Rebekah and Sophie. An Oak Park Story
Original title Rebekah and Sophie. An Oak Park Story
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Oak Park Stories is a series of experimental, reflexive and digital ethnographies that attempts to explore a forty-year-old social experiment in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. It is experimental in that I have not followed the traditional method of producing a book or a film but instead made an interactive and nonlinear work that has both video and text. It is reflexive in that the subject of my research is my hometown. Rather than hide this fact, I try to make the reader/viewer aware of how my identity influenced things. It is digital in its form of delivery – on a CD using Quicktime movies and html documents. I have constructed these Stories in a nonlinear fashion, that is, unlike a book or a film, there is no defined beginning, middle or end. Viewers/Readers are free to begin anywhere. They can ignore anything that doesn’t interest them. I have provided many links to materials that will allow anyone interested to pursue a topic in more depth. I found writing in a nonlinear fashion to be amazingly freeing. I did not have to worry about some editor telling me that I was going off on too many tangents and that the work lacked coherence. There are two consequences that are a result of my decision to open up the paths readers/viewers could follow. First is the impossibility of know which video clips or which text modules will be examined. I therefore decided to say the same thing in a somewhat different manner in different places, that is, to be redundant on purpose. Second, I decided that creating a bibliography for the entire project and thereby forcing readers to stop reading to link to the bibliography was not a good idea. Therefore all bibliographic references are contained within the body of the text.
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Author/s Jay Ruby
Jay Ruby, a retired professor of anthropology and director of a graduate program in the anthropology of visual communication at Temple University in Philadelphia, has been exploring the relationship between cultures and pictures for over 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. His writings have been translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, and Estonian. He has edited a number of books including A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology [University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981], Robert Flaherty, A Biography [University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982], and Image Ethics [Oxford University Press, 1988] and Image Ethics in a Digital World [University of Minnesota Press, 2004] both co-edited with Larry Gross and John Katz. Among his single authored book are: Secure The Shadow: Death and Photography in America (MIT Press, 1995); The World of Francis Cooper: Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania Photographer (Penn State Press, 1999); Picturing Culture: Essays on Anthropology and Film (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Research Jay Ruby
Photography Jay Ruby
Sound Jay Ruby
Editing Jay Ruby