DOCUMENT SPRING/SUMMER 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
FILM 10 2015 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Award Winners
FROM THE CENTER 3 By CDS Director Wesley Hogan
EXHIBITIONS 4–5 BINNEGOED: Coloured & South African Photography Curated by Candice Jansen Beyond the Front Porch 2015 Certificate in Documentary Studies Undergraduate Capstone Projects
EDUCATION 11–15 Undergraduate Education Duke Students and Durham Middle Schoolers Explore Walt Whitman 2015 Certificate in Documentary Studies Graduates 2015 Julia Harper Day Award Winner
AWARDS 6–9 2015 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Nadia Sablin Wins for Series on Her Russian Aunts Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize Prestigious Award Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary
SPRING/SUMMER 2015
Continuing Education Featured Summer Institute: Master Class in Nonfiction Writing MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Congratulations to the Graduating Class of 2015
COVER: Yung Jock fans at the Bud Billiken Parade, Bronzeville, 2006. Photograph by 2014 Lange-Taylor Prize winner Jon Lowenstein, from South Side. LEFT: Mr. Peter Oliphant, the Haven Night Shelter, Cape Town, 1981. Photograph by Michael Barry. MIDDLE: Wasp nest, Alekhovshchina, Leningrad Oblast, Russia, 2013. Photograph by Nadia Sablin, winner, 2014 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, from Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila. RIGHT: Marquee at the 2015 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Photograph by Charlotte Claypoole (detail). OPPOSITE: Frames from Nicholas Pilarski’s I, Destini.
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FROM THE CENTER The Documentary Ecology of Teaching and Learning
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he Center for Documentary Studies has a passionate commitment to and has long excelled in education. That fact is well-defined in this issue of Document, where the student work shown and described serves as powerful evidence that some of nation’s most creative documentary minds, working with a wide range of pedagogies, are nurturing a remarkable new generation of storytellers. Naturally, we assume that seasoned documentarians have a lot to share and teach to future documentarians in the classroom. And they do. Yet sometimes, the process of who teaches whom is reversed. The world as we know it turns over, and fresh and unexpected viewpoints come to life. It is one of the true gifts of being at a teaching hub. Over the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of both witnessing and experiencing such a shift. One of our MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts students, Nicholas Pilarski (’15), truly connected with a much younger person. He listened. He watched. He asked questions, prodded, waited. He was there, and he listened some more. After a two-year journey, in his riveting thesis film Nicholas shifted the focus away from himself to fully embrace the story of someone else, to open himself up to learn from her. Watching the process, and the resulting documentary short I, Destini, I learned from Nicholas. Destini Riley is all of 15 years old. The depth and richness of her perspective is astonishing. In the film that she and Nicholas created together, she has put forth a treatise on power that destroys deeply ingrained notions about age, race, and wisdom. Without worry about framing or appearance, her staggeringly precocious observations have lodged themselves in my brain. I, Destini is a vivid yet agonizing portrayal of holding fast to one’s values and work ethic, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming challenge. The film is an eleven-minute animated story—illustrated and narrated by Destini—centered on her family’s experience of her brother’s incarceration. Watching the film at Nicholas’s final thesis screening, Destini’s exquisite illustrations honed my focus on her softspoken and clear witness. She seemed utterly devoid of pretense, the closest thing I’ve ever seen to pure, thoughtful observation: “Every person put in prison comes from a family, but you never think of this when you see young people arrested on TV. . . . It’s kind of like you’re tricked into believing that because someone doesn’t come from a fancy home, that they’re up to no good. It’s like the light from the news reflects into their skin.” Her poetic cadence brought the audience with her as she visited her brother in prison, where, she noted, the light is “hard and doesn’t show your whole face. Everyone looks blue. In the holes you see pain, worries, thoughts. It’s like it’s in a different language; I can never read what’s missing.” When the lights came up, it felt as if someone had just sucked all the air out of the theater. When the floor was opened for questions, it took some time before hands were raised. People, it seemed, had to gather themselves. The film, so firmly anchored in Destini’s subjectivity, had invited all of us to reconsider what we thought we knew of the world and our place in it. It’s rare for a documentary artist, whether a graduate student like Nicholas or a longtime practitioner, to find a documentary subject and ask, “What set of new
skills do I need to develop to tell this person’s story?” More often than not, we rely on the tools we know best—we make a film, we take photographs, we interview. Nicholas took an unusual path—he came to the MFA program to study filmmaking, and used it as a tool to discover and embrace a new subjectivity. Instead of playing to his strengths, he challenged himself, noting: “If I was going to be concerned about Destini, I had to make a film differently.” Rather than use traditional documentary film approaches, he focused on the languages in which Destini was fluent—drawing and animation. As he later noted, “I’m interested in art that changes people, and I’m interested in being changed in the process of making art. The real piece is my own growth and how we worked together.” Both Destini and Nicholas navigated their separate subjectivities, and together found a way to portray her experience. Destini told stories and illustrated them with pen and paper. Nicholas taught himself to draw additional frames and learned to animate them. The director became student, and together he and Destini created a mutually transformative documentary that I invite you to witness for yourself: vimeo.com/125403677, password “CDS.” In the wider CDS community, where learning and teaching is a fluid, shared experience and concept, it does not get better than this. —Wesley Hogan, CDS director
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EXHIBITIONS
BINNEGOED: Coloured & South African Photography Juanita Kreps Gallery | Through July 29, 2015 Reception and Curator’s Talk: Monday, May 11, 6–9 p.m.
bin-ne-goed [bә΄nәxut] Afrikaans n. 1. Innards or intestines. 2. Euphemism for courage. 3. Way of being on the inside that is both vital and entangled. South Africa during Apartheid is revisited here through the work of sixteen photographers who lived and worked during this period of legalized racial segregation. BINNEGOED: Coloured & South African Photography reflects on the country’s history of race classification to consider what it meant to be neither Black nor White, but classified as Coloured even a century before Apartheid began. With archival photography, BINNEGOED makes visible these small Coloured histories that, while marginal to the story of South Africa today, are rooted deep within the country and its body politic. The photographs have been widely exhibited and published around the world, says exhibit curator Candice Jansen, and some are considered iconic images in South Africa. “I rediscovered their power when I read them within an alternative context—like that of Coloured identity politics,” Jansen says. “This exhibition then became for me a process of rediscovery, of having
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to unlearn dominant historical thinking, and to look at South Africa during Apartheid from the margins of history.” Drawn from Duke University’s Archive of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, BINNEGOED exhibits the work of some photographers who came of age during Apartheid defiance, artists like Cedric Nunn, Paul Alberts, Gideon Mendel, Zubeida Vallie, George Hallett, Paul Weinberg, and Bee Berman. BINNEGOED: Coloured & South African Photography is curated by Candice Jansen, 2014–15 exhibitions intern at CDS. Jansen is also a new Ph.D. fellow and an Archibald Mafeje Scholar at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) in Johannesburg, South Africa. The exhibit event on May 11 is cosponsored by Duke University’s Concilium on Southern Africa. Amusement park, Strandfontein, Cape Town, 1983. Photograph by Michael Davies. OPPOSITE LEFT, top to bottom: Young pallbearers at the funeral of three boys killed in the Trojan Horse Massacre, Athlone, Cape Town, 1985; photograph by Zubeida Vallie. The home of Amy Madhlawu Louw, grandmother of the photographer, iVuna, KwaZulu-Natal, 2001; photograph by Cedric Nunn. Cape Town, circa 1970; photograph by Jenny Gordon. Alex la Guma and son, Barto, London, United Kingdom, 1972; photograph by George Hallett.
Beyond the Front Porch 2015
University Gallery | Through October 3, 2015 This exhibit features nine large prints that represent the final projects of nine college seniors who will graduate with a CDS Certificate in Documentary Studies. Below, words from their instructor, Alex Harris. See pages 12–13 for more information on the students and their projects.
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Certificate in Documentary Studies Capstone Projects
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Students in the Documentary Capstone Seminar have the spring semester of their senior year to complete a photographic, video, audio, or multimedia project that is meant to be the culmination of their coursework at the Center for Documentary Studies and their four years at Duke (and in one case, UNC–Chapel Hill). This year’s class has shown what former Duke University President Terry Sanford coined over three decades ago as the unofficial university motto: Outrageous Ambitions! They are tackling projects—like womanhood at Duke, forming a nontraditional family, the essence of Quaker thought and life, the idea of beauty in relation to aging—that might be reasonable to complete if these students weren’t also enrolled in three or four other courses, weren’t also involved in various local and national causes, and weren’t also taking the time to maintain Duke friendships that will last some for the rest of their lives. In completing these capstone projects, students are showing the one quality that is most difficult to achieve for any documentary artist bombarded with life’s daily distractions alongside news of huge and complex problems facing society: They are taking themselves and their own work seriously. This is the quality they will need in order to move beyond university life, to remain aware of the big picture, while maintaining focus on particular subjects and issues they themselves consider to be of vital importance. —Alex Harris, Duke Professor of the Practice of Public Policy and Documentary Studies
CDS exhibitions director Courtney Reid-Eaton (r) and exhibitions intern and BINNEGOED curator Candice Jansen. Tintype photograph by Harlan Campbell.
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AWARDS FIRST BOOK PRIZE
Nadia Sablin Wins 2014 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for Series on Her Russian Aunts Sablin’s photographs are wonderful and sophisticated. . . . The two sisters seem to exist in a privileged reality, one closer to the warm smell of strawberries in summer. Lives like these used to be normal everywhere, but they are at a remove, antique, now—the sisters seem to be living in a Russian fairy tale. Their exertions are real enough, though. We admire them and even envy their simplicity and the beauty of the light and land they inhabit.
—sandra s. phillips, senior curator of photography at the san francisco museum of modern art and 2014 first book prize judge
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adia 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 Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila. Sablin receives a grant of $3,000, publication of a book of photography (her first), and a solo exhibition in Duke University’s new Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery; the photographs will then be placed in the library’s Archive of Documentary Arts. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has written an introduction to Aunties, which will be published in November 2015 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies.
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 remarkably lyrical and evocative photographs, taken over seven summers, capture the small details and daily rituals of her aunts’ surprisingly colorful and dreamlike days, taking us not only to another country but to another time. Alevtina and Ludmila, now in their seventies, seem both old and young, as if time itself was 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.
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CDS Celebrates the 25th Anniversary of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.
—quote by francis bacon, posted on dorothea lange’s darkroom wall
The Center for Documentary Studies celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2015, a year that also marks the 25th anniversary of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize. The $10,000 award is given to encourage documentary work in the tradition of acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor, and supports documentary artists—working alone or in teams—whose extended fieldwork projects rely on the interplay of words and images. CDS announced the prize in 1990, and the following year awarded the first Lange-Taylor Prize to Keith Carter and Suzanne Winckler for their fieldwork in Tunica County, Mississippi, then among the poorest counties in America. Since then, the prize winners’ projects have taken them from as close to home as the North Carolina mountains and Chicago, Illinois, and as far away as Azerbaijan, China, Morocco, Pakistan, Ukraine, and Samoa. The Lange-Taylor Prize has been awarded to documentary artists whose cameras and pens are directed at central issues of our time. Projects have documented the lives of the severely mentally ill, the rise of Salvadoran gangs in U.S. cities, the influx of immigrants to Italy, the way the incarcerated hold on to a sense of identity, the dislocation and change brought about by highway construction in Appalachia, the lasting effects of war on citizens of the former Yugoslavia, to name only a few. In its breadth and range, this work is as important for its clarity of purpose as for its eloquence in communicating truths of human experience, the unexpected journeys of our neighbors across the globe, what they’ve lived through, how they get by day to day. The work of Lange and Taylor, wife and husband, artist and social scientist, has certainly demonstrated a lasting power. Our prize, named in their honor, has proven its wide reach, an influence, like that of Lange and Taylor themselves, that continues to enrich the nature of documentary work as it deepens our collective understanding.
OPPOSITE: Photographs by Nadia Sablin, from Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila
Lange-Taylor Prize Winners, 1991–2015 1991 Free Grace, Keith Carter and Suzanne Winckler 1992 Farewell, Promised Land, Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin 1993 Mara Salvatrucha, Donna DeCesare and Luis Rodriguez 1994 Mapping American Samoa, Reagan Louie and Tom Farber 1995 The More Things Change, Antonin Kratochvil and Jan Novak 1996 Women, Mary Berridge and River Huston 1997 E l Periodo Especial, Ernesto Bazan and Silvana Paternostro 1998 I-26: Corridor of Change, Rob Amberg and Sam Gray 1999 Mountain Jews: A Lost Tribe, Jason Eskenazi and Jennifer Gould Keil 2000 O ne Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, Deborah Luster and C.D. Wright 2001 Pane Amaro/Bitter Bread: The Struggle of New Immigrants to Italy, Paola Ferrario and Mary Cappello 2002 The Garden of Eden: Living with Schizophrenia on Coney Island, Dona Ann McAdams and Brad Kessler 2003 G uatemala City Dump: Life at the Rim, Misty Keasler and Charles D’Ambrosio 2004 S hadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice, and the Will to Survive in America’s Toughest Boxing Gyms, Jim Lommasson and Katherine Dunn 2005 High Plains, Peter Brown and Kent Haruf 2006 The Human Is an Atom That Won’t Be Split: Resisting History in Ukraine, Larry Frolick and Donald Weber 2007 After War, Roger LeMoyne and Kurt Pitzer 2008 Becoming Chinese: Uighurs in Cultural Transition, Carolyn Drake and Ilan Greenberg 2009 Unnatural Borders, Open Wounds: The Human Landscape of Pakistan, Teru Kuwayama and Christian Parenti 2010 If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public, You are a Prostitute: Women and Prostitution in Morocco, Tiana Markova-Gold and Sarah Dohrmann Two-year hiatus during guidelines update 2013 City Under One Roof, Jen Kinney 2014 South Side, Jon Lowenstein
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LANGE–TAYLOR PRIZE
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HAND & EYE: FIFTEEN YEARS OF THE DOROTHEA LANGE–PAUL TAYLOR PRIZE Document: Special Issue, 2005 104 pages, more than 100 photographs Available from CDS: $10, paperback Featuring words and images by Donna DeCesare, Luis Rodriguez, Mary Berridge, Ernesto Bazan, Silvana Paternostro, Deborah Luster, C.D. Wright, Rob Amberg, Sam Gray, Jason Eskenazi, Jennifer Gould Keil, Paola Ferrario, Mary Cappello, Dona Ann McAdams, Brad Kessler, Misty Keasler, Katherine Dunn, Jim Lommasson, Peter Brown, and Kent Haruf
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he 18th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies, was held April 9–12 in downtown Durham, North Carolina, and featured screenings of full-length and short nonfiction films from around the world along with filmmaker Q&As, panel discussions, and an Awards BBQ on April 12. While a number of films screened out of competition, the forty-nine films in the NEW DOCS program were eligible for this year’s awards—thirty-five features and fourteen shorts selected from over thirteen hundred submissions, including twelve World Premieres, thirteen North American Premieres, and two U.S. Premieres. This year, for the first time in Full Frame’s history, the Reva and David Logan Grand Jury Award for a feature documentary was presented to two films: Kings of Nowhere, directed by first-time filmmaker Betzabé Garcia, and (T)ERROR, directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe. Thanks to the generosity of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, each film will receive the full award amount of $10,000. Grand Jury members Marilyn Ness, Sam Pollard, and Bernardo Ruiz stated, “We are very pleased to honor two important films deserving of greater attention on an international stage, both of which speak to the heart of documentary storytelling in unique and compelling ways.” In Garcia’s poetic, patiently photographed Kings of Nowhere, a handful of residents stay their ground after a flood leaves their Mexican village semi-submerged. In (T)ERROR, FBI informant “Shariff” grants filmmakers Cabral and Sutcliffe unprecedented access as he engages in a counterterrorism sting against a white Muslim man, illuminating the controversial methods employed in the government’s war on terror. Juries and Full Frame audiences selected nine other awards, including the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award. The $7,500 annual prize, juried by CDS representatives, was created to honor and support documentary artists whose works are potential catalysts for education and change, who best connect the power of the documentary tradition with community life, and who best lead viewers to understand and reflect on themselves and the world portrayed. This year’s award went to Last Day of Freedom, directed by Nomi Talisman and Dee Hibbert-Jones. The film was also awarded the Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short Film. Last Day of Freedom’s beautiful, inventive animation accompanies testimony of one man’s agonizing decision to turn his brother in to the police. Bill Babbitt’s younger brother, Manny, a decorated Vietnam veteran, suffers from PTSD. When Bill finds evidence that ties Manny to a murder, he goes to the police, thinking that it is not only right but also a way to get help for his brother. In the ensuing trial, Bill testi-
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2015 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Award Winners
fies for both the prosecution and the defense and is haunted by recollections of Manny’s last day of freedom. “Last Day of Freedom won for its nuanced exploration of the nature of memory,” said CDS director Wesley Hogan, representing the award jury. “It’s a stunning film that asks us to rethink what we know of PTSD, family life, policing, and capital punishment.” fullframefest.org
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Other 2015 Full Frame Awards Full Frame Audience Awards FEATURE: How to Dance in Ohio, Alexandra Shiva. Three young women on the autism spectrum navigate social rules and the impending challenges of adulthood as they prepare for their first formal dance. SHORT: Giovanni and the Water Ballet, Astrid Bussink. Giovanni dreams of becoming the first boy to compete in the Dutch synchronized swimming championship and spends hours and hours in the water preparing for one last test. Full Frame Inspiration Award The Storm Makers, Guillaume Suon. A devastating exposé of Cambodia’s human trafficking system, revealed through the stories of two professional “recruiters” and a young woman who is sold into slavery and escapes. Full Frame President’s Award The Farewell, Alejandro Alonso. Long retired from the local mine, Pablo Fabelo spends his days smoking cigars, playing cards, and quietly reminiscing in this languid, lushly photographed short. The Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award Tocando la Luz (Touch the Light), Jennifer Redfearn. Echoing its title, this quietly arresting film radiates with possibility as three blind women in Havana, Cuba, navigate their profound desire for independence. The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights Peace Officer, Brad Barber and Scott Christopherson. After a former sheriff sees his son-in-law killed in a controversial police standoff, he dives into an obsessive, suspenseful investigation of the militarization of American law enforcement. The Nicholas School Environmental Award Good Things Await, Phie Ambo. A richly textured portrait of an aging Danish farmer who runs a biodynamic farm and prioritizes spiritual methods over contemporary standards. Honorable Mention: Overburden, Chad A. Stevens. In the heart of Appalachia, an environmentalist and a former procoal activist join forces to protect their community.
Undergraduate Education Walt Whitman and Literacy Through Photography
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he innovative teaching methodology known as Literacy Through Photography (LTP) was developed at CDS and integrates photography and writing to help children and youth explore universal themes such as self, family, community, and dreams. In LTP director Katie Hyde’s undergraduate courses, students collaborate with youth in local Durham schools. Here, Hyde describes a new project: In late 2014 I piloted a new LTP project that explores Walt Whitman’s epic poem Song of Myself, an idea that arose from an informal discussion about how CDS might engage with Duke’s Whitman archives. I wanted to see what Durham students thought of Whitman’s ideas a century and a half later, and how the poem might inspire their own self-portraits. With the help of MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts student Jonna McKone (’15), I worked with two fifth-grade classes at Club Boulevard Elementary School. Students read and interpreted verses that related to themes of pride, belonging, natural cycles, equality, selfreliance, and empathy. We drew inspiration from Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself, a wonderful illustrated interpretation of the poem by Allen Crawford. Our project had several components. Students sketched representations of such lines as, “You are also asking me questions and I hear you,/I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself,” and also wrote about him/ herself in light of the verse “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The project culminated with close-up photographs of a favorite part of oneself—a leg, an ear or eye, one’s brain or heart. Students decorated the large prints with Whitman verses and their own words, such as: “We connect together to make one”; “I am different, I can accept that”; “My world is yours”; “A small idea is just as great as a big idea.” I loved seeing students’ easy engagement with Whitman’s poem and was moved by their diverse and complicated self-portraits, which I hope will be archived along with Whitman’s materials. I decided to plan an extended Song of Myself project for the spring, this time involving all thirteen students in my LTP undergraduate course and two former students. At the time of this writing, we were in the midst of teaching a two-week intercession camp for fifteen middle schoolers at the School for Creative Studies. During the first morning of camp, Whitman’s opening lines, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/And what I assume, you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” kicked off an honest and mature sharing of personal stories and philosophical leanings. Having pinned Whitman’s writings to the Civil War era, students could also see their contemporary relevance—for example, one student mentioned the deaths of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. Campers tied Whitman’s metaphors regarding the worthiness of and interconnections among all people and living beings to quotations they already knew or found from Martin Luther King, Jr., Tupac, Ghandi, Einstein, President Obama, and Paul Farmer, such as, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.” During our field trip to the Eno River State Park, I paired campers with a Duke student partner and asked them to discover and photograph small details in honor of the verse, “I believe a blade of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.” The next day, students arranged thumbnail prints of their photos—depicting a few blades of grass, a single flower, a pinecone, a shadow, a turtle, a drop of water
on a hand—and mapped the main stars of Pegasus, Orion, Scorpius, and other favorite constellations. During our camp, each student made several self-portraits (with words, photographs, and drawings) and will collectively produce a ’zine that illustrates chosen verses. As a title for their work they wisely decided on Every Soul’s Song. —Katie Hyde, Literacy Through Photography director
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OPPOSITE: CDS director Wesley Hogan on opening night. Photograph by Alex Boerner. ABOVE, TOP: Self-portrait by Devin Tabron. MIDDLE: Illustration by Shamar Kirk of the Walt Whitman verse, “To behold the day-break!/The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,/The air tastes good to my palate.” BOTTOM: A map of the Little Dipper constellation by Isa Terry using photographs made along the Eno River.
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2015 Certificate in Documentary Studies Graduates Under the guidance of Alex Harris, nine graduating seniors in the 2015 Capstone Seminar completed a final project as the final step in receiving a CDS Certificate in Documentary Studies. On April 26, the students presented their projects and received their certificates, followed by an opening reception for Beyond the Front Porch 2015, an exhibition of their work on view at CDS through October 3 (see page 5). Congratulations to these nine students, who describe themselves and their work:
BRENNA LYNN CUKIER
EILEEN G. ADAMS San Francisco Bay Area | Public Policy I have always been interested in hearing and writing stories, and pursued a documentary studies certificate as a way to engage with the world outside of Duke. While my projects have ranged in medium and in content, they maintain my dedication to authenticity as I strive to give voice to my subjects. My final project, The Search, uses photography and self- and subjectproduced audio to explore the parallel lives of Don Henson and myself: Don, a high school senior looking to the future and unsure of what he sees there, and Eileen, a college senior equally uncertain of what path she is meant to be walking. My work explores struggle, triumph, disappointment, and hope, all with the goal of furthering the search we all make to find a meaningful life.
Scottsdale, Arizona | Journalism I am a student at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill but have taken classes at CDS throughout my college career, a process facilitated by the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program. Upon entering college, my ambition was to be a television news reporter. After taking a few classes at CDS, however, I found documentary work to be the ideal platform for combining my skills as a broadcast journalist with my passion for creative storytelling. My final project, Susan, is my first experience creating a vignette about a personal subject—my maternal grandmother, Susan Hammer. The film combines archival material, interviews, and present-day footage to explore growing older through the lens of one woman’s life and memories.
MAYA CAROLINE FLIPPEN McKinney, Texas | Women’s Studies Throughout college I have learned that my identity is tied to my studies, activism, service, and interactions. I cannot separate my sense of self from my academic experience. That’s why I’m so grateful to have had the rewarding, challenging, and life-affirming experience of majoring in women’s studies and getting the documentary studies certificate. My passion for documentary grew in Wesley Hogan’s class Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, where I was encouraged to consider identity and inequity in the complex and nuanced light of storytelling. Dear Emily is an attempt to use visual media to explore womanhood at Duke. In a competitive collegiate world fueled by rigorous academics, rigid social structure, and enormous pressure to look and act the way a Duke woman “should,” this project is an attempt to let woman-identified Duke students breathe.
JAMES PATRICK BANDO Los Angeles, California | Earth and Ocean Sciences; Japanese CDS is a place I come back to each semester not only to learn more about the community and landscape around me, but also more about myself. Learning about the many facets of documentary has allowed me to think about the bigger world I inhabit and how we each fit into it. My interest in documentary studies developed through photography courses taught by MJ Sharp and Susie Post-Rust; my most recent work, however, is an expansion of a family photographs project I started in Katie Hyde’s Sociology Through Photography class. The Archived Memories is an audio-stills project about my relationship with my 93-year-old great-uncle, John Takemoto. Using original family photographs dating back to 1921, I tell his story and what it meant for him to discover and uproot a particularly difficult past.
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LAUREN ROSE HENSCHEL Miami, Florida | Visual and Media Studies; Cultural Anthropology My experience with psoriatic arthritis, a debilitating genetic autoimmune disease, inspired me to use art as a cathartic exploration of pain and empathy that all humans experience. I have
been greatly influenced in all of my classes at CDS, namely the Capstone Seminar, Multimedia Documentary, Children and the Experience of Illness, and Documentary Engagement. The subjects of my documentary pieces and I have developed strong bonds, and I hope to continue to create documentaries that will have as much of an impact on others as my subjects have had on me. My film Las Fronteras traces the unexpected paths of two disparate families as they became one. One family, a mother and daughter, emigrated illegally from Peru to the United States to escape the cycle of poverty there. The other, my American family, welcomed these two into our home. This film will highlight how families can be formed, ripped apart, and put back together in unconventional ways.
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MARGARET ELIZABETH PERRY
DANIELLE MAYALL Alexandria, Virginia | Environmental Science and Policy; Cultural Anthropology I am half Brazilian, half Peruvian, and was born in Switzerland; my multicultural background and experiences traveling and living around the world have led to my strong interest in exploring the interaction between people, cultures, and the natural environment, namely through photography. My passion for food, the environment, and health and exercise come together in Know What You Eat. My final project is an attempt to show how I feel about food and society— five photo illustrations that show the ugly truth behind commonly eaten foods. I want people to stop and think about what they are eating—the consequences not only for themselves, but also for the environment
Baltimore, Maryland | Public Policy; Certificate in Markets and Management Studies I have a passion for documentary photography (and hate writing artist’s statements!). Despite having dyslexia and a variety of other learning differences that make me a slow reader and writer, I consider myself an avid learner. I especially appreciate the way multimedia documentary work can provide insight for a wide-ranging audience in a way that I believe written expression cannot. For me, documentary work is an important means of connecting cultures, promoting understanding, and preserving the present as it becomes our history. I have enjoyed all my classes at CDS, particularly Small Town USA with Susie Post-Rust, and will miss sitting on the CDS porch on warm afternoons. The photographs and audio recordings in Sound It Out document the experiences of illiterate adults working with tutors to learn to read, and explores how being illiterate has impacted their lives and what is motivating them to learn to read later in life. I hope that my project captures the sincere appreciation each student has for their tutor and the Durham Literacy Center.
KARI ELIZABETH VAUGHN
LAURA ADDISON NAVARRO Charlotte, North Carolina | History Early in my freshman year, I fell in love with documentary film as a way to explore creativity and communication. Through classes at CDS and through the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, I have been inspired by great works—particularly those pertaining to southern culture and environmental issues—and hope to continue working as a visual storyteller after graduation. My final project, She’d Be Satisfied, looks at the ways in which family histories are made and retold across generations. Using family photographs, home videos, audio, and video, I explore my family’s emigration from Cuba, piecing together different narratives in an attempt to understand the grandparents I never knew and my own place within my larger family history.
Greensboro, North Carolina | Math; Statistics Motivated to take photography classes by my father’s camera collection and love of the medium, I started at CDS during my first year at Duke. I have also taken oral history, audio, and film classes at CDS to diversify my experience within the documentary tradition. During my last semester I returned to still photography, making and using pinhole cameras for my final project. Examining what it means to be Quaker, The Light Within connects the voices of local Quakers with black-and-white analog and digital photographs inspired by those same voices. All of the photographs were made using my pinhole cameras as a way of working with a process that parallels the Quaker dedication to simplicity, humility, faith, and search for the Light.
y documentarystudies.duke.edu/classes/undergraduate-education Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu
create great work, she has a unique ability to make strong and lasting connections with the subjects she works with. She has enormous potential and gives herself fully to every opportunity she enters into. I look forward to following her career for many years to come.” Lauren’s next project is Las Fronteras (working title)—a film that traces the unexpected paths of two families as they became one. See pages 12–13 for a description of the project from Lauren’s Certificate in Documentary Studies statement. We’re thrilled that Lauren is this year’s recipient of the Julia Harper Day Award and wish her continued success.
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— Christopher Sims, CDS undergraduate education director
Continuing Education Featured Summer Course: Master Class in Nonfiction Writing June 1–5, 2015
2015 Julia Harper Day Award Winner
Duke University Senior Lauren Henschel The Julia Harper Day Award was created by the Center for Documentary Studies in 1992 in memory of the young woman who was CDS’s first staff member, a writer and photographer of real accomplishment. This $500 award goes to a graduating Duke University senior who has demonstrated excellence in documentary studies and contributed significantly to CDS programs. This year’s Julia Harper Day Award goes to Miami, Florida, native Lauren Henschel, a visual and media studies major with a minor in cultural anthropology and a CDS Certificate in Documentary Studies. Lauren’s current body of work and Graduation with Distinction project is entitled Indelible. It has been displayed at Carnegie Hall, the Miami Art Museum, and has been published in Duke Magazine, Latent Image, and Duke FORM. Indelible is an art installation piece combining still images, audio narratives, and video footage that presents anonymous stories of individuals with scars and the manifestation of pain on the human body. Lauren’s own experience with psoriatic arthritis, a debilitating genetic autoimmune disease, inspired her to create Indelible, in which she has used art to turn her soul outward. Her cathartic exploration of pain takes place through the lens of her camera. Lauren’s intention is to create a platform through which individuals can explore the intersection between pain and empathy, allowing them to take a deeper look at how they view the pain of others and how they process their own. In addition to her success in the documentary field, Lauren is one of the founding members and co-editor-in-chief of The Bite, Duke’s premiere food publication. Lauren has also worked with the National Psoriasis Foundation to raise millions of dollars for psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, and created her own nonprofit to help children come to terms with their illness. Elena Rue, a CDS instructor who nominated Lauren for the award, writes, “I was lucky enough to have Lauren in class during the first semester of her first year at Duke and it has been a privilege to watch her grow as a person and as a documentarian. Lauren not only has the skills and drive to
Lauren Henschel. Tintype photograph by Harlan Campbell.
Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org
This summer the Master Class in Nonfiction Writing enters its fourth year of bringing together ambitious students of longform documentary nonfiction from around the country with experienced instructors and editors. The class will offer an intense week of writing, reading, and workshopping student projects under the guidance of two new co-instructors: Barry Yeoman, an award-winning journalist—National Magazine Award for Public Interest, Gracie Award, Sidney Hillman Prize, among many honors—who specializes in longform narrative about complex social issues; and bestselling novelist and nonfiction writer Haven Kimmel—A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch, among other works—who has been a guest speaker in the class since its inception. “I love working with the diverse groups CDS draws in the summer, the variety of ages and interests, and look forward to helping guide students closer to who they ultimately want to be as writers,” Kimmel says. The class will study and discuss select pieces of longform nonfiction and apply what is learned directly to work in and out of class. The goal is for each student to end the week with a work of high-quality, publishable nonfiction that they’d be proud to send to magazines and other publications. The workshop format creates a supportive community for a wide variety of writing and writers and works well for students in various stages: students with ongoing projects they’d like to finish or refine, students just beginning new projects, and students who know they want to write longform nonfiction but who are still searching for their subject. Throughout the week, participants will have the space and time for sustained, concentrated writing, access to the world-class Duke University Libraries system, multiple individual meetings with Yeoman and Kimmel, as well as an opportunity to hear firsthand from accomplished guest writers who come to class to discuss their work and the world of publishing. To register for the Master Class in Nonfiction Writing and other summer courses:
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This spring, Duke University’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts celebrated the successes of the class of 2015 in MFA | EDA 2015, the program’s annual thesis exhibition, on view from March 20–April 18. Featuring site-specific projects by fourteen graduating students, the exhibition featured a tremendous range of work, including presentations of film and video, installation, photography, interactive arts, sound, and multimedia at multiple venues across Duke’s campus and downtown Durham. For information on the artists and works in the exhibition, visit mfaeda2015.org. MFA| EDA 2015 was supported by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Program in Arts of the Moving Image, Kenan Institute for Ethics, and Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts, as well as by The Carrack Modern Art and SPECTRE Arts.
Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu
NonproямБt Organization U.S. Postage
PAID Durham, North Carolina Permit Number 60
SPRING/SUMMER 2015 | THE CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY