20 Facts About Sol Worth

Sol Worth was a painter, photography and visual communication scholar.

Sol Worth attended the founding class of the High School of Music and Art in New York City as an art student from 1936 until 1940; in 1937 one of his paintings was chosen to be part of a student exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Sol Worth graduated in 1943 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, but entered the Navy before graduation and did not formally receive his diploma until already on board the USS Missouri in the Pacific.

In October 1945, Sol Worth returned to New York City to marry Tobia Lessler, his college sweetheart.

Sol Worth remained in New York City on inactive duty with the Navy until 1946, when he received an honorable discharge from the service.

Sol Worth worked in the same firm for over seventeen years, eventually becoming vice-president and creative director.

In 1956 Sol Worth was awarded a one-year Fulbright Lecturership as visiting professor of documentary film and photography at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Sol Worth served as consultant to Seldes until accepting a visiting lectureship at the Annenberg School in 1960.

In 1964, Sol Worth decided to devote himself entirely to teaching and research in visual communication, and moved to Philadelphia to take a full-time position as assistant professor of Communications at the Annenberg School.

In 1966, Sol Worth was promoted to associate professor and director of the Media Laboratories, and in 1973 he was named professor of communication and education.

In 1976, Sol Worth created the Undergraduate Major in Communications in the College at Penn, and was appointed the first chair of the new major.

Sol Worth's promotions recognized the outstanding research and scholarship that he had undertaken while at Penn.

In 1967 Sol Worth received the Wenner-Gren Foundation award for outstanding research in communication and anthropology.

From 1968 to 1972 Sol Worth held a Visiting Research Professorship at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, where he worked with the Department of Community Medicine to develop a bio-documentary teaching unit to enable doctors, medical students, patients, and members of the community to present themselves and their world on film.

In 1972, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Sol Worth organized and taught a summer institute which took selected doctoral students and young faculty in the social sciences and helped them to learn how to use the visual media of still photography, motion pictures, and television for research and communication.

Sol Worth served as its editor until his death in 1977.

Sol Worth was actively involved with the American Anthropological Association, the American Film Institute, and the International Film Seminars, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Sol Worth was chair of the Research Division of the University Film Association, and served as the senior member of the board of directors for the Society of Cinematologists from 1967 through 1970.

Sol Worth served on the founding board of directors of the Semiotic Society of America and on the editorial board of the Journal of Communication.

Sol Worth was attending the Flaherty Film Seminar in Andover, Massachusetts, when he died peacefully in his sleep of a heart attack on August 29,1977, at the age of fifty-five.