Bologna por­tico

The 2010 Inter­na­tional Visual Soci­ology Asso­ci­ation (IVSA) Con­fer­ence was held at the world’s old­est uni­ver­sity, Uni­versità di Bologna, in Italy. Bologna la Rossa (named for its red roofs and his­tor­ic­ally left­ist polit­ics) is an utterly beau­ti­ful city, with por­ti­cos along the streets enabling walk­ers to wander sheltered from the sun­shine. This annual con­fer­ence is a place for those work­ing in soci­ology and related dis­cip­lines to share and develop their exper­i­ence and know­ledge of work­ing with the visual, and this year the focus was reflec­ted in the con­fer­ence title: Think­ing, Doing and Pub­lish­ing Visual Research: The State of the Field? This provided an oppor­tun­ity to reflect on dif­fer­ent meth­od­o­lo­gical prac­tices based on pho­to­graphy, video and sim­ilar tools. (You’ve cer­tainly never seen so many con­fer­ence del­eg­ates with cameras.)

Valentina Cuzzo­crea (Uni­ver­sity of Cagliari) sug­ges­ted that she and nowayto­makealiv­ing col­lab­or­ate to run a panel on work and the visual. At the 2009 con­fer­ence, Carol Wolkow­itz and Phil Mizen (both Uni­ver­sity of War­wick) had organ­ised two ses­sions on the theme of ‘Topo­graph­ies of Work’ which gen­er­ated inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion of the ways in which work spaces pro­duce par­tic­u­lar exper­i­ences and rep­res­ent­a­tions of work. Our call for papers this year also gen­er­ated suf­fi­cient interest to put on two ses­sions, the first with a focus on ‘doing work’, the second on work in cul­tural indus­tries. Given that the dom­in­ant top­ics of the con­fer­ence were con­sump­tion, the city and digital tech­no­lo­gies, these pan­els on work were (inev­it­ably) out­liers. If the study of work has lost its foothold in soci­ology, it is even fur­ther from the ima­gin­a­tions of those in cul­tural stud­ies, media and com­mu­nic­a­tions. How­ever, we argue – and demon­strate — that this gen­eral absence is not jus­ti­fied (espe­cially in the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate), and that visual soci­ology has a lot to offer the study of work.

Paolo Car­dullo (Gold­smiths Col­lege, UK) began by present­ing his pho­to­graphy of work­ers along the Thames at Green­wich. Con­trast­ing the top down vis­ion of res­id­ents in the new build flats, Paolo spoke to the all male and pre­dom­in­antly migrant work­force work­ing close up to the river, in the bound­ary zone of the post-industrial dock­side. His pho­to­graphs of weld­ers seemed to show the man con­sumed by the job. He described the pre­car­ity of work and life for these work­ers. There’s a small irony in a pre­cari­ous work­ing life spent address­ing the pre­car­ity of the mater­ial world: fix­ing the boats, clean­ing the rust, weld­ing the gaps. You can view his pho­to­book, Doing Work: Chron­icles of the Work­ing River here.

Dawn Lyon (Uni­ver­sity of Kent, UK) spoke about her eth­no­graphy of the refur­bish­ment of a build­ing in Med­way, Kent in which she and artist-collaborator, Peter Hat­ton (also Uni­ver­sity of Kent), exper­i­mented with dif­fer­ent ways of doc­u­ment­ing and rep­res­ent­ing the prac­tice of work. Peter fixed his gaze on change over time as seen from spe­cific spaces across the build­ing site, whilst Dawn fol­lowed with the cam­era whatever work was going on at the time of the visit. Through these approaches, it was pos­sible to appre­ci­ate dif­fer­ences in work­ers’ rela­tion­ships to the build­ing (con­cep­tual, mater­ial, embod­ied), and doc­u­ment how suc­cess­ive lay­ers of the refur­bish­ment served to con­ceal earlier labour. (Read more here.)

Phil Mizen (Uni­ver­sity of War­wick, UK), present­ing a paper co-authored by Yaw Ofosu-Kusi (Uni­ver­sity of Edu­ca­tion, Win­neba, Ghana) decried the vogue for research­ers put­ting cam­eras in the hands of chil­dren as though pre­sum­ing a self-evident rela­tion­ship between the images and the real­ity of children’s lives pro­duced by a ‘pure’ gaze. When read­ing the images gen­er­ated by street chil­dren in Accra, Ghana he shows how com­plex is the rela­tion­ship between see­ing and know­ing. The sub­stant­ive aim of the paper was to explore the com­plex­it­ies of informal eco­nomic activ­ity by chil­dren. Plastic bag selling was often an entry point into the informal eco­nomy, with chil­dren then mov­ing into poten­tially more stable forms of work, often pat­ron rela­tion­ships with street sellers or bus drivers. Phil argued that ideas about skill were not rel­ev­ant, but the chil­dren drew on ingenu­ity and cre­ativ­ity to make a living.

In the second panel, the focus shif­ted to work in the cul­ture indus­tries. Terry Aus­trin (Uni­ver­sity of Can­ter­bury, New Zea­l­and) presen­ted a paper co-authored with John Farns­worth (CPIT, New Zea­l­and) on The Septem­ber Issue, a cinéma vérité doc­u­ment­ary on the pro­duc­tion of Amer­ican Vogue and a por­trait of its editor, Anna Win­tour. Terry argued that the film invoked a recon­fig­ur­a­tion of cul­ture work as dis­trib­uted worlds are made and remade across media plat­forms – as when the doc­u­ment­ary cam­era­man is pho­to­graphed for the Septem­ber issue. Terry also drew on Latour to explore how objects coordin­ate the embod­ied, affect­ive work of magazine journ­al­ism, pay­ing atten­tion to the low-tech white­board where the magazine is laid out.

Lynne Pet­tinger (Uni­ver­sity of Essex) took a dif­fer­ent approach to the role of the object in work, explor­ing the cre­at­ive pro­duc­tion of per­form­ance. She argued that con­cepts famil­iar to the soci­ology of work (aes­thetic labour, emo­tional labour and craft) are pro­duct­ive in mak­ing sense of cre­at­ive work, and used these to read pho­to­graphs of per­form­ing musi­cians. The pho­to­graphs reveal the inter­re­la­tion­ships between bod­ies and tech­no­lo­gies needed for per­form­ance, and the way the work­ing body is trans­formed. She fin­ished by reflect­ing on the gains of silence and immob­il­ity when explor­ing multi-sensory experiences.

The perfect macchiato

The per­fect macchiato

Vikt­orya Aleksanayan (Slavic Uni­ver­sity, Armenia) fin­ished the ses­sion with an auto­bi­o­graph­ical tale of start­ing work in media pro­duc­tion in Armenia. She described the need to develop a wide range of skills when work­ing in small busi­nesses, and of how quickly she had learned how to put together a TV show. There fol­lowed a lively dis­cus­sion of the mer­its of pho­to­graphy when film and video were so read­ily avail­able, and we thank our presenters and audi­ence for being part of the con­ver­sa­tion. We then fin­ished the after­noon admir­ing the skill of the local barista and his cre­ation of the per­fect macchiato…