Whose Agenda Is It, Anyway? Documentary Burdens, Community Benefits

At the Center for Documentary Studies, we talk a lot about collaboration. What we mean by that may vary greatly, depending on the project or the individuals involved, but implicit in these conversations is the belief that documentary work, at its core, involves reciprocity, shared action, common interests and mutual engagement. Out in the field, the documentarian is not a solo agent pursuing art for art's sake, nor is she or he the old-school marauding ethnographer, parachuting into exotic territory and ferreting out cultural goods for publication or display at some high-minded institution. Instead, in this paradigm, practicing the documentary arts always involves tangible connections with the community, from start to finish, and that can—and should—take a long time (if there's ever a real end to these engagements). This means that the documentarians and the documented are in the experience together, inextricably, though the nature of their interactions will fluctuate from day to day.

Various organizations and independent artists across the country pursue community-oriented approaches to documentary work, encountering the challenges of collaboration as they teach, practice and present their art. Founded in 1973, the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, is a well-known educational organization that seeks to foster community by documenting the stories of local people and their culture and surrounding landscape. For the past 16 years, the Philadelphia Folklore Project in Pennsylvania has documented, supported and presented local folk arts and culture, with the belief that the quality of urban community life is directly related to the persistence, diversity and vitality of vernacular folk cultures. With an activist bent, Appalshop, a multidisciplinary arts and education center in Whitesburg, Kent., is one of the best-known proponents of putting the media arts to work for community goals. Growing out of a federal War on Poverty media training program in 1969, Appalshop produces original films, radio, photography, books, music, theater and spoken-word recordings that "support communities' efforts to solve their own problems in a just and equitable way," according to its mission statement. "Appalshop is dedicated to the proposition that the world is immeasurably enriched when local cultures garner the resources, including new technologies, to tell their own stories and to listen to the unique stories of others."

Some organizations focus their efforts on documentary productions that amplify local voices and cultivate understanding, often by giving life to untold experiences. MediaRites, a nonprofit multicultural production organization in Portland, Ore., has produced award-winning national radio documentaries and community projects since 1984. Picture Projects, founded in New York City in 1995, focuses on using new media technologies to create documentaries that explore the contemporary social fabric through first-person stories, dynamic data and dialogue. Many people have heard the work of Radio Diaries, a not-for-profit organization that works with individuals "to document their own lives for public radio: teenagers, seniors, prison inmates, and others whose voices are rarely heard."

These few examples suggest a broader range of organizations and artists pursuing collaborative community connections using documentary techniques. Out of our continuing dialogue at the Center for Documentary Studies, informed by experience with our own documentary projects as well as those of others, come general observations about the nature of documentary work and community engagement. Intended as neither rules nor principles demanding adherence, the following comments suggest ways of connecting documentary vision and practices with community priorities and goals across a spectrum of possible collaborative arrangements.

First, just what do we mean by "documentary work"? Basically, it's the process of going into the field—into a community, of some sort—to record, preserve and present significant experiences, using such tools as a camera and an audio recorder. Underlying, and hardwired to, the process is a documentarian's motive, the intent.

"Our individual motives may vary," says Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies. "We may want to preserve something for posterity, to acknowledge an accomplishment, to promote change, to create shared understanding, but always as we document we engage in something larger than ourselves, something beyond the confines of our singular lives. This connection is the beginning of understanding how documentary work fits naturally with community life."

Connecting to "something larger than ourselves" by definition requires the consideration of people in a particular place, so documentary work cannot be practiced or understood without responding to various interactions in the field. In this sense, documentary expression is fundamentally community-based, played out in response to dynamics present in the place where the lens is focused.

A simple way to think about different approaches to doing documentary work involves evaluating who has input into and control of the process, from selecting topics for exploration to snapping the shutter or turning on the tape recorder to editing materials to deciding where and how images or audio is used. A documentary artist might retain the lion's share of this control—and there is nothing automatically flawed about this orientation—yet to do so with no consideration for the people represented would, besides being a breach of ethics, fall short of any honest attempt at conveying the experiences of those individuals as lived and felt by them. Instead, the resulting work would most likely communicate more about the viewpoint, interpretation and experience of the artist than anything else. (And so what, exactly, has been documented?) This is not to say that an audience could derive no understanding whatsoever about the people represented, yet it is to suggest that the artist's perspective probably would trump all others, reducing the potential of the documentary process to reap collaborative benefits.

Documentarians who wrestle with this challenge find numerous ways to open up the process, all of which entail involving their "subjects" to varying degrees in the shaping of the work. Spending time in the field canvassing and listening to community voices, before a project is fully conceived and planned, might be a first step. Spending more time in a place, responding to people and events and adjusting the focus of the work as it proceeds, is central to the evolution of a creative documentary project. The results help to shape answers to some of the following seminal questions in doing documentary work: How does an artist's creative eye (or ear) find its due place in the documentary process? What is the role of the documentarian's expertise? Where does it end? Who sets the agenda? Whose project is it? Who gets to see the work in progress? What is the role of the intended audience in shaping the project's content? In shaping its outcome?

The documentary artist working in a community is inevitably changed by encounters and relationships with the people who live there, and that impact is reflected in the perspective and choices of the artist, in the stories that get told and in how they are presented. This is a complicated dynamic, particularly when asking whose perspective, whose story, ultimately gets passed along—keeping in mind, too, the impact that documentarians themselves may have on a community and its residents. Photographer Rob Amberg lives in Madison County, N.C., where he has been documenting Dellie Chandler Norton and her extended family and community since the mid-1970s. He has photographed and interviewed many members of this remote mountain community over the years, some of them time and time again, forming relationships that go beyond the documentary process yet always reflect back on it and inform it in significant ways. One such relationship is with Norton's adopted son, Junior.

"For me, it's in the ordinary that we find the universal truths," says Amberg. "With Junior, the challenge for me is to be as open, relaxed and visionary in my picture-making as he is in his presentation of those truths. When that happens, we seem like alter egos, telling these stories, revealing these lives, for I too feel revealed. My photographs of Junior offer me the opportunity to find something of myself. He is less the subject of my images, but more accurately, the photographs are the expression of our relationship."

In "Sodom Laurel Album," Amberg's book about Dellie, Junior and their lives and surroundings, we find a multilayered visual and oral history that reveals the particulars of these rural mountain experiences—growing and selling tobacco, old-time ballad singing, storytelling, family gatherings—accompanied by Amberg's own journal entries, showing his changing perceptions of a world that he entered as a stranger. Amberg's written and photographic observations are intimate, yet they reflect a growing recognition that his perspectives remain colored by his position as an outsider in the Sodom Laurel community.

This tension between an "outsider" coming into a community to capture the "inside" experience is at the root of the documentarian's challenge, even (and perhaps most especially) in projects of shorter duration, though an honest effort to listen to the community can still shape the documentary work dramatically.

"Two Towns of Jasper," a feature-length documentary film about the racially motivated murder of James Byrd Jr. in Texas in 1998, evolved as a collaborative effort between a black filmmaker and a white filmmaker who decided, after visiting the town, to document black and white residents of Jasper with separate, racially distinct crews. The filming occurred over the course of a year, from January to December 1999.

"I didn't get to Jasper until December of '98 for the first time," says Marco Williams, who directed "Two Towns" with Whitney Dow. "It wasn't until that firsthand visit that I really could see a movie. And that's not unnatural—I mean, the notion that you need to do on-the-ground research to begin to fully own a vision of the story. Then I saw what was possible through my own eyes as opposed to through Whitney's eyes, and through the eyes of the media, which sort of reflects back on the film itself, the need to see things, to interpret, through segregated lenses."

In 2002, the film won the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award, in recognition of its unique collaborative nature, significant contributions toward increasing understanding of the complexities of racial dynamics in American communities (told through a specific local story) and integral acknowledgment of the realities of race in documentary representation. Canvassing community voices influenced the filmmaking process, the filmmakers' vision, decisions about how best to capture and represent community experiences, and a host of other decisions by the film's directors and crew.

What may seem an obvious idea—to listen to the community involved in a documentary project—can take on real power when it is fully embraced throughout the entire process, whether by an individual documentarian working on a project or by an institution shaping and running a community documentary program.

Youth Document Durham, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies, involves young people (ages 10 to 16) from diverse communities in documentary training and projects that examine their viewpoints and amplify their voices. CDS staff members and interns provide instruction in documentary methods and guidance, but the program is youth-driven—from a youth advisory board that makes decisions concerning themes for exploration—such as teen violence, race relations, sex education, media literacy, career choices—to decisions about presentation of final projects: what form they will take (exhibits, 'zines, Web sites, murals, radio programs), what their content will be, what audiences will be addressed. These final projects make public the young participants' views on community issues, not by simply asking them their opinions, as someone documenting youth culture in Durham might do, but by involving them in the entire documentary process, from conception to completion.

In 2002 Youth Document Durham won national recognition, becoming one of 13 programs in the United States and Mexico to receive a Coming Up Taller Award from the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences. The Coming Up Taller Awards recognize excellence in community-based, after-school arts and humanities programs that demonstrate the power of these disciplines to encourage young people's creativity. The winning programs provide young people with learning opportunities, chances to contribute to their community, and ways to take responsibility for their own futures.

For Youth Document Durham, the documentary process is the integral connection to engaging, and to engagement with, the larger community. It is the vehicle by which young people determine and articulate their ideas about the world around them, then move a step further to invite dialogue, to expect responses to their vision.

Projects that put cameras in the hands of young people are a prime example of the shift in perspective and power that results from a renegotiation of control over documentary tools and outcomes. Such projects often have a subversive undertone. "Disparando Camaras para la Paz," or Shooting Cameras for Peace, is the brainchild of Alex Fattal, a 2001 Duke University graduate who went to Colombia on a Fulbright Fellowship to study the impact of differing perspectives in photography. Fattal's work in Colombia was also supported by the AJA Project, an international organization founded by fellow Duke grads that provides multimedia-based educational support to young people living in areas of violent conflict and social upheaval. While there, Fattal spent time with refugee children on the outskirts of Bogota, teaching them how to document their own lives with inexpensive automatic cameras. "The idea of giving cameras to children is giving them the tools to tell their own story," Fattal told The Seattle Times last year. "To break the dynamic of foreign photographers. Even if it's a Colombian photographer, it's an upper-class guy who comes in and takes pictures and leaves."

Giving children control over how they are represented to the world also gives the rest of us a chance to see their experiences in a new light. Often, this reorientation changes perceptions and may alter policies that impact children, their families, and their communities. Fattal, who continues this work as a 2002-2003 Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow with the Center for Documentary Studies, developed some of his ideas about the power of putting cameras in the hands of children through the Literacy Through Photography (LTP) program at CDS, founded by photographer and teacher Wendy Ewald. For more than 30 years, Ewald has traveled the world, teaching and collaborating with children on photographic projects that test our notions of the picture-making process.

"Since the time when I first began photographing, I have heard many times, in many languages, children and adults say, 'I want to take a picture'—when what they meant was, 'I want to be photographed,'" says Ewald. "Who or what is it, I asked myself, that really makes a photograph—the subject or the photographer?"

Ewald has explored that question on a Native American reservation in Canada, in a one-room school in Appalachia, in a small village in the Colombian Andes, and, among other places, in India, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Durham, North Carolina.

In 1990 the Center for Documentary Studies invited her to establish its LTP program, a school-based initiative that teaches children to make photographs, beginning with the self-portrait and then moving to family, community and dreams or fantasies. The children are encouraged to write about these ideas either before or after making the pictures. Ewald observed over the years that students who worked from photographs with ties to their own lives, especially pictures they had taken themselves, were able to write more and with greater ease as they articulated their own experiences.

Photographs, used in this way, allow students to bring their home and community lives directly into the classroom. For teachers, who rarely come from the same community as their students, photographs can provide a glimpse into students' lives outside the walls of the school building. In increasingly diverse classrooms, making and sharing their own photographs also gives students insight into each other's experiences.

In an even more proactive way, cameras, or other documentary tools, in the hands of community members can be turned toward projects that meet civic, social, economic and other shared goals, determined by community residents themselves. Indivisible, a project of the Center for Documentary Studies in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, sent photographers and interviewers to twelve communities across the country to document grassroots initiatives for social change. Through images and first-person narratives, they captured the complexity of civic ventures where community members are working toward a common goal. A multifaceted project, Indivisible engaged diverse audiences through a major trade book, an extensive Web site, and traveling exhibits to museums and to public common spaces such as train stations and malls. The project also produced an educators' guide and a booklet, Putting Documentary Work to Work: A Guide for Communities, Artists, and Activists, for individuals and organizations preparing to do their own community-based documentary projects.

One part of Indivisible, called Inside Out, put documentary tools directly in the hands of local residents through funded collaborative projects conceived by local leaders in each of the 12 participating communities. These projects continued the documentary process started by Indivisible photographers and interviewers, and the resources acquired, skills learned and knowledge gained will stay with each community long after the documentary project has been completed. The Pew Charitable Trusts, which funded Indivisible, provided $10,000 for each local project, which took shape according to each community's circumstances and interests.

Just to give one example: Building a future on the shoulders of the past is the goal of a group of Navajo herders, weavers, and cultural activists working under the name Diné bí' íína', meaning "Navajo lifeways." Identifying with deep cultural traditions, Diné bí' íína' organizers, who represent the Navajo Nation Sheep and Goat Producers, see long-term economic and cultural benefits in increasing sheep and wool production and in nurturing awareness of the history of sheep to the Navajo way of life. Founded in Arizona in 1991, the group is committed to supporting traditional ways of life and economic opportunity.

For their local project Diné bí' íína' members teamed up with Indivisible interviewer Jack Loeffler to teach documentary audio techniques to a group of high school teachers and students on the Navajo Nation. In an intensive course, teachers and students learned how to do fieldwork and record interviews using analog and digital audiotape (DAT) recorders. In addition to the technical training, they learned and practiced the art of interviewing while conducting aural history interviews with other Navajos and learned how to make stereo recordings by documenting the acoustic music of two Native American musicians. Recording equipment purchased through the grant remains in the community, as do the skills and knowledge acquired by local residents who may continue the documentary work. Archival CDs of the assembled recordings, along with the Navajo component of Loeffler's field recordings over the last decades, will be deposited at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock. Duplicates of the interviews will be held in the archive at Diné bí' íína'. Loeffler produced a radio program featuring elements of most of the interviews, which will be included in his 13-part series titled "The Lore of the Land," sponsored by the Museum of New Mexico, and to be broadcast regionally over Community Public Radio stations. Copies of the program will also be sent to KTNN, the Navajo Nation's radio station.

Collaboration on a documentary project can, in itself, help strengthen community. "Documentary work is closely connected to remembering, creating, and telling life stories and experiences," says Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies. "Most of us share a need to recall and reconsider local memory, to revisit and renew our connection to place. Out of shared telling and remembering grow identity, connection and pride, binding people to a place and to one another.

"These ties form the basis of community life: individual involvement in schools, churches, civic organizations and public causes and events. The documentary process, and sharing the results of that work, provides a way for us to acknowledge and shape community life as we advance our understanding of these connections and how they inform our work in the present."

This community-building dynamic plays out in infinite ways: bringing people together to address shared or conflicting interests, honing a community organization's focus, identifying new allies, increasing understanding across typically impassable barriers, broadening a message.

Sometimes the coming together involves new alliances around issues that themselves suggest a need for more "comm-unity." A new community of young documentarians has emerged from the Youth Document Durham program at CDS. These repeat participants have passed the age limit for continued involvement in the program, so they initiated their own new group: Project YAER, Youth Against Established Racism. Planning to use documentary methods to track, highlight, and address racial dynamics in the local community, they are in the formative stages of setting specific goals and seeking funding. They are working with CDS staff members to shape their project.

At other times, community-building is envisioned on a much broader scale. As part of Indivisible, the Alaska Marine Conservation Council (AMCC)—a consortium of fishermen, environmentalists, scientists and educators dedicated to the restoration and protection of the marine habitat—made documentary photographs and conducted interviews with AMCC fishermen who depend on the ocean for their livelihood. The organization produced a booklet designed to provide a human perspective on the effects of destructive fishing practices. The booklet uses photographs and firsthand accounts to educate the public about Alaska's threatened maritime habitats. It will also be distributed to Alaskan fishing organizations to prompt discussions about fishing practices and potentially narrow the gulf between conservation advocates and fishermen.

Using the products of documentary work in strategic ways, particularly through facilitated discussion with public audiences, extends the notion of connecting documentary collaboration and community goals through the final stages of the documentary process, beyond passive presentation to active engagement of community members in responding to the content of the work. When residents view local concerns through the long lens of a documentary perspective, cultivated over time, they are likely to discover new opportunities for dialogue and develop new visions for the future of their shared surroundings.

In the end, how we understand the nature of community itself may be influenced deeply by the many interactions at the core of documentary work. From research and preservation projects—such as Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South, which gives light to the monumental efforts made by African Americans to build their own communities and institutions during that oppressive period in the nation's history—to educational programs in documentary studies that create communities of practitioners to documentary projects that engage people in the collaborative dance of pursuing individual and shared goals, the documentary process can advance collective principles that both define and serve communities. Sharing these ideas, and putting them into practice, turns the documentary process into a crucible for real change in community life, both in the present and, over time, leading into a markedly different future.

Lynn McKnight worked, taught and consulted in the field of journalism for two decades before joining the staff of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University in 1999. She is now the director of external relations and communications at CDS. Founded in 1989, CDS promotes an arts-and-humanities approach to documentary fieldwork—drawing upon photography, filmmaking, oral history, folklore and writing as catalysts for understanding and change.

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Whose Agenda Is It, Anyway? Documentary Burdens, Community Benefits

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