Top Reviews for:

The Complete Sol Worth
LARRY GROSS & JAY RUBY, EDITORS

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By Michael Dooley, Print Magazine

Every age delivers researchers who change the way things are done, thought about, and explained. Disciplines suggest their own solutions that are always waiting in the wings but which need one or more perceptive individuals to connect the dots. Too often, however, these pioneers are forgotten by second and third generation scholars who in the digital age are responding to an ever-shortening half-life of knowledge, and in the current conjuncture, the killing of history by new technologies that conduct fast-breaking information in the perceptual present. Disciplinary epistemologies are thereby often lost in the mists – not of time – but of publication clutter as academics try to carve out for themselves intellectual niches that help to brand them in the increasingly congested job market. For our students, mostly digital natives, if it’s not on the Net, it does not exist.

It is my impression that everyone is writing but few of us are reading anymore. Our jobs depend on outputs, publications and impact factors. Our bosses – auditors rather than academics – require these indices to justify their own jobs, let alone those of us actually still working in the field.

The Complete Sol Worth is a timeous effort as recovery of a key visual anthropologist who lived and worked before the digital age. No matter, his theories, methods and work remain as relevant today as before.

Sol Worth, amongst a few others like John Adair, Margaret Mead, Paul Hockings, Jay Ruby, Larry Gross and Karl Heider, established different strands of a new sub-field, one that connected anthropology with documentary, and in Worth and Adair’s case, subject-generated film making with the methodology of semiotics as an explicit encoding strategy. Like with most paradigmatic breaks, the one offered by Worth and Adair was dramatic.

It is quite fitting, then, that Worth’s colleagues, Larry Gross and Jay Ruby, have compiled a very extensive consolidated memory of Worth’s work, comments on it and developments from it. This archive is further enhanced by republishing articles from Worth’s former student, Dick Chalfen, and Chalfen’s student, Sam Pack, amongst some others, This 485 page hyperlinked tome is divided into the following sections: a) the Complete Sol Worth (preface, list of publications, biography, photographs), b) Reprints of two books, i) Studying Visual Communication, ii) Through Navajo Eyes, c) Other Publications, d) Films, e) Sol Worth’s Art Work, and f) Publications About Worth’s Works (by Dick Chalfen, Margaret Mead, John Collier, Margaret Dubin, Sam Pack, Bob Aibel and Leighten Peterson. A key figure in the genesis of the study of visual communication, Sol Worth (1922-1977) started his career as a filmmaker and painter before turning to academic pursuits. How film could be understood and studied as medium of communication (in both production and reception) was his initial aim, from where he moved on to bigger and more weighty questions about the nature of visual media in general and the role that visual images play in shaping and constructing reality. Worth is perhaps best known for the “Navajo Film Project” that he conducted with anthropologist John Adair in which they allocated 16mm cameras to Navajo residents of the Pine Springs, Arizona reservation, in order to study how individuals who had never made or used movies would do so for the first time. How would their movies reflect their own culture and their ways of seeing and telling about their experiences? The book, Through Navajo Eyes, became enormously influential in the fields of anthropology, communication and cinema studies, among other disciplines and is reproduced in its entirety here.

My own interaction with Worth and some of the above characters, who all played roles in his life and work, was from afar in the late 1970s. My own MA supervisor, John Van Zyl, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and I had been toying with the idea of ethnographic film. Van Zyl then spent a sabbatical at the University of Pennsylvania, and like the returned pilgrim he brought back fascinating, absorbing and exotic tales of the luminaries he had met like Ray Birdwhistell, Richard Aibel, George Gerbner and a new way of making sense called visual anthropology where texts and contexts cohered. He organised a Visual Anthropology conference at Wits, and of those invited, Jay Ruby and Gei Zantzinger , participated, robustly engaging us on a film that I had made on indigenous healers, whose production and visual method had been inspired by Heider’s approach, Ethnographic Film.

It was a little later that I managed to get a copy of Through Navajo Eyes, which was to become a basis of my own early semiotic-led film making and associated theory. My own book, Appropriating Images (1996) re-articulates Worth and Adair into a framework which examines the West looking at us here in Africa looking at the West. We also strategically applied Worth’s semiotic to an analysis of films on South Africans to disrupt the prevailing apartheid lens which assumed that the apartheid perception of reality was concretely real and that (approved) images of races comprised actual simulacra of racial policies. (Let’s not go there, the argument is very convoluted.) However one makes sense of the claim that ‘film’ is a prescriptive ‘model ’of and for reality, Worth’s theories and methods assisted us in deconstructing such correspondence theories that underpinned representation.

 

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By Keyan G. Tomaselli

Centre for Communication, Media and Society
University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban, South Africa; Distinguished Professor Faculty of Humanities University of Johannesburg Johannesburg, South Africa

Visual Anthropology, 28: 365–368, 2015 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2015.1052332

The Complete Sol Worth

Gross, Larry, and Jay Ruby, eds. The Complete Sol Worth. USC Annenberg Press; text with photos; 485 pp. ISBN Ebook: 978-1-62517-188-7.

De´ja` vu. That was my response when asked to review this book. I found myself back in the 1970s, the analog era, before PCs and digital media came to dominate ways in which contemporary electronically connected but atomistic individuals comprising tele-communities make sense in, but less of, the postmodern world. The early history of visual anthropology still exists within the living memories of some of us first and second generation veterans. It was a period of modernity, it was pre-internet, when cultures were less mobile and more stable.

The Complete Sol Worth reminds us that every age delivers researchers who fundamentally change the way things are done, thought about, and explained. Disciplines suggest their own solutions that are always waiting in the wings but which need one or more perceptive, innovative and dogged individuals to connect the dots. Too often, however, these pioneers are forgotten by third and fourth generation scholars, who in the digital age are responding to an ever- shortening half-life of knowledge, and in the current conjuncture, the killing of history by new technologies that transmit fast-breaking information in the perceptual present. Disciplinary epistemologies are thereby often lost in the

mists—not of time—but of publication clutter as academics try to carve out for

themselves intellectual niches that help to brand them in the increasingly congested and competitive job market. For our students, now mostly digital natives, if it’s not on the Net, it does not exist.

It is my impression that everyone is writing but that few of us are reading anymore. That writing is usually highly lucid, engaging and often faddish, constructed on an electronic device. In the age of rampant managerialism, institutional corporatization and performance management, our job security depends on outputs, publications and impact factors. Getting into the field is complicated by institutional review board considerations, time and the academy’s need for academics to be teaching in the classroom much more than ever before. Our new bosses—auditors rather than academics—require theseindices to justify their own positions, let alone those of us actually still working in the field. It was Worth who came from the field and who worked in it, and who with his colleagues, fundamentally shifted a variety of disciplines, which eventually came to cohere in the idea of visual anthropology. This shift did not occur as a desk-bound exercise, but from an experiential one.

The Complete Sol Worth is a timerous recovery of a key visual anthropologist who lived and worked before the digital age, when celluloid was the norm. No matter, his theories, methods and work remain as relevant today as before. Epistemological histories are always important, even if they require excavation. Sol Worth, amongst a few others like John Adair, Margaret Mead, Paul Hockings, Jay Ruby, Larry Gross and Karl Heider, established different but inter-related strands of a new sub-field, one that connected anthropology with documentary, and in Worth and Adair’s case, subject-generated filmmaking with the methodology of semiotics as an explicit encoding strategy. As with most paradigmatic breaks, the one offered by Worth and Adair was dramatic and impacted a number of cognate disciplines: anthropology, communication, and both filmmaking and film theory, amongst others.

It is quite fitting, then, that Worth’s colleagues, Larry Gross and Jay Ruby, have compiled a very extensive consolidated memory of Worth’s work, comments on it and developments from it. This archive is further enhanced by republishing articles from Worth’s former student, Dick Chalfen, and Chalfen’s student, Sam Pack, amongst some others. This 485-page hyperlinked tome is divided into the following sections: (a) the Complete Sol Worth (preface, list of publications, biography, photographs), (b) Reprints of two books, i) Studying Visual Communication, ii) Through Navajo Eyes, (c) Other Publications, (d) Films, (e) Sol Worth’s Art Work, and (f) Publications about Worth’s Works (by Dick Chalfen, Margaret Mead, John Collier, Margaret Dubin, Sam Pack, Bob Aibel and Leighton Peterson).

A key figure in the genesis of the study of visual communication, Sol Worth (1922–1977) started his career as a filmmaker and painter before turning to academic pursuits. How film could be understood and studied as a medium of communication (in both production and reception) was his initial aim, from where he moved on to bigger and more weighty questions about the nature of visual media in general and the role that visual images play in shaping and constructing reality. Worth is perhaps best known for the ‘‘Navajo Film Project’’ that he conducted with the anthropologist John Adair, in which they allocated 16 mm cameras to Navajo residents of the Pine Springs, Arizona, reservation, in order to study how individuals who had never made or used movies would do so for the first time. How would their movies reflect their own culture and their ways of seeing and telling about their experiences? How were the films read by their community? The book, Through Navajo Eyes [1972], became enormously influen- tial in the fields of anthropology, communication and cinema studies, among other disciplines, and is reproduced in its entirety here.

My own interaction with Worth and some of the above characters, who all played roles in his life and work, was from afar in the late 1970s. My own MA supervisor, John Van Zyl, at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, and I had been toying with the idea of ethnographic film. Van Zyl had been instrumental in the establishment of the School of Performing Arts in which I was employed to teach film and TV production. Van Zyl had introduced cine- and theater-semiology to South Africa in the early 1970s and persuaded me to study the semiotics of film. In the Library I discovered original bound volumes of C. S. Peirce’s philosophy and I set about trying to make sense of them, in relation to Karl Heider’s Ethnographic Film [1975]. My connection with Worth’s semiotic work was thus immediate, once I had sourced copies of his books and made sense of Peirce.

Van Zyl then spent a sabbatical at the University of Pennsylvania, and like the returning pilgrim he brought back fascinating, absorbing and exotic tales of the luminaries he had met like Ray Birdwhistle, Richard Aibel, and George Gerbner, and a new way of making sense called visual anthropology where texts and contexts cohered. These ideas fitted perfectly with the theory-practice couplet that we were developing at the School in the context of an apartheid political economy that had delayed the introduction of television till 1976, the year that the revolution led by black schoolchildren in Soweto began. We had been looking for media theories and production strategies to contest the then common sense that media were always determining, that anyone working in, or studying media, was automatically co-opted by hegemonic interests. The above theorists, amongst others, helped us and our students break with this ‘‘you-are-what-you-watch’’ assumption and to generate systematic debate about performance and sign theory in the service of critique and democratization.

Van Zyl organized a visual anthropology conference at Wits in 1980, and among those invited, Jay Ruby and Gei Zantzinger participated actively and furthermore offered other seminars and discussions. They very robustly engaged us on a film that I had made on indigenous healers for the Wits Department of Psychology, whose production method and structuring had been inspired by Heider’s approach. Apart from John Marshall’s films, this was the first time perhaps that the visual anthropological classics had been screened in South Africa.

It was a little later that I managed to get a copy of Through Navajo Eyes, which was to become a basis of my own subsequent semiotic-led filmmaking and associated theory. My own book, Appropriating Images: The Semiotics of Visual Representation [1996], re-articulates Worth and Adair into a framework that criti- cally examines the West looking at us here in Africa looking at the West. We also applied Worth’s semiotic strategically to an analysis of films on South Africans, to disrupt the prevailing apartheid lens which assumed that the apartheid perception of reality was concretely real and that (approved) images of races comprised actual simulacra of apartheid geo-racial policies. (This argument is very convoluted indeed, claiming that ‘‘film’’ is a ‘‘model’’ for reality, and is not developed here.) However one makes sense of the claim that ‘‘film’’ is a pre- scriptive ‘‘model’’ of and for reality, Worth’s theories and methods assisted us in deconstructing such correspondence theories that underpinned the theory of rep- resentation that had currency within some intellectual sectors of the apartheid state.

The two points that I am working towards here are that (i) theory is never just ‘‘academic’’ (i.e., irrelevant), as it both legitimizes and questions prevailing hegemonies, depending on how it is applied; and that (ii) in the analog world of modernity where information was paper-bound, theories travelled differently, more slowly, erratically, and were appropriated with often surprising results. Nowadays, with the internet, nearly all studies, theories and information are instantly available (if on occasion for a price). The adoption, adaptation and re-articulation of received theories is much easier nowadays. However, what needs to be kept in mind is that we all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. Worth and his colleagues’ work offers one of the foundations of the field.

Keyan G. Tomaselli

Centre for Communication, Media and Society

University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban, South Africa; Distinguished Professor Faculty of Humanities University of Johannesburg Johannesburg, South Africa

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By Faye Ginsburg, New York University

A welcome collection for those who know Sol Worth’s work, and those just learning about it…

The Complete Sol Worth is a remarkable collection of the writings of Sol Worth, an energetic and visionary scholar and filmmaker who died far too young but left us with a rich archive of writings, photos, and intellectual heirs in anthropology, media studies, and visual culture. Fortunately, the work is easily available thanks to the republication of all his work in digital form, along with a biographical essay, a wonderful collection of photos, and some terrific articles reflecting on his influence and contributions, in particular his most famous project, Through Navajo Eyes. Edited with great appreciation and insight by distinguished media scholar Larry Gross — who was mentored by Worth — and the well-known visual anthropologist Jay Ruby who was Worth’s close colleague, the collection is well worth adding to your digital bookshelf .

Faye Ginsburg
Director, Center for Media, Culture and History
Kriser Professor of Anthropology
New York University

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Review posted on Amazon.com by RSA

A major contribution in the field …

A must have for anyone interested in Visual Communication, Visual Anthropology, Ethnography, Aesthetic Communication, Film And Art Theory and much more. Worth was a towering figure whose work advanced so many fields by leaps and bounds. Great to have all of this material so easily accessible.

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