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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 Art Director: Bonnie Campbell Communications Coordinator and Document Editor: Elizabeth Phillips Digital Arts and Publishing Intern: Tory Jeffay 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
SPRING 2014
FEATURED 3 My White Friends An exhibition of photos by Myra Greene contemplates racial identity MFA | EDA 2014 6–7 MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Thesis Exhibition of the Graduating Class of 2014 EDUCATION 8 Undergraduate Education Three New Documentary Studies Classes Continuing Education Fall 2013 Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates New Distance Learning Program for Certificate Students
AWARDS AND BOOKS 10 Deadlines and Recent Publications OTHER NEWS 11 Countdown to Full Frame Documentary Essay Prizewinner to Visit Duke CDS Alum Wins Sundance Directing Award FRIENDS OF CDS 11
COVER: MG, Chicago, Illinois, 2009. TOP: HD, New York, New York, 2008. BOTTOM: The Ws, Chicago, Illinois, 2008. OPPOSITE: DF, Belfast, Maine, 2008. PAGE 4: TOP: RD, Rochester, New York, 2009. BOTTOM: AG, Rochester, New York, 2007. PAGE 5: TOP: KJ, Canadaigua, New York, 2007. BOTTOM: KM, Rochester, New York, 2009. Photographs by Myra Greene.
Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY MYRA GREENE
MY WHITE FRIENDS
Juanita Kreps Gallery | March 10–May 17, 2014 | Artist’s Talk & Book Signing | April 9, 6–9 p.m.
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yra Greene has frequently used the human body in her work— primarily black and brown bodies, often her own— to explore issues of difference, beauty, and memory. Responding to the mistreatment of New Orleans’s black residents after Hurricane Katrina, for example, she made a series of ambrotypes showing close-ups of her facial features. The images draw on taxonomic photography of the nineteenth century and racially coded ideas that one’s physiognomy determined one’s character. Over time, Greene says, she “struggled with the concept of commodified blackness and how an art object helps to promote that idea.” In conversations with white friends about the commodification of race, she realized that they had very different notions than her own. In one pivotal exchange, a friend remarked that he really didn’t think about whiteness at all. Greene left that night thinking about how one could lack consciousness about one’s racial identity: “I had never considered this was possible. In the end his position made absolute sense. Whiteness is the dominant part of popular culture; it’s marketed and fed back to us as the definition of ‘normal.’ Everything else is organized around that normal.”
My White Friends was born out of that conversation. The project’s “racial identity portraits” are co-constructions Greene made with her friends that capture the individual characteristics that make them feel decidedly “white.” As she puts it, “These people are not caught in an act by the camera but instead are manicured into a space and provided an opportunity to respond to the idea of being imaged for their race. Some found it amusing; it caused great anxiety for others.” Greene says that some people see the images as mundane, because at first glance they “appear as something one sees every day. But if you shift your view a bit, they call into question a lot of bigger concerns about how we describe and then think about racial identity.” Her goal in bringing whiteness to the forefront in this way is thoughtful dialogue. “I want conversations, not categories.” Myra Greene’s quotes are edited from “Conversation Starter,” an interview with Tate Shaw that appears in the book My White Friends, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2012.
Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu
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For a slideshow of images
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Duke University’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts will celebrate the successes of the Class of 2014 this spring with the program’s annual thesis exhibition, which will be on view from March 21 to April 18. Featuring site-specific projects by thirteen graduating students, MFA | EDA 2014 presents a tremendous range of work—film and video, installation, photography, performance, sound, and multimedia—installed over the course of four weeks at venues on campus and around Durham. The kickoff event is Friday, March 21, 5–7 p.m., at the Power Plant building at the American Tobacco Campus in downtown Durham. MFA | EDA 2014 continues in March and April with a series of openings, film premieres, artist talks, performances, and screenings at sites including The Carrack Modern Art, Cassilhaus, SPECTRE Arts, the Power Plant Gallery, and the Fredric Jameson Gallery. Congratulations to the Class of 2014!
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8 Beginning March 17, check mfaeda2014.org for a detailed schedule of events, venues, and information on the artists and works in the exhibition.
1. Runa A | 2. Kristin Bedford | 3. Amanda Berg | 4. Rachel Boillot | 5. Brenda Burmeister | 6. Malina Chavez | 7. E. E. 8. Sarah Garrahan | 9. Caitlin M. Kelly | 10. Jing Niu | 11. John Rash | 12. Shan Shan | 13. Jennifer Stratton MFA | EDA 2014 is 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. Additional support is generously provided by Ellen Cassilly and Frank Konhaus and the Cassilhaus Collection, The Carrack Modern Art, and SPECTRE Arts.
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EDUCATION
UNDERGRADUATE New Documentary Studies Classes
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hree new undergraduate classes made their debut at the Center for Documentary Studies this spring: CDS director Wesley Hogan is teaching Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: Documenting Activist Women in the South. Students are examining the contentious history of female-led social movements—campaigns to end racial profiling and improve public education, for instance—and using oral history, archival research, and cultural production to explore ways to document and create narratives of women’s social activism. Hogan has challenged students to question, “Who has the power to shape the stories that get told? Who does not have that power? Where does that power come from?” Students in CDS writer-in-residence Duncan Murrell’s Documentary Publishing course are editing, designing, and promoting Vanishing Point, a new digital documentary magazine. “I am truly intimidated by this class,” Murrell writes, “and being a little intimidated by your students is a good place to be as a teacher.” At the time of this writing, the class had already received seventy-five submissions in every documentary medium. “The thing we’re most looking forward to doing is presenting to the world, as widely as possible, the best of the best documentary work being made by students at Duke and CDS.” Lehman Brady Visiting Professor Mike Wiley has “singlehandedly and deftly added performance to CDS’s repertoire of ways to document life,” writes CDS undergraduate director Charlie Thompson. Wiley’s new course, Acting Out Black History, explores a powerful, experimental form of storytelling—documentary theater. Students in the class—from both the undergraduate and Continuing Education programs—are conducting oral histories and archival research of African American life and then transforming this research into documentary theater performances.
TOP: Mike Wiley in Brown v. Board of Education. MIDDLE: Wesley Hogan in front of the CDS community garden. Photograph by Christopher Sims. BOTTOM: Self-portrait by Duncan Murrell. OPPOSITE: Still from Southern Psychic by Chip Howell.
y documentarystudies.duke.edu/classes/undergraduate-education Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org
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Fall 2013 Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates People of all ages and backgrounds enroll in the Continuing Education program at the Center for Documentary Studies. Some choose to pursue a Certificate in Documentary Arts, which culminates in a substantial documentary project—works of photography, film and video, audio, multimedia, and writing. The following six students in the Fall 2013 Final Seminar in Documentary Studies, taught by filmmaker and longtime CDS instructor Randolph Benson, presented their final projects to the public and received their certificates during an event at the Full Frame Theater in December. Jim Adams grew up in a small town in Indiana and studied at the University of Indianapolis and Purdue University. He moved to North Carolina in 1986 and worked as an architectural illustrator before studying art and blacksmithing at the John C. Campbell Folk School and Penland School of Crafts. Since 1999 he has worked as a painter and sculptor. Jim’s audio project, Gaining Balance, was born out of his struggle to make sense of a deep personal loss. The piece was created from interviews with his brother and father and from his own audio journals.
Bill Wagner grew up in upstate New York and has lived in North Carolina for most of the last twenty-three years. He earned a graduate degree in nurse anesthesia in 1995. Wagner’s passion for documentary work led him to study at CDS, where he was a certificate student for nine years. After Grandma Died is his video exploring the long history of discord between his mother and grandmother, and the reasons behind the final rift—Bill’s mother stopped seeing her parents entirely at the age of forty. To view and listen to some of the certificate students’ final cdsporch.org/archives/21145 projects
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Distance Certificate in Documentary Arts CDS’s Continuing Education director, April Walton, describes the program’s new distance-learning option:
Theo Martins is a freelance photographer from Brazil zwho is now based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His video, One Day, Never Mind, captures a day in the life of the rock band Nirvana when they performed at Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, in one of their last moments as a band unknown to the mainstream. At the time, the fall of 1991, Nirvana barely registered on the rock scene, but they had just released the now-legendary album Nevermind.
For thirteen years, summer institutes at the Center for Documentary Studies—classes in audio, video, documentary studies, writing, and photography—have attracted students from across the country and around the world. Some out-of-town students have returned year after year. All of our courses count toward the Certificate in Documentary Arts, and many of these students have felt motivated to engage in the certificate program. Over time, this group has grown and created the demand for a more structured process for non-local students. We formally launched the two-year Distance Certificate in Documentary Arts in fall 2013, consisting of a mix of both onsite and online classes, a balance that we feel is the best way to bring non-local students into the CDS community. A weeklong, summer intensive version of the required Introduction to Documentary Studies course, the cornerstone of our certificate program, exposes students to the many different approaches and philosophies concerning documentary work. To complement the intensive introductory course, we inaugurated a Doc U Arts Retreat, which takes place each winter. It is designed specifically as a touchstone for our distance students, a time for them to come together in person to get energized, share works in progress, work closely with instructors, and forge plans for completing their projects. In addition to the introductory course, a variety of online and condensed weekend-long versions of on-site courses count toward the Distance Certificate. Requirements for the two-year Distance Certificate in Documentary Arts include:
Martha Moore was a media producer in Nashville, Tennessee, for many years before family ties brought her back to her native North Carolina. Her biopic follows Ellie Kinnaird’s remarkable journey from life as a 1950s suburban housewife and mother to her role as a nationally known progressive political voice in the South. Empowered in the 1970s by the women’s liberation movement, Kinnaird became a prominent attorney and a courageous advocate for the environment, education, social justice, and campaign finance reform, serving four terms as mayor of Carrboro, North Carolina, and eight terms as a North Carolina State Senator. The Honorable Ellie Kinnaird follows her in what would become her final, tumultuous year in public office.
s The Intensive Introduction to Documentary Studies in the first year, offered in the summer at CDS; s Two Doc U Arts sessions, in the first and second year, held in the winter at CDS and other Durham sites; s At least two elective courses, which can be any combination of online classes, weekend workshops, and summer intensives; s A full year of “distance mentorship” with an instructor after fieldwork has been completed, the fruit of which will be: s A final project, completed at the end of the second year, in any medium (including audio, video, photography, writing, and multimedia).
Carol Edmonds grew up in rural Guilford County, North Carolina. After retiring from a career as a computer systems analyst, she got involved in photography and videography through classes at CDS. For her video, Meet the People, she traveled from Asheville to Morehead City, North Carolina, interviewing folks who are trying to get the medical attention they need. Her documentary is about some of the 560,000 qualified North Carolinians who have been denied Medicaid benefits by the North Carolina General Assembly. Chip Howell began working in video while still in high school and continued as an undergraduate at East Carolina University. He is currently an independent producer of short corporate videos for use on the Internet. Chip became intrigued by the size and scope of the psychicservices industry, and the approximately 27 percent of an estimated eighty-thousand practitioners nationwide who work in the Southeast. His video, Southern Psychic, offers an up-close look at of one psychic who believes her work improves people’s lives.
y cdscourses.org Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu
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AWARDS & BOOKS Recent Publications CDS Books at the Center for Documentary Studies are works of creative exploration by writers and photographers who convey new ways of seeing and understanding the diverse range of human experience. Recent releases include a book described as “flamboyance immortalized” by the New York Times. Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene by 2012 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography winner Gerard H. Gaskin was co-published with Duke University Press. Our Documentary Arts and Culture series with the University of North Carolina Press includes other highly acclaimed books, most recently One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia and Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II. For more information about these and other CDS Books: documentarystudies.duke.edu/books
y Current & Upcoming Prizes Lange-Taylor Prize The Lange-Taylor Prize supports documentary artists—individuals or teams—who are involved in extended, ongoing fieldwork projects that rely on and exploit the interplay of words and images in the creation and presentation of their work. Words can be taken in a broad sense: audio pieces, graphic novels, edited oral histories, creative narratives, and poetry are all welcomed. The winning individual or team receives $10,000, a solo exhibition at CDS, and inclusion in the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Library. Submissions accepted from February 1 to May 7, 2014
John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards Now in its twenty-fourth year, the John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards, established in 1989 by the Center for Documentary Studies, are granted to undergraduates studying at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to help them conduct sustained work on summer-long documentary fieldwork projects. Winners receive up to $2,000, and their projects are included in the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Library. Submissions accepted from February 1 to March 3, 2014
2014 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography JUDGE: Sandra S. Phillips, SFMOMA The Center for Documentary Studies and the Honickman Foundation’s First Book Prize in Photography honors work that is visually compelling, that bears witness, and that has integrity of purpose. The winning photographer receives a grant of $3,000, publication of a book of photography, and inclusion in a website devoted to presenting the work of the prizewinners. The biennial competition is open to North American photographers of any age who have never published a book-length work and who use their cameras for creative exploration, whether of places, people, or communities; of the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it; of objective or subjective realities. Submissions accepted from June 15 to September 15, 2014 firstbookprizephoto.com
y For more information about CDS awards and prizes: y documentarystudies.duke.edu/awards Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org
TOP: Dismantling the Ushagat. Photograph by Jen Kinney. MIDDLE: Baptism, First A.B. Church, 1983. Photograph by Paul Kwilecki. BOTTOM: Kelly at Douglas House, Jersey City, 1995. Photograph by Gerard H. Gaskin. OPPOSITE: Photograph by UNC-Wilmington Film Studies Department.
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Countdown to Full Frame The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies, marks its seventeenth anniversary this year. Passes may still be available for the four-day event in downtown Durham, April 3–6; 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 March 27; film descriptions and the festival schedule will be available March 13.
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Doc Essay Prizewinner Rachel Andrews to Visit Duke The CDS Documentary Essay Prize honors the best in documentary photography and writing in alternating years. The 2013 inaugural prize competition was awarded in writing and went to Cork City, Ireland–based writer and cultural critic Rachel Andrews for her essay “A New Wilderness at the Maze,” in which she explores the meaning of the demolition of Ireland’s infamous Maze prison, the maximum-security facility where paramilitary prisoners were incarcerated during the “Troubles.” Andrews will be coming to the Duke campus April 16–18 for a visit co-sponsored by CDS and the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute. She’ll be speaking with students, including those in a House Course on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Her public presentation on April 16 will include photographs by Dara McGrath, who worked with Andrews and others on a 2008 collaborative art project on the Maze. Read an excerpt from “A New Wilderness at the Maze” in the Winter 2014 issue of Document:
y cdsporch.org/archives/21071
CDS Alum Ryan White Wins Directing Award at Sundance
In January, Duke University/CDS alum Ryan White (’04) and Ben Cotner, won the Directing Award/U.S. Documentary at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival for The Case Against 8, which follows the legal battle to defeat California’s Proposition 8 revoking same-sex marriage rights in the state. The film, described by The Hollywood Reporter as “a stirring civil rights film that is both cogent and emotionally charged,” illuminates the human side of a much-publicized news story as it follows the
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plaintiffs’ five-year journey to the Supreme Court. The Case Against 8 will air on HBO this June. Ryan made his first short films at CDS, graduating with a Certificate in Documentary Studies. His first feature documentary, the award-winning Pelada, was co-directed by fellow certificate graduates Gwendolyn Oxenham and Rebekah Fergusson (Rebekah was co-producer on The Case Against 8). Good Ol’ Freda, his 2013 feature, screened at numerous film festivals, including the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, before its theatrical release in fall 2013.
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online donation at documentarystudies.duke. edu/donate or you may send a check payable to “Center for Documentary Studies” to Friends of CDS, 1317 W. Pettigrew Street, Durham, NC 27705. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Lynn
McKnight, Associate Director for Programs and Development, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University: 919-660-3663 or docstudies@duke.edu.
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