March 20, 2010. Ethics in Photography panelists Gilles Peress, Bonnie Jo Mount, Corinne Dufka, Elizabeth Barret, Wendy Ewald, and moderator Thomas Keenan engage the attendees at the White Lecture Hall at Duke University’s East Campus.

In this week’s class, we watched Elizabeth Barret’s film Stranger With A Camera. I had heard of this film before, but had never seen it. It was incredibly compelling. On Saturday, March 20, I had an opportunity to attend an Ethics in Photography panel discussion and workshop hosted by Duke’s Center for International Studies, DukeEngage, Center for Documentary Studies, and the Duke Office of Research Support. Panelists included Magnum photographer Gilles Peress, Bonnie Jo Mount, picture editor for The Washington Post, Human Rights Watch’s Corinne Dufka, CDS’s Wendy Ewald, and Bard professor Thomas Keenan as moderator.

The scope of the discussion was as follows – Photography and film-making are increasingly integrated into many aspects of a student’s academic life. Even two decades ago, visual images of others were for private or small group viewing. This is no longer the case. We now have cell phone cameras, Facebook, blogging and other means of communicating images to a wide audience in a very short time. Many of these images find second lives, being shared in ever-widening networks or, even, picked up by news outlets. And this dramatic technical change raises questions that are not part of most students’ thinking. Now is the moment, when with the many service-learning projects and increased funding for undergraduate research at Duke and other schools, to examine what it means to take, own and share a photograph.

Panelists and attendees were presented with the following case study as a basis for the discussion:

Case Study [ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY]
The goal of the following narrative is to provide all participants with a come “think piece” from which we can play off during the morning panel discussions and in the afternoon break groups. We have adjusted both Duke’s calendar and that of the world’s to accommodate this story.

* Where are the points in the narrative where one might talk about Amy’s responsibilities and, very importantly, responsibilities to whom?
* Does she have any responsibility for second party use?
* Do those users have any obligations to Amy or the photograph’s subject?
* Are there questions of breach of agreement (Duke’s Institutional Review Board/Human Subject approval that she needed to submit for her program in Chile) and breaches of conscience/implied good faith?

Panelist Gilles Peress addresses a question as Bonnie Jo Mount looks on (left). Slides presented by Corinne Dufka of Human Rights Watch (right).

Five pages of handwritten notes later, I was left with the notion that there are larger issues out there to consider when thinking about pictures. We certainly can’t process everything before we press the shutter release, but there will be a time to check your heart and your gut before distributing your images. This case study raised so many more questions that I initially thought it would. The rich blend of experience from the panelists made for excellent conversation and gave me lots to chew on.

Homework this week included:
Ruth Behar, Chapters One and Three, The Vulnerable Observer
Daryl Lang and David Walker, “Meaning and Interpretation: Inside a Controversial 9/11 Image” (from PDN, November 2006)
Wendy Ewald, I Wanna Take Me a Picture
James Agee and Walker Evans, excerpts, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Come to class next week with a one-page, typed narrative project summary to workshop.

John Biewen (above), Audio Program Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, spoke with our class Tuesday, March 9, 2010. He shared sections of his documentary piece Nuevo South with us. As a photographer that has only dipped my toe into audio, I was fascinated by the amount of fieldwork that goes into producing such a piece. John noted that he probably made 20 trips to Siler City over the course of a year to gather material. And that’s not counting editing all the audio.

John shared that two versions ultimately aired: a narrated version on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon, and a non-narrative , which was published at American RadioWorks and can be heard here. We discussed the differences between narrative and non-narrative and the pros and cons of each.

In addition to teaching at CDS, John produces documentary work for NPR, PRI, American Public Media, and other public radio audiences. His work has received two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s Public Service Award, and the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award, among others. He recently published a book, Reality Radio, which he co-edited with Alexa Dilworth.

Reading homework this week:
Barre Toelken, “The Yellowmen Tapes, 1966-1997″
Lesley Williams with Naomi Schegloff, “Ethics”
James Bau Graves, “Rules of Engagement: Facilitating Community Cultural Programs”
FolkStreams, from Making the Film, A Singing Stream

Additional recommended reading:
Art Spiegelman, Chapter Two, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
Dorothy Noyes, “Group”, from Journal of American Folklore

We’re also supposed to:
1. Watch two documentaries pieces from WRAL’s Clay Johnson.
2. Read several project descriptions from the Southern Documentary Fund’s list of current projects and note which ones we find compelling and why.
3. Decide on an idea for a project and be prepared to discuss it at next week’s class.

(Walker Evans’ FSA photographs of Floyd Burroughs, his wife, Allie Mae Burroughs, and the washstand in the Burroughs’ home, Hale County, Alabama, 1936.)

Week two of the Seminar in Documentary Studies brought a great discussion session of the previous week’s reading assignments. We discussed several passages, what spoke to us, and of course, the interesting character of James Agee. We talked about the homework exercise “Who Are You?” and reviewed a case study of a student and his idea for a documentary project. The resulting discussion was centered around being aware of our own biases when going into a documentary project. Joy emphasized the importance of introspection and asking questions of yourself in an effort to better understand your subject and perhaps even why you want to document them.

Next, we discussed the definition of a documentary. We reviewed several different genres of documentary work: expository, direct cinema, social change, and reflexive.

This week’s homework is to read:
Bruce Jackson, Chapter Seven, Fieldwork
Hugo Slim and Paul Thompson, Chapter One, Listening for a Change
Guides to equipment and getting started in the field (CDS handout)
Sample interview agreement (CDS)
Jay Allison, “Radio Storytelling”, Nieman Reports, Fall 2001

In addition to the reading assignments, we’re supposed to experience a documentary of our choice (audio, film, exhibit, etc.) and evaluate its genre, discern the type of fieldwork conducted, evaluate how meaning is constructed in it, and post our comments on the class discussion board.

A few things of interest:
1. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I’d heard about this book and even seen it at bookstores before. Like many things we’re quick to dismiss, I was never really interested in it. It’s now on my “books I’d like to own” list. Walker Evans was only 32 when he accompanied James Agee (26) to rural Hale County, Alabama on an assignment for Fortune Magazine. They spent more than a month with three different families documenting their daily lives. Evans mainly used an 8×10″ view camera, but also a Leica 35mm and possibly a 4×5″ view camera. Agee submitted a lengthy manuscript to the Fortune editors, longer than anything they could feasibly publish. More than a year later, and still unpublished, Agee convinced Fortune to release it and then tried to have Harper and Brothers publish it as a book. He refused to make changes and the deal went nowhere. Finally, in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published by Houghton Mifflin. The first printing opened with 31 photographs by Evans, with no captions, then the extensive writing of Agee. It was a very unusual design and layout for a book of this type. What’s more interesting to me is that, in 1960, after Agee’s death, a second edition was released. The second edition contained twice as many photographs as the first (62) and an essay by Walker Evans. Some of the images he included weren’t even from Alabama and some had been taken when he worked for the Resettlement Administration. Bruce Jackson’s take on why Evans did this is an interesting one – “Perhaps he realized that this book was where his mark was being made and he had to become more of a presence in it than he had in the first edition.”

2. Errol Morris and James Curtis wrote a great article series called “The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock“, which addresses long-held theories about manipulation of photos and settings, posing elements of photographs, and the larger concept of purpose and identity of the FSA. It’s an extremely wordy and heavily footnoted series, but it’s well worth the read. Rothstein, Lange, and Evans are discussed at length.

3. You can access all the entire FSA archive (and many other great images) at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. What does this mean? Well it means you can spend hours and hours online pouring over photographic history AND you can download high resolution TIFF files and make your very own prints to hang on your walls. How cool is that?