Jay Ruby's Home Page

"Remember that there are parts of what it most concerns you to know which I cannot describe to you; you must come with me and see for yourselves. The vision is for him who will see it."

Plotinus

Jay Ruby, a retired professor of Anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia, has been exploring the relationship between cultures and pictures for the past thirty years. His research interests revolve around the application of anthropological insights to the production and comprehension of photographs, film, and television. For the past two decades, he has conducted ethnographic studies of pictorial communication in a rural American community. He was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, received a B.A. in History [1960], an M.A. [1962], and Ph.D. [1969] in Anthropology. A founding member and past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Visual Communication, past president and trustee of International Film Seminars, Ruby holds advisory and board memberships in a number of national and international organizations and is president of the Center for Visual Communication, a research co-operative. He has held visiting lectureships at the University of Pennsylvania in Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, Rutgers University in Art, and in Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Princeton University. Ruby co-produced, directed and wrote two award winning ethnographic documentaries, A Country Auction [1984] and Can I Get A Quarter? [1985] and served as consultant, advisor, and researcher on numerous films and television programs. Ruby has curated photographic exhibitions since 1974 including Images of the USA - Three European Photographers [1985], Fragments of A Dream: The Pittsburgh Photographs of W. Eugene Smith [1988] at the Arthur Ross Gallery, Philadelphia;Reflections on Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania Landscape Photography for Lehigh University [1986]; Something To Remember You By: Death and Photography in America at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach [1994]; and Not a Bad Shot: The Photographs of Francis Cooper, Woodmere Gallery, Philadelphia [1996]. In 1968 he founded the Conference on Visual Anthropology, an international event he directed until 1980. Included in his diverse film/video programming experience are the Flaherty Film Seminar, The Arden House Public Television Seminar, and The Annenberg International Conferences on Visual Communication. Ruby has been trained, conducted research, and published extensively in archaeology, popular music, film, television, and photography. Since 1960 he has edited a variety of scholarly and popular journals on American archaeology, popular culture, and visual anthropology including Studies in Visual Communication. and Visual Anthropology . He has edited a number of books including A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology [University of Penn Press, 1981], Robert Flaherty, A Biography [University of Penn Press, 1982], Image Ethics [Oxford University Press, 1988] and Image Ethics in the Digital World.[2003, University of Minnesota Press] both co-edited with Larry Gross and John Katz. His writings have been translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, and Estonian. Among his single authored works are Secure The Shadow: Death and Photography in America, (1995, MIT Press), The Photographic World of Francis Cooper: Not A Bad Shot, a book length study of Francis Cooper, a nineteenth century Pennsylvanian photographer (1999,Pennsylvania State University Press) and Picturing Culture: Essays on Film and Anthropology (2000, University of Chicago Press). In 2006 he published four CD-ROM multimedia and one DVD ethnographies about his hometown, Oak Park, IL titled Oak Park Stories. See his web site at astro.temple.edu/~riuby/opp for details. The ethnographies are distributed by DER of Watertown, MA (www.der.org). He is currently in production with Milton Machuca on a new film, "Country Auction Revisited."

Web Sites

Oak Park Stories Project -

Country Auction Revisited Film Project

Web Archive in Visual Anthropology

The Anthropology of Visual Communication at Temple University - 1968 to 2004 (under construction)

Book Excerpts

1995 Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge: MIT Press.

1999 The Photographic World of Francis Cooper: Not a Bad Shot.University Park: Penn State Press. Francis Cooper Photographs and Essay

Articles Available to Be Downloaded.

1973 Up the Zambesi with Notebook and Camera or Being an Anthropologist without Doing Anthropology...with Pictures. PIEF Newsletter 4 [3].

1974 With R. Chalfen. The Teaching of Visual Anthropology at Temple. SAVICOM Newsletter 5.

1976 In a Pic's Eye: Interpretive Strategies for Deriving Significance and Meaning from Photographs.Afterimage, 3[9]:5-7.

1978 The Celluloid Self. In Autobiography: Film/Video/Photography. John Katz, Editor.Art Gallery of Ontario, pgs. 7-10.

1981 With Sol Worth. An American Community's Socialization to Pictures: An Ethnography ofVisual Communication. In Studying Visual Communication, Larry Gross, Editor. University ofPennsylvania Press, Phila, pgs. 200-203.

1981 Seeing Through Pictures: The Anthropology of Photography. Camera Lucida, 3:20-33.

1982 With Barbara Myerhoff. Introduction. A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press, Phila., pgs. 1-38.

2001 The Professionalization of Visual Anthropology in the United States - 1960s and 1970s. To be published in the selected proceedings of the "Origins of Visual Anthropology: Putting the Past Together, IWF, Gottingen, Germany.

The following articles have been extensively revised and updated and form the basis of a new book entitled Picturing Culture published by the University of Chicago Press. While you can still read them in their orginal form, I recommend you look at the revised versions in Picturing Culture.

1975 Is an Ethnographic Film a Filmic Ethnography? Studies In The Anthropology of Visual Communication 2[2]: 104-111.

1980 Exposing Yourself: Reflexivity, Anthropology and Film. Semiotica, 3[1-2]:153-179.

1980 Franz Boas and Early Camera Study of Behavior. Kinesis Reports 3[1]:6 11.

1981 A Re-examination of the Early Career of Robert J. Flaherty. Quarterly Review of Film Studies,5[4]:431-457.

1982 Ethnography as Trompe L'Oeil: Anthropology and Film. In A Crack In The Mirror. University of Pennsylvania Press, Phila. pgs. 121-132.

1983 An Early Attempt at Studying Human Behavior with a Camera: Franz Boas and The Kwakiutl:1930. In Methodology in Anthropological Film Making. Nico C.R. Bogaart and Henk Ketelaar, Editors. Edition Herodot, Gottingen, Germany, pgs. 25-38.

1991 An Anthropological Critique of the Films of Robert Gardner. Journal of Film and Video Vol. 43, No. 4:3-17.]

1989 The Teaching of Visual Anthropology. Teaching Visual Anthropology, Paolo Chiozzi, editor. Firenze: Editrice "Sedicesimo." pgs. 9-18.

1990 The Belly of the Beast: Eric Michaels and the Anthropology of Visual Communication. In Communication & Tradition: Essays After Eric Michaels, Tom O'Regan, editor. Continuum, [3]2: 53-98.

1991 Speaking For, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking Alongside: An Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma. Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 7, No. 2:50-67.

1995a The Viewer Viewed: The Reception of Ethnographic Films. In The Construction of the Viewer: Media Ethnography and the Anthropology of Audiences, Peter Crawford and Sigurjon Hafsteinsson, editors. Hojbjerg: Intervention Press, pgs. 193-206.

1995b Out of Sync: The Cinema of Tim Asch. Visual Anthropology Review, vol. 11, no. 1:19-37.

1996 Visual Anthropology. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson and Melvin Ember, editors. New York: Henry Holt and Company, vol. 4:1345-1351.

Go to a more extensive list of my publications

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What is Visual Anthropology?

Visual Anthropology is often considered to be merely a fancy word for ethnographic film. I see the field as more inclusive and complex dealing with all aspects of the visible world from the vantage point afforded by theories of culture and communication. Ethnographic film is a minor branch of the documentary film world and almost totally oriented to television or the classroom. It has marginalized itself from the mainstream of cultural anthropology in part because few ethnographic filmmakers are trained anthropologists and the theoreticians of ethnofilm like Bill Nichols and Trinh T. Minh-ha have a less than adequate knowledge of anthropology. See my polemical critique of Bill Nichols' essay, The Ethnographers' Tale.

There are two canonical books read by everyone interested in "visual anthropology" - Heider's Ethnographic Film, Hockings' Principles of Visual Anthropology and John Collier's Visual Anthropology. I find these works undertheorized in a way that trivializes the field. Moreover there has been a lack of public debate about their adequacy. I have therefore added my reviews of Heider, and Hockings to the list of my writings available via the web. Along with Sol Worth and others, I advocate an approach to visual anthropology called the anthropology of visual communication. There are several essays in Worth's Studying Visual Communication that outlines the stance. I was the director of a graduate program at Temple University where these ideas were explored. Along with my colleagues Bapa Jhala, Niyi Akinasso, and Denise O'Brien, we developed a unique program of graduate studies in the anthropology of visual communinication from 1990 to 2002. If you are interested in exploring how we transformed Worth's concept of an anthropology of visual communication into a Ph.D. program see the following linked articles:

1974 With R. Chalfen. The Teaching of Visual Anthropology at Temple. SAVICOM Newsletter 5.

1989 The Teaching of Visual Anthropology. Teaching Visual Anthropology, Paolo Chiozzi, editor. Firenze: Editrice "Sedicesimo." pgs. 9-18.

If anyone wishes to begin a dialogue or debate with me, I suggest doing it on the VISCOM listserv. Email me to learn how to join it.