I’m a horrible blogger. Just plain bad. Class ended about three weeks ago and I haven’t posted anything about it – or anything else – in eons. OK, now that that’s out of the way, on to the task at hand.

I’m lumping weeks 7 and 8 together as one was sort of preparation for the other. Our final class was the presentation portion of what project we plan to undertake. It was great to see and hear everyone’s ideas sort of start to come to life in such a short period of time. Some of us came to the class with an idea already in mind, while others weren’t sure of what they wanted to pursue. I found that the idea I had in the beginning changed over time into something I feel is more true, more refined, and will ultimately reflect the human element of my subject. I’ll write more about that later as the project matures.

To the three people that may even be reading this, I have to suggest Joy’s class to you. The Center for Documentary studies, through Joy’s class, does an incredible job of show and tell with documentary work. This class will help you think about things in entirely different ways, some more challenging than others, and hone your vision and ideas as a documentarian. I felt like I grew a lot in a short period of time and now it’s time to continue that growth as I plan and work on my project.

Do the work.

Lehman Brady Visiting Professor, documentary performer and playwright, Mike Wiley in the CDS Library performing Dar He: The Story of Emmett Till.

Our class had the pleasure of a visit from Mike Wiley last week. I’m sure I wasn’t the only student in class wondering what a documentary performer actually did. I mean, it’s not as obvious as film making, photography, oral history, etc. I’ll admit, I even had somewhat of a “really?” outlook on Tuesday’s class. That instantly changed when Mike began to share about the kind of work he does, how he works, does research and interviews, and ultimately performs his work. I was blown away by the whole process. We were then treated to a roughly 10-minute performance of part of Dar He: The Story of Emmett Till. It was incredible!

Mike’s work includes Blood Done Sign My Name; Life Is So Good; Tired Souls: The Montgomery Bus Boycott; Dar He: The Story of Emmett Till; Jackie Robinson: A Game Apart; Brown v. Board of Education: Over Fifty Years Later; and One Noble Journey: A Box Marked Freedom.

Mike’s Web site is here.

One of the things I’ve appreciated the most about this class has been our exposure to so many different forms of documentary study. As a photographer, it’s easy to have a narrow field of view on documentary work. I’ve always liked documentary films, so that was easily adaptable to my relatively short list of what documentary studies were. For whatever reasons (and I’m sure there are many), I never really evaluated all the other forms of documentary work (most certainly not documentary performance). Throughout the six weeks of class thus far, the variety of assigned readings, and the exposure to the incredibly generous visitors we’ve had (thanks to Joy, our fearless leader), so many doors have been opened and I’ve begun to see an interconnectedness I was unaware of. Perhaps I’ll write more about that later.

For homework this week:
“Knowing Your Rights” legal terms overview
“Is It Legal?”
“Concerning Releases”
Prepare a five-minute presentation about our project.

Left: The Web site of photographer Ava Johnson. Right: An untitled image from her series entitled “Good. Grief.” © Ava Johnson

Photographer, instructor, performer, and Center for Documentary Studies Public Information Coordinator, Ava Johnson visited our class in WEEK 5. I had the opportunity to meet Ava the previous Saturday when I attended the Ethics in Photography panel discussion at the White Lecture Hall (post here). Ava was one of three CDS instructors who facilitated the afternoon workshop with Duke students and a couple of CDS students.

Ava’s energy and passion for photography are evident as soon as you meet her. Just listening to her express her work and share her personal life experiences added a whole new dimension to seeing her work. That’s one of the beautiful things about getting to talk with artists while they share their work. Her enthusiasm was infectious and I couldn’t help but be motivated to go make pictures.

She shared some of her portfolio projects with us including “South of the Border”, a series of images made with Diana and Holga cameras that focused on the details of decay and disrepair of the classic freeway tourist trap. She also shared an incredibly poignant and genius series called “Recreations”, whereby she presented diptychs with family photographs on the left and recent photographs of her on the right in the same places, in the same poses. This series was especially great for me because it offered an intimate look into her family life. My favorite project is entitled “Good. Grief.” Ava shared that this series of images came about in the aftermath of a devastating apartment fire. Faced with moving to an area unfamiliar to she and her partner, she used her camera to document a time in her life where she was unsettled, both physically and emotionally. These images convey an amazing awareness of time and place and an almost haunting familiarity. Being able to listen to her describe these series of events was quite emotional for me.

Ava’s work is here.
Ava blogs here.

This week’s homework:
Glenn Hinson, “Crafting Fictions, Telling Truths: Creative Collaboration in the Photography of Roland L. Freeman”
Raphael Samuel, “Perils of the Transcript”
As told to Pamela Grundy by John B. McLendon, Jr., “‘A Position of Respect:’ A Basketball Coach Who Resisted Segregation”
Clarissa Sligh, “The Plaintiff Speaks” from Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography

Also for homework, create an elevator pitch for our project.

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?

I had the good fortune of being one of ten applicants selected to attend a workshop with Ernesto Bazan hosted by the Duke Center for Documentary Studies on Thursday, February 18. I’ve been to CDS many times to see exhibits and listen to lectures and for a long time, I’ve wanted to take a class there. For one reason or another, I’ve held off on signing up for a class, that is until yesterday. I was able to get one of the last remaining spots in the Seminar in Documentary Studies class, which meets Tuesday nights for eight weeks.

The course description states that “through short readings, close examination of several documentary projects, and guest speakers who will present their own projects and perspectives on the documentary experience, you will gain a broad introduction to the diverse fields that comprise documentary studies. We emphasize not only methodologies, but also philosophies and ethics of fieldwork in different settings. Throughout the term, students will explore fieldwork examples and, at the final meeting, will present preliminary projects of their own. These projects may be the beginning of long-term documentary initiatives, or simply a means of helping decide directions for future projects.” I’m also excited that we’re going to learn how to write a proposal for a viable documentary project.

So, last night was the first night of class. We were introduced to our instructor, Joy Salyers, and spent some time introducing ourselves, talking about our backgrounds, and our individual goals for the course. The class (15 students plus instructor) meets in the library at CDS (left image). We went through the syllabus and the administrative housekeeping before breaking for 20 minutes to go downstairs and view Pac McLaurin’s work entitled “Walls That Speak” (center image). I had an opportunity the previous week to view Pac’s work and was happy that the class, as a whole, got to view it as well. I was impressed not only with the work, but by the care for which he clearly had for his subjects (you can read more at the link). (On the way back to the library, I saw Dr. Tim Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name and Senior Research Scholar at the CDS and Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture in the Divinity School at Duke, in the hallway. I had just taken Katlyn and Cameron to see the film adaptation of the book Friday night and I wanted to tell him that we enjoyed the film and to thank him again for writing such an amazing book.) The class rejoined in the library and Joy asked us to first talk about what we noticed about the work, then to talk about how we felt about it. I had never stopped to think about the difference, but a light bulb went off for me when she said that and went on to explain. Later, we watched a three-minute clip of Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” (right image) and discussed framing. We received a handout that outlined some key concepts of framing and worked as a group to answer some questions about the framing from the clip we watched, which we’ll share during next week’s class.

I’m very excited about this class and, dare I say, even excited about the homework.

I have to read the following:
James Curtis, “Making Sense of Documentary Photography”
Josh Braun, “A Brief History and Primer [of Documentary Film]”
Stephen Smith, “What the Hell is a Radio Documentary?”
bell hooks, “Talking Back”
James Agee, Preface, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Bruce Jackson, “The Deceptive Anarchy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”

In addition to the reading, I have to answer the questions on the “Who Are You?” worksheet. I’ll try to provide updates from week to week and share some insights from the class. I’m looking forward to this journey!

(Apologies to James Pomerantz at A Photography Student for borrowing the idea to blog about photography, art, and school.)