visual sociology

CONFERENCE THEMES

visual sociology, documentary work and public imagery

IVSA 2004

San Francisco, CA

August 11-13

What people see shapes what and how they think, and what people think shapes what and how they see. This duality leads people through both physical and social worlds. It colors the environments they seek to avoid, alter, create, or sanctify, and frames their explorations of individual and group identity. This back-and-forth between seeing and thinking is also embedded in the craft of studying how people go about doing just those things.

Russian army parade. Moscow 1996 (photo by Nancy Woodruff)

As a special case of "The Thought of the Eye," the 2004 IVSA Conference will take a close look at visual sociology, documentary studies, and public imagery. Three genres of public imagery will receive special attention:

Public Images in the Mass Media Images distributed through mass market movies and television programming, billboards, books, magazines and newspapers, and on product packaging, merchandise displays, and web sites.
	Airport concourse. Athens Greece, 2003
	Public Images in Local Culture Images that people make, acquire, arrange, and display in local contexts as expressions of individual or group identity, status, accomplishment, friendship or affinity, personal style, politics, religion, and so on. These images include, among other things, family photos, clippings and copies of mass media imagery (including commercially produced posters and prints), religious icons, art works, signs, and decorations.
Teenage girl's room. Berkeley, California 2004
Public Images in Social Inquiry Images that are made public by social scientists, documentarians and artists who use photographs and video tapes to study and portray culture and social life.
	Bhutanese archers, Asian Art Museum. San Francisco, California 2003

TOPICS FOR PROPOSALS AND SESSIONS

Proposals are invited for individual papers, workshops, portfolio-centered roundtables and organized sessions that report on or embody visual studies of culture and social life. We especially encourage proposals related directly to the conference theme or that focus on one or more of the following topics:
public imagery and public policy visual representations of inequality and injustice visual information and public discourse ethics and politics of image-based work visual sociology, visual anthropology and the documentary film the public face of new and old visual media public images as private property visual dimensions of professional and public communication photo archives, photo illustration and social research image-making theory and craft visual culture as a public resource image-based approaches to teaching: students and publics
guidelines for submitting proposals	Photo by Dulce Pinson

"The Thought of the Eye" 2004 Conference of the International Visual Sociology Association
San Francisco Art Instituted, August 11-13 San Francisco, California

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