"Document" Fall 2015 by CDS.Duke

DOCUMENT FALL 2015 | THE CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

Center for Documentary Studies

AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

DOCUMENT

a Publication of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

919-660-3663 | Fax: 919-681-7600 | docstudies@duke.edu | documentarystudies.duke.edu

Director: Wesley C. Hogan

Associate Director for Programs and Development: Lynn McKnight Publishing Director: Alexa Dilworth Web Design and Production Manager: Whitney Baker

Art Director: Bonnie Campbell Communications Director and Document Editor: Elizabeth Phillips Social Media and Digital Projects Manager: Jenna Strucko

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University teaches, engages in, and presents documentary work grounded in collaborative partnerships and extended ﬁeldwork that uses photography, ﬁlm/video, audio, and narrative writing to capture and convey contemporary memory, life, and culture. CDS values documentary work that balances community goals with individual artistic expression. CDS promotes documentary work that cultivates progressive change by amplifying voices, advancing human dignity, engendering respect among individuals, breaking down barriers to understanding, and illuminating social injustices. CDS conducts its work for local, regional, national, and international audiences. All photographs appearing in Document® are copyright by the artist. | Document® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

CONTENTS

FALL 2015

DOCUMENTARY 2015: ORIGINS & INVENTIONS 3 CDS Launches a National Forum

South Side Images and Text by 2014 Lange-Taylor Prizewinner Jon Lowenstein

FEATURED 4–5 One Person, One Vote The SNCC Legacy Project–Duke University Partnership Reframes Democracy’s Future

EDUCATION 11–14 Undergraduate Education 2015 John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Award Winners

PROGRAM 6 Young Documentarians Carry on the Legacy of Lewis Hine BOOKS & EXHIBITS 7–10 Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila Photographs by 2014 CDS-Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Winner Nadia Sablin Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial Photographs by Jessica Ingram

MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Introducing the Incoming Class of 2017 Continuing Education Spring 2015 Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates New Fall Classes

OTHER NEWS 15 2015 CDS Documentary Essay Prizewinner CDS Summer Intern Chanel Norman New CDS Podcast: Scene on Radio

Friends of CDS Support the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS)—a 501c3 nonprofit organization affiliated with Duke University—by making a contribution today. Celebrating our 25th Anniversary, CDS remains unique in our broad scope as a center for teaching, production, and presentation of photography, film, audio, writing, and other creative media. CDS enriches the documentary field through innovative classes; Full Frame, an international film festival; exhibition galleries and traveling exhibits; artist awards; publishing; podcasting; and other signature programs. Moving forward, CDS strategic priorities are: • To expand the documentary field to include a more diverse range of people; • To invest in technology, production facilities, and exceptional faculty/practitioners to enhance our educational core; • To establish a dynamic laboratory for innovation, critique, and creativity; and • To engage in collaborative projects that will broaden documentary’s range and impact. Please join us on this transformative journey. Two Easy Ways to Give: Make a secure online donation at documentarystudies.duke.edu/donate or send a check payable to “Center for Documentary Studies” to Friends of CDS, 1317 W. Pettigrew Street, Durham, NC 27705. For More Information: Contact Kathryn Banas, Senior Development Associate, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University: 919-660-3687 or kathryn.banas @ duke.edu.

CDSDuke

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DOCUMENTARY 2015: ORIGINS & INVENTIONS are created and shared) has morphed in very practical and dramatic ways, opening up the field and posing new questions about how documentary is taught, practiced, presented, and distributed. At the same time, documentary traditions and the universal demands of creative expression anchor these changes in familiar terrain that informs the broader field in enduring ways. So what’s the essence of documentary today? What is its import? What are the central questions and challenges for documentary artists and fellow practitioners, and what are the avenues for continued exploration and creative projects that will enrich documentary going forward in the “viral witnessing” era? Opportunities for a broad-ranging group of documentary artists, scholars, and educators to come together to explore these important questions are few. There are gatherings that tend to focus on particular mediums or practices in the documentary or journalistic fields, but no signature convening yet exists whose aim is to provide an open, cross-media, interdisciplinary conversation on documentary approaches, to create a national discourse about the role of documentary in contemporary society and where the documentary field is headed. There is no better culmination to our yearlong 25th Anniversary celebration than to address this gap by inaugurating such a signature convening. The first CDS Documentary Forum—Documentary 2015: Origins & Inventions—will be held in November 2015. See the Event Details box for more information. And please join us. —Wesley Hogan, CDS director

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Event Details

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or twenty-five years, CDS has cultivated documentarians—students and artists who bear witness to the human experience through the stories they tell. The first institution in the United States dedicated solely to documentary’s rich legacy and continuing practice, CDS stands out nationally and internationally for its broad approach to the documentary arts, embracing multiple mediums, forms, styles, and perspectives. Under one roof, CDS documentarians include photographers, filmmakers, radio producers, writers, and new-media artists working in myriad ways. These practitioners and faculty members teach and create in a dynamic setting, which includes galleries, an international film festival, radio production, darkrooms and digital editing labs, screening rooms, workshops, and public events. Our work is facilitated by our location at a major research university, which provides interdisciplinary connections and a fertile intellectual environment. Documentary practice in many ways seems light years, not a mere twenty-five years, removed from 1990, when we opened our doors at Duke University. The field, like most others, has been deeply influenced by the rise of the Internet and vast changes in digital technology that support mobility, connectivity, participation, replication, interactivity, crowdsourcing, and other dynamic shifts in a landscape once characterized largely by artists working independently. The nature of “the document” (what can be created from life experiences to share and preserve) and “the documentary opportunity” (when and how these “documents”

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Save the date! A national forum hosted by the Center for Documentary Studies—Documentary 2015: Origins & Inventions—will be held November 20–22, 2015, in Durham, North 0 99 Carolina. The weekend will include dinner, dancing, and honored guests at 1 • since a CDS 25th Anniversary celebration on Saturday, November 21. Documentary 2015 will bring together photographers, filmmakers, podcasters, writers, media professionals, educators, students/alumni, and supporters to view compelling documentary work and to examine central issues in the documentary field, with recognition of deep traditions and an eye toward the future. Join us for this celebration of and open conversation around documentary today—looking back, looking forward. Tickets go on sale September 16.

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CDS Launches a National Forum

See the link below for more information; while you’re there, enjoy the rest of our special 25th Anniversary website, feauturing CDS history, highlights, and happenings.

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#DocForum2015

COVER: Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving, Stone Mountain, Georgia, 2006. Photograph by Jessica Ingram, from Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial (see page 10).

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

FEATURED

The SNCC Legacy Project–Duke University Partnership Reframes Democracy’s Future Our experiences have created a level of “ informational wealth” that we need to pass on to young people. This unprecedented collaboration with Duke University hopefully will pilot a way for other academic institutions to re-engage history and those who make it.

—courtland cox, student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc) veteran and sncc legacy project chairman

n a year that marks the 50th Anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, increasing state legislation nationwide effectively restricts those rights. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Legacy Project and Duke University, represented by the Center for Documentary Studies and Duke Libraries, are taking action with a new and unique partnership—a multi-year collaboration illustrating the struggle that achieved voting and civil rights. Using a digital gateway, the One Person, One Vote project aims to redefine the mid-twentieth-century civil rights– era narrative around voting rights, highlighting the history and lessons of the grassroots movement of that era in order to help current and future generations continue efforts to create “a more perfect union” in the twenty-first century. In addition to the SNCC Digital Gateway, the project includes a working conference on voting rights and a series of critical oral histories, all facilitated by, among others, SNCC Visiting Activist-Scholars in residence on Duke’s campus. The members of the SNCC Legacy Project (SLP) are veterans of the history-changing SNCC, an organization that became the cutting edge of the civil rights revolution. The group of young activists embedded themselves

in southern black communities during the 1960s, working with local leadership to secure the right to vote; more broadly, as former SNCC veteran and SLP board member Charles Cobb elaborates, “SNCC’s work was also about cultivating new local leadership and reinforcing existing local leadership. SNCC field secretaries did not see themselves as community leaders but as community organizers, a distinction that empowered local participants by reinforcing the idea at the heart of SNCC’s work in every project—that ‘local people’ could and should take control of their lives.” SNCC’s execution of this philosophy in the Deep South galvanized thousands of those local people; together, their work forced elected officials to put forward the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and created an expansion of political, social, and economic opportunity for all citizens in the 1960s. In counties throughout the Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi Black Belt, less than 3 percent of all African Americans were registered to vote in 1964. Thirty years later, that percentage had increased tenfold. In 2008, black voter turnout for the first time equaled that of whites. SLP exists in order to preserve and extend this legacy. The roots of the organization’s partnership with Duke reach back to 2010, when SLP leaders approached Duke faculty whom they knew regarding fundraising for a 50th Anniversary celebration of SNCC’s founding at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1960. That interaction set the foundation for the ambitious alliance that took shape in 2013, despite the fact that for some SLP members, says SNCC veteran and SLP board member Judy Richardson, on the face of it Duke appeared to be an unlikely ally—the university, after all, was a southern, historically white in-

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OCUMEN

Gateway will consider which organizing principles and strategies might be useful to today’s generation of activists and foster a broader intergenerational dialogue about the meaning of democracy today,” says John Gartrell, director of Duke Libraries’ John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture. The new materials will come in part from a growing number of academic and other institutions and organizations that will make their digital collections accessible within the gateway. The SNCC Digital Gateway will eventually include assets and outcomes from the other components of the SLP-Duke partnership—the working conference and the critical oral histories. The One Person, One Vote conference in fall 2015 will commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and will include civil rights veterans, present-day activists, policy experts, elected officials, academics, students, and youth organizers, including representatives from Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, and Moral Mondays. Work and discussion will center around organizing strategies on how to ensure the constitutional right to vote for all Americans and how to use the lessons of the past and current best practices to ensure political equality in the South. At Duke in spring 2016, a group of oral historians, undergraduates, and a new cohort of SNCC Visiting Activist-Scholars will begin work on the critical oral histories, identifying up to forty SNCC veterans and developing a series of questions for the interview process. In addition to “the actors who did the actions,” Courtland Cox says, “we also want to involve what are called ‘adjacent actors,’ people who might have been segregationists, or people who might have been part of the FBI, for example, to help give perspective on not only what we were thinking going forward, but on what they were thinking about opposing us.”

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stitution, “and some of our board members lived in North Carolina back in the day.” The execution and success of a one-year pilot project that began in June 2014 reframed SLP’s approach. “There are other institutions that do civil rights history, that do documentary history, but what you don’t have is the kind of institutional will that we’ve found here at Duke,” says Richardson. In the pilot phase, she and Cobb came to Duke as SNCC Visiting Activist-Scholars and worked collaboratively with scholars, undergraduates, archivists, and graduate students to create a documentary website that launched in March 2015—One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights. As Duke Libraries’ Karlyn Forner, the site’s project manager, describes it, the “guiding principle is really about telling stories—the stories of voting rights, and the stories of grassroots organizing, and of local people and community folks.” This guiding principle is in service of a primary goal at the heart of the website and the project overall, including the working conference and critical oral histories: to turn the common civil rights narrative on its head—back to its proper alignment—to reflect that while history is generally taught and told from the top down, history is made from the bottom up. It’s an approach in marked contrast to most histories of the civil rights movement, which focus on the great leaders, dramatic marches and speeches, and judicial and legislative changes that dominated the headlines in the 1960s. In that light, says Cobb, “the southern civil rights movement is almost totally misunderstood. So part of what drives my involvement is my dissatisfaction with how much has been left out of the traditional historiography. This site pilots this convergence of people deeply involved in the movement with academics and academic institutions as a way and means of telling the story. This is a first. . . . If there’s any single thing that is most absent in the historiography, it’s the thinking of movement people.” As SNCC veteran and SLP chairman Courtland Cox describes it, the site tells the history “from the inside out . . . from the point of view of those who were actors, those people who had to think through how you deal with this obstacle, what are the strategies, what are the tactics, what are the timetables, who’s the opposition, who’s the ally.” The internet, Cox says, is the perfect vehicle for this message—“democratizing media” reminiscent of then– cutting edge tools that SNCC used to great effect in the 1960s, including so-called WATS lines—800-type phone lines—and citizens’ band (CB) radios. Though SNCC, Cox says, “had a profound effect on changing American society, particularly as it dealt with the question of civil rights and human rights, the fuller story . . . really has not been told. So this is an effort using the new technologies that are available, particularly digital technology, to tell that story to the generations going forward so that they may understand what happened in the past and how they might use their time and energy to make changes for the future. We now have the ability to match both the history and the mechanisms to tell the history in such a way that allows everybody to participate in the discussion.” Shortly after the launch of the One Person, One Vote website, the project received a $604,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that solidified the SLPDuke partnership for the next three years. That support will allow for the expansion of the website and its interpretive framework of SNCC’s history to create the SNCC Digital Gateway, which will incorporate essays and analysis, historic documents, timelines, maps, activist profiles, oral histories, short documentary films, photographs, and teaching resources. “Our hope is that the SNCC Digital

This is an enormous achievement, to find ways to bring experts who were so central to the voting rights struggle into the formal historical record through their own words and on their own terms.

—wesley hogan, center for documentary studies director and civil rights scholar Altogether, the SLP-Duke partnership is a remarkable action-in-progress. “The way we are working together— activists, archivists, and scholars—is a powerful new model,” says CDS director Wesley Hogan, who has written extensively about SNCC’s grassroots work and legacy. Judy Richardson sums up the power of amassing, preserving, and presenting that “bottom-up history” in remarking on the standard historical trope of the civil rights era: “If you think that it was only Dr. King who did the movement, then you don’t know that is was people just like you who did it. And if you know that it was folks just like you who did it—regular people—then you’ll know you can do it again, and you keep doing that, and doing that, and doing that. That’s the dangerous part of knowing the real history, that regular people changed this country, and they changed it for everybody.” At Duke University, additional support for the One Person, One Vote project is provided by the Departments of African and African American Studies, History, and Women’s Studies; Duke Human Rights Centers at the Franklin Humanities Institute and at the Kenan Institute for Ethics; Forum for Scholars and Publics; Humanities Writ Large Initiative; John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture; Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture; Office of the Provost; and Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.

y onevotesncc.org Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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PROGRAM

Founded on the spirit, values, and actions of the groundbreaking social documentary photographer, CDS’s Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program strives to increase the number of committed documentarians in the humanitarian field and to explore the potential of documentary work to be used as a tool for policy reform both here and abroad. Since its founding in 2002, the program has connected the talents of young documentarians with the resources and needs of organizations serving women, youth, and their communities in fifteen different countries. Hine Fellows give the tools of their trade back to local participants, asking them to document issues central to their daily lives. Fellows then connect these materials with their own projects, creating works that are not just about, but also by, the people with whom they engage, thereby helping ensure their right to join in broader conversations that affect their lives. CDS is pleased to introduce our three 2015–16 Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows, all of whom will be working with organizations in the New York City area, identified below: Brenna Cukier (Center for Family Life; Sunset Park, Brooklyn) received her BA in journalism in 2015 as a Robertson Scholar at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. In an effort to combine her newsroom skills with her passion for creative storytelling, she also received a CDS Certificate in Documentary Studies, which she started during a semester in residence at Duke as part of the cross-university Robertson program. During her summers, Brenna combined videography with her interest in NGOs to document the work of various education-focused nonprofits around the world, from Atlanta, Georgia, to the Azores Islands to Bali, Indonesia. “If I have learned anything as a videographer, it’s that we don’t stop looking through a lens when we put the camera down, and I am excited to see how the Hine Fellowship will contribute to my perception of the world and how my perception of the world will contribute to the lives of others.” Laura Doggett (Next Generation Center; Bronx) graduated from Duke University in 2013 with an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. Utilizing video, audio, writing, theater, and visual arts, Laura has spent much of the past twenty years creating opportunities for girls from underserved communities to have agency and power over their own stories, from the Appalachian mountains to the inner-cities of New York and Washington, D.C., to Jordan’s Syrian refugee camps and urban areas. “I’m excited to see where the young people I will work with [as a Hine Fellow] take us as they engage with the documentary arts process—using these tools to find a voice that’s distinctive and undeniably their own. . . . I hope that together, this young collective of media makers can create a complex and vibrant portrait that reflects what they most want to share about how they see and move through their worlds.”

Young Documentarians Carry On the Legacy of Lewis Hine Nicholas Pilarski (Center for Court Innovation; Brownsville, Brooklyn) aims to create art that facilitates development and growth through collaborative documentary practice. After completing a degree from the University of Michigan in theater and film, he went to India to work with the world’s largest Theatre of the Oppressed movement, Jana Sanskriti, concentrating on how theatrical and social techniques developed by the group could influence new media and documentary. The experience was fundamental in Nicholas’s decision to pursue an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University; he graduated from the program in 2015. “While supported by the Hine Fellowship, I hope to help create a space where ideas can be shared freely and personal history can be documented through the process of collaborative self-expression. I can think of no greater privilege than to create work through the optic of activism and education that Lewis Hine helped define almost a century ago.”

Read longer profiles cdsporch.org/archives/24527

Photoville An exhibition of work by six current and former Hine Fellows—curated by Hine creative director Alex Harris and Hine program director Elena Rue—made the lineup for the 2015 installment of Photoville (September 10–20), the largest annual photographic event in New York City. In 2014, more than seventy thousand visitors came to the unique waterfront venue to enjoy work by four hundred visual artists. The participating fellows and their fellowship projects, years, and placement sites: Amanda Berg, youth literacy and sports, 2014–15, New York City; Sarah Stacke, schoolto-prison pipeline, 2014–2015, New York City; Amanda Van Scoyoc, young mothers and their children, 2007– 08, Massachusetts; Emma Raynes, families of Brazilian sugarcane workers, 2006–07, Brazil; Kate Joyce, informal settlements, 2003–04, South Africa; Noah Hendler, child-headed households, 1996–97, Rwanda.

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documentarystudies.duke.edu > Projects > y Hine Fellows Program > Current and Past Fellows

Hine-Sight.org A recent website by 2013–14 Hine Fellow Natalie Minik features five multimedia pieces that revisit Hine Fellowship projects—by Gretchen Ferber, Amanda Van Scoyoc, Christina Wegs, Indaia Whitcombe, and Cameron Zohoori—from the years the program worked with nonprofits in Boston. In creating the pieces, Natalie explored the effects of former fellows’ documentary work on the individuals and families portrayed in their projects, on the neighborhoods these individuals live in, and on the organizations that are attempting to help them improve their lives. She was also interested in the former Hine Fellows themselves. What impact did working on these documentaries have on their own lives and careers?

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TOP TO BOTTOM: From projects by 2015–16 Hine Fellows Laura Doggett, Brenna Cukier, and Nicholas Pilarski (details)

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AUNTIES: THE SEVEN SUMMERS OF ALEVTINA AND LUDMILA Photographs by Nadia Sablin Winner of the 2014 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography In these pictures it is always spring or summer, the garden flourishes, the women enjoy the span of the seasons. The photographs are warm with an aroma of the magical. . . . [Sablin] chooses to show their way of living as almost enchanted: we can hardly believe that what we see in these pictures will ever disappear. —sandra s. phillips, 2014 first book prize judge and senior curator of photography at the san francisco museum of modern art

Nadia Sablin, a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, was chosen by renowned curator and historian Sandra S. Phillips to win the seventh biennial Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for her color photographs that document time spent with her aunts over seven summers (see a selection on pages 8–9). Sablin receives a grant of $3,000, publication of a book of photography, a solo exhibition, and inclusion in a website devoted to presenting the work of the prizewinners. In northwest Russia, in a small village called Alekhovshchina, Nadia Sablin’s aunts spend the warmer months together in the family home and live as the family has always lived—chopping wood to heat the house, bringing water from the well, planting potatoes, and making their own clothes. Sablin’s evocative photographs capture the small details and daily rituals of her aunts’ colorful and dreamlike days. Alevtina and Ludmila, now in their seventies, seem both old and young, as if time itself were as seamless and cyclical as their routines—working on puzzles, sewing curtains, tatting lace, picking berries, repairing fences—and as full of the same subtle mysteries. Sablin collaborated with her aunts to re-create scenes she remembered from her childhood and to make new images of the patterns of their days. In the photographs, Sablin combines observation and invention, biography and autobiography, to tell the stories of her aunts’ life together, and in the process, quilts together a thoughtful meditation on memory, aging, and belonging. Sablin’s solo exhibition opens in November 2015 in Duke University’s new Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery, concurrent with the publication of Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila; the photographs will then be placed in the library’s Archive of Documentary Arts.

From Nadia Sablin’s afterword to Aunties: In World War II, my grandfather Alexey was a sapper in the Russian Army on the Karelian Front. Fairly early in the war he was wounded, losing sight in one eye, most of his hearing, and the

use of one of his hands. Because of these injuries, he was able to return home to his wife and two daughters. My grandparents had three more children after the war, the youngest of whom is my father. In 1952, Alexey began to lose the vision in his remaining eye. To help the family get along better, he decided to return home to the place where he grew up. He found an unoccupied hill in Alekhovshchina, a village north of Saint Petersburg, close to his brothers, sisters, and cousins. He took his house apart, log by log, a Roman numeral carved onto each one, and floated it down the Oyat River to its present location and reconstructed it. More than sixty years later, the house is still occupied by my aunts from April to September. My parents and I left for the United States in 1992, when I was twelve years old. I was afraid that I would never see the house or my grandfather again. . . . When I was finally able to return, it was as though nothing in the village had changed. The air still smelled of pinecones, and the tablecloth on the dinner table was the same one I remembered from childhood. For me, a city girl, time in the village was both exciting and difficult. As I got older, I was very bored at times, so I began to read, descending from my room only to eat at strictly appointed meal hours—tea at 11:30, supper at 7:00; be late and go hungry. That’s really where books happened for me, in the attic of my aunts’ house, in a small room that my father built when he got married. I’m much more influenced by writers than artists or photographers. Mikhail Bulgakov, Gabriel García Márquez, and Haruki Murakami introduced me to Magical Realism—a world that I was already inhabiting. A talking cat or a rain of marigolds makes perfect sense to me, because that’s how I experience the village—or maybe it becomes true in the village of my photographs. The images, both real and imagined, are part of a process of forgetting and remembering. Life there is never easy, and the hard realities of my aunts’ physical labor jar me when I first return. But then my memories and my imagination flood my perceptions, and Alekhovshchina begins to transform back into a magical place all over again.

Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila Photographs by Nadia Sablin | Foreword by Sandra S. Phillips Published by Duke University Press and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies 88 pages | 11 x 8.25 | 54 color photographs November 2015 | $45.00, hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8223-6047-6

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BOOKS and EXHIBITS

AU N T I E S T H E S E V EN S U M M ER S O F A L E V T I N A A N D LU D M I L A

PHOTOGRAPHS BY 2014 CDS/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE IN PHOTOGRAPHY WINNER

NADIA SABLIN

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ROAD THROUGH MIDNIGHT:

A CIVIL RIGHTS MEMORIAL

Photographs by Jessica Ingram

Juanita Kreps Gallery | Through October 17, 2015 | Reception + Artist’s Talk: September 17, 2015, 6–9 p.m. In 2006, while exploring downtown Montgomery, Alabama, Jessica Ingram found herself standing on the former Court Square slave market. The historical marker presented stark facts, including the dollar values paid for slaves, but said nothing about the meaning of the place. “I’m from the South and was raised with an awareness of the devastating history of slavery,” says Ingram, “but this site sparked something in me that caught fire.” Curious about other sites, and what hidden histories she might be passing as she drove across the South, Ingram began researching and photographing places where civil rights– era atrocities, Klan activities, and slave trading occurred, like a building in Pulaski, Tennessee, not far from where she grew up. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in a law office there; the original historical marker on the building had been unbolted, flipped around, and reattached so that only the back of it could be seen. Unlike that site, or the slave market In Montgomery, there are no markers at most of the places Ingram has documented. As the years pass and the landscape transforms itself in ways both beautiful and banal, all that remains of the events that occurred are the memories and voices of those who lived through them. Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial presents thirty of Jessica Ingram’s photographs of locations of historic significance in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee—in Mississippi alone, Medgar Evers’ backyard in Jackson, the bank of the Sunflower River near Midnight, the site of the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County; in Ringgold, Georgia, the site where Mattie Green was killed in her home by a bomb in 1960. And many others. While a majority of the images remind us of the violence associated with the civil rights movement, others highlight its successes, like the photograph of Koinonia Farms. The interracial community in Georgia has weathered firebombing, night riding, Klan intimidation, and economic boycotts and is the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity; its social justice work is ongoing. The

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exhibit also presents audio oral histories from Ingram’s interviews with family members, local people, investigators, and journalists who witnessed, were impacted by, and remember these events.

South Side An exhibition by 2014 Lange-Taylor Prizewinner Jon Lowenstein will be on view at CDS following the run of Jessica Ingram’s Road Through Midnight. CDS’s oldest prize supports documentary artists whose fieldwork projects rely on the interplay of words and images. Lowenstein received $10,000 and this solo show, which features selected images, texts, and video from South Side, his prizewinning project about the Chicago neighborhood where he has lived and worked for more than a decade. The project combines black-andwhite photographs, video, personal narrative writing and poetry, oral histories, and found ephemera in what Lowenstein hopes is “a lasting testimony . . . to the legacy of segregation, the impact of vast wealth inequality, and how de-industrialization and globalization play out on the ground in Chicago.” Look for more information on the exhibition in the next issue of Document. South Side is on view October 29, 2015–February 27, 2016, with an opening reception and artist’s talk on October 29, 6–9 p.m., at CDS.

documentarystudies.duke.edu > yLange-Taylor Prize > Prizewinners

ABOVE: Armstrong Tire and Rubber Company, Natchez, Mississippi, 2007, site of Wharlest Jackson’s murder in 1967. Photograph by Jessica Ingram. OPPOSITE: Photograph by 2015 John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Award winner Reem Alfahad, taken during an Arts-Policy Internship with the Ministry of Culture in Medellin, Colombia.

Undergraduate Education 2015 John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Award Winners

CDS’s John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards go to undergraduates attending local universities to help them conduct summerlong documentary fieldwork projects. Revered scholar John Hope Franklin (1915–2009) was professor emeritus of history at Duke University; the awards are named in Dr. Franklin’s honor in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments and his dedication to students and teaching. Congratulations to our six 2015 award winners; we’ll be following their progress as their projects take shape: Reem Alfahad (Duke University), a Baldwin Scholar who majored in public policy, graduated in May 2015. Through her project, “Hope and Reconciliation,” she will explore the narratives of young artists in Medellin, Colombia, as they grapple with their city’s past and present. While these artists grew up after the death of Pablo Escobar and are experiencing the ongoing revival of their city, narco-trafficking, poverty, and displacement are ongoing realities in present-day Medellin. Reem will be based at the Proyecto Boston Medellin (PBM), and will create profiles of several artists and the trajectories of their artwork and stories through her writing and audio work. One of the potential artists creates silhouettes of gang members, sex workers, and street vendors; another documents his family’s dairy farm on the outskirts of the city, which faces questions of preserving natural spaces in the face of encroaching development. Mariana Calvo (Duke University) is a rising junior studying history and public policy. In the summer of 2014, she participated in a DukeEngage program in Tucson, Arizona, where she worked with a number of women from the western highlands of Guatemala. For her project, she will travel to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, conduct oral history interviews on the country’s civil war, and write an essay drawing on the connections between the civil war and immigration to the United States. “The narratives surrounding Latin America are often about places of absence—absence of wealth, absence of history, absence of the rule of law. However, as a Latin American I know that there is so much cultural and historical wealth in Latin America, and in this case specifically, Guatemala. My goal in writing this essay is to show people that Guatemala, and other countries that have historically supplied immigrants to the United States, have an intrinsic value, and that we should work to keep people from immigrating.”

but will all of a sudden officially ‘belong to.’ . . . I intend to explore and document my experiences in modern-day Europe as a Jew, which I believe is of particular relevance given the many recent acts of anti-Semitism there.”

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Christine Delp (Duke University) graduated in May 2015 with a self-designed Program II major in ethics and visual documentary studies. Her project will be a short film, Derailleur, that examines the bicycle through documentary and ethnographic lenses: “The bicycle is both a symbol of youthful innocence and adulthood nostalgia. It is used by privileged communities for health and environmental reasons, as well as by less privileged communities as a form of cheaper transportation. A bicycle evokes feelings of power and freedom within the rider, as well as feelings of fear and danger. Economically, the bicycle is perhaps more democratically accessible; but in space, it—or rather its rider—is a precarious authoritarian. Furthermore, as a human-powered, open-air, and unpredictable machine, the bicycle resists modern norms for transportation systems. The film’s narration will explore these themes and others through a detached voice in the style of a documentary essay, similar to a nature film. Though the film is not strictly satirical, the style of examining the bicycle both as an unfamiliar object and as a means for social commentary will likely contain satirical elements.” Grace Farson and Amirah Jiwa (University of North Carolina– Chapel Hill) are creating a joint project. Grace graduated in May 2015 and majored in media production and food studies; Amirah will graduate in December 2015 and is majoring in economics and peace, war, and defense. Their interactive website will use photographs, video, and long-form narrative writing to explore the link between conflict and a culture of innovation in Israel and the West Bank. “There is much optimism around the idea that the strengthening of economic ties through the technology sector will also contribute to the strengthening of political ties between Israel and the West Bank, and this project will highlight some of the partnerships between Israelis and Palestinians within this developing sector. So far, the idea that conflict is not impeding innovation in the region has been central. A secondary focus, however, will be to explore the possibility that perhaps conflict is the cause of the culture of innovation in both societies. Being risk-loving is a key entrepreneurial trait, and living in an environment of uncertainty . . . might encourage the ‘all or nothing’ attitude that is the backbone of success for so many startups.”

Brenna Cukier (University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill) graduated in May 2015 as a Robertson Scholar with a major in journalism and mass communication and will be a CDS Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow in 2015–16 (see page 6). She also received a CDS Certificate in Documentary Studies from Duke University. The granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor whose family fled Berlin, Brenna is working with an organization that handles claims for the restoration of German citizenship for Jewish victims of the Nazi regime and their descendants. Brenna will be making a film that documents this process while simultaneously telling her grandmother’s story. “The culmination of my documentary will be a trip to my grandmother’s hometown of Berlin this summer after I secure my German citizenship. My goal is to document my first experiences in a country I have never visited or lived in,

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MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Incoming Class of 2017 Duke University’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts launched in 2011 as a joint initiative of the Center for Documentary Studies, Program in Arts of the Moving Image, and Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. Fostering collaborations across practices and backgrounds, the innovative two-year program brings together the documentary approach and experimental production in analog and digital media, and welcomes students from the full arts spectrum—painters, sculptors, writers, photographers, filmmakers, and experimental practitioners working in computational and new media, sound work, performance, and installation. MFA|EDA director Tom Rankin has described current students and alumni as “artists who have infused all of Durham with a range of artistic ideas that expand our notions of ‘experimental and documentary arts’ while also elevating the arts generally, on campus

and in town.” A warm welcome to a new cohort, the thirteen students in the MFA|EDA’s incoming class of 2017: Salima Al-Ismaili was born and raised in the Sultanate of Oman and graduated from Northwestern University in Qatar with a BS in journalism. Upon graduating, she worked as a reporter for a weekly newspaper and as a public relations specialist at a marketing and communications agency in Oman. Salima’s previous documentaries explore issues of migration and displacement, and she “is also interested in creating films that study statelessness and the history of human migration.” Sarah Elizabeth Borst is a documentary and portrait photographer from Davidson, North Carolina. She received her BFA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and has most recently been working in Hong Kong on scholarship from

TOP TO BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT (photograph by or of) : Salima Al-Ismaili, Sarah Elizabeth Borst, Andrea De Francesco, Sylvia Herbold, Lauren Mueller, Colleen Pesci, Tony Shafer, Kate Stephens, Jason Sudak, Ran Xin, Haoyang Zhao, Xingyao Zheng, Yijie Zhu

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Andrea De Francesco was raised in Italy and graduated with a BA in drama and film studies from the University of Sussex, England. Born in 1992, Andrea started taking pictures at the age of fifteen, which formed the basis of his interest in film, painting, and theater. After three years of university and creating device performances as well as studying social and philosophical theories, he hopes to merge all of these art forms together for his future work. His photography works “focus mainly on portraits and the narratives that emerge from the issues of family structure, travel, immigration, and identity.” Sylvia Herbold is a multimedia artist from Bangor, Maine. Her works range from painting and printmaking to film and video. By exploring “the storytelling aspect of portraiture, improvisation, and the challenge of conveying the sitter’s subjectivity,” she invites people to tell their own narratives and make their own art. Most recently, she has worked with youth as an art teacher, yoga teacher, and visiting artist at public schools in Ellsworth, Maine, and in New York City. Sylvia has collaborated on projects for exhibitions at Pier 42, the Museum of the City of New York, Union Square Park, Snug Harbor Park, and MU in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Lauren Mueller studied English literature at the University of British Columbia, receiving her BA in 2010. She then taught English as a second language to immigrant populations in Vancouver, work that led to teaching in several different countries, including Taiwan and Thailand. While abroad, Lauren pursued her interest in filmmaking as an assistant director on Portraits of Sex Workers. The documentary was used for a conference led by Liberation and Empowerment: Attaining Dignity and Rights (LEADR), an organization that supports sex workers and their children in Bangladesh. In 2012, Lauren returned home to Portland, Oregon, where she took classes at Northwest Film Center and helped teach filmmaking to adults from underserved populations. Lauren’s personal work explores different subcultures as well as alternate lifestyles, “from people’s experiences with online dating to the familial bonds found at one of the oldest amusement parks on the West Coast.” Colleen Pesci spent her childhood “bopping around the Midwest” until finally landing in Wisconsin. She studied special education at Benedictine College in Kansas, after which she taught in Peru and then moved to New York City to manage a food pantry followed by a cookie company. Her photography focuses on the relationships between members of the community and their experiences of the world. She is interested in “how photography can transcend cultural boundaries and promote conversation through a single image.” Tony Shafer is a writer, filmmaker, sculptor, and performer who has explored “the modern day socio-political landscapes of hyper-consumerism, gender, and the multifaceted valleys of violence.” He received his BA and MFA in English from San Diego State University, where he was an editorial and production assistant of Fiction International for six years. Tony draws from a diverse set of life experiences ranging from “working in construction to being an art model to living in a web-cam house (once filmed by MTV) to documenting the aftermath of Mexican Mafia violence to representing SDSU at the 2003 Campus Antiwar Network national conference.” He has also cocoordinated

two film festivals and a literary magazine and has been vice president on the board of directors of an art center. Kate Stephens grew up in North Carolina and Kenya. She returns to Kenya frequently as an archivist and photographer for New Life Homes—a group of rescue homes for infants. Kate researched international and interracial adoption as an undergraduate at Emory University, where she majored in American studies and African studies. For her senior thesis, Kate wrote a history/memoir of the life of Sue Henry, a camp director in Mentone, Alabama. Kate lived with Sue in her final days, recording their conversations and those of others in the community of women who were caring for her. “Fret Not; It’s Good: Sue Henry’s Final Days,” tells the story of Sue’s last two weeks and what that time revealed about the rest of her life. After college, Kate moved to Brooklyn, New York, and continued to study death and dying as a researcher for a PBS documentary. She currently works as a freelance editor.

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SCAD; she will be exhibiting five of her series in the city’s Sham Shui Po area in January 2016. For Sarah, photographing is a way to “process, understand, and explore questions about America and the social gallery we have oh-so-carefully and comfortably constructed for ourselves.” This May, she was named one of the top seven seniors graduating in 2015 by American Photo on Campus magazine (and featured in the spring print issue) and in the fall of 2014 was named a Lucie Awards finalist. Sarah is also an editorial assistant for Aint-Bad Magazine, which promotes new photographic art.

Jason Sudak was born in 1986 in Irish Hills, Michigan, and studied film and art history at the University of Michigan, where he received his BA in 2010. He has spent the past three years working as the video producer for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. His experimental films have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Media City Film Festival in Windsor, Ontario, and Secret Cinema in London. Ran Xin was born in 1993 and grew up in Tianjin, China. She studied international cultural trade and television editing and directing at the Communication University of China. She interned with Ogilvy Public Relations and worked for CBN-TV as a television director. A formative trip to Africa “awakened a personal consciousness,” and her subsequent photography and video work aims to address the role of the artist in depicting cultures and lifestyles. Haoyang Zhao was born in 1991 and grew up in Xi’an, China. After spending four years in Singapore for high school, he enrolled in the economics program at University College London, where he worked as an event photographer and cinematographer. In 2013 Haoyang attended Georgetown University, where he studied photography and film studies in addition to economics and political science. Haoyang’s interest is in “street photography and project-based documentary photography,” and he holds a Licentiateship Distinction from the Royal Photographic Society. Xingyao Zheng was born and raised in China, and received a BFA in Creative Media at Sun Yat-sen University. During a long migratory journey across the country with family, she came to have a particular perspective of “observing and interpreting man, nature, and city.” Her most recent documentary work involves a town that is slated to be razed due to reconstruction policy, tapping into Xingyao’s “passion for recording and revealing truth, and neglected and forgotten worlds.” She looks forward to making original documentaries at Duke and exploring a combination of new forms of creative production and representations of authenticity. Yijie Zhu was born in 1994 and grew up in a multicultural Chinese environment. She earned a BA at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she double majored in international journalism and communication and English literature. As a recent college graduate, Yijie’s work explores diverse genres and themes, including historical reflections, cultural activities, stage photography, and natural landscapes. She has also studied and produced works in England and Australia. Being a visual and cross-cultural communication enthusiast, Yijie is “determined to be a future expert at minimizing problems caused by cultural, historical, and ideological differences, and encouraging people to make the best use of the messages that film conveys. She came, she saw, she recorded.”

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Continuing Education Spring 2015 Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates The Center for Documentary Studies offers Continuing Education classes in the documentary arts to people of all backgrounds. Some enroll in the Certificate in Documentary Arts program, which offers a structured sequence of courses culminating in a final seminar and the completion of a substantial project, work that often moves out into the world in the form of exhibits, installations, films, websites, and more. The following six students completed their final projects in the Spring 2015 seminar, taught by folklorist and filmmaker Nancy Kalow. In May, they presented their work to the public and received their certificates. Kudos to our graduates, and best wishes for future projects. You Can Go Left and Come Out Right | Video Morgan Capps moved from Tennessee to Durham after spending just a week at CDS as a participant in the 2013 Documentary Video Institute. This summer she left for Santa Fe, where she is assisting on the feature documentary Turn! Her film You Can Go Left and Come Out Right reflects on the mind and memories of ninety-two-year-old WWII veteran Glen Lee, who for the last six years has spent nearly every day constructing an elaborate maze of sticks in a clearing of woods behind a Dollar General and an abandoned Kmart near the foot of Signal Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His “flashbacks and sudden pulses of seemingly unconnected thoughts and stories loosely parallel the winding maze that he occupies every day.” Do’s and Don’ts for Bomb Disposal | Audio Elizabeth Friend first “fell in love with radio as a child listening to the BBC late at night.” She now works as a reporter for a radio station in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and, along with a group of local audiophiles, curates Audio Under the Stars, Durham’s series of audio storytelling events. Bomb disposal was a novel concept at the start of World War II. In Do’s and Don’ts for Bomb Disposal, seventy-four-year-old Michael Friend remembers his father, Sub-Lieutenant Peter Donald Friend, who was one of the first people to sign up for the British Royal Navy’s bomb squad. Silent Sam—A Soldier of Discord | Video Don Heineman is a retired businessman who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Growing up in Chicago, he “saw the Civil War through a northerner’s eyes.” Now that he is a southerner, he has come to appreciate William Faulkner’s statement that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Silent Sam explores the controversial history of the statue of a Confederate soldier on the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill’s campus that has remained near the center of many social controversies at the school: the events of the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, today’s discussions about diversity. “To some, ‘Silent Sam’ is a memorial to those students from the university who fought and died for the Confederacy. . . . To others, he is a monument to white supremacy and an insult to the notion of a ‘university for the people.’” Vic Hudson: The Real Thing | Video Doug Klesch arrived in North Carolina from the Northeast in the early 1990s “with a vague sense of culture shock” but gradually acclimated to southern life. After a long corporate IT career, he has begun to establish himself as a freelance documentary and portrait photographer, graphic designer, and videographer.

His short film is an excerpt from Gate City Soul, a feature documentary-in-progress about the men and women who formed a vibrant soul music community in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the 1960s and ’70s. Vic Hudson focuses on the life and career of one of the community’s central characters, a musician, songwriter, and producer who influenced a generation of local musicians and record producers and whose musicianship and mentoring reached far beyond Greensboro into the fabric of the national soul music scene. Cotton Chronicle | Motion and Still Photography Houck Medford had a father and grandfather, both “bear-hunting and fish-catching storytellers,” who instilled in him “the values of good timing, visual description, and the power of a well-crafted story.” His project is an excerpt from a long-form documentaryin-progress, Cotton Chronicle: Century Industry, Century Farm, Century Family, a story about the advances in mega-agribusiness of a South Carolina family that has been cotton farming on the same land for more than a hundred years. “This family has been successful in staying ahead of the technology curve, planning for family succession, and perpetuating family values, but not without struggles and challenges. They have been dependent on their Lutheran faith for divine guidance. Any longtime farming family could stand in for the main characters in Cotton Chronicle—it would be the same story.” Inner Revolutions: Muslim Americans and the Legacy of Imam Khomeini | Multimedia Amy Nelson is a Montessori teacher and independent multimedia artist living in Durham, North Carolina, with her family. Her work as a reporter for NPR affiliate station WUNC has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press, the Radio Television Digital News Association, and the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation. Ayatollah Khomeini is a central figure in her web-based oral history project. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, many Americans came to know the religious cleric as a stern, uncompromising political leader who hated America. At the same time, Muslim converts who were active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s saw something else. Inner Revolution brings their voices, memories, and narratives about Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution to light. Certificate in Documentary Arts projects

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New Classes In addition to the many established photography, video, audio, writing, and special topics classes in our Continuing Education program’s Fall 2015 lineup, we’re excited about these brand-new offerings, some of which are online versions of existing onsite classes: Onsite and Online: Make That Audio Doc; The Enduring Image; The Art of Memoir Online Only: Memoir of Mobility and Movement Onsite Only: Documentary Night Photography; Photographic Workflow with Lightroom; Exploring Contemporary Documentary; Why Should I Care? Crafting Video Stories That Move People; Documenting Life, Briefly: Writing Flash Nonfiction; Participating Language: Introduction to Documentary Poetics

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2015 CDS Documentary Essay Prizewinner By now I have become a freshwater mussel groupie. I fawn over photographs. . . . I stalk them from a distance, writing their names in my notebooks: fatmucket, pistolgrip, heelsplitter, shinyrayed pocketbook, spectaclecase, pigtoe, snufflebox. I pore over their bios. Posters of mussels hang in our bedroom. Abbie Gascho Landis’s obsession helped her land the CDS Documentary Essay Prize, which honors the best in documentary photography and writing in alternating years. Landis, a writer and veterinarian in Cobleskill, New York, submitted “Immersion: Our Native Mussels and Bodies of Freshwater” for this year’s prize in writing. In her essay, she draws on six years of snorkeling in creeks, exploring large rivers, visiting laboratories, and interviewing biologists, weaving personal experience into her investigation of “these remarkable animals” and their habitats as one way of looking at growing water issues in the Deep South and elsewhere in the United States. An excerpt from “Immersion” will appear in the Winter 2015–16 issue of Document, and the essay in full will be published on our website in 2016. The CDS Documentary Essay Prize selection committee awarded an Honorable Mention to Jessica Wilbanks for “The Far Side of the Fire,” which explores charges of witchcraft against Nigerian children and reflects on her own experiences in the Pentecostal faith.

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Summer Superstar We were delighted to have Chanel Norman as our communications intern this summer. The senior at North Carolina Central University studies mass communications and broadcast media, and has become passionate about “the controls and inner state of communications as a whole” as well as broadcast and journalistic media. She has been developing her storytelling and production talents through her work with NCCU’s student newspaper and radio station, as well as several previous internships in the field. This summer, Chanel wrote scripts, filmed footage, conducted interviews, and produced videos in support of the CDS website and several long-term CDS projects. She plans to pursue a career in cinema production in the future. “Communications is so much more than what the average person would expect,” says Chanel. “What you choose to communicate controls so much of your life, and how you choose to communicate—whether that’s through a documentary video, news article, television broadcast, dancing, talking, writing, Facebook posting or tweeting—it’s all in your hands.” CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Photograph of freshwater mussels by 2015 CDS Documentary Essay Prizewinner Abbie Gascho Landis. Photograph of Chanel Norman by Whitney Baker. Photograph of Abbie Gascho Landis by Caroline M. Singletary. OPPOSITE: From You Can Go Left and Come Out Right, a video by 2015 CDS Certificate in Documentary Arts graduate Morgan Capps.

CDS’s New Podcast The Center for Documentary Studies is pleased to announce the creation of a new podcast, Scene on Radio. Produced and hosted by CDS audio director John Biewen, the biweekly podcast will offer listeners a regular and frequent dose of audio work made at CDS—new stories produced by Biewen, the best pieces made by our students, and occasional gems plucked from the CDS radio archives. “We at CDS have been making documentaries for public radio for years,” says Biewen. “We’re going to keep producing audio stories, but now first and foremost for this podcast. Scene on Radio will feature stories that explore human experience and the society we’re making for ourselves. In short: How are we doing? As the name suggests, this show will very often traffic in scenes—stuff happening out in the world, as opposed to lots of studio talk.”

The first episode of Scene on Radio will be available on September 9, 2015, and will feature the first story in Contested, a series that Biewen describes as “listening in on life in America through sports.” Stay tuned to documentarystudies.duke.edu and sceneonradio.org for more information.

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