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BZTUA R IES 91

1953b Materials on Friendship and Chifd-

hood among Chinese Families in New York.

Zn The Study of Culture at a Distance,

Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux, eds.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Notes on an Approach to a Study of

Personality Formation in a Hindu Village in

Gujarat.

n

Village India, McKim Marriott,

ed. Pp. 102-144. American Anthropological

Association, Memoir

83.

Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.

1955a

SOL WORTH

1922-1977

Sol Worth died in his sleep of a heart attack

on 29 August 1977. He had been attending one

of his favorite yearly conferences, the Flaherty

Film Seminar. Only years old , but troubled

by several previous heart attacks, Sol had been

disciplining himself to improve his health. His

sudden death was a personal blow to all who

knew him. We lost not only a close and person-

able friend, but one of the most innovative and

active contributors

to

the slowly emerging in ter-

face of anthropology and visual communica-

tion.

Sol

was born in New York on 19 August 1922

and received a B.F.A. degree from the State

University of Iowa in 1943. Shortly after, he

joined the Navy. There he worked at designing

posters, painting murals in training camp, serv-

ing as a helmsman on the

U.S.S.

Missouri, and

working in Intelligence Headquarters in

Hawaii. In 1945, he decided not to accept a

graduate assistantship in painting at Iowa, in-

stead accepting a position

as

a photographer

and filmmaker with Goold Studios, an adver-

tising studio in New York City. Between 1946

and 1962, Worth moved from an employee to a

195513

Photographs of Indian villagers. Pub-

lished in The Family of Man, by Edward

Steichen. New York: Museum of Modem Art.

1967 Photographs. Published

I

illustrations

in Human Action in Four Societies, by

Vincent Fresno. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:

Prentice-Hall.

Caste and Kinship in Rural Gujarat: The

Social Use of Space. Doctoral dissertation.

Ms. in Columbia University Library, New

York.

969

lartner and then to owner. During that period,

.e was an active practitioner of the commercial

arts. His photographs have been published in

advertising in such major magazines as New

Yorker

L q e McCall’s Harper’s Bazaar

and

Vogue. He also produced motion-picture com-

mercials and advertising films that appeared on

all major national

T V

networks, and he pro-

duced, photographed, and edited four

20-minute films on art subjects.

Between 1964 and 1973, at the University of

Pennsylvania, Worth again climbed a difficult

ladder of promotions, in this case from lecturer

in Documentary Film to Professor of Communi-

cations, and Professor of Communication and

Education in 1977. His intense curiosity and

facility for learning which questions need more

than superficial attention and treatment, and

his learned ability to articulate problems and

the details of an argument, carried him into

areas of anthropology, education, art criticism,

semiotics, mental health, and mass media, as

well as his chosen home discipline of communi-

cation.

One important theme of Worth’s work sur-

faced in his philosophy of teaching, his methods

of investigation, and his publications: how Man

has learned to construct, manipulate, and use

visual sets of symbols that become manifest in

visual symbolic forms, and, in turn, how those

forms are recreated, reconstructed, and inter-

preted by viewers in meaningful ways. In more

general terms, Worth repeatedly sought to

understand and articulate the relationship be-

tween visual symbolic forms, cognition, mean-

ing, communicative codes, and culture. He con-

centrated on the integration of certain classical

themes in anthropology and the visual-pictorial

mode of communication on both theoretical

and practical levels.

Worth is best known for his work in visual an-

thropology, a field that he repeatedly attempted

to clarify and organize. e recognized that, to

most people concerned with the articulation of

photography and anthropology, “Visual An

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92 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [81, 19791

thropology meant making photos, photo-

records, movies, ethnographic movies and film

footage-all for research” 1976a:7). Worth felt

that relatively restricted perspective diverted at -

tention from “how people made visual things,

how they learned and used these skills, and how

they learned to interpret them. What ‘Visual

Anthropology’, as a term, didn’t seem to con-

note was the host of problems involved in peo-

ple’s use of the visual-pictorial mode as a symbol

system that they could

or

did use in a variety of

contexts to structure their world, or their

worlds” 1976a:8).

As a remedy, Sol suggested that we reconsti-

tute this subfield as the Anthropology of Visual

Communication 1974). He worked toward that

goal in several ways. In 1970, in collaboration

with Margaret Mead and others, Sol helped

found the Anthropological Film Research Insti-

tute. In 1972 he organized and taught, along

with Jay Ruby, Carroll Williams, and Karl

Heider, a summer research institute in visual

communications sponsored by the National

Science Foundation. e also helped found the

Society for the Anthropology of Visual Commu-

nication and served as its president from 1972 to

1974. In addit ion, until his death he was editor

of the journal Studies in the Anthropology of

VLsual Communication.

related contribution of anthropological sig-

nificance involved clarifying the important

distinction between studying photographic im-

agery as a record

about

culture vs. treating

photographic imagery as a record

of

culture. He

was never comfortable with the notion of photo-

graphic “evidence,” because pictures could be

evidence of

so

many different, and often con-

flicting, kinds of things. In some cases, the im-

age could reveal more of the culture of the

image-maker than of the people in the image.

Worth called attention to the fact that most an-

thropologists and sociologists preferred to use

their cameras as a tool to collect data about

society and related cultural phenomena. Sol

urged his readers and students to think more

about observing how cameras were used by

members of a particular society in a particular

culturally structured way, to produce “sign

events” that were data

of

that culture. He sug-

gested that we study “what the members

of

a

society made pictures of, how they made them,

and in what contexts they made and looked at

them” 1976b:lO). What most people have

missed is that Worth was speaking of a diversity

of pictures that comprise what he elsewhere

called the “vidistic environment” 1977:70),

from simple line drawings, tattoos, and other

graphic forms to modern photographic ex-

amples such as feature films, student-made

films, home movies, and even collections of

snapshots. We should keep in mind that this ap -

proach is applicable to both the culture

of

the

anthropological observer as well as the anthro-

pologically observed.

It is equally significant that Worth empha-

sized the study of pictorial forms to learn how

someone organized and structured a look at the

world rather than simply treating pictures,

specifically photographic forms, as evidence of

what was “out there,” or as a “true” image of

the world. Sol frequently stated that a photo-

graph or a film was “not a copy oJthe world out

there but someone’s statement about the

world” [emphasis in original] 1976b:16). In

turn, he urged that we consider all photograph-

ic reports and analyses as patterned construc-

tions of only one of many realities. Building on

work of Nelson Goodman, Benjamin Whorf,

and Ernst Cassirer, he stated that pictures “are

a world in and of themselves. They bear some

relationship to other worlds-those in our heads

and those out there. But they are their own

events” [emphasis in original] 1976a:16). Our

work is to understand the human use and role of

symbols in that process and the existence of

multiple constructions, alternative communica-

tive articulations, and diversity of “reports.”

Another important theme of Worth’s work

concerned his fervor for uniting the study of pic-

torial modes of communication and ethno-

graphic methods

of

investigation. He was not

content simply to speculate and to theorize end-

lessly about how visual communication worked.

Sol adopted the anthropological bias of ob-

serving behavior in “natural” contexts and in-

sisted that man’s variety of symbolic forms could

“be interpreted only in terms of their context,

structure and conventional usage” 1976a:g).

Sol promoted the direct observation

of

how

visual “statements were made. In what context.

For what purpose. Under what rules, conven-

tions and restrictions. It enables us to look

at various ways of picturing the world”

1976a:18).

The development of this perspective was

formally initiated in 1964, when Worth read a

paper, “Filmmaking as an Aid to Action Re-

search,” at the Annual Meeting of the Society

for Applied Anthropology. That paper sug-

gested for the first time that a systematic process

of guided innovation be used for teaching the

use of film to novice filmmakers from another

culture. More important, Worth also suggested

that the process of film communication that

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B I T U AR

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93

developed from the innovation be studied by

methods of participant-observation in an ethno-

graphic perspective.

Encouraged by Ward Goodenough and in

collaboration with John Adair, Worth gained

funding from the National Science Foundation

for the Navajo Project. It was during that

period of innovative work that

his interests

swung from a previous focus on language, cog-

nition, and film to a broader perspective of such

encompassing concerns as communication, cul-

ture, and symbolic forms. parallel to linguis-

tics seems appropria te here. Inspired by Sapir-

Whorf, Worth seemed to lean less toward the

psycholinguistic relevance of these matters and

more toward an ethnolinguistic focus. The

Navajo Project resulted in seven Navajo-pro-

duced “biodocumentary” films, two papers

published in the American Anthropologzit

1967, 1970).

and the increasingly popular book

Through Navajo Eyes: Explorations in Film

Commu nication and A nthropology 1972).

Worth‘s talent for noticing trends and ques-

tioning certain taken-for-granted assumptions

about pictorial forms extended to making sug-

gestions for future professional training.

Sol’s

main concern was with training people

to

understand a world in which man increasingly

“presents himself not in person but through the

mediation of

visual

symbolic forms” [emphasis

in original]

1973349).

Worth’s concerns were

based on a series of predictions: “It is not un-

reasonable to expect that the New Guinea

native, the American Indian, the Eskimo, the

peoples of developing and developed states in

Africa and Asia, as well as various segments of

our society, will soon be able to make moving

pictures of the world as they see it and to struc-

ture these images in

their

own way to show us

the stories

they

want to show each other, but

which we may also oversee” [emphasis in orig-

inal] 1973:346). Sol generally felt that anthro-

pologists were not prepared for this situation.

Worth’s indictment of the anthropological

community was strong, to the point, heartfelt,

yet constructive:

“The only group of profes-

sionals involved in the making and use of an-

thropological films who have no training AT

ALL

in the making analysis

r

m e

of

f i lm are an-

thropologists. One can count on the fingers of

both hands the anthropologists who are trained

to study films, not as a record of some datum of

culture, but as a datum of culture in its own

right” [emphasis in original]

1973:359).

In

another instance

Sol

stated: “In the past, the

field of anthropology could get away with train-

ing visual illiterates to study verbal illiterates. It

is now no longer possible for the student of cul-

ture to ignore the fact that people all over the

world have learned, and will continue in great

numbers to learn, how to use the visual symbolic

mode”

1973:349).

Again,

Sol’s

reformulation

of an anthropology of visual communication

was an attempt to remedy that situation.

I feel that Worth’s theoretical contributions

are perhaps least understood in the anthropo-

logical community. We have yet to realize the

significance of his ideas on applying ethno-

graphic methods to the study of visual commu-

nication, his sensitivity to our interpretation of

images as special kinds of evidence bound by

social and cultural context, his attention to a

politics of symbolic forms, and his recent ideas

on ethnographic semiotics and vidistic environ-

ments. Yet it

will

be those concepts that will

have a lasting effect on the future development

of visual anthropology.

Sol’s academic career was a very rich one;

those of us working in anthropology and visual

communication sorely miss his stimulation and

guidance.

RICHARD CHALFEN

Temple University

P A R T I A L BIBLIOGRAPHY O F S O L W O R T H

967

with John Adair) The Navajo as Film-

maker: Report of Some Recent Research

in the Cross-Cultural Aspects of Film Com-

munication. American Anthropologist 69:

76-78.

970 with John Adair) Navajo Filmmakers.

American Anthropologist 72:9-34.

Toward an Anthropological Politics of

Symbolic Forms. n Reinventing Anthro-

pology. Dell Hymes, ed. Pp. 353-364. New

York: Pantheon Books.

1974 Introduction to the Anthropology of

Visual Communications. Studies in the An-

thropology of Visual Communication

l 1 ) :

1-2.

1976a

Doing the Anthropology of Visual

Communication. Working Papers in Culture

and Communication

1 2):2-20.

Department

of Anthropology, Temple University, Phil-

adelphia.

1976b

Margaret Mead and the Shift from

Visual Anthropology to the Anthropology of

Visual Communication. Ms. to be published

in Ruth Bunzell, ed. AAAS, Margaret Mead

Festschrift

1978).

Sol Worth

1922-1977).

Studies in the

Anthropology

of

Visual Communication.

4 2):66-72.

Includes a complete listing of

Worth’s publications and other works.

1973

1977