michael T Hayes

The Circle and the Spire

This presentation focuses on a digital film documenting the history of the Sacred Heart Mission Jesuit run Indian boarding school on the Coeur D’Alene reservation. The school was one of the longest running boarding schools and was open continuously from 1871-1985. The film juxtaposes evocative imagery of the closed and rapidly decaying school with the legacy of historical documents and images related to the school. The thematic focus of the film is on the tension between the Jesuit educational mission of building a “Wilderness kingdom” of spiritual conversion in the expanding topography of the American west  and the governmental dictate to “civilize” the indigenous population through an education designed to “Kill the Indian to save the man”. The film traces the collision of these forces and how they defined the purposes of education for Indians at the school.

The film draws from contemporary efforts to reconceptualize the Anthropological documentary and borrows from recent innovations that favour an aesthetic reading over a scientific explanation. Images, text, words and sounds are layered so as to evoke a poetic engagement that multiplies meaning thus spurring conversation

‘Film’- Murray Building 58, Room 4125, 3.00 pm to 3.45 pm

Natalia Diaz

Tierra Firme (subtitled)

This is a 29 minute long documentary  on the issue of displacement and the relation between geographical and personal identity. It focuses on the experience of a former Chilean political exilee, living now in Europe, and her efforts to redefine herself and her life in the light of a new battle ground: a different culture and different ideologies adapting in a new country and differently organized society. It is shot in digital betacam in both Belgium and Chile.

‘Body, Fashion, Identities’ - Turner Sims Auditorium, 4.15 pm to 5.45 pm

Dirk von Lehn

Making Sense of the Human Body

In recent months, Body Worlds, an exhibition of ‘real’ human bodies has received enormous media attention in the United Kingdom and Germany.  Journalists are largely united in their view that the exhibition is an outrage.  Some politicians even asked for it to be closed, banned from the British Isles and not to be opened in Munich in March 2003.  The principal reasons for the widespread public fury are (1) that the public display of human bodies is unethical, (2) that it is unclear whether the exhibits are of scientific or artistic nature, and (3) the exhibition encourages voyeurism.  The media outrage against the exhibition did not stop the exhibition to go ahead and to be attended by huge numbers of visitors.  Between March 2002 and February 2003 more than 800000 people came to see Body Worlds.  However, we know only relatively little about visitors’ responses to the exhibits.  Whilst empirical investigations undertaken by a German research team suggest that people enjoy their visit, learn from the exhibition and change their habits (e.g. smoking and drinking) we only have anecdotal evidence of visitors’ conduct at the exhibits.  The proposed paper uses video-recordings of visitors’ conduct and interaction at selected exhibits within Body Worlds (London) to explore (1) how the “realness” of the human exhibits features in visitors’ examination and experience of the displays, (2) how the aesthetic aspects of the exhibits features in visitors assessment of them, and (3) how visitors look at the exhibits in social interaction and discussion with others.  Based on the analysis of video-recordings the paper aims to shed light on the relation between aspects of the media debates (ethics, aesthetics, voyeurism) about the exhibition and visitors’ examination and experience of the exhibits.

Fiona Candy

The Fabric of Society: The Kinesics of Denim Clothing

Denim clothing is worn throughout the world by men and women of all ages who want to fit in, or to stand out: their blue garments are at once bland and mysteriously imbued with cultural reference, both uniform and intensely personal.  As a style of clothing, denim was originally developed to be tough and durable for work and yet incredibly, its intrinsic appearance remains almost unchanged more than one hundred years later.  It is the nature of ‘work’ and the workings of society that have changed so radically in this time.

During 2002, denim wearing in UK cities reached a new extreme of ubiquity: worn by all age groups, by the fashionable and the unfashionable, right across social and cultural boundaries. I came to consider that this might be a phenomenon indicating social transformation that cannot be adequately explained by the 20th century paradigm of ‘fashion’ and one that cries out to be investigated.  My current research involves a series of linked exercises that aim to investigate the full sensory and emotional experience of wearing denim clothing in public.  The intention is to use a variety of research approaches in order to create a multimedia archive of relevant data.

Denim clothing behaviour (i.e. the choice of brand, garment fit, cut and detailing) influences both the inner feeling of and the outer appearance of the wearer’s body shape; it generates and defines posture and gesture.  I propose that denim is a distinct and explicit body language; a visual vernacular used to express and assess each wearer’s individual ‘stance’ within the social landscape.  One of the aims of The Fabric of Society investigation is to record and interpret denim body language and I hope to contribute the results of this to Images of Social Life along with an explanation of my research context.

Greg Smith

Before and After: Depictions of Personal Transformation

Drawing upon publicly-available images of bodybuilding, cosmetic surgery and slimming, the paper considers the semiotics of personal transformation encoded in before and after photographs.

It identifies some commonalities and differences in the binary logic of the before and after pairing. The images and contextualizing text give varying significance to technical skill and transformed will.  In this deeply moral, visually-mediated rhetoric of personal improvement, changes in bodily appearance are seen to presage significant transformations of self-identity.

‘Urban Landscapes I’ - Turner Sims Green Room, 4.15pm to 5.45 pm

Ana Miljacki

Affect, Encounter, Relationship

Chantal Akerman opens Toute Une Nuit exactly where Antonioni left off his L’Eclisse, with a sequence of shots of the city in which we wait for a story to unfold and our protagonists to appear. In Antonioni, ‘nothing happens,’ city life goes on. With Akerman, we focus and the pattern of life, its difference and repetition, becomes our story. The protagonists - multiple. We could locate the same transformation of the approach within Akerman’s own body of work. From Saute Ma Ville (1968), to Jeanne Dielmann, and Les Rendez-Vous D’Anna (1978), specific protagonists drive the narration in her films. It is via her more documentary work that in 1982 we arrive at Toute Une Nuit. If we were to name the main protagonist of Toute Une Nuit, we would have to say: the city. However, the generality of the concept of the city, whose unity and universality we have long forgotten about, would be misleading in Akerman’s case. The repetition of the architectural places in Toute Une Nuit, or the repetition of similar situations, does not produce a general idea of the city. Repetition, as Gilles Deleuze tells us, is not generality. It, “as a conduct and as a point of view, concerns non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities.” Akerman’s repetition makes visible the palimpsest of minor narratives that constitute the everyday of the city. Minor narratives are always specific if we look at them from the right scale. The view of the city we experience in Akerman’s movies is never from above, never total, and we learn how to find our way around it…gradually and from within. A practice of urbanism as real-time cataloguing.

The very opening of Toute Une Nuit, shows us the context – the city – within which we will find the simultaneously anonymous and specific, simultaneously weak and strong, simultaneously here and everywhere. This movie, like all Akerman movies, deals away with the proper: the proper narrative, the proper place (the same ‘proper’ place that made strategic thinking possible, and that allowed the construction of the equally proper narrative). When we don’t have a notion of a proper place, the judging that presupposes an authority is superfluous. We replace the transcendental concepts of value and quality for the affectivity of things, and we have to replace the idea of one general narrative for many. “Affect as immanent evaluation, instead of judgement as transcendent value: ‘I love or I hate’ instead of ‘I judge’. 

Choosing to manipulate the everyday, by recording it in long deep-focus takes, or by collecting it into continuous tracking shots, or by simulating its heterogeneity, Chantal Akerman uncovers the politics immanent in minor decisions and acts through which we modify our worlds. The danger that her project risks, is the one of totalizing, of tokenism. Her films would be hardly believable if they attempted to represent all the weak, if they flattened the heterogeneity of experience in order to tell us about it. If we were to draw out categories of people and encounters, abstract them and fit them into explicable slots, and then if we were to look at these as if they were statistical data, we would miss the point completely. All we would see is an ode to the mass ornament. Instead, the operational of Akerman’s “city symphonies,” turns these films into a form of urbanism. It is an urbanism at the level of encounters. We embody our understanding of Akerman’s cities. With her, we form parts of the equilibrium that we modify, she with her camera, we through our memory. Through this “art of operating,” we modify the everyday without compromising it. “It could be considered the ceaseless creativity of a kind of taste in practical experience.

Cristiano Mutti, Luca Liberatore, Elena Vacchelli

Audio and Visual Approaches to Social Change

The Visual Sociology Lab operating within Università Milano-Bicocca aims showing  different visual research approaches referring to specific research issues, mainly urban change related issues. All the visual researches are built on a multimedia support. In particular the projects converging in OMSP (Osservatorio sul Mutamento degli Spazi Pubblici) at www.omsp.info resume most of the LSV work on urban change. OMSP includes different methodological approaches to visual research. Our IVSA conference contribution will focus on  the methods we used to build the Osservatorio, where many other projects converge. Each of them has been made using visual information with a proper visual sociology method. Just to make some example, the monitoring of how a social space is changing on a longitudinal perspective, in-depth structured interviews to experts and to specific target groups as well as photo-inputs interviews and so on.

Video and Audio communication will be supported from an up-dated bibliography focusing on urban sociology issues. It is also possible, for example, to understand how some of Milan public spaces are changing from the audiovisual field area research to its theoric outcomes. OMSP is thought to have a special attention for social agents contributing to determine urban change in nowadays globalised cities. A further theoric support will be given on issues such as immigration, postmodenity, non-lieux and spatial segragation. At the conference we'll speak about the different methods we used to build the Osservatorio. For each method I’m going to show a visual example on the screen. Every single example will be contestualized (that is, the wider meaning of each visual work will be briefly explained).

Sarah Bowers

Visualising Hope: A Visual Ethnographic Study of the Search for the Transcendent among Ukranian Students

For centuries worship and images have been intertwined in countries where Orthodoxy is the national faith. During the Communist regime, the Soviets used images to propagate communist ideology. Now, as western consumerism and values have poured into Eastern Europe, pictures of Western pop stars are everywhere. I will argue that a secular image can function like an icon when it represents something greater than the person/object it directly represents. My research focused on Ukrainian students in Kiev, where I lived for 10 months to conduct my fieldwork. I photographed students' living space and interviewed them about the pictures on their walls. This paper will present my research findings, the difficulties I encountered, and a glimpse of the shifting values and identities of post-Soviet youth in transition.

‘Film’ - Murray Building 58, Room 4125, 4.15 pm to 5.45 pm

Fernando Salis, Daniella Broitman

Voices from the Edge

This paper intends to articulate the question of social exclusion and media visibility through the analysis of Voices from the Edge, a documentary film produced with the support of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Voices from the Edge is a documentary film project focusing on this year s World Social Forum (WSF), held in Porto Alegre from the 23rd to the 28th of January. The film depicts the journey of a group of 23 favela (shanty town) leaders who travelled to Porto Alegre to have their voices heard. Through this lens, the film shows the diversity of visions that make up the WSF.

The intent of the documentary is not only to record the event but to use the production of the documentary as a forum in-and-of-itself to promote encounters between people, groups and organizations that may not otherwise interact. For example, with the collaboration of the favela leaders, the first seven minutes of the documentary was shown at the forum in a workshop open to the public. During this workshop the favela leaders networked with people from other parts of Brazil and the rest of the world. In another event, they met with the Brazilian Minister for Social Action, with whom they discussed political and social issues.

The final result of the project will be a 50-minute documentary that can be used as a resource in the educational system and as a tool for organizing marginalized communities throughout Brazil and abroad.