FRS 002L — (2
unit) —
CRN 76176 — R 12:10-2:00 pm — 25 Wellman
Picturing Social Reality: Photographs and Film, Facts
and Fabrications
Instructor: Jon Wagner, School of Education
Description: This seminar explores how photographs, video and
film are used to “picture” social life in social
research, journalism,
entertainment, advertising and propaganda. Discussion topics include:
making and
faking visual documents of social life; linking texts and images to create or
reduce ambiguity; marketing visual “documents” in the digital age;
the science and craft of representing social reality; and visual rhetorics of
fantasy and fiction.
Format: The seminar meets for two hours each week.
Seminars combine
mini-lectures and presentations with in-class discussions of
readings, photographs,
video tape viewing, student presentations and short writing
assignments. No standard
text is required, but students will read a selection of articles
chosen from diverse
sources, including: visual anthropology, visual sociology,
documentary film-making,
documentary photography, media studies and the arts. Students will
review “found”
video and film documents and construct visual documents of their own (in pairs
and teams) by working on four short assignments:
(A) Creating facts and fabrications (teams): Use still photographs and/or video
tape create two documents of social life that you find interesting. For one of
these, make a deliberate, concerted effort to “fabricate”
or “fake”
the social life you are supposedly “documenting.” For the
other, make
a deliberate, concerted effort to record a “factual account.”
(B) Interpreting “reality” in television programming
(teams): Compare
and contrast two examples of mass market television programming - one
that relies
on the proposition that what you are seeing is “fact,” and one that
relies on the proposition that what you are seeing is
“fabrication.”
What cues, design features, and framing are used to communicate these
propositions/expectations
to targeted audiences? Under what circumstances could these elements be misread
by people viewing these materials?
(C) Fact and fabrication as complements (pairs): Using both factual
and fabricated
images, put together a set of photographs or a short video tape that you think
provides a representation of social life that would be hard to
produce (for whatever
reason) if you relied exclusively on either “factual” or
“fabricated”
images.
(D) Framing fact and fabrication (individuals): Prepare a 1-2 page
statement that
could help audiences distinguish fact from fabrication in a media production of
your choice — i.e. a television show (or series), advertising campaign,
documentary or ethnographic film or photo book; fictional film or photo book;
political or policy document; a single work of photo/video art (or an
exhibition);
or the work of a visual artist. Students will present their work on
these assignments
to the class as teams, pairs or individually. Each student will also
write a brief
commentary (500-750 words) comparing assignments presented in class with one or
more of the course readings. Each student will also prepare a short
written statement
(300-500 words) that tries to distinguish “fact” from
“fabrication”
in a media product of their choice and present that statement in a
mini-conference
format at the last class session. Grading: Grades will
be based on the following: 20% for each of the four assignments and
commentaries;
20% on classroom participation.
About the Instructor: Jon Wagner is a professor in the School
of Education. His research interests include school organization and
reform, children's
material culture, and image-based research. Current projects include a study of
how children and adults view the material culture of children in the home and
in school and studies of two alternative high schools that emphasize
“problem-based
learning.” Professor Wagner is past President of the International Visual
Sociology Association and the founding Image Editor of the American
Sociological
Association's Contexts magazine.