"Document" Winter 2016 by CDS.Duke

DOCUMENT WINTER 2016 | 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 PICTURED 3 Photographs from #DocForum2015

INTERVIEW 4–5 Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman Award-Winning Creators of the Animated Short Documentary Last Day of Freedom BOOKS, EXHIBITS, AND AWARDS 6–10 South Side 2014 Lange-Taylor Prize Winner Jon Lowenstein Explores His Chicago Neighborhood Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila Photographs by 2014 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Winner Nadia Sablin “Immersion: Our Native Mussels and Bodies of Freshwater” 2015 CDS Documentary Essay Prize Recipient Abbie Gascho Landis and an Excerpt From Her Winning Entry

WINTER 2016

Michel Huneault Wins CDS’s 2015 Lange-Taylor Prize Photographer’s Post Mégantic Is a Transmedia Requiem to a Small Canadian Town EDUCATION 11–14 Undergraduate Education Spotlight on Kelly Alexander and “Our Culinary Cultures” Continuing Education Fall 2015 Certificate in Documentary Studies Graduates New Spring and Summer Classes

MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Thesis Exhibition Preview From the Class of 2016 OTHER NEWS 15 Full Frame Festival News Storymakers: Durham Document Duke 360°: A Year in Photographs

Support CDS Support the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS)—a 501c3 nonprofit organization affiliated with Duke University—by making a contribution today. Donors of $250+ are eligible for exclusive benefits as part of the new CDS Circle program. Now in our 25th year of teaching, producing, and presenting the documentary arts, CDS believes that a story, well told, can deepen insight and empathy, encourage understanding across barriers, and open possibilities for meaningful change. The shortest distance between two people is a story. Help us keep telling the stories that matter. 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,” Attn: Development, 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.

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OCUMEN

PICTURED Photos from Documentary 2015: Origins and Inventions

COVER: MMA (Montreal, Maine, and Atlantic Railway) train going through Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, seven months after the tragedy there, February 2013. Photograph by 2015 Lange-Taylor Prize winner Michel Huneault, from Post Mégantic (see page 10). ABOVE LEFT, top to bottom: Attendees prepare to watch a screening at CDS’s national forum in November 2015; the event brought together photographers, filmmakers, audio producers, writers, educators, students, and supporters to view and listen to compelling documentary work, examine central issues in the documentary field, and celebrate CDS’s 25th anniversary (cdsfirst25.com/ docforum2015). Film panel moderator Marco Williams with Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman (see an interview with the filmmakers on pages 4–5). A conversation on photography, war, and the human condition with (l to r) photographer Peter van Agtmael, Duke University President Richard Brodhead, and Duke MFA | EDA director and former CDS director Tom Rankin. Artist Hong-An Truong presents on the topic of witness and the documentary imagination. ABOVE RIGHT, top to bottom: Artist John Malpede in the midst of his documentary performance. Artist Brett Cook, former CDS Lehman Brady Visiting Professor. Former CDS director Iris Tillman Hill gives opening remarks. Special honoree Nathasha Trethewey presents a reading; other honorees included John Cohen, The Kitchen Sisters, and Samuel D. Pollard. Photographs courtesy of StoryMine Media, which organized and executed coverage of Documentary 2015 with the assistance of eight outstanding Forum Fellows: Kent Corley, Kelly Creedon, Shelia Huggins, Michelle Lotker, Michaela O’Brien, Madeleine Pron, Anna Spelman, and Wei Wang.

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DOCUMENT

INTERVIEW

LAST DAY OF FREEDOM The Making of an Extraordinary Documentary The film touches on so many significant themes—veterans care, PTSD, racism, flaws within the criminal justice system—and Bill Babbitt’s story is so emblematic of all these issues. What was your connection to the subject matter, and how did you find Bill? Dee Hibbert-Jones: Nomi and I have been collaborating since 2004. We’ve always been really interested in examining how individuals are impacted by larger social and political systems and in producing art projects around those stories. Nomi Talisman: And then I got a day job in media services with a little nonprofit in San Francisco that does death penalty plea work. The organization does a lot of mitigating work with the family and friends of people on death row, and I was conducting interviews with these people. I’d often come back home after interviews and talk to Dee about how this is an angle that nobody knows anything about, how looking at the far-reaching effects of the death penalty on individuals and communities really opens up the conversation about criminal justice. So we decided we wanted to do a project on this subject, and we asked the organization if they could give us recommendations for people to talk to. We started interviewing several people, and they all had powerful anecdotes to share, but we really wanted to find someone who was a great storyteller. So we went back to the organization, and they said, “Well, if that’s what you’re looking for, then you need to talk to Bill Babbitt.” DHJ: So we went to talk to Bill. And immediately we realized that he was an amazing storyteller and that his story has so many incredible angles to it; it highlights all these failures in the system and points out a lot of the issues that we’d been interested in for a long time. When we began the project four years ago, we thought that perhaps we would make some sort of installation that played with hesitations and stutterings and silences, but then we realized that Bill’s story needed telling in full, so we started on a linear narrative. We didn’t initially set out to make a film.

he animated documentary short Last Day of Freedom, directed by Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, tells the story of Bill Babbitt, a man who realizes that his younger brother Manny, a Vietnam vet, has committed a serious crime. Bill grapples with whether or not to turn Manny in; his decision to go to the police ultimately results in Manny’s conviction and execution by the state of California, and Bill is left reeling from the loss of his brother and his role in the outcome. The thirty-two-minute film, composed of Babbit’s starkly powerful testimony and more than thirty-thousand drawings by the filmmakers, had its world premiere at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April 2015, where it won the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award and the Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short. Since then, Last Day of Freedom has screened at festivals around the world, won the IDA Documentary Award for Best Short, and at the time of this writing, had been nominated for an Oscar. Hibbert-Jones and Talisman returned to Durham in November to screen their film as part of CDS’s national forum, Documentary 2015: Origins and Inventions. They spoke beforehand with Emma Miller, Full Frame’s programming coordinator, about the animation process and their entry into the documentary world.

Can you walk us through your choice to have the piece simply be Bill’s testimony, to immerse the viewer in his experience without bringing in other perspectives? It’s not until a few title cards at the end of the film that you zoom out to talk about the larger issues and injustices of Manny’s case. NT: We’ve had several people say to us, after seeing the film, “It’s so rare to hear somebody just talk to you for thirty minutes uninterrupted.” And I think without even thinking about it, when we started editing, we knew that Bill’s story was so powerful that we wanted people just to be carried by it. Bill does talk about Manny’s crime, and he does talk about the lawyers to some degree, but we felt that some of the details of the case muddied the narrative and interrupted the flow of Bill’s story. But the first few times we showed the film, we didn’t have the title cards at the end, and people immediately asked all these questions: “What happened in the trial? What kind of defense did Manny give? What crime did he actually commit?” So we realized we had to include those details in some way, but still allow the viewer to be carried by the story and stay with the emotional tenor of Bill’s experience and decision. DHJ: We really talked about the notion of allowing the viewer to walk in someone else’s shoes, someone who didn’t commit any crime but is cast into an incredibly challenging position, someone who could make viewers go, “That could be me. What

Stills from Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman’s animated short documentary, Last Day of Freedom

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You employ all sorts of visual styles and animation techniques in the film, but the line drawings used to represent Bill as he tells his story are particularly striking. There’s a vulnerability to the spareness and shakiness of those drawings that I think allows Bill’s emotion and the stakes involved in what he’s going through to be rendered even more viscerally for the viewer. There’s also the fact that, because you’re just using simple black lines on a white background, you’re able to steer clear of the racial marker of skin color. How did you make those kinds of choices about visual representation throughout the animation process? DHJ: You know, the one thing about animation is that nothing is an accident. You’re basically making decisions all the way along about how you want to render and represent something. We thought really hard about how we wanted Bill to be represented, and we played with a lot of different options and metaphors. Bill is holding it together, and he’s amazingly strong, but he’s also so fragile and delicate, and we wanted to represent that in the linear quality of the animation. And then we thought that by bringing in these really intimate close-ups, we could approximate the feeling of intimacy that you get with a family member. It was also a very conscious decision to make a line drawing out of someone who’s come across such racism in his life. Our hope was that the viewer would be forced to consider race in a new way; obviously, you still see Bill’s facial features, but the black-and-white style allows for a different way of understanding and seeing racial implication. It was a challenging visual choice to make, as we’re not part of the racial minority group that we’re representing, but Bill seems really happy with the final product. What about the other visual styles in the film—the splashes of color, the charcoal drawings, the animation of archival footage? I’m fascinated by the conversations that must go on behind the creation of thirty-two thousand individual drawings. DHJ: Well, we started by breaking the film into specific time periods and scenes, and then we worked through the aesthetic treatment of each of those. We really tried to think about the emotional states at play. For example, at some points, you’re almost experiencing Manny’s post-traumatic stress disorder, and at other points you’re experiencing Bill’s heightened emotional state. We wanted to replicate with our color palette and the quality of lines that feeling of how, when something terrible happens, everything you see around you becomes really bright, and things fall away, and what’s left seems excessive and saturated and overwhelming. NT: And we wanted different parts of the film to feel distinctive. We wanted to represent the archival footage from Vietnam differently, for example, and we played with textures and graininess to mimic the look of actual 16mm footage from army films. And then, at the beginning of the film, we used a softer color palette for the more idyllic scenes of Bill and Manny playing as kids on the beach, kind of like within a faded childhood memory. We were constantly thinking, “Does this represent a certain reality, does this represent a certain emotional space, does this represent a certain mindset?” Have you found there to be any tension in the marriage of animation and documentary? Animated documentaries have emerged as a genre in their own right, of course, and I think that audiences and makers are thinking in increasingly

expansive ways about the nonfiction form. But I’m curious if you’ve encountered any pushback from people who don’t think “documentary” is the most appropriate term to describe your film. NT: I think the term “documentary” is absolutely appropriate. This is somebody’s story, and the facts are all there, and it represents Bill’s authentic emotional journey. But we have had people come up to us and say, “Hey, you should make a ‘real documentary’ out of this because it’s a really important story.” And it’s like, “This is a real documentary.” DHJ: I was at a festival recently and heard a very interesting dialogue around the fact that animation is a tool, and documentary is a genre. Animation is just one tool that documentary filmmakers can employ to tell stories. And really the line should be between fiction and nonfiction; what we do as filmmakers is choose methodologies for communicating stories that fall somewhere along that line. We felt like we were able to tell this story in the most layered way through the use of animation, and that’s why we made that conceptual decision— just as we made the film the length it is because that felt like the length it needed to be. Animation is a very time-intensive process. There is a lot of physical labor in it. We could have represented the story in a lot of different ways. We could have used other animation styles or techniques that would have sped up the process. But we really wanted to honor the story by rendering it through this particular, deliberate approach. And part of our intention with the use of animation was to open up Bill’s story to new audiences, people who might otherwise find it unbearable to watch a grown man cry on screen.

DOCUMENT

would I do in that situation? How would I respond?” So that was the reason we wanted to take ourselves out and remove any extraneous perspectives. The facts at the very end cap the story and provide answers to some of the questions unaddressed by Bill’s narrative. But it was very conscious to try to make everything from his point of view, in the hopes that audiences would really begin to empathize with Bill, to understand the complexity of his situation and the difficulties he’s facing.

The two of you come from the art world. This is your first documentary film, which makes the success you’ve had so far all the more incredible. What has it been like working in this new mode and traveling with the film to festivals? NT: Well, we’ve learned that the babysitters get expensive. [laughs] DHJ: One thing I’ve been struck by is the community in the documentary world. It’s been extraordinary sitting and watching other people’s films and feeling a part of something. You don’t get that within fine art exhibitions. In a fine art context you’re often working alone. NT: I think that in the documentary community, people are truly invested in learning something about the world. You see filmmakers and audiences all trying to learn about an issue, about people, about a particular place. I also think that because film is a time-based medium, the amount of time and attention people spend engaging with work is different than in a gallery setting, where people often just breeze through an exhibition. If you watch a film, it’s a different commitment, and I find something really refreshing about that. It’s been hugely moving to see an audience connect with the work at screenings, and it’s been hugely rewarding to get to talk about it with them afterwards. DHJ: It’s also been really heartening to feel that a lot of the things we were trying to do with the project have actually come through. When the juries at Full Frame presented us with awards and read statements about the film, it was the first time we’d actually heard anyone articulate the representation of race and the choices in storytelling that we’d actively, consciously worked on for years. So I think we’ve been incredibly lucky that after so much time and struggle and fundraising, it feels like what we were trying to achieve with the project has been realized. We’re also kind of nervous—oh my God, what’s the next thing that we’re going to do?! See page 15 for information about the nineteenth annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, April 7–10, 2016. Full Frame is a program of the Center for Documentary Studies.

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

BOOKS | EXHIB

South Side Work by 2014 Lange-Taylor Prize Winner Jon Lowenstein Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries Through February 27, 2016

Artist Jon Lowenstein won the Center for Documentary Studies’ Lange-Taylor Prize in 2014 for South Side, a project on his longtime Chicago neighborhood that combines black-and-white photographs, video, audio, narrative writing and poetry, and found ephemera. The various elements of the project and exhibit collectively document “the legacy of segregation, the impact of vast wealth inequality, and how de-industrialization and globalization play out on the ground in America.” Lowenstein has also been trying to find his own place in the story he’s telling, a white man in a predominantly black neighborhood where his presence and identity are often questioned. Here, one of Lowenstein’s poems from South Side, about an encounter he had with individuals wearing the baggy white T-shirts that were once considered the uniform of the streets. 79th and Stony Island. A million stories on this corner. The cold fall night and the White T’s move fast, not nervous but fast. They got somewhere to go. I wait at the red light. A passenger is in my car. She shouldn’t be in the car, but she is. Seventy-ninth and Stony is long way from where she should be. White looks at the White T’s moving, and they’re so hungry; it’s always in the eyes and the walk. It’s like the two things go in opposite directions. The walk is cool, even when the eyes are darting, surveying, challenging, looking, looking again. The danger is ever present, always there, and the White T’s are experts at navigating it. These two were on a mission. They moved with purpose. They crossed in front of the hood at the northeast corner of 79th. Hungry, they passed and glanced left. I turned right and was gone. Certain corners have a feeling, that you don’t want to step out but you also want to be out there. There is that sense of life, of movement, of danger, of hustle, of pain, of hope, so real, so alive, and that’s what calls to the kids bored with life. This is street theater to keep people from the daily doldrums. Corners that have this special feeling:

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63rd and Ashland 63rd and Cottage 79th and Stony 79th and Cottage 47th and Halsted 72nd and Woodlawn 79th and Exchange Vincennes and 71st Halsted and 103rd 63rd and Wood For information on the winning projects by Lowenstein and 2015 Lange-Taylor recipient Michel Huneault (page 10):

ocumentarystudies.duke.edu > Dorothea Lange–Paul y dTaylor Prize > Prizewinners

Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila Photographs by 2014 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Winner Nadia Sablin Rubenstein Photography Gallery, Duke University West Campus Through February 28, 2016

Nadia Sablin was awarded the seventh CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography in 2014 for evocative images of her aunts’ timeless way of life at the family home in Russia. The prize is singular in its focus, providing emerging photographers with the tremendous resources of time and expertise necessary to create, print, and distribute a book—a milestone that is transformative in the career of an artist. “It was one of the most exciting days of my life—when I found out that the book was going to actually be made, that it was going to be a real thing and not just live in my imagination,” Sablin says. “The village, my aunts’ house, is where books became real to me, as real as my own life. And my aunts’ life is so bound to the cyclical nature of things. The photographs need to have a beginning, middle, and end. They are a story.” Nadia Sablin’s Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila was published in November 2015 by CDS Books and Duke University Press.

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BITS | AWARDS

2016 DOCUMENTARY ESSAY PRIZE IN PHOTOGRAPHY

The 2015 CDS Documentary Essay Prize in Writing Abbie Gascho Landis and Her Winning Entry The CDS Documentary Essay prize honors the best in documentary photography and writing in alternating years, with a focus on current or recently completed work from a long-term project. The 2015 prize competition in writing was awarded to Abbie Gascho Landis. An excerpt from her winning essay, “Immersion: Our Native Mussels and Bodies of Freshwater,” appears on pages 8–9. Landis is a writer and veterinarian at the Cobleskill Veterinary Clinic in Cobleskill, New York. She has received an Arthur DeLong Writing Award and was a finalist for the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Award in 2013. Landis has a bachelor’s degree in English and biology from Goshen College and a doctorate in veterinary medicine from Ohio State University. Her blog: thedigandflow.com. For the last six years, Landis has snorkeled in creeks, explored large rivers, visited laboratories, and interviewed biologists in order to document “these remarkable animals.” In her essay, Landis weaves personal experience into her investigation of native mussels and their freshwater habitats as one way of looking at water issues in the Deep South and elsewhere in the United States. “Endangered mussels have garnered national attention in recent water wars involving conflicts with agriculture and with cities like Atlanta during droughts,” Landis writes in her project statement. “‘Immersion’ looks at our water supply in this changing climate. The South seems rich with flowing water, yet southern teams of freshwater experts are now consulting with their counterparts from the arid West; they need a road map for navigating water shortages. While mussels have been studied for more than a century, research has recently ballooned, revealing complexities about their lives and roles in river systems.”

The upcoming CDS Documentary Essay Prize competition will be for photography. The 2014 prize, for photography, was awarded to Iveta Vaivode, a freelance photographer based in Riga, Latvia, for “Somewhere on a Disappearing Path,” in which she explores the rural landscape and, perhaps, the last inhabitants of Pilcene, a remote village in eastern Latvia, creating a new family album full of images of memories she’s imagined. As she writes, “The ambivalence of photographs, their possibilities and limitations, suggests that we should not trust images as records of our lives and histories. . . . My work addresses the idea of memory and ‘looking back’ through the creation of a narrative based on family history.” Submissions for the CDS Documentary Essay Prize in Photography will be accepted through February 16, 2016.

ocumentarystudies.duke.edu > Awards > y dCDS Documentary Essay Prize

Landis received $3,000 and will give a reading at the Center for Documentary Studies in 2016. Her essay will also be published in full on the CDS website and then placed in the Archive of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Library, Duke University. The members of the prize committee also awarded an Honorable Mention to Jessica Wilbanks for her complex and accomplished essay “The Far Side of the Fire,” which explores widespread charges of witchcraft against Nigerian children and reflects on her own experiences growing up in the Pentecostal faith.

OPPOSITE, left to right: Yung Joc fans at the Bud Billiken Parade, Bronzeville, 2006; photograph by Jon Lowenstein from South Side (detail). A six-letter word for . . . , 2011; photograph by Nadia Sablin from Aunties. ABOVE, left to right: 2015 CDS Documentary Essay Prize winner in writing Abbie Gascho Landis; photograph by Caroline M. Singletary. Photograph by 2014 CDS Documentary Essay Prize winner in photography Iveta Vaivode, from “Somewhere on a Disappearing Path.”

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BY ABBIE GASCHO LANDIS n a March day I stand in roadside weeds near the County Road 10 bridge over Chewacla Creek, Alabama, wiggling first my legs, then my arms into a borrowed wetsuit. The wetsuit’s zipper gapes like an open shell, displaying my pregnant belly, almost fourmonths round. With considerable effort, I zip up the two halves, encasing myself entirely. I have joined this Auburn University field crew on a whim—one of these biologists is my husband, Andrew. He watches his whole family squeeze into my wetsuit, then points us toward the creek. I sink to my knees, letting cool water flow over my thighs. Biting the snorkel mouthpiece, I submerge my head through a layer of crisp-edged floating leaves and into another world. A fish darts close, and I see its eyes and finely-lined fins. Its gills clap against its head like it is slowly applauding my green-rimmed face. I revel in the bright underwater world. The creek fills my ears, dimming other sounds. Sediment stays on the creek bed, leaving the water clear until my fingers sweep the rocks, raising a cloud. I graze my belly upstream into better visibility, moving to the rhythm of my breath whooshing up and down my snorkel. The biologists have told me that the creek’s edges often hold many hidden native freshwater mussels, of the family Unionidae. Finding mussels is our purpose for snorkeling Chewacla Creek in March. Look for two small openings, they tell me. Mussels filter feed through these apertures. They’re like two short tubes often sticking up just a bit from the mud. “Once you get your search image, it’s easy,” Professor Jim Stoeckel, a compact man who rarely stands still, assures me, “You’ll really start seeing mussels.” After about an hour, the extent of Stoeckel’s optimism becomes apparent. I have plucked, flipped, and groped at least fifty rocks, leaves, twigs, and bulges in the mud. I’ve never seen a mussel in the wild. These are not the coal black mollusks clinging like butterflies to rocks in the ocean. The family Unionidae includes almost three hundred species in North America. Nearly 70 percent of them are imperiled. My search image, which resembles two short drinking straws poking up from the mud, wavers like a mirage. “It’s really hard to describe what to look for,” Andrew tells me later. “I look for what is not mud and rocks. Something that has a particular shape. Something that’s more perfect than everything surrounding it.” Freshwater mussels live mostly buried. Their shell edges are parted like a surprised gasp, exposing two apertures. One intakes and the other releases water, which is how mussels eat, breathe, and even gather sperm to meet their eggs. Those apertures actually look like Georgia O’Keefe paintings—flower, female anatomy—elegant ovals decorated with variously shaped and colored papillae. Apertures, papillae, curve of a shell. These mussels ingest particles suspended in water. Sucking water across their gills, they sort particles as

edible or inedible. The water flowing in Alabama’s creeks and rivers, the water sitting in catfish ponds and reservoirs, the water gushing from my own faucet, has passed through the interiors of freshwater mussels. Although I do not see her, a mussel is there, near my feet. We stand in our wetsuits, leaning toward the creek bank. Andrew points; I still cannot see this mussel. Between my gravid abdomen and taut wetsuit, I can’t bend my waist. I bend my knees and tip forward. “She’s displaying,” he tells me. He waits while I stare. Then the mussel seems to materialize, differentiating from the leaves and rocks. Before my eyes, the creek bottom gains a dimension. A little spectaclecase, Villosa lienosa. She is doing the work of a freshwater mussel— filtering. She is also doing the work of many females this time of year. Her gills bulge with offspring—larval mussels—that she has brooded for months. Now the time has come. Above those offspring waves her mantle lure, decorated with multiple tentacles that look like a clump of small black worms. The bait. Ripe with offspring, a female mussel must attract a piscine obstetrician to deliver her babies into the world. Striking the bait, a fish will release thousands of larval mussels, which will hitch a ride on its gills, transforming into independent juveniles, then let go and sink into their new creekbed lives. Watching this wild mussel display her lure opens a door in my mind. I recognize this turning inside out for the next generation. This mussel and I are similarly vulnerable, preparing to empty our bodies into the future. Male and female mussels reproduce without touching. In fact, they reproduce without necessarily being near each other. Mussel biologists don’t actually know how far apart two mussels can be and still “mate” with each other. Step into the right creek at the right time of year, and you could be standing in a swill of mussel sperm. Female mussels, constantly filtering, draw in sperm along with bits of algae, phytoplankton, and tiny suspended particles of dirt. Inside the female, sperm fertilize eggs to form the mussels’ larval form, called glochidia. Mussels begin as these very miniature larval versions of themselves: Their shell at this stage is made of a pliable, yet tough material, chitin, that also forms the shells on shrimp. While they wait, open-jawed, for a fish, glochidia stay with mom. Sort of like an opossum, females brood their babies in a marsupial structure, gills, holding mature glochidia for a span of weeks to months. Inside the gills, a mussel keeps her glochidia in sealed tubes. Until they are released these larval mussels have no contact with the river. How long will a mussel brood her babies? Some species release their offspring after only a few weeks. They are short-term brooders, referred to as tachytictic. The word reminds me of tachycardia, which describes a rapidly beating heart, a fast pulse. Others, the long-term brooders—bradytictic mussels—tend their glochidia for up to seven months, typically over winter. A pulse so slow that each beat lasts half a year.

“Aristotle thought bivalves arose spontaneously from mud or sand,” biologist Wendell Haag writes in Freshwater Mussels of North America. “This would be remarkable indeed, but as always, the truth is even more interesting.” Even the phrase “mussel reproduction” is too general, Haag tells me over the phone. Asking, “How do mussels reproduce?” is like asking, “What do birds eat?” You have to be more specific. Are you asking about a hummingbird, which eats mostly flower nectar; or a goose, which eats mostly grasses; or a buzzard, which eats mostly carrion? Wendell Haag becomes animated in this point of our conversation about mussel sex. For years, I had carried in my head a formidable image of Haag. A Mississippibased U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, Haag has literally written the book on freshwater mussels and proliferates published scientific articles. A few decades ago, we didn’t really know how female mussels got their glochidia onto fish. The 1984 Missouri Naiades: A Guide to the Mussels of Missouri, for example, describes a pregnant female mussel waving her “mantle flaps with an undulating motion that mimics the swimming of a small fish.” Many experts at the time were uncertain about this mantle-flapping behavior, speculating that it might aerate the glochidia within the mussel’s gills. In 1988, however, biologist Bob Butler observed a lure caught on a snag in a tributary of the Choctawhatchee River in Alabama. The lure, uncannily resembling a small fish, was connected by a thin mucus strand to a southern sandshell, Hamiota australis. The mussel had apparently deployed this lure to dance in the current, angling for host fish. The lure turned out to be a package of glochidia. This showstopping behavior, previously unknown to science, helped to define our understanding of mussels’ reproductive tactics. Wendell Haag suggests that butterflies are a close analogue to mussels’ host use and larval transformation. Butterfly larvae—caterpillars—require a host plant, on which they feed, then transform into beautiful adult creatures. Some butterfly species, like monarchs, can only use a specific plant, like milkweed, to raise their caterpillars. Other butterflies are generalists; their larvae can eat almost any kind of plant and will manage metamorphosis into adulthood. So it is with mussels and the host fish their larvae require. But Haag’s analogy ends there. Butterflies can deposit their eggs on host plants. To get their larvae onto host fish, female mussels must bring the fish to them. For this, they have evolved complex strategies—mimicry, disguise, lures, and in certain species, entrapment. When this type of mussel attracts a fish, she clamps down on its head, forcing it to wait in a cloud of freshly released glochidia. I have become a freshwater mussel groupie. I fawn over their photographs, mussels ranging in size from thumbnail to dinnerplate, building glassy or ridged or pimpled shells that are brown or black or yellow, with or without dark stripes fanning across them, and always paved in-

side with pearl—white, pink, deep violet. I stalk them from a distance, writing their names in my notebooks: fatmucket, pistolgrip, heelsplitter, shinyrayed pocketbook, spectaclecase, pigtoe, snuffbox. I pore over their bios. Posters of mussels hang in our bedroom. In the wild, mussels are in peril because they’re sensitive. Burrowing and filter feeding at the intersection of water and earth, they suffer with disruptions to both creek bed and water. They’re also vulnerable because they’re specific. They have been called naiads, after Greek mythology’s freshwater nymphs, each linked inextricably to a particular stream or river. Some mussels are widespread, while some exist only in a single river system and some live in only a few creek sites. Mussels evolve with their river’s flow and geology, requiring particular river-bottom habitats. Their need for host fish links them to vulnerable fish diversity. Human-driven changes to creeks and rivers often disrupt water flow and quality, destroy the creek bed, and alter fish populations. When a waterway changes, mussels are the first to know. They may die outright, or be unable to reproduce. Like the check engine light on a dashboard, mussels indicate when there’s a problem with how their river is running. Of the 300 freshwater mussel species native to North America, 29 are extinct. Only 89 species are considered stable, while 182 species are classified as vulnerable, threatened, or endangered. One morning I sit in our family room and stare into our aquarium, which holds several fat bullfrog tadpoles beginning to transform. I call eighteen-month-old Sam over, pointing to things so small that he can’t see them. Legs. No longer than an eyelash, they end in three distinct toes flattened against a thick tail. Metamorphosis is ordinary, repeated many times on this planet, like gestation. I am well along in my second pregnancy; I’ve done this before. But I can’t keep my hands off my kicking belly, and I can’t pull my eyes from that tadpole’s two new legs. The sperm-shaped tadpole will unfold into a frog, as legs and feet stretch from a sleek round body. Reverse amputation. Transformation. Those who can only swim will soon leap and breathe air. We begin wet, swimming, tethered to a woman’s body. We breathe through her lungs, while our lungs lie folded like a butterfly’s wings in the chrysalis. Our hearts shortcut the flow of blood, skipping the lungs, in nearly the two-chambered way of fish. We will abandon this way of pumping with the umbilical cord—at birth—when we seal the windows in our hearts to make four chambers and arrive on dry land. “Breaking waters,” writer Terry Tempest Williams notes. “We are born from what is fluid, not fixed. Water is essential. A mother is essential.” After birth, we hold all of our water inside our skin. In Chewacla Creek, the water holds me while my body holds my child suspended in fluid. A few thin, complex tissue layers separate the creek water soaking my abdomen from the water bathing my child. We swim. I feel continuous with the life inside me and life surrounding us. In some way, I have arrived where I began. Illustration by Emily Wallace

THE 2015 DOROTHEA LANGE–PAUL TAYLOR PRIZE

Photographer Michel Huneault Wins for Post Mégantic

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University has awarded the twenty-third Lange-Taylor Prize to Canadian documentary photographer Michel Huneault for Post Mégantic, his project on a small town in Quebec that was the site of Canada’s deadliest train disaster in 150 years. The $10,000 prize 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. Like Lange and Taylor, and all serious documentarians, the competitive applicants to this prize have a point of view derived from an in-depth understanding of place, history, and the current situation, in concert with a personal relationship to the proposed work. Ultimately, their commitment is to use documentary expression to motivate the thinking and reflection of others. A meditation on loss and mourning, Post Mégantic incorporates photographs, videos, oral histories, and installations to tell the story of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, where on the night of July 6, 2013, a cargo train from North Dakota carrying nearly 8 million liters of shale oil derailed and exploded, killing 47 people and effectively destroying the town. From a population of 6,000, one out of every 128 citizens died. The explosion leveled most of the town center, creating a 400-meterwide area that is still inaccessible. “After fourteen visits and seventy days on the ground, up to mid-July 2014,” Huneault writes in his project statement, “I had completed a symbolic one year of mourning with the community. . . . My collaborations with people in Mégantic echo through the work, which has become an active fragment of evolving collective memory in the creation of oral histories, videos, photographs, and installations. The collection of documents has allowed me to develop immersive experiences adapted to medium, whether text or transmedia, that multiply each individual component’s impact. “I’ll keep going back—hopefully to find more light and

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healing—but also up the train track toward North Dakota, to where this oil and darkness originated. Today, although Mégantic’s center remains flattened and contaminated while the criminal investigation continues, the tracks were the first thing to be rebuilt and train traffic has resumed. While no oil is transiting here, it is passing through other North American towns.” Huneault, a freelance photographer based in Montreal, has a background in international development and conflict resolution. His graduate research at the University of California– Berkeley included an exploration of the role of collective memory in large-scale traumatic recovery. He describes Post Mégantic as a “requiem to the victims,” a documentary narrative about life, death, and the fragility of existence that he hopes will evoke for viewers of the work a “visceral sense of empathy, an appreciation based on introspection, imagination, and compassion.” The members of the Lange-Taylor Prize Committee also awarded an Honorable Mention to Alice Leora Briggs and Julián Cardona for Abecedario de Juárez and a Special Recognition to Serge J-F. Levy for The Fire in the Freezer. Submissions for the 2016 Lange-Taylor Prize will be accepted from February 1 to May 9. ocumentarystudies.duke.edu > Awards > y dDorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize

ABOVE: Twenty-one hours after the derailment, July 6, 2013; photograph by 2015 Lange-Taylor Prize winner Michel Huneault, from Post Mégantic. OPPOSITE, top to bottom: CDS instructor Kelly Alexander; photograph by Ollie Wilson. Vanilla layer cake and mandel brot, made by students in Alexander’s Our Culinary Cultures class; photographs by Tammy Lin and Kelly Alexander, respectively.

Undergraduate Education Kelly Alexander Puts Food Studies on the Front Burner

Among the gifted instructors we’re fortunate to have at the Center for Documentary Studies, Kelly Alexander comes with added benefits. If you walk into CDS and get a whiff of perfect fried chicken or the best chocolate cake you’ve ever had, she and the students in her food-writing class are working their magic. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a taste. Since 2007, Alexander’s documentary studies class, Our Culinary Cultures, has fed, enlightened, and inspired scores of undergraduates (and grad students as well). Along the way, she has taught Documentary Writing and serves as the faculty advisor for Duke Bite, the university’s student-run food magazine. She is also pursuing a PhD in Duke’s Cultural Anthropology department in order to sharpen her focus on the anthropology of food. “For the past eight years, [Kelly’s] influence on her students has traveled widely and deeply— intellectually, personally, and emotionally,” says CDS undergraduate education director Christopher Sims. Students describe the longtime food journalist as dedicated, passionate, funny, real; dynamic, warm, caring, exacting. A mentor who challenges them to dig deep, and whose mentorship extends beyond writing to complicating and expanding the ways they think. Not surprisingly, her student evaluations have landed her in the top 5 percent of undergraduate instructors at Duke a total of five times. Sims says, “Kelly’s students often write her after they graduate to tell her she was right—that being able to be a more expressive writer is useful in any career there is; that it’s worth their time to learn a few techniques that will help in making their writing stand out; that being an engaged and active reader will help them express themselves more powerfully.” Our Culinary Cultures applies a documentary approach to the world of food and its inhabitants, “from the men who sling eggs at Las Vegas diners to the farmers who raise North Carolina hogs.” Through extensive fieldwork and deep personal stories, students examine how food is raised, prepared, and presented, and explore the key biographical, economic, religious, and other truths that connect what we eat to who we are. “I came in with two basic ‘musts,’” Alexander says of her pre-hire discussions with Tom Rankin and Charlie Thompson, then–CDS director and undergraduate education director, respectively. “I must have a place where I can cook with the students, both for them and as a group, because it’s cruel and unusual punishment to expect anyone to think about food for any given period of time without eating it; and I wanted to run the class like a real writers’ workshop, as collaboratively as possible. We quickly came up with a class that involved fieldwork and ethnographic documentation, and that was also, and most importantly, fun. Some students are surprised to discover that the class is actually quite a lot of work; but I promise them, and I think I’m good to my word, that it’s going to be a really fun journey, and that they will surprise themselves. And they almost always do, which is my great joy.”

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EDUCATION

Additional kudos to two CDS instructors who received university-wide teaching awards last spring: Duke professor and CDS cofounder Alex Harris received the Robert B. Cox Award in Social Sciences for “a commitment to teaching over time and a willingness to invest substantial effort in meeting the school’s instructional needs.” And CDS undergraduate education director Christopher Sims received the Betsy Alden Service-Learning Award for “outstanding commitment to the ideals of service-learning.”

y documentarystudies.duke.edu/classes/undergraduate-education Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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Continuing Education Fall 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, a structured sequence of courses culminating in a final seminar and the completion of a substantial project. In December 2015, six students completed their final projects and presented them to the public at a certificate ceremony held in the Full Frame Theater. Filmmaker Randolph Benson, the seminar instructor, said that the projects “represent a true cross-section of the documentary arts—film portraits, audio, and issue-based docs—and challenge us to examine our preconceptions and to consider what binds us to our fellow man and woman, and what keeps us apart.” Congratulations to our graduates, and best wishes for future work. Self-Made | Video Christopher D. Lusk is a filmmaker and native of Bluefield, West Virginia. His documentary short, Self-Made, is about New Bern, North Carolina, resident and metal artist Martin Kampitch, who with his “self-developed, blue-collar style” has created works of art that are found across the world. The Forgotten Filipino Pioneers of the Delano Grape Strike | Audio Lisa Morehouse is an award-winning public radio reporter whose work can be heard on various NPR shows, The World, The California Report, and KCRW’s Independent Producer Project. For her series California Foodways, Morehouse is reporting county by county, exploring the intersections of food, culture, economics, history, and labor. Her audio project, The Forgotten Filipino Pioneers of the Delano Grape Strike, explores “one of the most significant movements in modernday labor history”—the Farmworker Movement that started in California’s Central Valley fifty years ago. “You’ve probably heard of the United Farm Workers and know the name Cesar Chavez, but before he became the embodiment of the strike and international boycott, a small group of Filipino farmworkers walked off the fields. Now people in the small town of Delano and across California are determined to share this rarely told history.” The Exceptionally Extraordinary Emporium | Video Lindsey Phillips is a documentary filmmaker and editor based in New Orleans; she is also the director of Cinema Reset, an experimental film and new media initiative partnered with the New Orleans Film Festival. Her most recent work includes directing and editing Welcome to the Music Box: The Roving Village Orchestra and editing short documentary films for The New Yorker and Time Magazine. In The Exceptionally Extraordinary Emporium, Lindsey explores Jefferson Vari-

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ety, “a family-owned fabric and craft store that is the epicenter of all things costuming in New Orleans. The store is a place of both raw goods and social congregation, where a diverse array of the New Orleans community can be found.” The film follows characters as they buy materials, create their costumes, and prepare for the 2015 carnival season, offering a deeper look into the New Orleans culture of costuming and masquerading. First Fight | Video Jon Ricker is an aspiring filmmaker living in Durham, North Carolina. First Fight marks his second film, “a glimpse into the life of Durham native Charles Estep and his dream to become a professional cage fighter.” Jon made his first film, 1280, as a student in the CDS Continuing Education program’s Anytown, USA class in 2014, which that year focused on Scotland Neck, North Carolina. The Muralist | Video Ryan Stone is an elementary educator in the Durham, North Carolina, public schools who “began playing with a video camera at a young age and today enjoys creating short films that highlight the people and places in [my] life.” He enjoys making videos with his students to create a sense of community in the classroom and school. Ryan’s short film The Muralist highlights the artistic process and talents of Michael Brown, an established artist in the Triangle region. The film starts in Brown’s studio and then moves to the street to follow the progression of one of his murals. Los Taxistas | Video Alan Young is a Chapel Hill, North Carolina–based entrepreneur and an aspiring writer. While doing research for a novel set in Mexico, he “took many taxis and got to know drivers who welcomed [me] warmly and taught [me] about their country.” His film Los Taxistas rides along with four Mexican taxi drivers who reveal intimate, and often poignant, thoughts about their lives and profession. Certificate in Documentary Arts projects

y cdsporch.org/archives/25365

Learn more about the Certificate in Documentary Arts, including the distance-learning option

y cdscourses.org > Certificate in Documentary Arts

CDS’s Continuing Education offerings are continually refreshed with new classes, and included in the current mix for spring 2016 are six new courses in multimedia, writing, and photography. Documenting Durham, combining writing and photography, will be co-taught by freelance writer Christina Cooke (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and, recently, The New York Times) and photographer Kate Medley. “We were propelled by what’s happening around us in Durham,” says Medley. “We both landed here in this era of great transition, influx, development, inclusion, and exclusion. We thought bringing the two mediums together would be a good way to capture that.” Students will dig deeply into a chosen part of the city, telling its story in pictures and in writing (they can also add audio or video, if they bring those skills). The online course True Story Workshop is designed for students working on nonfiction writing projects. The instructor is Erin Sroka, who’s been published in The New New South and Oxford American. Her approach to documentary is closer to essay writing than conventional journalism; she cites Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts) as an influence. “We’ll think about how to use research and fact in a way that makes a compelling story,” she says. “Documentary writing allows you to preserve other people’s voices. It allows for a sort of collage approach to writing, in which you can leave in bigger chunks of scene, and of characters presenting themselves as who they are, on their own, without the weight of narration.” (As an aside, students interested in collage in its more traditional form, using glue and stretched canvas, can sign up for Documentary Collage, a new course by Hal Goodtree.) The slate of weeklong summer institutes also includes one new entry in 2016. The Digital Publishing Institute, led by The New New South publisher Andrew Park, will immerse students in all aspects of producing an online publication. “There’s been a proliferation of tools, most of which are free, that allow individuals to create digital publications and stories that are every bit as professional as what big magazines and websites use,” says Park. “That’s very empowering for independent authors and photographers and multimedia artists.” The institute will run concurrently with the Photography Institute and the Master Class in Nonfiction Writing, creating opportunities for cross-fertilization between the various media.

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New Classes

— Marc Maximov, CDS Continuing Education coordinator

OPPOSITE AND ABOVE, top to bottom (from the following projects by 2015 CDS Certificate in Documentary Arts graduates): The Exceptionally Extraordinary Emporium by Lindsey Phillips. Self-Made by Christopher D. Lusk. The Forgotten Filipino Pioneers of the Delano Grape Strike by Lisa Morehouse. First Fight by Jon Ricker. The Muralist by Ryan Stone. Los Taxistas by Alan Young.

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts 2016 Thesis Exhibition

duke

mfa eda

A unique initiative, the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFA|EDA) at Duke University couples experimental visual practice with the documentary arts in a rigorous two-year program. The successes of the Class of 2016 will be celebrated this spring in MFA | EDA 2016, the program’s annual thesis exhibition, on view from March 25–April 24. Featuring site-specific projects by sixteen graduating students, the exhibition will feature 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.

Kristina Baker

Roxanne Campbell

Alex Cunningham

Tamika Galanis

Jon-Sesrie Goff

Qathi Hart

Kihae Kim

You-Jin Kim

Michaela O’Brien

Jason Oppliger

Dan Smith

Christopher Thomas

Beatriz Wallace

Wei Wang

Kyle Wilkinson

Michael Anthony Williams

The MFA | EDA 2016 thesis exhibition is made possible with support from the Center for Documentary Studies; the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies; the Program in Arts of the Moving Image; and the Office of the Vice Provost of the Arts at Duke University.

y mfaeda.duke.edu

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Other News Full Frame 2016

Duke’s Year in Pictures

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies and one of the premier nonfiction cinema showcases in the world, marks its nineteenth anniversary this year. The 2016 festival will be held April 7–10 in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Passes go on sale February 11; passholders enjoy a host of special benefits, including the opportunity to buy tickets to their preferred screenings before the general public. Tickets to individual screenings and other events go on sale April 1. Film descriptions and the festival schedule will be available in March; check the Full Frame website for more information.

At 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 2015, CDS wrapped up a unique yearlong collaboration with Duke Photography. Document Duke 360° was a crowd-sourced project that invited students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members to contribute to a visual conversation about Duke University, with Photos of the Day selected from 2,306 images submitted over the course of 2015. Duke’s vice president of public affairs and government relations, Mike Schoenfeld, from a story in Duke Today: “Not only were the images exquisite, powerful, and in many cases surprising, but the engagement of so many members of the Duke community made Document Duke 360° even more meaningful.” And in a 2015 retrospective message, Duke president Richard Brodhead recommended the project: “You’ll see a year in the life of our university . . . in all its quirky energy and creativity, in bursts of solitary focus and communal joy.” View the photo archive on the project’s website and Instagram account.

y fullframefest.org Storymakers: Durham CDS audio director John Biewen was one of fifteen radio producers nationwide tapped for “Localore: Finding America,” a new storytelling initiative from the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR). Producers pair with a local radio or TV station to create “new storytelling models with and for communities that public media doesn’t typically reach.” Biewen and North Carolina Public Radio WUNC will collaborate on “Storymakers: Durham.” A series of conversations here in Durham, North Carolina, one of the most racially balanced cities in the South, will raise fundamental questions about who we are as a community. In spring 2016, fifteen individuals from these Story Circles will be trained to shape and produce radio stories that address those questions, exploring divisions of race, class, and opportunity. Look for more information in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Document. (In the meanwhile, listen to Scene on Radio, the CDS podcast created and produced by John Biewen; sceneonradio.org.)

y document360.duke.edu > Archive y Instagram.com/documentduke360

Day 190: July 9, 2015, Duke Chapel in blue. Photograph by Tim Bounds from the Document Duke 360° project.

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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WINTER 2016 | THE CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY