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1 The American photographer Shelby Lee Adams is widely known for his portraits and images of community life in the tough and relatively poor Appalachian mountain regions of Kentucky over more than thirty-five years. Describing himself as a visual artist, Adams argues that his work is aimed at ‘overcoming superficiality by embracing the people straightforwardly, demystifying and destroying stereotypes, exposing regional and national misunderstandings and prejudice against rural peoples and all peoples in general.’ Examples of his work and ideals can be found on his own site: http://shelby-lee-adams.blogspot.com/.

Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary film The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia was released in 2002. This film explores debates around, and the political impact of, the representation of social groups in artistic works. In this case, do Adams’s images realize his own aims or could they reinforce existing negative stereotypes of poorer communities and families as suggested in this critical online article:

https://hyperallergic.com/28555/capitalist-realism-or-poverty-porn/.

Do your own research on Adams’s work, then write a 1,000-word essay addressing the question ‘What, if any, sociological insights into Appalachian communities can we gain from the work of Shelby Lee Adams that conventional sociological methods could not achieve?’ Be sure to explain why such visual recording adds to our understanding.

2 Interviews are conducted not just by sociologists but also by journalists, market researchers and TV documentary makers, and all interviewers find practical ways of eliciting the information they seek. The investigative journalist Louis Theroux likes to use unstructured interviews to draw out information from his subjects. He discusses his techniques in this short interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzC6NbVN1Xk.

Now watch Louis Theroux: Behind Bars (2008), directed by Stuart Cabb, as he interviews guards and inmates at San Quentin State Prison in San Francisco, California: https://archive.org/details/BehindBarsInSanQuentin-LouisTheroux.

Does the unstructured interview method work in this context? Do the interviews help us to understand the relationships between inmates and guards? Did inmates ‘play to the camera’, giving responses that make for good television rather than telling the truth? If you wanted to conduct your own research in a prison setting, what research methods would you use and why?