The following article was first published as
Becker, H. S. 1974. Photography and Sociology. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1, 3-26.
It was subsequently republished in a collection of Howard Becker's articles:
Doing things together: selected papers 1986 Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
It was been made available in this form with the kind permission
of Howard Becker and with the assistance of staff at the Templeman Library, UKC.
For ease of reference the pagination of the original 1974 publication has been preserved.
No images have been digitised for copyright reasons.
David Zeitlyn August 2000
North western University
Photography and sociology have approximately the same birth date, if you count sociology's birth as the publication of Comte's work which gave it its name, and photography's birth as the date in 1839 when Daguerre made public his method for fixing an image on a metal plate 2. From the beginning, both worked on a variety of projects. Among these, for both, was the exploration of society.
While sociology has had other ends, moral and metaphysical, sociologists have always wanted to understand how society worked, to map its dimensions and then look into the big sectors and little crannies so mapped. They ordinarily wanted to find things out rigorously and scientifically, and to develop general theories. But some sociologists have made it their main business to describe what has not yet been described, in the style of the ethnographer, to tell the big news, in the style of the journalist, combining these (more or less) with the desire for rigor and general theory.
Sociologists' choice of theories, methods, and topics of research
usually reflect the interests and constraints of the intellectual and occupational
communities to which they are allied and attached. They often choose research methods,
for instance, that appear to have paid off for the natural sciences. They frequently
choose research topics which are public concerns of the moment, especially as those
are reflected in the allocation of research funds: poverty, drugs, immigration, campus
or ghetto disorder, and so on. These faddish tendencies are balanced by a continuing
attention to, and respect for, traditional topics and styles of work.
The efforts and projects of photographers have been much more
various. In order to understand how photographers go about exploring society when
they undertake that job, it will be useful to remember the melange of other jobs
photography does. Think of a camera as a machine that records and communicates much
as a typewriter does. People use typewriters to do a million different jobs: to write
ad copy designed to sell goods, to write newspaper stories, short stories, instruction
booklets, lyric poems, biographies and autobiographies, history, scientific papers,
letters . . . . The neutral typewriter will do any of these things as well as the
skill of its user permits. Because of the persistent myth that the camera simply
records whatever is in front of it (about which I will say more below), people often
fail to realize that the camera is equally at the disposal of a skilled practitioner
and can do any of the above things, in its own way. Photographers have done all of
the things suggested above, often in explicit analogue with the verbal model. Different
kinds of photographers work in different institutional settings and occupational
communities, which affect their product as the institutional settings in which sociologists
work affect theirs (Rosenblum 1973).
Photographers have worked to produce advertising illustrations.
They have made portraits of the rich and famous, and of ordinary people as well.
They have produced pictures for newspapers and magazines. They have produced works
of art for galleries, collectors and museums. The constraints of the settings in
which they did their work (Becker 1974) affected how they went about it, their habits
of seeing, the pictures they made and, when they looked at society, what they saw,
what they made of it and the way they presented their results.
From its beginnings, photography has been used as a tool for
the exploration of society, and photographers have taken that as one of their tasks.
At first, some photographers used the camera to record far-off societies that their
contemporaries would otherwise never see and, later, aspects of their own society
their contemporaries had no wish to see. Sometimes they even conceived of what they
were doing as sociology, especially around the turn of the century when sociologists
and photographers agreed on the necessity of exposing the evils of society through
words and pictures. Lewis Hine, for instance, was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation
in connection with the early surveys of urban life (Gutman 1967). The American
Journal of Sociology routinely ran photographs in connection with its muckraking
reformist articles for at least the first fifteen years of its existence (Oberschall
1972:215).
Another kind of social exploration grew out of the use of photographs
to report the news and to record important social events. Mathew Brady (Horan 1955)
and his staff, which included Timothy H. O'Sullivan (Horan 1966) and Alexander Gardner
(1959), photographed the Civil War, and Roger Fenton the Crimean War. But it was
not until the 1920's that the development of the illustrated weekly in Europe produced
a group of photographers who made the photoreportage or photoessay
into an instrument of social analysis (Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon are among
the best-known graduates of these journals) (Gidal 1973). Later, the Picture Post
in England and Time, Life, and Fortune in the United States
provided outlets for serious photojournalists who worked with the photoessay form:
Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa.
The impulse to photographic social exploration found another
expression in the work produced by the photographers Roy Stryker assembled for the
photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration during the 1930's (Hurley 1972,
1973; Stryker and Wood 1973). Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein,
and others made it their business to record the poverty and hard times of Depression
America, their work very much informed by social science theories of various kinds.
More recently, political involvement has had a hand in shaping
the use of photography to explore society.
Photography and sociology 3
Page of images
Photography and sociology 4
Photographers participated actively in the civil rights movement
of the 1960's and brought back photographs which effectively stirred people just
as Hine's photographs of child laborers had. They then used those skills in somewhat
less immediately political kinds of essays-exploring communities, occupations, subcultures,
institutions-that have a sociological intent. These essays combine a journalistic
and ethnographic style with a self-conscious and deliberate artistic purpose.
Photography from the beginning strove toward art just as it did
toward social exploration. To be sure, earlier photographers in this tradition understood
that what they did had an artistic component. They worked hard to produce images
that measured up as art. But the artistic element of photography was held at a substantial
distance from photography carried on for more mundane purposes, including journalism.
Such influential photographers as Edward Weston conceived of their work as something
more like painting-they produced for galleries, museums, and private collectors as
much as they could-and did very little that could be interpreted in any direct way
as an exploration of society.
Art and social exploration describe two ways of working, not two kinds of photographers. Many photographers do both kinds of work in the course of their careers. And even this is an over-simplification since many photographs made by someone whose work is predominantly of one kind have strong overtones of the other. Paul Strand is clearly an art photographer; but his pictures of peasants around the world embody political ideas, and any number of socially concerned photographers do work that is personally expressive and aesthetically interesting quite apart from its subject matter - as, for instance, in Danny Lyon's The Destruction of
Photography and sociology 5
Lower Manhattan (1969) and Larry Clark's Tulsa (1971).
Photography has thus, like sociology, displayed a shifting variety
of characteristic emphases, depending on the currents of interest in the worlds of
art, commerce and journalism to which it has been attached. One continuing emphasis
has been the exploration of society in ways more or less connected with somewhat
similar explorations undertaken by academic sociologists. As sociology became more
scientific and less openly political, photography became more personal, more artistic,
and continued to be engaged politically. Not surprisingly, then, the two modes of
social exploration have ceased to have very much to do with one another.
Sociologists today know little of the work of social documentary
photographers and its relevance to what they do. They seldom use photographs as a
way of gathering, recording, or presenting data and conclusions. I want to acquaint
them with this tradition and show them how they can make use of the styles of work
and techniques common in photography. Many social scientists have already been active
photographically, and what I say will not be news to them (Barndt 1974). 3
Many photographers have undertaken projects which produce results
that parallel those of sociology, and make claims that in some ways parallel the
claims to truth and representativeness of sociology. Insofar as their work has this
character, I intend to show them how a knowledge of some of the ideas and techniques
of academic sociology can be of help to them.
I do not want to make photographers of social scientists or impose
a social science imperialism on photographers (not that there is any chance such
attempts would be successful). Many sociologists will find the work and methods I
describe hopelessly unscientific, although I hope that this discussion will cause
them to reconsider their own methods. Many photographers will find my suggestions
academically arrogant; satisfied with the way they now work, they will see no advantage
in alien ideas and procedures.
What I say is most directly addressed to those social scientists
and photographers who are sufficiently dissatisfied with what they are doing to want
to try something new, who find difficulties in their present procedures and are interested
in seeing whether people in other fields know something that might help. Ideally,
it is directed to the growing number of people, whatever their professional background,
who are concerned with producing photographic explorations of society.
In addition, I have tried to show how even those sociologists
who have no interest in photographic work can learn something from the light shed
on conventional research methods by a comparison with photographic methods. Some
generic problems of social exploration profit from the light the comparison generates.
I will not be concerned with every aspect of the use of visual
materials in social science in this paper. Specifically, I will not consider three
major areas of work to which social scientists have devoted themselves: (1) the use
of film to preserve nonverbal data for later analysis, as in the analyses of gesture
and body movement by such scholars as Birdwhistell, Ekman, Hall, and Lennard; (2)
the analysis of the visual productions of "native seers" for their cultural
and social meanings, as in the Worth-Adair (1972) study of Navaho filmmakers; (3)
the use of photographs as historical documents, whether they have been taken by artless
amateurs and preserved in family albums, as in Richard Chalfen's work, or by professional
photographers, as in Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). All three are interesting
and important areas of work, but differ from the use of photographs to study organizations,
institutions, and communities that I have in mind. There is considerable overlap,
of course, and I do not insist on the distinction.
Anyone who gets into a new field must pay some dues. Photographers
who want to pursue the matter further will have to read some social science prose,
and many will probably find that too steep a price; some will find a viable solution
in a working partnership with a social scientist (as in the fruitful collaboration
of Euan Duff and Dennis Marsden in an as yet unpublished study of unemployed men
and their families in Britain).
The price to social scientists is less painful. They must acquaint
themselves with the extensive photographic literature; I have reproduced some examples
here and will provide a brief guide to more. In addition, they will have to learn
to look at photographs more attentively than they ordinarily do. Laymen learn to
read photographs the way they do
6
headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what
is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention
to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem. Every
part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total
statement; the viewer's responsibility is to see, in the most literal way,
everything that is there and respond to it. To put it another way, the statement
the image makes-not just what it shows you, but the mood, moral evaluation and causal
connections it suggests-is built up from those details. A proper "reading"
of a photograph sees and responds to them consciously.
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. The following exercise, taught
to me by Philip Perkis, is a way of seeing what is involved:
Take some genuinely good picture; the ones reproduced in this
article will do. Using a watch with a second hand, look at the photograph intently
for two minutes. Don't stare and thus stop looking; look actively. It will be hard
to do, and you'll find it useful to take up the time by naming everything in the
picture to yourself: this is a man, this is his arm, this is the finger on his hand,
this is the shadow his hand makes, this is the cloth of his sleeve , and so
on. Once you have done this for two minutes, build it up to five, following the naming
of things with a period of fantasy, telling yourself a story about the people and
things in the picture. The story needn't be true; it's just a device for externalizing
and making clear to yourself the emotion and mood the picture has evoked, both part
of its statement
When you have done this exercise many times, a more careful way
of looking will become habitual. Two things result. You will realize that ordinarily
you have not consciously seen most of what is in an image even though you have been
responding to it You will also find that you can now remember the photographs you
have studied much as you can remember a book you have taken careful notes on. They
become part of a mental collection available for further work. (When you do this
exercise a number of times you will acquire new habits of seeing and won't have to
spend as much time looking at a new print).
I hope this does not sound mystical. Black and white still photographs
use visual conventions that everyone brought up in a world of illustrated newspapers
and magazines learns just as they learn to talk. We are not ordinarily aware of the
grammar and syntax of these conventions, though we use them, just as we may not know
the grammar and syntax of our verbal language though we speak and understand it.
We can learn that language through study and analysis, just as we can learn to understand
music and poetry by making technical analyses of harmony and counterpoint or of prosody.
We don't have a large amount of such photographic analysis available, especially
as it relates to the concerns of social scientists. But it is absolutely prerequisite
to any analysis and discussion that you practice looking at photographs long and
hard, so that you have something to analyze.
Photography and sociology 7
One reason sociologists should be interested in the work of social
documentary photographers is that photographers have covered many of the subjects
that are persistent foci of sociological concern. Some have done their work for the
government, some on assignment, or speculatively, for magazines and newspapers, some
supported by foundations, some as the "private" work they do between paying
jobs, or as a hobby. Describing the variety of topics photographers share with sociologists
will provide the opportunity to acquaint those unfamiliar with the photographic literature
with some of the most interesting and important work.
In dealing with the topics they share with sociologists, photographers
say what they have to say in many ways. Without giving many examples, or offering
an extended description of the various forms of photographic statements, I'll simply
suggest the following as among the possibilities now in use. A photographer may make
his statement in the form of an aphorism or witticism, a photographic one-liner that
may be no more than a joke (in the case of EIliot Erwitt 1972, for example) or may
be of considerable depth (as in the work of André Kertész 1972). He
may produce slogans. He may be saying "Look at that!" in wonder at some
natural phenomenon (Ansel Adams' pictures of Yosemite seem to say that), or in revulsion
from some disgusting work of man (McCullin 1973). He may tell a story or, finally,
he may produce something that implicitly or explicitly offers an analysis of a person,
an artifact, an activity or a society. It stretches ordinary usage to speak of these
projects as "studies," as though they were sociological research projects;
but the exaggeration emphasizes, as I want to, the continuity between the two kinds
of work.
Both photographers and sociologists have described communities.
There is nothing in photography quite like such major works of social science as
Warner's Yankee City Series, Lynd 's Middletown and Middletown in Transistion
, and Hughes' French Canada in Transition . Photographers have
recently produced more modest efforts, such as Bill Owens' Suburbia (1973) and George
Tice's Paterson (1972), both describing smaller communities through a hundred
or so images of buildings, houses, natural features, public scenes and (in Owens'
book) family life. A number of photographers have accumulated massive numbers of
negatives of one city, as Eugéne Atget (Abbott 1964) did in his attempt to
record all of Paris or Berenice Abbott (1973) or Weegee (1945), the great news photographer,
did, each in their way, of New York; but only small selections from the larger body
of work are available, and we usually see only a few of the images at a time.
Like sociologists, photographers have been interested in contemporary
social problems: immigration, poverty, race social unrest. In that great photographic
tradition, one typically describes in order to expose evils and call for action to
correct them. Lewis Hine, who called himself a sociologist, put credo succinctly:
"I want to photograph what needs to be appreciated; I want to photograph what
needs to be corrected." His greatest project showed conditions of child labor
in the United states in a way that is thought to have helped the passage of remedial
legislation. Somewhat earlier, Jacob Riis (1971), a reporter, photographed the slums
of New York and exhibited the results in How the Other Half Lives. I have
already mentioned the photographs of rural poverty by the members of Stryker's FSA
photographic unit and might add to that the collaboration of Bourke-White and Erskine
Caldwell (1937) in You Have Seen Their Faces. Life in Black ghettoes has been
photographed, from the inside, by men like James Van Der Zee (DeCock and MeGhee 1973)
(among other things the official photographer for Marcus Garvey) and Roy de Carava
(de Carava and Hughes 1967); from the outside, by Bruce Davidson (1970) and many
others. Dramatic confrontations of the races make news, and many photographers have
covered such stories (Hansberry 1964) and gone on to more extended explorations of
the matter. W. Eugene Smith (1974) has recently published a major essay on pollution,
its victims, and the politics surrounding it in Japan.
Other photographic work deals with less controversial problems,
in the style of the sociological ethnography. Sociologists have studied occupations
and the related institutions of work, and photographers have too: Smith (1969) did
major essays on a country doctor and a Black midwife; Wendy Snyder (1970) has a book
on Boston's produce market, and Geoff Winningham (1971) produced a book-length study
of professional wrestling. Photographers have also investigated social movements,
as in Paul Fusco's (1970) book on Cesar Chavez and the UFW, Marion Palfi's (1973)
work on civil rights, or Smith's classic essay on the Ku Klux Klan (1969). They have
shared with sociologists an interest in exotic subcultures: Danny Lyon's (1968) work
on
8
Photographers present the results of their explorations of
society in a variety of ways, using varying quantities of images to make different
kinds of statements. One might, at one extreme, present a single image, capturing
in it all that needs to be shown about something from some point of view. Stieglitz'
"The Steerage," for instance, seems to make a self-sufficient statement
about the experience of European immigrants, showing both the masses Emma Lazarus
wrote about, crowded onto the deck of the ship, but also a brilliantly lit gangway
that seems to lead to better things. (lronically, the ship was actually headed east,
to Europe.)
Usually, however, photographers exploring society give us more
than one striking image. They explore a topic more thoroughly, sometimes in one concentrated
burst of attention and activity, sometimes (on a timetable more like that of the
social scientist) over a period of a few years, sometimes as the preoccupation of
a lifetime. The concentrated burst occurs when the conditions of work-a magazine
assignment, for instance-make it unlikely that you will be able to return to the
subject again 4. It may occur when circumstances make a brief visit possible
to an ordinarily inaccessible place (Bourke-White's visit to Russia). Photographers
can seldom get the support for more long-term projects, certainly not on a routine
basis, so a great deal of important work has been done in this concentrated way and
many prized photographic skills consist of doing good work despite the lack of sufficient
time.
Probably because of the connection with magazine work, such photographic
studies typically saw publication as a photoessay. The form, pioneered in Europe,
reached maturity in Fortune and Life. Bourke-White, Smith, and others
developed a form in which a few to as many as thirty photographs, spread with an
accompanying text over four to
Photography and sociology 9
eight or ten pages, explored a subject in some detail, giving
more space and attention to a subject than a conventional journalistic treatment
allowed. Photoessays often, like good sociological studies, showed the great variety
of people and situations involved in the subject under study. Of course, magazine
editors played a decisive part in the selection and arrangement of the materials,
and photographers frequently objected to their interference. Gene Smith resigned
from Life over this issue.
When a photographer finds it possible to pursue a subject for
a longer time-a year or more-he may accumulate sufficient material for a more extended
presentation. Guggenheim grants and other fellowship and foundation funds have supported
many such projects (Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street, many of Marion Palfi's
studies, Smith's work on Pittsburgh). The government has supported others: the FSA
projects, Hine's exposes of child labor. Or the project may be the photographer's
private affair, supported by work of an entirely different kind.
In any event, photographers who work over a more extended period
accumulate a large pool of images from which they can choose those that best express
their understanding of their topic. Choices are made from that pool of images for
specific uses, often in consultation with or entirely by others: editors, curators
and the like. The selection so made may have more or less organization and coherence.
The work of the FSA photographers, for instance, typically appears simply as a collection
of variable size and made up of a variety of combinations from the entire body of
work they produced.
Larger selections of work usually appear either as books, museum
exhibits or both. They may contain anywhere from thirty to four or five hundred prints.
Especially when they appear as books, the projects often take on a more organized
and sequential format. Such formats allow, and almost require, a more analytic stance
than a simple collection, and suggest statements that overlap considerably with those
found in sociological ethnography.
The function of text in a photographic book is not clear. Photographic
books may contain no text at all (e.g.,
10
Close study of the work of social documentary photographers provokes
a double reaction. At first, you find that they call attention to a wealth of detail
from which an interested sociologist could develop useful ideas about whose meaning
he could spin interesting speculations. A collection of photographs on the same topic-a
photographic essay or book-seems to explore the subject completely. Greater familiarity
leads to a scaling down of admiration. While the photographs do have those virtues,
they also tend to restrict themselves to a few reiterated simple statements. Rhetorically
important as a strategy of proof, the repetition leads to work that is intellectually
and analytically thin.
Many sociologists and photographers will find those judgments
irrelevant. Some sociologists work with equally simple ideas; but those who are responsive
to the tradition of ethnographic fieldwork will want photographic explorations to
provide results as rich and interesting as their own descriptions. Some photographers
are content to produce a few compelling images. But many of the book-length projects
just described aspire to more than that, whether they make the aspiration explicit
or not. Their authors are sensitive to the currents of thought and interest in the
larger cultural community, and want to do work that is thought of as more than a
beautiful illustration. Photographers and sociologists who don't share these traditions
and sensitivities will find what follows of little use.
The problem, then, is why photographic exploration of society
is so often intellectually thin. A subsidiary question of interest to photographers
and to sociologists who may take a photographic approach to their work, is: what
can be done to make that work intellectually denser?
The answer to these questions lies in understanding the role
of theory in making photographs of social phenomena. Most sociologists accept the
folk notion that the camera records objectively what is there for it to record, no
matter what the ideas of the person who pushes the button. Laymen may believe this,
but photographers know better. To be sure, something real has to emit light
rays in order to produce an image on film or paper, and whatever is real that is
emitting light rays where they can go through the lens will make some kind of image.
That constraint exists, so that John Collier, Jr. (Friends of Photography 1972:49)
is right to say that "The camera constantly trips up the artist by loyally going
on being a recorder of reality."
Nevertheless, the photographer exerts enormous control over the
final image and the information and message it contains. The choice of film, development
and paper, of lens and camera, of exposure and framing, of moment and relation with
subjects-all of these, directly under the photographer's control, shape the end product.
The way he controls it-what he decides to make it into-depends in the first instance
on professional traditions and conditions of work. The kind of photograph he has
learned to value and the possibilities for making them provided by the institutions
he works in influence his decisions in general. Thus, for example, the short time
periods magazine editors allotted to projects meant that photographers could not
produce pictures that require lengthy acquaintance with the subject. Newspaper photographers
do not, as a rule, make pictures that contain large blurred areas, because editors
prefer pictures sharp enough to look good in newspaper reproduction (Rosenblum 1973).
A second influence on the image the photographer produces is
his theory about what he is looking at, his understanding of what he is investigating.
Saul Warkov says: "The camera is a wonderful mechanism. It will reproduce, exactly,
what is going on inside of your head." That is, it will make the picture (given
a modicum of technique) look just the way the photographer thinks it should look.
Think of it this way: as you look through the viewfinder you wait until what you
see "looks right," until the composition and the moment make sense, until
you see something that corresponds to your conception of what's going on. Similarly,
when prior to making the exposure you choose a lens and film, an f-stop and a shutter
speed, you do so with the same considerations in mind. If you make exposures that
look some other way than what makes sense to you, you probably will not choose them
for printing or exhibition. Thus, what you expect to see and what, even if you did
not expect it, you can understand and make sense of-your theory-shape the images
you finally produce.
Since the skilled photographer can make the image look as he
wants it to, and knows he can, photographers should be aware of the social content
of their photographs and be able to talk about it at length. As a rule, they are
not. One of the foremost recorders of the urban scene, Lee Friedlander, asked to
verbalize the explicit social criticism his pictures seem to make, answered by saying,
"I was taught that one picture was worth a thousand words, weren't you?"
(Friends of Photography 1972:10). (And the recorder of the exchange adds that the
audience of photographers and photography buffs burst into applause.) It is as though
the criticism is there, but the photographer doesn't want to verbalize it directly,
preferring to rely on intuition. In my limited experience with photographers, I have
found that Friedlander's attitude, while not universal, is very common.
If the above remarks are accurate, then when social documentary
photography is not analytically dense the reason may be that photographers use theories
that are overly simple. They do not acquire a deep, differentiated and sophisticated
knowledge of the people and activities they investigate. Conversely, when their work
gives a satisfyingly complex understanding of a subject, it is because they have
acquired a sufficiently elaborate theory to alert them to the visual manifestations
of that complexity. In short, the way to
Photography and sociology 11
change and improve photographic images lies less in technical
considerations than in improving your comprehension of what you are photographing
your theory. For photographic projects concerned with exploring society it means
learning to understand society better. Insofar as sociology possesses some understanding
of society (a very large if), then a knowledge of sociology, its theories, and the
way they can be applied to specific situations might improve the work of both photographers
and photographic sociologists.
A sociological theory, whether large scale abstract theory or
a specific theory about some empirical phenomenon, is a set of ideas with which you
can make sense of a situation while you photograph it. The theory tells you when
an image contains information of value, when it communicates something worth communicating.
It furnishes the criteria by which worthwhile data and statements can be separated
from those that contain nothing of value, that do not increase our knowledge of society.
The work of social documentary photographers suffers then from
its failure to use explicit theories, such as might be found in social science. This
does not, of course, mean that their work embodies no theory at all. If they had
no theory, they would have no basis on which to make the choices through which they
produce their images. They have a theory, one which, because it is not explicit,
is not available to them for conscious use, criticism, or development. Since they
do not make explicit use of a theory designed to explore the phenomena they are interested
in, they end up relying implicitly on some other kind of theory. The arguments that
have attended the publication of some of the major works of obvious social import
(e.g., Davidson's East 100th Street) indicate that the theories photographers
rely on are, not surprisingly, lay theories, the commonplaces of everyday life in
the intellectual and artistic circles they move in. Since photographers, for all
their public inarticulateness, tend to be in touch (via their connections in journalism
and art, and increasingly, through their location in academia), with contemporary
cultural currents, they use the ideas and attitudes that are making the rounds in
order to organize their own seeing.
That is probably overly harsh, since often enough photographers
contribute images that help to shape those attitudes. Nevertheless, photographs of
Harlem residents tend to revolve around such ideas as "Look how these people
suffer" and "Look how noble these people are in the face of their suffering"
(it might be argued that the latter was the twist Davidson relied on for the originality
of his work). It is not that these things are incorrect or that for any reason they
should not be said. But they are not sufficiently complex to sustain the weight of
a real exploration of society, which will inevitably show that things are more complicated.
In fact, the complications provide a great deal of the interest and points of active
growth for social science thinking.
Training in social science, which presumably fills your head
with social science theories, will not necessarily improve the social science content
of your photographs. Knowledge does not automatically shape what you do, but works
only when it is deliberately put to work, when it is consciously brought into play.
Ruby (1972) argues that the pictures anthropologists take in the field are really
vacation pictures, no different from the ones they take on any other vacation or
that non-anthropologist vacationers take, focusing on what seems exotic and out of
the way. Anthropological thinking does not affect the pictures. Photographic sophistication
does. An unsophisticated photographer will produce a lot of isolated images while
a sophisticated one will go after sequences of action.
Sociologists are probably like anthropologists. As they become
more photographically sophisticated they will produce more interesting images, but
not necessarily ones that have sociological content. Similarly, giving photographers
a course in sociology or a list of suggested readings will not make their pictures
sociologically more sophisticated. Learning some of what sociologists know will be
necessary for improving the sociological content of their work, but it will not be
sufficient.
How can sociological ideas and theory be brought to bear, in
a practical way, on photographic explorations of society? The example of sociological
fieldwork, as that has been described by a number of writers, (e.g., Lofland 1970;
Schatzman and Strauss 1973), provides a useful model in the procedure of sequential
analysis. I'm not referring to anything very esoteric, just to the procedure which
allows you to make use of what you learn one day in your data-gathering the next
day.
In some social science and photographic styles of work, you defer
analysis until all the materials have been gathered. In a large-scale survey or experiment,
the researcher can seldom change the way he gathers his data once he had begun; the
inability to apply knowledge gained to the gaining of more knowledge is the price
of standardized precision. (To be sure, one can apply the lessons of one survey or
experiment to the next one, and workers in these styles usually do.) Photographers'
failure to apply the lessons they learn at the beginning of a project to its later
phases is more likely due to the photojournalistic emphasis on short intense trips
to places one would not otherwise ordinarily be in, or getting the shooting done
as rapidly as possible to cut down on expenses, and the great value placed on personal
intuition, all of which have been elevated in some versions of photographic work
to operating norms. (Like sociologists, photographers of course bring what they have
learned in previous projects to bear on the next one.) Working in this style, photographers
take advantage of their temporary presence in a situation to shoot a great deal,
waiting until they have left the field to develop film, make contact sheets, and
edit their results.
Fieldworkers work differently, in a way immediately adaptable
to photographic projects. As they write up the descriptions and verbatim accounts
that constitute their field notes, they simultaneously or shortly thereafter make
preliminary analyses of that information (Lofland 1970; Schatzman and Strauss 1973).
What is there in what they have recorded that they don't understand? How can they
find out more about it? What ideas does it suggest about the organization they are
studying and the people's experience in it? What patterns of interaction, of cause
and effect, of interrelationship are suggested by what they now know? If the rest
of what they observe is like this, what generalizations will they be able to make?
Where should they look to find evidence that these preliminary ideas are wrong (or
right)? In short, they develop tentative hypotheses about the object of
12
Photography and sociology 13
of the time. (Aside from the visual considerations, photographers doing this kind
of research might want to use a wide-angle lens, perhaps 35mm, as standard equipment,
because it will force them up close where they ought to be.)
The photographer can also get more data by showing people the
pictures he has already taken. He probably will have no choice, because people will
want to see what he's up to. This will give him the chance to use the photo elicitation
technique Collier (1967) describes so well: showing the pictures to people who know
the situations under study and letting them talk about them, answer questions, suggest
other things that need to be photographed, and so on. 5
If the photographer has some sociological ideas available, he
can apply them to these more or less commonsense questions and answers. Much of what
I've described so far is only what any reasonable curious person might want to know.
Nevertheless, basic sociological theory is involved, one compatible with most varieties
of sociology in current use. Let me put it in the form of a list of questions to
be answered in the field, cautioning that the answers don't come all at once, but
through a process of progressive refinement and constant testing against new information.
This formulation of the questions a sociological-photographic study could usefully
orient itself to is not original; it has been heavily influenced by Everett Hughes
(1971).
(1) What are the different kinds of people in the situation? They may or may not look different; they will certainly be called by different names.
(2) What expectations does each kind of person-members of each status group-have about how members of other groups ought to behave? What are the recurring situations around which such expectations grow up?
(3) What are the typical breaches of those expectations? What kinds of gripes and complaints do people have? (A complaint is a sign of a violated expectation; "He's supposed to do X and he hasn't.")
(4) What happens when expectations are violated? What can people do to those who do the violating? Is there a standard way of settling these conflicts?
These questions put in a commonsense way ideas integral to
almost any sociological analysis. (1) refers to what a sociologist might call status
groups; (2) to norms, rules, or common understandings; (3) to deviance or rule violations;
(4) to sanctions and conflict resolution. The advantage of the translation is that
these concepts are linked in such a way that if you identify something you have seen
as an instance of one of them you then know that you ought to look for other things
that will embody the ideas it is connected to in the theory. If, for instance, you
see someone reward or punish someone else, the theory directs you to look for the
expectations that have been violated in this case, and for the status groups to whom
those expectations apply. Anyone exploring society photographically can ask these
questions, both visually and verbally. Each day's data provide some provisional answers
and some new questions, both discovered by careful inspection and analysis of the
material.
The photographic investigator can supplement his visual material
with a running verbal record. Depending on his intentions, this might be a full set
of field notes such as a sociologist doing a conventional field study would keep,
complete with verbatim conversations, or a record of a few outstanding thoughts and
remarks. Some photographers (e.g., Winningham and Lyon) have tape recorded interviews
with the people they photograph. Some (e.g., Owens) have recorded the responses of
people to their photographs.
As the work progresses the photographer will be alert for visual
embodiments of his ideas, for images that contain and communicate the understanding
he is developing. That doesn't mean that he will let his theories dominate his vision,
especially at the moment of shooting, but rather that his theories will inform his
vision and influence what he finds interesting and worth making pictures of. His
theories will help him to photograph what he might otherwise have ignored. Simultaneously
he will let what he finds in his photographs direct his theory-building, the pictures
and ideas becoming closer and closer approximations of one another. Like the sociological
fieldworker, who finds much of his later understanding latent in his early data (Geer
1964), he will probably find that his early contact sheets, as he looks back through
them, contain the basic ideas that now need to be stated more precisely.
The photographer, like the sociologist who builds more and more
comprehensive models of what he is studying (Diesing 1971), will arrange the visual
material into the patterns and sequences that are the visual analogue of propositions
and causal statements. He will consider the problems of convincing other people that
his understanding is not idiosyncratic but rather represents a believable likeness
of that aspect of the world he has chosen to explore, a reasonable answer to the
questions he has asked about it
Whether they start as sociologists or photographers, anyone who
undertakes the kind of project I have just described will run into certain problems,
which are common both in being frequent and ubiquitous and in being shared by the
two vocations. In some cases, sociologists have ways of dealing with problems that
photographers might find useful; in others, the way photographers deal with those
problems will throw a new light on sociologists' troubles.
Truth and Proof
Insofar as a photograph or group of them purports to be "true,"
the particular meaning of that ambiguous claim needs to be specified. Once we know
the kind of truth a picture claims, we can assess how far we accept the claim and
how much of the statement it makes we want to believe.
Photographs (barring those that have been obviously manipulated
to produce multiple images and the like) minimally claim to be true in that what
they show actually existed in front of the camera for at least the time necessary
to make the exposure. Photographs in the social documentary style claim more than
that, presenting themselves as pictures of something that was not done just for the
photographer's benefit, but rather as something that occurs routinely as part of
the ordinary course of events. Or the photograph suggests that what we see is, if
not ordinary, characteristic in some deeper sense, portraying some essential
14
Photography and sociology 15
unanticipated and possibly exciting material (both sociologically and visually).
Following some of these suggestions might produce a lot of dull pictures, but so
do most procedures; exciting and informative photographs are always hard to come
by.
Fieldworkers may use crude time-sampling devices: checking up
on someone or someplace every half-hour, or on different days of the week, or different
times of the year. Some avoid "leaving things out" by attaching themselves
to one person at a time and following that person through his entire daily (and nightly)
round. They may ask people under study who else they ought to talk to or observe.
As they become aware of categories or situations that deserve special study, they
can systematically choose some to observe or they can observe all of them. Fieldworkers
follow the discipline of recording everything they see and hear while making these
observations.
Photographers could do all of these things, but they would need
to observe some discipline equivalent to incorporating everything into the field
notes, for a photographer's data do not exist unless they expose some film. In following
someone around for a day, they might for instance adopt some such convention as exposing
at least one roll of film every hour or so, adapting the time period to the character
of what they were observing. They would thus avoid waiting until "something
interesting" happened, and increase the chance that things that don't as yet
fit into the photographer's developing understanding would nevertheless get into
the record. They might similarly photograph certain activities or places on some
schedule that interferes with their tendency not to shoot what does not seem visually
interesting. Any kind of theory of the kind discussed earlier would likewise direct
the photographer to things his intuition and visual sense might not call to his attention.
Remember that theory is itself a sampling device, specifying what must be incorporated
into a full description.
Shooting what seems interesting usually satisfies the photographer's
need for a method. However, they often realize, if they are sensitive to their own
work, that they are producing essentially the same pictures in a variety of settings,
because their notion of what is visually interesting has become divorced from the
social reality they are working in. If they are not sensitive to that possibility,
others might point it out. A technique that breaks up their established visual habits
guards against this. In addition, photographers often find that they are slow to
discover and shoot things they later realize they need for a more complete visual
understanding. The same techniques of randomized and theoretically informed sampling
may help. The object of all this is not to turn photographers into sociologists or
enslave them in mad sociological rituals, but rather to suggest how sociological
tricks might solve problems of photographic exploration.
Sociologists try to convince their readers that generalizations
from findings are legitimate by indicating that they have used a conventionally approved
technique. The scientific community has already inspected the logic of that technique,
so it is sufficient to indicate that it has been appropriately used. Readers who
accept that convention are automatically convinced.
No photographer uses such standardized devices, and I'm sure
that none would be interested in pursuing such techniques as probability sampling.
They have their own devices, however, worth exploring because these produce conviction
in the viewers of photographic work similar to that produced by sampling designs
in sociological readers. Since sociological procedures are, to quote Campbell again,
"radically underjustified," it is worth considering photographers' methods,
even though they may appear even more underjustified to sociological readers.
16
Photography and sociology 17
of this deserves further analysis, since it is convincing (there are other such devices
which need to be described and analyzed).
The problem of the reactivity of data-gathering procedures
is very similar in ethnographic and photographic work. Does the sample of behavior
observed and recorded accurately reflect how people ordinarily act or is it largely
a response to the observer's presence and activities? Both sociologists and photographers
frequently deal with this by cultivating the art of being unobtrusive. Many people
know how to manipulate their bodies and expressions so that, in the absence of any
reason to pay special attention to them, the people they are observing ignore them;
how they actually do this is not explicitly known, and deserves investigation. It
is probably easier to be unobtrusive in public places where you are not known as
an investigator and it may or may not be easier if you are carrying a camera. In
many situations carrying a camera validates your right to be there; as a tourist,
as a member of the group recording the scene for their purposes, or as a representative
of the media. Under many circumstances, observing or photographing is commonplace
and expected; many other people are doing it. Your presence does not change anyone's
behavior since observers and photographers are part of the situation. You should,
of course, include their presence in your observations and photographs.
In many situations, the people being observed are engaged in
activities of considerable importance to them and cannot change what they are doing
for an observer's benefit even if they would like to. Reactivity depends on the freedom
of those observed to respond to the observer's (or photographer's) presence. If they
are enmeshed in the constraints of the social structure in which they carry on their
normal activities, they will have to carry on as they ordinarily do for whatever
reasons cause them to do that ordinarily (Becker 1970). They may be well aware that
they are being observed or photographed, but not be free to change what they do.
Photographers routinely make use of this possibility. I once watched Michael Alexander
photograph a woman fighting with her small child in a playground. Alexander was practically
on top of her, but the child was kicking and screaming and, though she had no idea
who he was, she felt she had no choice but to deal with her child despite the unwelcome
recording going on.
A third solution recognizes that the reactivity often reflects
fears about what will be done with the information
18
Sociologists have increasingly worried about the conditions
under which they will be allowed to gather data and then make their research results
public. Science requires that data and operations be open to public inspection and
independent verification. Unconstrained, scientists would (and should) make all their
data public. But they are constrained by both legal and moral considerations from
doing so, and ordinarily take substantial precautions to avoid harming anyone by
revealing who furnished information for or are the subjects of research. They may
simply change the names of people, organizations, and places, or use elaborate coding
procedures to preserve the anonymity of survey respondents.
People sociologists write about seldom sue them (though my colleagues
and I were once threatened with a libel action by the administrator of an organization
we studied). Consequently, they worry more about ethical than legal problems. Though
a substantial literature debating these problems has grown up, the situation is confused
and sociologists do not agree on procedures or relevant ethical principles. They
tend to agree on generalities-"We should not do harm to the subjects of our
research"-but not on the application of such crucial terms as "harm."
To take one example: Are organizations, and especially such public ones as governmental
agencies or schools, entitled to the same privacy as individuals, or is not social
science research part of the public review to which they are necessarily subject?
Another: Where do you draw the line between inconvenience or embarrassment and substantial
harm?
Photographers have been considerably more interested in legal
problems. When they make simplified analyses of the problems they explore, they can
take an equally simplified view of the ethical problems. Having no trouble telling
the good guys from the bad guys, they have not had to worry so much about ethical
questions. If their work hurts the bad guys on behalf of the good guys-well, that
was the point. But they have had to worry about being sued for invasion of privacy,
and libel. The law here seems to be as ambiguous as the ethical standards of sociologists.
Photographers know they can be sued and often take the ritual precaution of having
people sign standard release forms, though these may not be as useful as supposed. 6 They
also try to maintain friendly relations with the people they photograph, in much
the same spirit as the advice I heard given to medical students: if you are good
friends with your patients they won't sue you for malpractice. Alternatively, they
rely on this being a large, differentiated society in which it is relatively unlikely
that anyone will see the picture of him you put in a book or exhibit.
Everett Hughes' (1971) idea of the research bargain provides
the terms for a useful comparison. What bargain do
Photography and sociology 19
investigator and investigated make? In both photographic and sociological investigations,
it is fair to say, the people investigated probably do not know what they are getting
into. They may give their consent, but it is not an informed consent. From an ethical
and perhaps a legal point of view, the bargain is not fully valid. Sociologists are
generally very cautious about this, at least in public discussion, and I think they
might consider seriously a view more common among photographers: people can and should
take care of their own interests and once the investigator has honestly described
his intentions he has fulfilled his obligations. I don't propose that we accept this
view uncritically, but we might think hard about why we should not. Journalists have
long operated with a different ethic and there is perhaps as much reason to adopt
their practice as that of physicians, which has tended to be the one sociologists
orient themselves to.
Photographers have probably taken a tougher line because they
can't use some of the devices sociologists do. Unless you block out faces and other
identifying marks, everyone in a photograph is identifiable and there is no possibility
of preserving anonymity. That is the strength of the medium, and no one would sacrifice
it for ethical considerations. The strength of photographic work may not depend on
the people and organizations studied being identified specifically, since the implicit
argument is that what you see is characteristic of a large class; so the people in
the individual prints are in effect anonymous, though they might be known to some
who see the pictures and others could conceivably find out who they are if it seemed
important. (But see Alwyn Scott Turner's Photographs of the Detroit People, in
which a great many people photographed are not only named but their approximate addresses
are given, too.)
The other aspect of the photographer's situation that leads him
not to worry so much about ethical considerations is that when he is not photographing
anonymous people who will be made to stand for some more general aspect of the human
condition he is usually photographing people who, because they are public figures,
expect to be photographed and only complain when it is grotesquely overdone, as in
the case of Jacqueline Onassis. These people epitomize the rationale I mentioned
earlier: perfectly capable of defending their own interests, they accept their photographic
burden as one of the costs of being a public figure, whether they like it or not.
Both these strategies offer possibilities for social researchers.
Sociologists frequently disguise names of people and organizations without thinking
why, and might often be able to identify them, particularly when what they have said
or done is no more than ordinarily discreditable and when (as is inevitable in social
research) a long time elapses between getting the information and putting it into
print. Studs Terkel has done that in his books on Chicago and on the Depression to
good effect and without doing anyone harm.
Similarly, we might treat public figures as just that, justifying
our observations, interviews, and quotations on the grounds that we are entitled
to them as citizens and need no special social science warrant for our actions. A
good example appears in a study by a combined legal and social science research staff
of public access to information (Northwestern University Law Review 1973). As part
of an elaborate experiment, researchers visited a number of public offices in search
of information to which their access was guaranteed by law. Information holders often
refused them or evaded their requests with transparent devices; the researchers in
providing evidence for their conclusions, described their encounters with public
officials, identified by name and office. I see no reason why that device
should not be used more often than it is.
Concepts and Indicators, or Ideas and Images
Sociologists tend to deal in large, abstract ideas and move from
them (if they do) to specific observable phenomena that can be seen as embodiments,
indicators, or indices of those ideas. Photographers, conversely, work with specific
images and move from them (if they do) to somewhat larger ideas. Both movements involve
the same operation of connecting an idea with something observable, but where you
start makes a difference. Granting, and even insisting as I already have, on the
conceptual element in photographs, it still is quite different to start with something
immediately observed and try to bend ideas to fit it than to start with an idea and
try to find or create something observable that embodies it. Sociologists have something
to learn from photography's inextricable connection with specific imagery.
Many sociological concepts, whose meaning seems intuitively clear,
would he very hard to portray visually. Consider the notion of status integration.
Defined as a congruence (or lack of it) between two or more indicators of social
rank (education and income, for instance), its human meaning seems obvious. A man
who made $100,000 a year but had never finished grade school would, we can imagine,
have troubles another man with the same income who had completed college would never
know. Does it have a visual counterpart? Can we imagine what a person in either of
those states would look like, what we might see him doing, what his possessions and
environment would consist of? The answer, to both questions, is probably no.
We cannot imagine the visual counterpart of status integration,
I think, because the concept has been defined by the rules for calculating a status
integration score from numerical indicators of specific ranks. The human meaning
of the concept has been left to be evoked intuitively from the label applied to the
results of that operation. As a result, no one can be sure what an instance of status
integration would look like and thus no one can photograph it.
Obviously, every sociological idea need not be connectable to
a visual image to be valid or useful. On the other hand, consider this. Some sociologists
describe a basic problem of empirical research as one of finding empirical indicators
(things observable in real life) to measure a concept whose meaning they have already
decided. A sizable literature discusses the logic by which the two can be defensibly
connected. But, as the example of status integration suggests, a third element is
involved: the basic imagery we intuitively supply to fill out the meaning of an abstract
concept operationally defined. We seldom consider the logic by which we connect concepts
and indicators to that basic imagery, or the procedures by which we can develop that
imagery explicitly and connect it defensibly to concepts and indicators. While, to
repeat, sociological ideas needn't evoke a clear visual image to be defensible, considering
the
20
Photography and sociology 21
organization must do some particular thing (e.g., satisfy some particular need or
requirement) if it is to survive. The statement is misleading unless we interpret
it as shorthand for the cumbersome proposition that it will change from its present
form of organization and level of performance in various ways if the particular need
or requirement is met at some other level or in some other way than that specified.
When we put it that way, we recognize that survival, which the simpler statement
treats as a given, can be made problematic and variable. The political effect comes
about when we take what we have defined, for scientific convenience, as unchanging,
as in fact, unchangeable. We thus, implicitly or explicitly, suggest to those who
think that some particular change is the way to solve a pressing problem, that their
solution is utopian and unworkable. What we are really saying, in such a case, is
that the phenomenon in question can only be affected by changing something so difficult
to change that only extraordinary effort and power can accomplish the feat. The mobilization
of effort and power might be accomplished, if only in a way that the analyst might
think unlikely or distasteful (e.g., violent revolution).
Likewise, when sociologists fail to consider some people and
some aspects of a situation and do not gather data about them, they forego the possibility
of finding out that some things said by or about those people are not true, that
their informants' descriptions of their own actions may be self-servingly misleading.
For social scientists, this choice usually results in studying subordinate echelons
in an organization or community, while taking the descriptions by superiors of their
own activities as adequate and trustworthy and therefore not needing any investigation.
This lack of scientific skepticism is a political choice and has political consequences
(Becker 1967; Blumer 1967; Becker and Horowitz 1972).
Since photographers seldom produce explicit analyses of social
problems, they are less likely to confront this problem directly. But their idea
of who should be photographed and who should not may have the same consequence's
as the sociologist's decision about who is to be studied, the photographer thereby
giving us great informational detail about some people, and suggesting that others
either do not exist or can be filled in from the viewer's imagination. How, for instance,
would Hine's documentation of the problem of child labor have been affected had he
included among his portraits of exploited children portraits of the men and women
who owned the factories, profited from that exploited labor, and lived in extravagant
luxury on the profits? It might have given a more damning indictment of the entire
system, though it is questionable that his work would then have had greater effect.
One could also argue that the machines and factory buildings present in his pictures
convincingly evoke the owners and their power (though not the luxury of their lives),
or that other photographers provided that material, e.g., Steichen's (1963:31) portrait
of J. P. Morgan.
Another aspect of framing is that we can either include all of
what we do show within the picture's frame, and thus indicate that it is self-contained,
or include parts of things that extend beyond the frame and thus evoke the world
into which they extend, or things that stand for and evoke worlds and situations
which lie beyond. Portraits, for instance, can contain all of the person's body and
thus indicate that it is not necessary to know more, or they can contain only parts
and thus indicate that there are other parts the viewer must supply from his imagination.
Likewise, a portrait can contain some chunk of the person's ordinary environment-an
artist's studio, a scientist's laboratory which evokes a world of activity not pictured,
but there. Or it may simply show some setting (home or whatever) in such a way as
to suggest more about the person. André Kertész (1972:118-119), for
instance, has a portrait of Mondrian that faces a picture of Mondrian's house, which
arguably conveys a more Mondrianish spirit than the portrait of the artist himself.
In any event, photographers do understand and use what lies beyond
the portion of reality they actually show. In this they differ from social scientists
who prefer not to discuss explicitly what they cannot claim to have studied scientifically.
In that sense, social scientists make themselves ignorant about matters that lie
beyond their frame, ignoring even what they do know by casual observation or in some
other informal way. Instead of building such partial knowledge into their analyses,
they rely on time-honored verbal formulae (e.g., "all other things being equal")
to limit and frame their analyses. These formulae, like legal formulae, have been
revised and refined so as to say exactly what is meant, what is defensible, and no
more. A large number of these conventions exist, part of the rhetoric of contemporary
science.
In any event, when social Scientists fail to deal with the reality
that lies beyond the frame they placed around their study, they do not get rid of
it. The reader, as with photographs, fills in what is hinted at but not described
with his own knowledge and stereotypes, attaching these to whatever cues he can find
in the information given. Since readers will do this, whatever verbal formulae are
used to attempt to evade the consequences, sociologists might as well understand
the process and control it, rather than being its victims .
Personal Expression and Style
Sociologists like to think of science as impersonal. However,
they recognize that people work differently, that some have easily recognizable styles
of work, that some work has an elegance missing in other research. In short, they
recognize a personally expressive component in sociological research and writing.
They seldom discuss that component (I suppose because it contradicts the imagery
of impersonal science). When they do discuss it, they usually describe it as a flaw.
For instance, critics frequently complain of Erving Goffman's jaundiced view of the
world, of modern society, and especially of personal relationships. They characterize
that view as overly calculating, as cynical and even as paranoid. Similarly, some
critics of so-called "labelling theory" criticize it for being overly skeptical
about established organizations, their operations and records.
Both Goffman and labeling theorists have the elements these criticisms
single out. So does every other theory and style of work. The critical analysis errs
only in suggesting that some theories and studies have such components while others
are properly impersonal, as befits scientific activity. But Blau and Duncan's (1967)
study of the occupational
22
This paper is made up of notes from work in progress, and what I have said is necessarily preliminary and incomplete. The kind of work it intends to encourage barely exists as yet, though the common and converging interests of social scientists and photographers, often in the same person, suggest that we don't have long to wait. I hope the paper will provoke further discussion and work on the problems it proposes.
1Work on this paper has been supported
by the Russell Sage Foundation. A book-length version of the material is in preparation.
I am grateful to Marie Czach, Blanche Geer, Walter Klink, Alexander J. Morin, and
Clarice Stoll for their useful comments on an earlier version.
2I have found Newhall (1964) and Lyons
(1966) useful background references.
3Alexander Blumenstiel now edits a journal called Videosociology.
4See, for instance, the quote from Bresson in Lyons (1966:41), and the descriptions of magazine work in Bourke-White (1972).
5Collier's book is a classic, and required reading for anyone interested in these problems.
6Boccioletti (1972) deals with a number of common photographic legal problems and refers to Photography and the Law by G. Chernoff and H. Sarbin (Amphoto: nd.d.), which I have not seen.
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Becker, Howard S.
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1970 Field Work Evidence. In Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Howard S. Becker, ed. Chicago: Aldine. pp. 39-62.
1974 Art as Collective Action. American Sociological Review39(6).
24
Blumer, Herbert
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1972 Portrait of a Decade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
1972 Russell Lee. Image 16(3): 1-8.
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1973 Sixty Years of Photography. New York: Grossman.
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1974 Wisconsin Death Trip. New York: Pantheon.
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1968 The Bikeriders. New York: Macmillan.
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1968 Brassai. New York: New York Graphic Society.
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1973 Research Study: Public Access to Information. 68(2).
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1974 Suburbia. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books.
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1973 Invisible in America. Lawrence: University of Kansas Art Museum.
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1971 How the Other Half Lives. New York: Dover. (Original publication 1890.)
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1973 Photographers and Their Photographs. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University.
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1972 Up the Zambesi with Notebook and Camera or Being an Anthropologist Without Doing Anthropology . . . With Pictures. Paper presented at the 71st Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Toronto.
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1967 Portrait of an Epoch. New York: Macmillan.
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1973 Men Without Masks. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society.
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1973 Field Research: Strategies for a Natural Sociology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
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1970 Haymarket. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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1973 In This Proud Land. Greenwich: New York Graphic Society .
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1972 Paterson. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
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1970 Photographs of the Detroit People. Detroit: Alwyn Scott Turner
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1945 Naked City. New York: Essential Books.
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1971 Friday Night in the Coliseum. Houston: Allison Press.
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