Biographical
NoteBiographical
NoteSol Worth was born Solomon
Wishnepolsky on August 19, 1922 in New York City. The son of a
dressmaker by the name of Jack Wishnepolsky, very little is know
of his life before he began formal education.
He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City
from 1936 until 1940. Upon graduation from high school with a
major concentration in art, he went to the University of Iowa.
At Iowa, he majored in painting and sculpture and graduated with
a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1943.
After leaving the University of Iowa, he served in the United
States Navy from 1943 until 1945. While in the Navy, he was assigned
to Military Intelligence at the Joint Intelligence Center in the
Pacific Ocean area aboard the U.S.S. .Missouri..
In 1945, he married the former Tobia Lessler and together they
had a daughter Debora, now a therpist and married to Robert Hymes,
Columbia University professor in the East Asian Institute. Worth
returned to New York and began work for the Goold Studios in still
photography and motion pictures. Working in the same firm for
over seventeen years, he eventually became Vice-president and
Creative Director of the studios. While at Goold, he entered the
New School for Social Research where he took various courses in
film producing, film animation and film editing from 1948 until
1950.
His scholarly abilities were well recognized during this period
as he was granted a Fullbright Lectureship as a Visiting Professor
of Documentary Film and Photography during the 1956-1957 year
at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Here he produced a documentary
film entitled "Teatteri," which was chosen for the permanent
collection of Documentary Film at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York City.
This film prompted Gilbert Seldes, the first dean of the Annenberg
School of Communications, to invite Worth to become a Visiting
Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School
in 1960 where he was named the Director of the Documentary Film
Laboratory and supervisor of Media Laboratories.
In 1964, Worth decided to devote himself full-time to his teaching
and research and moved to Philadelphia to take a position as Assistant
Professor of Communications. In 1973, he was named a full Professor
of Communication. During this period, he was awarded an M.A. Honoris
Causa from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 and was also
a Visiting Research Professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine,
City University of New York from 1968 until 1972.
In 1976, Worth began a new project in his scholarly career as
he was appointed the first Chair of the newly begun Undergraduate
major in Communications. To a large degree, this major was created
because of Worth's perseverance and interest in the project.
In 1966 he and John Adair received a National Science Foundation
grant that enabled him to instruct the Navajo Indians in the art
of filmmaking as part of a study of cross-cultural communication.
This research, which was probably his most famous, eventually
led to the publishing of a book in 1972, co-authored with Adair,
entitled, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication
and Anthropology. Additionally, in 1967, Worth received the
Wenner-Gren Foundation award for outstanding research in communication
and anthropology. As the author of over two dozen scholarly papers,
he was well recognized in the fields of anthropology and communications,
as well in the field of visual communication.
His participation and leadership in a variety of scholarly organizations
and publications was a mark of this respect. In 1970, he founded,
along with the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Jay Ruby and
others, the Anthropological Film Research Institute, and from
1972 through 1974, he served as founding President of the Society
for the Anthropology of Visual Communication. He was also Chair
of the Research Division of the University Film Association and
served as the Senior Member of the Board of Directors for the
Society for Cinematologists from 1967 through 1970. Finally, he
served as editor of the journal, Studies in the Anthropology
of Visual Communication from its inception in 1973 until his
death.
Worth was also involved with a wide range of more broadly based
organizations throughout his career, such as: the American Anthropological
Association, the American Film Institute, and the International
Film Seminars, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institute.
Worth was in the midst of submitting a proposal to the Guggenheim
Foundation for a large-scale research project in visual communications,
when he died on August 29, 1977 of a heart attack at the age of
fifty-five. He had been attending the Flaherty Film Seminar in
Boston when he was stricken.
Tom Potterfield
Sol Worth's Publications
available at this site.
A Listing of Worth's Publications
Through Navaho Eyes with John Adair
Toward an Ethnographic Semiotic - an unpublished paper
Introduction to Erving Goffman's Gender Advertisements
Larry Gross's 1983 article entitled Life vs. Art: The Interpretation of Visual Narratives published in Studies in Visual Communication, vol. 11, no. 4 has been added because it is a critique and elaboration of the model of social communication first proposed by Worth and Gross in Symbolic Strategies.
Go To the Sol Worth Papers at the University of Pennsylvania Archive