Jay Ruby
Department of Anthropology
Temple University
Phila, Pa 19122
Phone - 215-204-7513
Fax - 240-209-7764
Email - ruby@acsworld.com
A Biographical Note
Jay Ruby, a 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). Current research
involves a study of the social costs of maintaining diversity in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.
Jay Ruby's Publications
Books
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
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 original 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.