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Frederick Wiseman: Sociological Filmmaker?

1985; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2070407

1939-8638

Timothy J. Curry,

Participatory Visual Research Methods

In a fit of empiricism, I once instructed a student researcher to count the number of photographs in fourteen of the leading social science journals and fourteen of the leading biological science journals. The results were not too surprising: The biological sciences used photographs nearly twenty-five times as often as the social sciences, 799 photographs to 32 (a list of the journals sampled is available on request). Not surprising either are the photo credits sections of the illustrated textbooks now very common in sociology. A cursory look at the ones on anybody's shelf is likely to reveal the names of professional photographers and photographic agencies, rather than the names of social scientists. When it comes to showing films in the classroom, most of us also rely on others to produce our materials. The disinclination toward photography runs deep within our discipline, but this review is probably not the place to examine the reasons why (see Curry and Clarke, 1983; Stasz, 1979). Rather, let us review the career of a celebrated independent social documentary filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, whose films have been well re-