A term project for a journalism course in documentary photography (the proposal for which is cited in ED 177 560) centered on photographically documenting a rural community and measuring its symbolic sociodramas. The focus of the project was to determine how various community groups interpreted a given set of photographs selected to represent a dominant social institution, the church, in a small community. A coorientation model and a multidimensional scaling approach were chosen to analyze the set of documentary photographs and to compare responses of religious and lay groups to the photographs. Results indicated that their responses were multidimensional in interpretation. The findings suggest that although photographers rarely make any attempt, either qualitatively or quantitatively, to assess the communication effects of their pictures, documentary photography does extract from its subject the essence of interpersonal relationships and resulting social order and that the success of any documentary effort should, therefore, be analyzed from the perspectives of those photographed. (AEA)