Jay Ruby, a 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 . 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], and Image Ethics [Oxford University Press, 1988] with Larry Gross and John Katz. His writings have been translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, and Estonian. His most recent book, Secure The Shadow: Death and Photography in America, was published by MIT Press in 1995. The World of Francis Cooper: Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania Photographer will be published in the fall of 1998 by Penn State Press. He is currently working on a book based upon his essays about film and anthropology.