It’s an old canard: a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of this photo, a viewer with nothing to go off but the image could follow a thousand trails. The commodification of food, fetishizing of a culture, or casual racism expressed by the advertisement might catch your eye. You may also see fascination with representations of self, cultural confusion, wholesale mockery, or keen, winking marketers at work. For Wing Young Huie and Doug Hartmann, too, the picture, taken by Wing in downtown Minneapolis and featuring three Asian American women checking out an ad for Japanese restaurant Fuji-Ya, elicited very different responses.

Doug:

I guess I did request food for thought, didn’t I? It strikes me that looking sociologically at food and eating is a tricky challenge: the emphasis is always to put eating and food in the social contexts that others often take for granted and that can be hard to represent in the first place. How to capture not just the physical “food” and its biological consumption, but all of the other phenomena that surround food and imbue it with meaning and importance? Plus, American culture adds layers to food, from how it’s represented on television (there are whole networks devoted to literal consumption) to how it’s advertised—here with a ridiculous tagline observed by women at a bus stop, within a street- and cityscape. This image is fascinating in its sociological aesthetics.

Wing:

Although the photo is part of my series “Eat,” I was doing a project on adoptive families when I took it. Each of these women is adopted from Korea and, though they grew up in different family structures, they have in common that they all had white parents. When they started hanging out, they noticed that people stared at them when they walked together in public. Here, they are staring: at a sushi restaurant advertisement with racially loaded—ironic?—messages.

Fuji-Ya is a hip Japanese restaurant, and this promotion is a play on fortune cookie messages, with their broken English laced with sexual innuendo. Another ad for the restaurant has the message “From this position you will receive fun.”

I, too, think the photo is hilarious, but can see that, no matter the intent, some will find it offensive. But, then again, my English is not broken.

Doug:

I’m not sure that the new literature on the sociology of food would have come to mind had I not been prompted, already thinking about “food for thought.” Now that I read your reply and know the background of the photo, I feel like I can’t help but shift toward race and urban space. I’ve been mulling over how I put your image in the “food” box so quickly, neglecting all of the other possible themes.

All of us face huge challenges in grasping and representing the whole buzzing complexity of the worlds around us. It seems so improbable, almost impossible to get at it all. And when we try, we do so through particular lenses and categories of analysis that invariably—necessarily—come at the expense of others. It’s a curse as much as a challenge.

To quote James Baldwin’s classic essay “Notes of a Native Son,” “Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. These categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; into which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions.”

Wing:

Hey Doug, it was great to see your latest post and thoughts about “found sociology” and about the trap of the documentary approach. I wonder about [this] in my own work, but try not to think about too much—try to keep my head down (or up) and just keep producing.

….Over the years I’ve come to realize that I’m attracted to photographing the various ways people are mirrored (or not mirrored) culturally. I’ve never watched any episodes of Dora the Explorer, but when I was growing up there weren’t any Asian cartoon leading characters, so I related to white characters like Jonny Quest and his father Race, rather than his brown exotic sidekick, Hadji.I’m attracted to photographing the various ways people are mirrored (or not mirrored) culturally.

Doug:

When I first looked at your photograph, without seeing your comment, I was kind of puzzled. I loved the image, but wasn’t quite sure how to place it or what to make of it. Was it supposed to illustrate some general point about diversity? Or something about middle class life? Then, I thought perhaps it was something about kids and families—because I saw not only a mom and daughter, but also started wondering if the mom was supposed to be pregnant….

Once I got past those initial thoughts/impressions, I did notice the Dora blanket, and it definitely did get me thinking about popular culture (as it sounds like was your initial intent), though I was thinking more about kids than race/ethnicity. [When] I finally read your note, it all fell into place. How silly and slow I felt. I mean, I almost always describe my research as being about race and popular culture, and then when you send an image intended to be right in my wheelhouse I almost don’t even notice!I almost always describe my research as being about race and popular culture, and I almost didn’t even notice them in my first look.

…Let me say one specific thing to further the point and conversation: I think it is very difficult (or can be) to situate actual human beings in the context of our mass media and popular culture visually. Like so much of culture and society, it is always there, permeating our thoughts and existence, but often quite difficult to represent. This image obviously overcomes that problem, and I can’t wait to see the others you’ve been taking with a similar theme and sensibility in mind.

Wing:

I think the meanings of a photo are the least clear when I’m actually in the processing of taking it. I was photographing members of Light of Faith and Hope in Jesus Christ, a small storefront church where most, if not all, of the members are Latino. There were a variety of after-the-service-activities that I shot, including a birthday party, a pinata smashing, and basement buffet, before I saw the girl wrapped up in a cartoon character who really resembled her (as much as a real person can look like an oversimplified caricature of a human being).The meanings of a photo are the least clear when I’m taking it… Here I saw a girl wrapped up in a cartoon character who really resembled her.

It’s refreshing to me that you first saw this as just a picture of a family; that you reacted to it perhaps as a father rather than a professional sociologist. Sometimes I worry that reading photos through the prism of culture and identity, as is my wont, may blind a person to everyday humanness.

As we continue to explore the nexus of our respective fields, I wonder how much of what I do focuses on the specific, while sociology is concerned with the general. I am reminded by something Diane Arbus said: “It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.”

Doug:

First: I think I understand and appreciate what you mean when you say that the meanings of a photograph are the “least clear” when you are actually taking a picture. That point reminds me that so many of the meanings and implications we derive and project onto cultural objects like your photographs are derived not just from the image, but from what each of us brings to those images and the conversations and exchanges that they occasion and prompt. That’s one of the fun, creative aspects of our whole project, in fact.

But I’d also like to point out—wearing my sociology hat—that when you sketch out the context within which a particular shot is taken… it really helps shape and determine how and what I will think about a particular image, what meanings and implications I see in it, impart to it, or develop from it.

I am also very interested to hear that you think so much about the relationship between the specific and the general, the particular, and the more universal—and these especially in the context of what you call “everyday humanness.” These are the kind of themes that sociologists think about all the time. One analytic concept this calls to mind is “representation” or “representativeness,” how something unique or particular can and necessarily does stand in for a larger concept, category, or group.Sociologists think about the relationship between the specific, the general, and the universal all the time. Something unique can stand in for a larger concept.

Is this what you mean by “the prism of culture”? On this note, I’m less than certain, actually, about what you mean by your question about whether the “cartoon landscape is catching up to real cultural representation”? …I guess I’m not sure what is “real”, independent from our ability to represent it in some way and make sense of that representation with respect to other, more general categories and experiences…

Wing:

Not only are the meanings least clear the moment when I press the shutter, I’m not sure if the resulting image ever becomes clarified. In a way, the more meanings that are possible, the more successful the photo is in my mind. I’m often surprised at someone’s interpretation, and each layer of interpretation affects how I look at it.

When I started photography over 35 years ago, I had this kind of pure notion that there shouldn’t be any words or even titles accompanying a photo–the image should stand on its own. But over the years, I’ve added more and more text and context, sometimes I think too much. [It might rob] the viewer of their own interpretation. Perhaps that shift comes from an increasing desire to inform, rather than this idea of photography for photography’s sake.

I guess what I mean by “prism of culture” is that I often think about the cultural implications of a photo. This may have to do with the fact that, when I was growing up, there seemed to be few people in popular culture who looked like me—just kung fu characters and Connie Chung. Since I wasn’t “represented”, I became what I saw, and therefore forgot what I looked like.Since I wasn’t represented in popular culture, I became what I saw. I forgot what I looked like.

I was always the only Asian student in my school, from kindergarten until senior high when another Asian kid appeared at Duluth Central High School. I ended up avoiding this kid. It took me a long time to realize—not until I was working on my “Looking for Asian America: An Ethnocentric Tour”—[to start] thinking about why I would avoid someone who looked like me.

In my mind, growing up, I thought I was like everyone else. It’s not like you grow up with a mirror in front of you. Popular culture becomes your mirror. And popular culture is a distorted mirror. …

The World of Disney, I’m sure, had a lot to do in shaping my world and my view of myself. But, as I mentioned, there were few Asian cartoon characters, and I wonder if even the non-human characters such as Bugs Bunny, were made with a white, male, Christian point of view for a white, male, Christian audience. And how long did it take to finally have a major cartoon character like Dora that reflected America’s now-minority-but eventual-majority Latino population?

The Changing Lenses project, as a conversation between a photographer and a sociologist, is very much based in the interaction of images and stereotypes, assumptions and visions, contexts and the understandings of those contexts.

Trayvon Martin was killed in late February 2012, and the case against his shooter, George Zimmerman, continues. So, too, do public reactions to Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s defense. Perhaps no combination of image and stereotype was more prominent or controversial in American culture this past spring than hoodies and race. For a sociological perspective and relevant research on the controversy and media coverage of it, we can recommend Jeff Dowd’s rich post on our TSP Community Page Sociology Lens, “Disembodied Racism and the Search for Racist Intent.”

For our part, our conversations have taken us in two directions. First, informed by interests in sport, race, and politics, Doug Hartmann found himself ruminating on the photo of LeBron James and the Miami Heat posing, heads down as if in silent reflection, in hoodies. The moodily lit image prompted thoughts about social consciousness and the political voice of athletes in America (more on this recently), thoughts on Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Olympic victory stand demonstration back in 1968. Both incidents share the fact that athletes’ may most effectively make political expressions through their bodies and actions—ironically, not a point Hartmann got into in his TSP White Paper with Kyle Green, “Sport and Politics: Strange, Secret Bedfellows.”

Second, Wing Young Huie set out to consider hoodies as one symbol of “otherness” and breaking down stereotype. Since March, he has undertaken a project called “We Are the Other,” which includes the diptych above, Roland.

Perhaps these two approaches don’t come together, but when you read reactions to both Martin’s death and the case that has unfolded in the media and in the public consciousness, as covered in our TSP Roundtable “Thinking about Trayvon: Privileged Response and Media Discourse,” more questions than answers will necessarily be raised. In that Roundtable, for instance, sociologist Enid Logan raised the idea that perhaps protestors should have been holding signs reading “I am George Zimmerman,” as it “would have implied a truer, more honest understanding of the relations of power, privilege, and economic and social violence that contribute to the devaluation of black life.” Or maybe, as fall comes on, we’ll all just raise our hoodies against the cold and take a moment to consider how symbolic this clothing has become.

The TSP team has been working to assemble a collection of thematic materials on debt for the first iterations of our books from W.W. Norton. I mentioned this to Wing and asked if that theme called any particular images to mind. At first he couldn’t think of anything. Then he had me take a look at this picture from his “We are the Other” project.

The photo shows two men, Bobby and Reggie, according to the title, sitting in a kitchen. Save the fact that the men are of different races and the haunting self-consciousness of the unnamed man on the right, I didn’t immediately understand the significance of this image, let alone its relation to debt. One could see it as a photo of a neighborly chat, a family gathering, or a work break. But then Wing shared the story behind the image.

The kitchen is Bobby’s and his house is just down the street from Wing in South Minneapolis.  One of nine children, Bobby has lived in the same house since his mother bought it in 1968. On February 17th, 2012, Bobby’s house was the center of a block party called the “Foreclosure Free Fest.” Turns out Bobby, a proud 57-year-old plasterer and former Marine, had fallen behind on his mortgage after a series of health problems. This picture was taken that evening.

The event drew 300 supporters throughout the night, with a line-up of well-known local musicians who performed in his small living room and on a stage in Bobby’s front lawn. Bobby didn’t know everyone who came that night, but one person he did know was Reggie. They grew up together in South Minneapolis and met in the 7th grade “We ran the neighborhood,” says Bobby. “We fought each other and fought everyone else. But that’s the way it was, you beat someone up. and they end up your best friend.”

With coverage from ABC News and the Huffington Post, as well as the support of his friends, neighbors, and those in the Occupy movement, Bobby was able to get the Bank of America to offer a mortgage modification that will allow him to keep his home. The support seems miraculous to Bobby: “It’s like I fell in the mud and can now come up for clean air all the time.”

Bobby is, of course, one of thousands, even millions of Americans struggling with debt and foreclosure—each one with a story, each one with some friends and neighbors and support, and yet each one with little media coverage that can lead to real help or assistance as they struggle to maintain the piece of the American Dream they thought they’d already achieved.

The Society Pages’ work on the “social side of politics” has, at the time of this writing, already has yielded some insightful white papers (Joe Gerteis’s piece on religion and political culture brings Weber to life, for instance), several great Roundtable exchanges and Office Hours interviews, and a host of host of provocative blog posts. But we’ve been having a devil of a time illustrating some of these contributions.

When you think of politics and sociology, some of the first images or ideas that come to mind are those of images of demonstrations, activism, political organizing, and protests. And sociologists have definitely been on the leading edge of studying social movements and political activism from the civil rights movement to union organizing to the Tea Party and Occupy movements. However, the images associated with such movements can convey a vision of politics (and the sociological vision of politics) that is far too limited and one-sided. They also make it seem as if all sociologists are radicals and care about protest and social disruption. This is to say, politics isn’t only about protest signs, it’s about people working in dozens of ways to shape the communities in which they live.

Sociologists may be a fairly liberal lot, sympathetic to and often involved in protest, but like everyone else, we also engage politics in many other ways. Public opinion polling is most obvious, but sociologists have contributed to the study of political phenomena by looking at why people vote, how political parties are organized (and organize themselves), and the effects of various “frames” for political issues and candidates. Perhaps most uniquely, political sociologists take a long view toward political issues and how various, social and demographic trends affect voting and representation over time.

The problem, from a visual point of view, is that the images one might imagine to these contributions tend to be boring (how many pictures of voting booths can you stand?), backstage, or too out-of-date to pin down and represent the moment—much less be of immediate interest or use to politicians, policy makers, or political pundits in the heat of an election season.

Without getting into any of these details, I threw the challenge of photographing political sociology over to Wing Young Huie. Political photographs, he admitted, presented a bit of a conundrum for him as well. Part of the problem is that he’s never been particularly political himself. Also, in his experience, the “circus” surrounding politics is so overwhelming and so orchestrated by media consultants and experts that there is little left to appeal to his artistic sensibilities.

Instead, Wing said he tends to be interested in things not usually covered by the political press. “For instance, do aesthetics determine political beliefs or is it the other way around? Why do liberals and conservatives dress the way they do? Can knowing whether or not you like to color outside the lines as a kid be a predictor of your opinion on abortion?” Indeed, Wing summarized—playfully I suspect, perhaps simply for my behalf—that he tends to be interested in the sociology of politics rather than the politics itself. Nevertheless, Wing found our common ground and got us going.

From this foundation, we started going through his archive and contact sheets, looking for images that were “political” or “about politics.” As expected, it was a bit of a challenge. We found a few images of protests and political rallies. These were fabulous, arresting images but had the baggage I discussed above. And many of the more sociological images we looked at were difficult to identify specifically as “political.” Finally, though, there was one image that we both really locked in on.

This image doesn’t have any particular meaning or backstory for Wing. It was on a contact sheet from one of the first rolls he shot for Frogtown, the project that really put him on the artistic map. He doesn’t have any real memory of the image, the politics, or the event, however. “I think,” he explained, “I was just walking around and bumped into it.” He goes on: “I only took two shots of the politician, both from the back.” Looking at it now, it is “amazing how few of the children, who became unwitting political advertisements, are actually looking at the politician.”

But as we continued talking about this picture, we came to realize it’s a wonderful image and metaphor for the backstage, backstory visions of politics in which we are both interested—images that are not only difficult to represent visually but so often missing from both public and scholarly understandings of politics and the political process. It’s a different angle and one we don’t usually pay attention to: this, though, is where the action so often missing from both popular and scholarly understandings of politics and the political process really happens.

Doug Hartmann: There are at least two facets of religion in America that stand out to sociologists. First, Americans have long been among the most religious people in the developed world. Religion has been a foundation of community, connection, and citizenship throughout this country’s history. Second, there is a remarkable diversity and pluralism of religious belief and practice in the United States, documented most recently and famously by Diana Eck‘s religious pluralism project at Harvard.

Few nations can claim this unique combination; typically, religious devotion goes hand in hand with religious conflict (or worse). Indeed, it is precisely because of this harmonious combination of devotion and diversity that noted political scientist Robert Putnam (he of Bowling Alone fame) titled his recent book on American religion American Grace.

For a sociologist, this unique, almost paradoxical combination of devotion and diversity raises questions about solidarities and boundaries. These kinds of questions inspired me to undertake a research project with some of my students almost a decade ago on the idea of America as a Judeo-Christian (rather than Christian) country. Without going into the details, we found that over the course of less than 50 years, the term “Judeo-Christian” went from being either a cultural curiosity or political provocation to a bipartisan, mainstream touchstone supposedly signaling the historic culture of the nation.

As Wing Young Huie and I started talking about religion and society, I remembered this paper and sent it along. Wing is not particularly religious, though he was for some time, and I don’t know how closely he read my paper or what he thought of it, but this is the photograph and commentary he sent in return.

Wing Young Huie: When I took this photograph in 1998, nearly half of the student population at Roosevelt High School, located in the urban core of South Minneapolis, was Somali. Perhaps school district officials thought it best to keep all of the refugees together; that’s what they’d done with Southeast Asians in the mid-‘70s, too.

All of the students pictured here are Muslim and, as required by their faith, pray five times a day. This could be problematic during school hours, and they’d pray as discreetly as they could under stairwells or in bathrooms. Whether it was the separation of church and state that legally prohibits prayer in schools or the distinctly not Christian spectacle of prostrated Islamic worship, the Somali students banded together to find an alternative place to pray. Racial tensions flared between these students and both white and other black students at Roosevelt.

Ironically, Our Redeemer Lutheran Church (across the street from the school) became the safe haven for these kids. Every Friday during their lunch hour, Somali students transformed the basement of Our Redeemer into a mosque. First the boys prayed, then the girls.

Fourteen years later, I wondered if a Muslim prayer group still meets. I was surprised to see that the church marquee now reads: Our Redeemer Oromo Evangelical Church. The cultural cross-pollination continues: the Oromo, ethnic refugees from Ethiopia, now occupy the sanctuary and hold services in both Oromo and English (for the young Oromos who don’t speak the mother tongue). The Roosevelt Muslim student group is still going strong and has moved its services several doors down to the YMCA. One school administrator told me that they are now joined by a significant African American contingent that has converted to Islam.

Doug Hartmann: At first, I was surprised by Wing’s choice of an image. But as I started thinking it through, I came to see Wing’s representation of Muslim men as a wonderful commentary on the ongoing changes, challenges, and complexities of the cultural-religious core of American cultural life. The photo and Wing’s commentary underscore both how open and tolerant Americans can be of religious differences, as well as of how much work we still have to do in terms of acknowledging, accepting, and incorporating these different communities of believers. I mean, on the one hand, if there is some big, cultural consensus about America being a Judeo-Christian nation, where does this leave Muslim Americans? Apparently, sometimes in stairwells and basements. I’m quite sure that this is why some conservatives are so obsessed with the belief that our President, whom they cannot stand, is secretly Muslim.

More interestingly, I went back and reviewed my original paper. There I was equally surprised (and a bit embarrassed) to be reminded that we had actually found that Muslims and Islam were at that time emerging as a major point of discussion and controversy in the context of references to Judeo-Christian culture. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten this thread and needed Wing to help me rediscover it! Now I’m thinking it might be time to update this research, originally undertaken early in the new millennium, when the after-effects of 9/11 and its implications for Arabs and Muslims and Islam were only beginning to be felt.

Wing Young Huie:

I had never been to rural Montana. When we first pulled into Baker, it resembled a scene from an apocalyptic movie: tidy, rustic shops lined main street, but where was everybody? A lone soul finally appeared to inform us that the demolition derby was in town. Apparently the entire populace of Baker was at this car-as-gladiator spectacle.

An accommodating elderly gentleman in a cowboy hat excitedly explained the intricacies of the sport to us. The sight and sounds of smashing metal contrasted with the languorous audience and its intermittent cheers. In many ways, it didn’t seem all that different from a crowd at a baseball game back in the Twin Cities.

When my attention turned to photographic possibilities, I was excited to spy one of the only Asian faces in this communal gathering. This man and his wife, both Cambodian, blended right in with their dress and deportment. But to me, he still looks Photoshopped into this picture. I wonder, is that what I, also an Asian American, look like walking around the land of Lake Wobegon—as though I’ve been Photoshopped into the landscape?

Doug Hartmann:

This was one of the first photos Wing and I work-shopped publicly as we began the Changing Lenses project.  On that winter night, I told the crowd that I liked the idea of this photograph as much as the image itself. It so powerfully and succinctly captured the reality of an increasingly diverse, multicultural America. As I put it then: “What could be more mainstream, Midwest, Heartland-America than a demolition derby?” And yet, here in the midst of this quintessentially middle-American spectacle was an Asian American man.

I think I went on to talk about the paradoxes, complexities, and peculiarities of America and race—giving examples from my own projects, Wing’s portfolio, and other scholarly research. I think I talked about the tensions between our easy celebration of diversity and the problems and inequalities that persist even in the face of these differences—what my colleague Joyce Bell and I have called America’s “happy talk” about diversity. I think I even brought up the question of whether Americans’ encounters with racial others serve to break down traditional racial and ethnic boundaries or simply reinforce them.

But honestly, what I most remember about the event was not what either of us said about this photo, it was the audience response. They had vast and radically contrasting things to say. People talked about class differences and rural/urban contrasts, pointed out the different levels of interest and attention among the spectators, and expressed extremely different views on the Asian man himself. Some saw him as alienated and out of place, others thought he looked so confident and self-assured he might be in charge of the whole operation. One audience member looked into the background and took the conversation into the controversies surrounding public breastfeeding, while another spotted a woman in the crowd and simply pointed out that she looked like his grandmother, so he felt kind toward her.

This conversation reminded me that diversity isn’t just a socio-demographic phenomenon, but that there is a diversity of opinion in the various ways people see and experience the worlds in which we live. This is a general point, of course, but a crucial one for this project. Rich images like those Wing produces remind us of the complexity of social life—and idea that is powerfully conveyed when you invite folks to respond to and comment upon your work, as both artists and academics do every day.

This is little Geno. I’m big Geno. He’s going to be a security dog. I’m going to take my time with him. I’m just trying to get his neck to be strong. The chain is to put muscles in his chest. Right now he’s young. As he gets old he’ll get used to it…Once he sees me with it, he know he’s got to put it on. At first he didn’t want to have it on, but now he’s used to it. It’s not being abusive. You can train a dog how you want to train a dog, just like a child… You know, you just raise your dog just the way you want to be raised up. That’s all that is.

Wing Young Huie:  When photographing, I try to present people as they present themselves, but a photograph is just a snippet of that person. If you took a thousand photographs of someone, which photograph would be truest? And who decides the truth about any photograph—the person in it, the person who took it, or the person looking at it?

This is to say, you never know how a photograph will be interpreted. I have photographs that seem innocuous to me but instill fear in others. This photograph of a man and his dog, in particular, often gets a visceral reaction. Recently, I was putting up a permanent installation in a public building of about 50 photographs from my Lake Street USA series. To decide which photo should go where, I laid them all out along the wall.

Perhaps because of the scandal concerning Michal Vick, still fresh in the public’s consciousness, or perhaps because I’ve become more cautious in which images I deem proper for public settings, I told the woman helping me hang photos that this one might cause trouble. Sure enough, a few moments later an African American man walked by and blurted, “This is really offensive to me! This only perpetuates what people already think of us.” We ended up putting the photograph in a basement room.

Doug Hartmann:  When I first saw this image, I wasn’t particularly moved to comment—not because I didn’t think it was interesting, but because I thought there was much more sociological meaning and significance in this picture than first meets the eye. I was pretty sure the sociological dimensions were more complicated, controversial, and awkward than I wanted to delve into.  However, when I learned that the piece had indeed proven controversial for Wing, I decided to weigh in.

Most of what I knew and thought about this piece came through the lens of my knowledge and understanding of the arrest and conviction of famed NFL quarterback Michael Vick for being involved with the breeding, beating, and brutal training of pit bulls for underground dog-fighting. Indeed, over the past few years I have read or heard a surprising number of papers and presentations on Vick, and at least two things stand out.

One has to do with how the whole incident played off of and reinforced some of our worst racial prejudices about African American men (athletes in particular). To give just one example, I recently read a paper that compared media coverage of the initial allegations against Vick with those against Ben Rothlesberger, a white NFL player who was accused (though ultimately did not stand trial) for rather extreme sexual harassment charges. Although Rothlesberger’s charges were arguably more egregious than Vick’s, the media coverage of the accusations against Vick was far more extensive and negative, playing up the fears and threats a famous black man represented in the culture. No one could dispute his crimes were disturbing; but what was more problematic was how this incident functioned to reinforce a whole bunch of stereotypes about the crime and violence in the black community. My sense is these stereotypes were what made folks in the community so uncomfortable with the original public placement of Wing’s photograph.

We often hear there’s “some truth in every stereotype”—and this, what’s assumed and then reinforced about a subculture of crime and violence in the black community, is the second thing about the Vick case that really stood out to me. It made me awkward and uncomfortable—not just the animal cruelty itself, but the larger context of violence and illegality in which these behaviors were normalized. In this context, I was particularly interested to read Big Geno’s comments to Wing, especially his parallel between training dogs and raising kids. I’m pretty sure I don’t agree, but I am intrigued by the view and the otherwise unfamiliar life-world that produces it

Many of these issues came to a head in a submission on animals and society we worked with for Contexts a little while back. That piece, “Our Animals, Ourselves,” was largely about the close, reciprocal relationships between animals and the humans who own, identify, and associated with them. In its first iteration, the version of the article we sent out for peer review, there was a passage about the racialization of pit bills because of their close association with young African American men in contemporary U.S. culture. Without a doubt, this passage proved one of the most volatile and contested of any we had to adjudicate during our editorial tenure. Some readers loved the point and believed it to be grounded and insightful with many historical parallels; others hated it as overblown and unfounded. We never knew quite what to make of these differences and ultimately “punted”—that is, we took out the most specific, racially sensitive material and ran a watered down version of the point. “Pit bulls—and more importantly, their owners—have become scary and frightening monsters to many Americans. No stereotypical portrayal of an African American, Latino, or working-class skinhead gang is complete without a pit bull in the picture. So pit bulls… are defined as dangerous, hated by association, and given no place in civilized society.”

Looking back, I still don’t know if we handled that article correctly—the final article wasn’t nearly as explicit or provocative about the racial dimensions as the original. But both the experience of editing the piece and choosing what to run highlight, I think, the controversy and volatility contained even a seemingly straightforward image: a man and his dog become, instead, a place where race, stereotypes, and animals all come together.

Changing lenses is the product of an ongoing conversation between sociologist (and TSP co-editor) Doug Hartmann and photographer Wing Young Huie. In each post, and in varying formats, we will exchange what’s seen behind a camera lens and what’s seen through a sociological lens to get at the diversity of perspectives and cultivate a unique look at the human experience. Sometimes you’ll read a story, see a Q&A, or possibly even get to view a video of the two of us discussing an image and related research, but every time you check back with Changing Lenses, you’ll find a striking image and a great jumping-off point for developing your sociological imagination.

The late January event to workshop Changing Lenses, held in cooperation with the kick-off of Huie’s new blog k(now), produced a livelier, more animated conversation than we had hoped in even our most vivid imaginings of the event. In a room crammed with neighborhood friends, art opening regulars, sociologists, students, and everyone in between, each photo that came up on the screen for dissection between the sociologist and the artist led to open, engaged interaction between those who saw broad, sociological ideas and those who spotted interesting details and shared their own recollections.

Where some saw, say, the alienation of the immigrant, others saw integration and, indeed, success. Where some saw a man lurking dangerously, others saw women who were the relics of a forgotten age of matching shoes and gloves, unconcerned with the stylish man around the corner. And where some saw cringe-inducing reminders of a racially-charged past prominently displayed on a midwestern couple’s front lawn, others learned there was a also story of proud adoptive parents maybe just looking for some way to incorporate their child’s cultural legacy into their own.

After this successful party, we excitedly came together with The Society Pages’ associate editor just a few days later, jumpy with the energy of new ideas for collaborations. What you’ll see here in the coming months (and, given luck and the depth of Huie’s expansive portfolio) will be a continuance of that cold evening’s warmth: sociological insights, a photographic insider’s knowledge, and readers sharing their own viewpoints. We encourage anyone and everyone to join in: please, please share what you see through your own lens by posting your pictures, stories, and even academic insights in the comments. More firmly convinced than ever that art and sociology really are for everyone, we can’t wait to get started!