Visual Sociology
Rieger uses photography to document social change
By Judy Hughes
As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Thousands of pictures--over decades--can be worth a lot also when it comes to telling a story of social change in a small community.
That's why U of L sociology professor Jon Rieger has repeatedly made the 700-mile trek to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to document the passage and impact of time on Ontonagon County.
The result is a "sort of time-lapse photo record of social change" there from his 1970s graduate school days to now.
In the mid-1980s Rieger started to re-photograph the sites that he first shot in 1970. The initial photos would serve as a baseline for visually measuring the area's decline from a healthy, growing mining area to a community affected by closing of the mines and by changes in the pulpwood-logging industry--a rural county losing jobs and population.
 This was the biggest industrial enterprise in the southern part of Ontonagon County, Mich., and had been in business since the 1920s. The first photograph, from 1970, shows the plant in its full heyday, when it had 44 employees working in two shifts and 13 trucks that brought raw milk from farms throughout the area. The next four photos show the plant at successive stages of its demise and eventual disappearance over 20 years. Small dairies like this could not compete with the big regional and chain operations that came into the area. (Photos by Jon Rieger) |
The re-photograph endeavor has yielded a vast catalog of black-and-white, 8-by-10 images chronicling change in the fortunes of Ontonangon County in the remote, forested area of western Upper Michigan. Rieger's work and the reports he has published have helped lead to a whole area of image-based academic research. And they have led to Rieger becoming a founding member of the International Visual Sociology Association, whose membership now numbers more than 350.
The association's journal, Visual Sociology, published his article "Photographing Social Change" in 1996. That piece now is considered a benchmark in the field.
"A lot of sociology is built around surveys and observational and participation studies. Visual sociology is built around images," Rieger says.
Long interested in photography, the sociologist found that the camera became a good tool for documenting change.
"I would argue that pictures convey huge amounts of information, and pictures can record huge amounts of information with very high accuracy. When we talk about social change, at some point everybody starts to wonder what it looks like," Rieger says, adding that a series of photos can provide information just as the more traditional charts and graphs can do.
"In effect, we all kind of understand what decline looks like in a series of photographs," he adds. "Images are just as effective or more effective in conveying what is happening."
However, a visual sociologist neither conveys information the way a photojournalist does nor uses photos for the same purpose.
Photojournalists seek a simple image, a photo that "gives up its information in a flash," according to Rieger. "They are interested in a photo that has one meaning--and conveys that meaning immediately."
Instead of selecting an image with quick impact, visual sociologists seek as image that will serve as evidence about what is happening socially.
"We want those pictures to be saturated with information, every square inch, clear out to the edges--cluttered pictures, so to speak," Rieger says. "I want to make sure these are pictures that are full of information that bears on the matter of social change."
To that end, he uses a Pentax camera that produces a negative about five times as big as a 35-mm camera does and processes his own film, prints and enlargements.
"I can make prints that don't lose much when they are blown up to an 8-by-10. The nice thing is that the detail is preserved."
