CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY
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winter 2013 LaToya Ruby Frazier Photographer’s Campaign for Braddock Hospital Illustrates Her Hometown’s Struggle
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Sixteenth Annual Event, April 4–7, 2013
“Little War on the Prairie” CDS Radio Doc Explores History and Memory
One Place Paul Kwilecki’s Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
Continuing Education Spring 2013 Preview: Gift Certificates, Discounts, New Classes
+ awards EVENTS COURSES MORE
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: Tom Rankin Associate Director for Programs and Development: Lynn McKnight Publishing Director: Alexa Dilworth Art Director: Bonnie Campbell Communications Coordinator: Elizabeth Phillips Publishing Intern: Joel Mora 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.
Front Cover, top to bottom: 1) A Dakota dancer at the annual Mahkato Wacipi (Pow Wow) in Mankato, Minnesota, September 21, 2012 (detail). Photograph by Caroline Yang. 2) A map created by Tanzanian Literacy Through Photography student Joshua Msavillah. 3) Courtney Reid-Eaton and Dexter Romweber after their performance at Professor Diablo’s True Revue IV. Photograph by Kristin Bedford. 4) Corporate Exploitation and Economic Inequality (detail; detail also on contents page). Photograph by Abigail DeVille. CONTENTS PAGE: Photograph by Documentary Street Photography workshop participant Kate Medley. BELOW, left to right: Roland Kirk, saxophones; Paul Bley, piano. Photograph by W. Eugene Smith. 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival attendees wait in line before a screening (detail). Photograph by Joel Mora. LaToya Ruby Frazier. Photograph by Mike Vorassi.
winter 2013 HIGHLIGHTS December 14
January 15
February 12
The Jazz Loft Project
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Campaign for Braddock Hospital
Traveling Exhibition Opens at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona
Passes Go on Sale
Artist’s Talk with LaToya Ruby Frazier
Please check the online CDS calendar for a full events listing: documentarystudies.duke.edu > events
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featured
LaToya Ruby Frazier Center for Documentary Studies Exhibit Illustrates Photographer’s Hometown Stand
Now thirty-one, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier began to document herself and her family as a teenager; her recent work extends that intimate circle to include her hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania. The small town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh was a thriving industrial hub for close to a century, the site of steel baron Andrew Carnegie’s first mill (still in operation). With the collapse of the American steel industry in the 1970s, Braddock went into a precipitous decline—over time, a mass exodus of people and businesses and plunging real estate values—from which it has yet to recover.
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One of the most recent victims is Braddock Hospital, which had served its community since 1906. The hospital merged with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in 1996, but in 2010, claiming that the hospital was losing money and underutilized, UPMC demolished the historic six-story building despite intense local controversy, challenges from the Braddock Council president, and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights. A new hospital was built in an affluent suburb that a majority of community residents cannot easily reach. “Braddock Hospital was our largest employer,” says Frazier. “Today our community does not have adequate health care, emergency care, or employment opportunities.” The struggle for economic opportunity and access to health care by Braddock’s marginalized residents in the wake of the hospital’s closing, particularly senior citizens and African Americans, inspired Frazier’s work in her 2011 series Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital), now on view at the Center for Documentary Studies. The series includes documentary photographs as well as repurposed ads from a campaign by the Levi’s clothing company that drew on Braddock’s industrial history. A 2012 article on Time magazine’s photo blog, Lightbox, “When the Personal Turns Political,” says, “Frazier was left stunned by what she saw as the irony and greed of the ads,” with their “calls for the ‘New Pioneers’ to ‘Go Forth’ to new opportunities in Braddock and invigorate the town’s growth,” and exhortations that “Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important.” Frazier began editing the ads with comments—her own and those of other community members—and photographed them. She then transformed those images, along with her photos of citizen protests to save Braddock Hospital, into black-and-white photolithographs and screenprints that reference early–twentieth century advertising and social documentary. Frazier dedicated Campaign for Braddock Hospital to Braddock Council President Jesse Brown and the community activist group Save Our Community Hospital. The series debuted at the 2012 Whitney Biennial in New York City.
Exhibit and Talk Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital) is on view in the Kreps Gallery at the Center for Documentary Studies through Saturday, February 23, 2013. The CDS exhibit, which opened November 19, features Frazier’s twelve 17 x 14–inch black-and-white photolithographs and screenprints from the series as well as a video projection by Frazier and her mother, DETOX (Braddock U.P.M.C.). The 2011 video concerns health issues in the industrial landscape of Braddock, Pennsylvania, in a community with limited access to health care after the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center demolished historic Braddock Hospital in 2010. Frazier will give an artist’s talk at CDS on February 12, 2013, followed by a reception.
CLOSE-UP The following is excerpted from a Q&A between LaToya Ruby Frazier and Martha Rosler that ran in the Whitney Biennial’s 2012 program. The Museum of Modern Art has described Rosler (1943– ) as “one of the most influential artists of her generation . . . whose artistic practice, teaching, and writing continue to influence succeeding generations. Rosler makes ‘art about the commonplace, art that illuminates social life,’ examining the everyday by means of photography, performance, video, and installation.” LaToya Ruby Frazier: In my new series, Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital), I have taken a stance with the community activist group Save Our Community Hospital and proudly follow the example of Tony Buba, the great documentary filmmaker of Braddock, Pennsylvania, in a struggle and fight for economic justice regarding health care, employment, redevelopment, and corporate exploitation to name a few. I often feel conflicted as to what role I should be playing, as it feels I play four to five different roles as artist, educator, mentor, daughter, and citizen of Braddock. Lately I am trying to understand the possibilities of activism and what it means when people ask me if I am going to become an activist. Martha, as a vocal artist, writer, and cultural critic, have these modes of activism satisfied or fulfilled the concerns you have raised in your various projects? For example, with regard to your project If You Lived Here . . . [a major multimedia project on homelessness and housing] is the collectivity of all this information that has been disseminated to those who have access to your book If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism (1991) enough to cause social change or to serve the disenfranchised? Martha Rosler: Nothing is ever “enough,” but one keeps trying. But asking art to be directly instrumental is, in my opinion, generally a mistake. We all fill at least some of the roles you mention, but if we can keep our minds on the citizen element, we would be adding something vital and critical to the practice of art. Joining with the aims and campaigns of grassroots groups is as good as it gets, but I do think one ought not become a functionary of any group that one works with, except in very specific instances. Work with them, not for them. Though that would be honorable, too, I believe that art contributes more through retaining a degree of autonomy—but it would take more space than we have here to spell that out without sounding like I’m simply arguing for precious individualism. A certain ambivalence is part of the territory. It is always in the minds of artists to participate and even meddle in public events, which is why artists are so central to the Occupy movement: it’s all about the reinstitution of the imagination, not just in the service of trademarked artworks but of human beings.
Since 2007 LaToya Ruby Frazier has been the associate curator for the Mason Gross Galleries at Rutgers University, where she has also taught photography in the Mason Gross School of the Arts. In 2012 Frazier was appointed critic in photography at Yale University.
PAGE 3 AND ABOVE: Images from LaToya Ruby Frazier’s exhibit Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital)
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Also On View in the CDS Galleries
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Gordon Parks’s Life Magazine Segregation Series Lyndhurst Gallery | Through March 2, 2013
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enaissance man Gordon Parks would have been one hundred years old on November 30, 2012 (he died in 2006, at ninety-three). As a young man during the Depression, he joined the Civil Conservation Corps, the New Deal work relief program; played semi-professional sports; and did various odd jobs until 1942, when he joined the Library of Congress’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) as the first [Julius] Rosenwald Fellow in photography. Parks was exposed to racism and segregation in Washington, D.C., in ways he hadn’t experienced while living in Minnesota or Chicago; FSA photo team head Roy Stryker pushed him to strike back at the discrimination with his camera. In 1948, he became the first African American to work as a staff photographer for Life magazine. In his twenty years at the iconic publication, he sought to challenge stereotypes while still appealing to a larger audience. The Restraints: Open and Hidden, which opened at CDS on November 12, is an exhibition of a color photo essay of the same name that Life ran in 1956; the piece sought to show the magazine’s (largely white) audience that black people, even those living under segregation, lived full, rich, ordinary lives.
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Spreads from Gordon Parks’s September 24, 1956, Life magazine photo essay, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden”
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Full Frame 2013
very April we gather in Durham to celebrate the very best in documentary filmmaking. As Full Frame has grown in both scale and stature, we have honored our storied masters and presented new documentary artists, and we have witnessed a revolution of ever-shifting digital media. While these changes have been undeniable and transformative, the constant is also profoundly visible: documentary, in all its many forms, provides much-needed affirmation and critique of the human predicament—explorations of lives and geographies that cry out for attention—with the hope of provoking change. We live in a time when the documentary impulse is more alive than ever. The broad proliferation of work across every available medium—hybrid blends of image and sound, history and story—is merely the frame, the context for this rare and pure creation called Full Frame. For one long weekend a year we gather to watch and listen, to share and discuss, to take full advantage of the exhibition spaces of this festival. When I’m asked to explain the popularity of documentary—whether film, radio, photography, or writing—I strive to combine understanding with conjecture, while acknowledging that any attempt to explain the contemporary moment is doomed to fail. But it is my belief that even as we become increasingly global and virtual, we long for the stories and subtleties of the local and the actual. We thirst for truth and originality, stories of people and places rendered with deftness of eye, and heart. The documentary arts may well be the central, crucial instruments to understanding our current time, and ourselves. Documentary is often now or never—we can all think of countless examples of the importance of “being there.” At other times, the power of documentary expression comes to us through years of reflection, through stories seemingly exiled from our collective consciousness. We are fed and energized by works of personal, cultural, and political memory. The documentary artist is forever challenged to collect and tell the story, to recall and reconsider both individual and collective memories. To tell the hard stories is to advance our understanding of
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each other, to affirm the truth that seeing is at the core of an active and responsible present. There is nothing more relevant, powerful, and resonant as the act of reflecting on the past and the present, of finding ways to merge the local with the communal. The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival provides the time and space for all of us to do just that. “Each of us is moving,” American writer Eudora Welty said, “changing with respect to others. As we discover we remember, remembering, we discover.” —Tom Rankin, Center for Documentary Studies director, from the 2012 Full Frame program catalog
Full Frame: April 4–7, 2013 The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is an annual international event dedicated to the theatrical exhibition of nonfiction cinema. Each spring Full Frame welcomes filmmakers and film lovers from around the world to historic downtown Durham, North Carolina, for morning to midnight lineups of over a hundred films as well as discussions, panels, and southern hospitality. As Sadie Tillery, the festival’s director of programming, says, “Full Frame continues to be a very intimate festival—no shuttles, no red carpets—and at any time during the weekend, one can walk out onto the central plaza and find oneself in conversations with filmmakers and film lovers alike.” Passes go on sale January 15, 2013, via the Full Frame website and the Duke University Box Office. Passholders enjoy special benefits at the jampacked, four-day event, including the opportunity to acquire tickets to screenings before they go on sale on March 25. Film descriptions and the festival schedule will be announced on March 14.
y fullframefest.org 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Photograph by Joel Mora.
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CDS Documentary Essay Prize
The new CDS Documentary Essay Prize honors the best in documentary photography and writing in alternating years: one year, photos; one year, writing. The focus is on current or recently completed work (within the last two years) from a long-term project— fifteen images; fifteen to twenty pages of writing. The first prize competition will be for writing. The winner will receive $3,000 and take part in CDS’s Documentary Writer Speaker Series. Submissions accepted from November to January Deadline: January 31, 2013
John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards This year marks the twenty-third anniversary of the John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards, established in 1989 by the Center for Documentary Studies. CDS makes these awards to undergraduates attending 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; their projects are included in the Archive of Documentary Arts at Rubenstein Library, Duke University. Submissions accepted in February Deadline: March 1, 2013
Lange-Taylor Prize The year 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. First announced a year after the Center for Documentary Studies’ founding at Duke University, the prize was created to encourage collaboration between documentary writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor.
As Tom Rankin, director of CDS, writes of the origins of the prize, “In its breadth and range, documentary work is as important for its clarity of purpose as for its eloquence in communicating truths of human experience. . . . Dorothea Lange articulates this power, the promise of documentary expression, in a 1940 essay: ‘Documentary photography,’ she writes, ‘records the social scene of our time. It mirrors the present and documents for the future.’ The values inherent in the work and spirit of Dorothea Lange, with her husband and creative partner Paul Taylor, the innovative result of the ‘contemplation of things as they are,’ have been guiding principles for the documentary projects of all the Lange-Taylor prizewinners. “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.” In 2011, in recognition of the rapidly changing environment in which documentary artists conduct their work, we suspended the Lange-Taylor Prize competition in order to evaluate the best avenues for supporting documentary projects in the future. This year, CDS is proud to relaunch the Lange-Taylor Prize, which supports documentary artists—working alone or in teams—who are involved in extended, ongoing fieldwork projects that rely on and exploit, in intriguing and effective ways, the interplay of words and images in the creation and presentation of their work. The updated guidelines expand on the idea of “writing” by allowing words to be represented by audio or in graphic novel format. As in the past, edited oral histories, creative narratives, and poetry (that is both personal and social) are also encouraged. The winner will receive $10,000, a solo exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies, and inclusion in the Archive of Documentary Arts at Rubenstein Library, Duke University.
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Current & Upcoming
Submissions accepted in February and March Deadline: April 2, 2013 For guidelines and more information about these and other CDS awards: documentarystudies.duke.edu > Awards
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CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography The winner of the sixth biennial competition, selected by judge Deborah Willis, will be announced in January 2013. Past winners include Benjamin Lowy (Iraq | Perspectives, 2010), Jennette Williams (The Bathers, 2008), Danny Wilcox Frazier (Driftless, 2006), Steven B. Smith (The Weather and a Place to Live, 2004), and Larry Schwarm (On Fire, 2002).
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no. 63, Mère célibataire, Morocco, 2011. Photograph by former Lange-Taylor prizewinner Tiana Markova-Gold.
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ESSAY
Why I Live at the Gallery
By Duncan Murrell Center for Documentary Studies Writer in Residence
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t’s widely known, or should be, that here at CDS we work, teach, and make documentaries in an art gallery. There are two main galleries on the first floor of the Lyndhurst House, but throughout the whole building nearly every stretch of blank wall has been transformed into an exhibition space. For a writer previously used to working by himself in the sensory deserts of small rooms, this last year has been a revelation and has changed the way I work. Last year [2011], frustrated with something I was writing, I wandered downstairs into one of the galleries and spent the better part of an hour transfixed by Laura Poitras’s O’ Say Can You See, a video installation featuring slow-motion clips of New Yorkers in the hours and days after the attacks of September 11, staring up at the blank spot in the sky where the World Trade Center towers used to stand. The soundtrack had been recorded weeks later at the Yankees come-from-behind Game 4 World Series victory, slowed down until it became
(Apologies to Eudora Welty) something else, like the guttural moaning of someone hurt. Moment after moment and from the same angle, Poitras’s film recorded the faces of dozens of New Yorkers as they were transformed, frame after frame, by what they saw, or didn’t see, in the sky. What I saw in those faces was something I’d first seen—or perhaps more accurately, had first recognized—years before while looking at Auguste Rodin’s monumental sculpture The Burghers of Calais. The sculpture depicts a moment in 1347, during the Hundred Years War. During a siege, the English demanded that Calais send out six of its leading citizens, dressed in nearly nothing, bearing the keys to the city and nooses around their necks. Six men volunteered, and Rodin’s sculpture made 542 years later portrays the moment the six stepped out of the gates of the city and for the first time faced the conquerors and their likely deaths. Writing is, among other things, an exercise in connecting the previously unconnected and seeing moments of commonality that may have been overlooked. Even more, being a writer—being a documentarian, in general—means not only noticing those moments, but noting them. Noting implies greater engagement, it means you’ve found some place to keep the thing seen—in memory, on paper, on film—so that it can be revisited and considered. The novelist Marilynne Robinson, in an essay on characters, wrote something that I think applies for documentarians: “Where does this creature come from? From watching, I suppose. From reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections, as we do all the time. . . . There is a great difference, in fiction and in life, between knowing someone and knowing about someone.” What I saw in Poitras’s film was the faces of the New Yorkers, yes, but also the faces of the burghers, in which I first noted that courage is in fact a species of fear; that courage marks a human’s persistence in fear and sadness. Not persistence despite fear, as if fear were something separate that could be sequestered from courage, but persistence with fear. That day I went back up to my desk and decided that the essay I’d been writing—about the experience of immigrants in rural Chatham County, where I live—had been missing the thing Poitras had captured so simply. And so I wrote about fear and persistence. I also wrote about the atmosphere of dread and insecurity created by the attacks on the World Trade Center, manifest in part by fear of outsiders. CDS exhibitions director Courtney Reid-Eaton has given me many moments like that. Recently it was Coney Island 40 Years: Photographs by Harvey Stein that reminded me of the demotic beauty embodied in the seedy, lively county fairs of my own youth. And so this is why I live in the gallery: I am made better by it. Every day I’m presented the experiences of others, both of the artists and of their subjects, and in this way I’m barred from the solipsism of the writer, alone, in his own space endlessly contemplating himself. You can’t walk a hallway here without this confrontation with the collected works of human nature—on the walls, on the drying racks, in the air, on the editing screens. If the documentary arts are grounded in anything, it’s this outward turning toward the world. Every day I work, eat, and live in a gallery of that world. It’s a civilizing experience.
Stills from Laura Poitras’s O’ Say Can You See video installation in the Kreps Gallery at CDS. Photographs by Joel Mora.
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Katie Hyde Director, Literacy Through Photography in Arusha, Tanzania
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iteracy Through Photography (LTP) is an innovative arts and education methodology developed at the Center for Documentary Studies that encourages children to explore the world by photographing scenes from their lives and using those images as catalysts for verbal and written expression. For over two decades, Durham, North Carolina, teachers and students have taken part in LTP programs in their local schools, and LTP workshops continue to train students, educators, and artists from the U.S. and abroad. Sociologist Katie Hyde has been involved with LTP since 1998, since studying with its founder, photographer Wendy Ewald. Hyde teaches undergrad and continuing education classes at CDS, and directs an eight-week summertime LTP initiative in Arusha, Tanzania, that involves a group of undergraduate fellows sponsored by Duke University’s DukeEngage program. Katie describes the 2012 trip: During our busy summer my DukeEngage team and I worked with eight schools, offering LTP workshops for 150 teachers and collaborating with nearly 1,000 schoolchildren. As a personal highlight, I worked at Arusha Primary School with nine sixth-graders whom I trained as LTP student leaders. As leaders and spokespeople for LTP in Arusha, they will teach fellow students at their own and other schools while continuing to hone their photography and writing skills through new LTP assignments. These self-described “Super Nine Heroes” of LTP created a 120-page book that they called The LTP Book of Different Skills; the nine projects within are filled with maps, drawings, photographs, and writings that feature the places and memories special to them, the paths they take in their daily lives and the ones they envision following in the future. We started with a look at antique maps of Africa drawn by Europeans with imagery reflecting myths about African landscapes, people, and cultures. This spurred students’ interest in sharing their own knowledge of place and mapping contemporary stories. Several of our projects built on the concept of “desire lines”—eroded paths popular as shortcuts or as intuitively and creatively designed routes. I photographed various desire lines around Arusha Primary School’s expansive campus to distinguish them from paved and dirt roads and paths of broken concrete or dirt lined with hedges. The students recognized the desire lines as paths forged by
their peers and teachers, rather than by school planners and architects. Each student selected a photograph and drew around it to place it in context. Students also created maps showing their own personal desire lines between school and a favorite destination such as home or church, illustrating them with photos they made—of a water tap, a garden, a traffic circle, a newsstand, and so on. Their captions—“a clever girl waves bye to the watchman,” “a mother who is cutting cassavas and potatoes,” “the place where we tell each other stories”—highlight their personal claim to the paths they might travel with friends. Another assignment involved a poem I found by chance—“Footpath” by the Kenyan poet Stella Ngatho. Each student photographed one of the poem’s nine stanzas and beautifully captured the sense of longing and absence conveyed in each, such as this first line, “Little path, leading home, leading out. Return my mother to me.” The skills that the Super Nine developed over the summer are listed on the back cover of The LTP Book of Different Skills: using the camera, taking photos, reading photos, drawing maps, writing home stories, and writing poems. As they practice and share these new skills and knowledge when teaching fellow students, their work emphasizes what my Duke students and I hope to convey to all collaborators, young and old—that LTP (or Learning Through Pictures, as Arusha teachers and students call it) is also learning through practice, peers, participation, play, and perspective.
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top to bottom: Katie Hyde with a student in Arusha, Tanzania. Photograph by Meaghan Li. Students working on a Literacy Through Photography assignment. Photograph by Katie Hyde. A map created by Tanzanian Literacy Through Photography student Gabriel Auka.
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Sam Stephenson 2012–13 Lehman Brady Professor
guities of biography. New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm is a centerpiece of the course, and one of her core philosophies seems to be that biography is basically impossible. There’s no way to get the story right. But the process is intoxicating. What really matters in the end is telling a good story and not making anything up on purpose.” The Jazz Loft Project traveling exhibition opened a three-month run at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, in December 2012.
y jazzloftproject.org CDS Interns Ross Davidson, Ian McClerin, and Joel Mora
Since 2000, the Center for Documentary Studies has coordinated the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professorship in Documentary Studies and American Studies, which brings distinguished practitioners and scholars of the documentary arts to Duke University and UNC–Chapel Hill to teach courses on both campuses and engage in lectures, screenings, and other events for students, faculty, and the general public. Writer Sam Stephenson, the current Lehman Brady Professor, has been studying and writing about the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith since 1997, which led to his directorship of the Jazz Loft Project at CDS five years later, a program that went on to win a 2010 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and a 2010 Innovative Use of Archives Award from the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York. Stephenson’s two acclaimed books on Smith—Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project (2001) and The Jazz Loft Project: The Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue (2009)—will be followed by a biography, Gene Smith’s Sink, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The course Stephenson is teaching this academic year, Documentary Biography, concerns research using archival and oral history sources to write about third parties and is modeled on “following W. Eugene Smith’s footsteps for almost sixteen years now,” as he says, traveling to twenty-three states and Japan and interviewing more than five hundred people in the process. “I’ve been writing one-off profiles of intriguing people I’ve found on Smith’s trail for the Paris Review Daily blog. Without question, meeting these people has propelled me forward on Smith, not so much Smith himself; they are a reflection of him in a certain way, perhaps a better reflection than the one he himself provided,” Stephenson says. “So [the Documentary Biography course] is about the challenges and ambi-
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This is the third year that we have offered nine-month internships to recent college graduates. CDS interns gain broad experience in the documentary field, with particular focus on exhibitions, print and digital publications, and web design and maintenance. Our three interns for the 2012–13 academic year: Ross Davidson received a BA in design studies from North Carolina State University in 2012. A writer and photographer, he also studied furniture design and fabrication at the Penland School of Crafts and was an exhibitions management intern at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ross assists exhibitions director Courtney Reid-Eaton with installation/deinstallation and the transfer of materials to Duke University’s Archive of Documentary Arts. Ian McClerin is a writer, storyteller, and recent graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he received a BFA in filmmaking with a concentration in directing. He is currently working on three documentaries and has begun raising money for a narrative feature-length film he plans to direct in summer 2013. Ian assists web manager Chris Sims with the creation and project management of sites for new CDS endeavors and helps streamline the maintenance of existing web resources. Joel Mora earned a BS in 2010 from the University of Florida, where he studied journalism and Latin American studies while working as a multimedia intern at the Gainesville Sun. After graduation, he traveled the country with the band Morningbell and shot a documentary, which he is currently editing. Joel assists publishing and awards director Alexa Dilworth with print editorial and production work and awards publicity and communications coordinator Elizabeth Phillips with social media and web marketing projects.
ABOVE: Sam Stephenson. Photograph by Jason Goodman. BELOW, left to right: Ross Davidson and Ian McClerin. Photographs by Joel Mora. Joel Mora. Photograph by Ross Davidson.
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Little War on the Prairie
CDS Radio Doc Explores History and Memory
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radio documentary produced by Center for Documentary Studies audio director John Biewen aired on This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass, in November 2012. “Little War on the Prairie” tells the long-overlooked story of one of the key episodes in the Plains Indian wars of the nineteenth century, a troubling history that Biewen, a Minnesota native, says is “deeply at odds with the state’s cherished tale of peaceful settlement by Scandinavian and German settlers.” Biewen describes the story: Once called the “Sioux Uprising,” the bloody, thirtysix-day U.S.–Dakota War raged up and down the Minnesota River Valley, claimed hundreds of lives (perhaps thousands in its aftermath, including the official Congressional exile of the Dakota people from Minnesota), and culminated in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. On December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Dakota warriors were hanged in the town of Mankato, with four thousand eager spectators looking on. President Lincoln approved the list of the condemned after sparing hundreds of others. The war, and the longer process of Indian removal that the war essentially completed, cleared the ground for modern-day Minnesota. The show is historical of course, taking listeners on a journey into the events of 1862—what happened and why. But the story is also partly personal. Mankato is my hometown, yet I grew up hearing next to nothing about the events that so shaped the place; it was only through researching the documentary that I learned the facts in any detail. So the program also explores the evolving ways in which Minnesotans have told the story of the U.S.-Dakota War—or, just as often, have mis-told or forgotten it. If you ask a typical Minnesotan about what happened there in 1862, you’re likely to get an uninformed shrug. Why do Minnesotans know so little, and seemingly care even less, about their own civil war? One answer, offered by my father, a retired schoolteacher: “Maybe because we won.” “Little War on the Prairie” is framed in the larger
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context of American collective memory, or, in this case, regional memory. I grew up with a sense of historical innocence, a pervasive notion that as a white midwesterner I had no great ancestral sins to answer for— unlike, in particular, white southerners. I interviewed white southern friends who’ve lived in the Midwest, including CDS colleague Tim Tyson, about their experiences on the receiving end of such smugness. “The South becomes the bearer of the bad stuff,” Tyson says, summarizing what he perceived as the prevailing midwestern view. “So all bad things are projected onto the South, and then that’s not us, so we’re clean.”
Storytelling Magic After the November 23, 2012, broadcast of “Little War on the Prairie” on This American Life, the response was immediate and overwhelming. Here are just a few of the hundreds of comments posted on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. “ The already high bar set in place by This American Life was raised considerably by your audio documentary. I was enthralled, and cannot say enough good things about this work.“ “This may be the best episode of this radio show, ever.” “ Thanks so much for this. I have ancestors who were about fifty miles from Mankato in the 1860s. I had never heard any of this story, and I wept through much of it. I am so glad to hear a history that depicts the complexity of a deeper reality.” “Riveting, spellbinding, brilliant storytelling. Bravo!” “ The dead on both sides deserve to have their story told even so many years later. Another fabulous piece [on] TAL.” “ Unbelievably good and astonishingly tragic. I stood in my kitchen for an hour listening, fascinated, furious, and gut-punched. I’m blinking away tears as I write this.” Listen to the podcast:
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A Dakota dancer at the annual Mahkato Wacipi (Pow Wow) in Mankato, Minnesota, September 21, 2012. Photograph by Caroline Yang.
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BOOKS One Place Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
“Beauty Isn’t Enough” At different times throughout the decades that Paul Kwilecki worked on his opus about his home terrain, he used different words to describe it. He called it a “project,” a “photographic journal,” something “more than a catalogue,” and perhaps most often, a “document.” But none of these rather simple words and descriptions communicate the depth and nuance with which he approached his work. . . . “Good documentary photography,” he wrote, “is simultaneously a record of reality and an editorial on that reality. . . . I am making a factual record out of bits and pieces of experience and they are stubborn about bonding to aesthetic standards. Much is lost in translation from reality to photographs of reality, most of it bringing order to something that is by nature random.” And maybe his most poignant perception, an idea so honest and reflexive as to leave no room for further comment: “I rearrange sacred furniture. Because my brain, not my camera, is my instrument, beauty isn’t enough. I’m looking at subject, not at the surface of the print, though I’m grateful when the surface turns out to be beautiful.” — Tom Rankin, Center for Documentary Studies director, from his introduction to One Place
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he newest book in the Documentary Arts and Culture series, a collaborative publishing venture between the Center for Documentary Studies and the University of North Carolina Press, is forthcoming in the spring of 2013. One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia, features the work of a singular Southern artist. Though his talent and ambition could have taken him most anywhere, Paul Kwilecki chose to remain in Bainbridge, Georgia, the small Decatur County town where he was born, raised, and ran the family’s hardware store. A self-taught photographer, he documented life in his community for more than four decades, making hundreds of masterful and intimate black-and-white prints. Kwilecki developed his visual ideas in series of photographs: high school proms, prison hog killings, shade-tree tobacco farming, factory work, church life, the courthouse. He also wrote eloquently about the people and places he so poignantly depicted, and in this book his unique knowledge is powerfully articulated in more than two hundred photographs and selected prose. “Decatur County is home,” Kwilecki said, “and I know it from my special warp, having been both nourished and wounded by it.”
ONE PLACE Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
Tom Rankin directs both the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) and the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University.
Documentary Arts and Culture Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Jacket photographs by Paul Kwilecki
—NATASHA TRETHEWEY, U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Thrall
“As full of riches as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kwilecki’s sustained portrayal of Decatur County is an American classic.” —ALEC SOTH, photographer and author of From Here to There “A masterful visual drama of life in the South. Gesture is critical to Kwilecki’s eye, revealing his love for humanity.” —DEBORAH WILLIS, author of Posing Beauty and Reflections in Black
“An epic of ghostly ordinariness.” —ROY BLOUNT JR., author of Long Time Leaving
“There is something downright supernatural about Kwilecki’s accomplishment. . . . One Place is a monumental chronicle of the real, messy, complicated, redeemed, and redeeming American spirit.” —RANDALL KENAN, author of Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Documentary Arts and Culture Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University The University of North Carolina Press www.uncpress.unc.edu
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Iris Tillman Hill, former CDS director, is coeditor of the Documentary Arts and Culture series.
The University of North Carolina Press www.uncpress.unc.edu
“One Place is a deep reflection on one artist’s tilling of the soil at the heart of home, but mostly these words and images are about time, what lasts, what doesn’t.”
Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) is the author of Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia (1982). Tom Rankin directs both the Center for Documentary Studies and the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. Iris Tillman Hill, former CDS director, is coeditor with Rankin of One Place and the Documentary Arts and Culture series.
PAUL KWILECKI and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia Edited by TOM RANKIN
“One Place is a masterpiece of documentary art.” —ROGER HODGE, editor-in-chief, Oxford American magazine “Once you’ve seen these photographs, you can’t forget the places or the people.” —JULIAN COX, founding curator of photography and chief curator, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
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“I rearrange sacred furniture. Because my brain, not my camera, is my instrument, beauty isn’t enough. I’m looking at subject, not at the surface of the print, though I’m grateful when the surface turns out to be beautiful.” —PAUL KWILECKI
Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) is the author of Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia.
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“These pictures reflect their maker, a man who was fascinated by the subjects he chose, especially the more vulnerable ones, and who was an outsider himself, at least by temperament.” —SANDRA S. PHILLIPS, curator of photography, SFMOMA
Edited by TOM RANKIN
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hough artistic and ambitious, Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) chose to remain in Bainbridge, Georgia, the small Decatur County town where he was born, raised, and ran the family’s hardware store. He had always been interested in photography and taught himself how to use a camera. Over four decades, he documented life in his community, making hundreds of masterful and intimate black-and-white prints. Kwilecki developed his visual ideas in series of photographs of high school proms, prison hog killings, shade-tree tobacco farming, factory work, church life, the courthouse. He also wrote eloquently about the people and places he so poignantly depicted, and in this book his unique knowledge is powerfully articulated in more than two hundred photographs and selected prose. Paul Kwilecki worked alone, his correspondence with important photographers his only link to the larger art world. Despite this isolation, Kwilecki’s work became widely known. “Decatur County is home,” he said, “and I know it from my special warp, having been both nourished and wounded by it.”
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In the series Documentary Arts and Culture Published by the University of North Carolina Press and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University 272 pages | 201 color photographs $45 hardcover | ISBN 978-1-4696-0740-5 Available in spring 2013 in bookstores or by ordering from UNC Press
Clockwise from above left: Sarah Will Harris statue, Oak City Cemetery, 1966; water tower through cemetery gate, 1982; Flint River boat basin, 1979 (cover shot). Photographs by Paul Kwilecki.
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Undergraduate Highlighted Course: Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography
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began teaching Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography to undergraduates at CDS in 2000. In a nutshell, the course provides students with an opportunity to explore contemporary issues in health care using photography as the prime means of exploration; it’s open to all undergrads but always draws a number of premed majors. In class we examine the works of notable photographers who have focused on health issues, such as Lewis Hine and W. Eugene Smith. Outside class, students undertake a semester-long photo documentary project of their own design. Over the years students have explored a wide variety of health-related topics ranging from orphanages to brain surgery. As a practicing physician [Duke Medical Center pediatrics] and documentary photographer, it is my privilege to teach this course and offer what I hope is a valuable perspective, namely that the tools of documentary can heighten our powers of observation and help us come face-to-face with important health issues beyond the classroom—and along the way allow a kind of understanding that can’t be easily achieved otherwise. For my students who end up as health care professionals, it is my hope that the experiences gained in the course will enhance their skills as healers.
Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, and Program in the Arts of the Moving Image—is only in its second year. Participants in the MFA Visiting Artist and Scholar Series conduct individual and group critiques, serve as guest lecturers, and often give public talks or workshops. These six distinguished artists will participate during the 2012–13 academic year: Jim Dow is a photographer and professor of photography at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others. His book American Studies was published in 2011 by CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies and powerHouse Books. LaToya Ruby Frazier teaches photography and curates the gallery at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. A retrospective exhibit will open at the Brooklyn Museum in spring 2013, followed by a show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Hunter Gray is a Duke alumnus, partner and producer of Verisimilitude Films, and cofounder of Artists Public Domain, a nonprofit that develops, finances, and produces films outside of the commercial mainstream. His past producing credits include Another Earth, Half Nelson, and Academy Award–winning actor Natalie Portman’s short film Eve. Mark McElhatten is a film curator and cofounder of the annual New York Film Festival series Views from the Avant-Garde, one of the most influential showcases in the world for artist-made film and digital moving-image work. He has curated programs for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Laura Poitras is an award-winning filmmaker best known for her trilogy-in-progress about post-9/11 America, including the films My Country, My Country and The Oath. The 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellow was Duke University’s Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker in fall 2012. Poitras teaches documentary filmmaking at Yale University. Tamiko Thiel is an internationally exhibited computational media artist who explores the dramatic and poetic capabilities of various forms of reality, with recent showings at the Museum of Modern Art and the 54th International Venice Biennial.
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—John Moses, M.D.
MFA in Experimental & duke Documentary mfa Arts eda Visiting Artist and Scholar Series
The visiting-artist talent that the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts program is drawing to Duke University is all the more impressive given that the program—offered jointly by Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies,
Above to below: Photograph by undergraduate student Rory Lubner. Still from MFA student Erin Espelie’s film Beyond Expression Bright.
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Continuing Education Student Work: Documentary Street Photography
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Documentary photographer Harvey Stein visited CDS this fall to give a talk related to an exhibit of his photographs then on view, Coney Island 40 Years, and to teach a Documentary Street Photography workshop in our Continuing Education program. The nineteen fortunate participants—the class was wait-listed in short order— enjoyed a jam-packed three days as the group went to work in various Durham locales, including a street fair, a flea market, and a busy stretch of local businesses. “Harvey’s class exceeded my expectations,” wrote Mary Samouelian. “Blending discussions about street photography, technical aspects of cameras (e.g., external lighting, exposure, etc.), slideshows, and field trips where we were encouraged to take pictures of people we didn’t know, Harvey gently, yet assertively, nudged us out of our comfort zone. Looking through my pictures from the two days of fieldwork, I was pleasantly surprised at the results (basically, ‘Wow, I took those?’).” Donna Kay Smith was struck by the power of the group experience: “The long days bleeding well into the nights as we scrambled to complete the day’s work in preparation for the next was reminiscent of children’s camps, retreats, or the early days of college when lack of sleep and enclosure with strangers-become-classmates opens doors to an intensity of experience and comradeship, replete with support and collaboration, that no weekly two-hour class can re-create. For seventy-two hours I lived, worked, and breathed street photography in the midst of a quickly formed and closely-knit community; they gifted me with themselves, and I became a better photographer for it.” View a slideshow of images taken by workshop participants: cdsporch.org/archives/15728
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Spring 2013 News The CDS Continuing Education program is offering gift certificates for spring 2013 classes in the documentary arts, which can be purchased on the registration website, as well as a new early registration discount ($10 off when registering at least ten days before class starts) and Duke employee discount (10 percent off). The full lineup of spring 2013 classes is posted on the registration website; in addition to a wide range of repeat classes, new course offerings include: Basics of Documentary Digital Photography A series of four workshops: Digital Camera Craft, Media File Management, Editing Digital Photographs, and a Digital Printing Tutorial Hindenburg Workshop Documentary Animation: A Hands-On Introduction Stories in the Air: Creating Drama from Community Stories and Oral Histories
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ABOVE: Top left and right, photographs by Kate Medley. Remaining four images by Ilene Hadler. Opposite: Top, Roy Hyde, Fairhope, from Why We Are Here. Photograph by Alex Harris. Bottom, Professor Diablo’s True Revue IV. Photograph by Kristin Bedford.
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New Books from CDS Cofounders
istorian William Chafe and documentary photographer Alex Harris, both Center for Documentary Studies cofounders, published books this fall to critical acclaim. Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal is Chafe’s examination of the relationship of politics’ ultimate power couple. Chafe, Duke University’s Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History, is retiring in 2012 after forty years on the Duke faculty. In Why We Are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of a Southern City, photographs by Harris and text by renowned evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson create a meditation on the meaning of place through the lens of Wilson’s childhood in Mobile, Alabama— “where my heart has always lived,” he writes in the introduction.
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More information: cdsporch.org/archives/14378 cdsporch.org/archives/15754
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Professor Diablo’s True Revue A new documentary performance series debuted this fall, the brainchild of CDS writer in residence Duncan Murrell. Musicians, writers, and visual and mixedmedia artists explored themes such as “relationships” and “outsiders” at four different installments of Professor Diablo’s True Revue, which Murrell describes as “a variety show featuring artists and documentarians of every kind and combination. We create the structure of the Revue itself, the artists organically create the juxtaposition of words, music, and images, and audience members become active participants in giving themselves over to the human desire to connect and make sense of what they’re seeing. We’ve been able to do this with artists whose work is grounded in the documentary impulse, which raises all kinds of happy, hopeful questions about what documentary art is and can be.”
Duke at the Movies Duke University students and faculty made movie news this fall: Films by MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts students Marika Borgeson, Erin Espelie, and Talena Sanders screened as part of the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde series, the prestigious festival’s showcase for artist-made film and digital moving-image pieces, and one of the most important venues in the world for this type of work. Films by Lecturing Fellow and Artist in Residence David Gatten and Visiting Artist and Adjunct Instructor Shambhavi Kaul also screened. Recent Duke graduate Jean Rheem, who received a CDS Certificate in Documentary Studies in May 2012, screened a short film at the NYC Independent Film Festival. One of Rheem’s instructors at CDS, documentary filmmaker Gary Hawkins, called The Social Group “probably the best film to come out of the CDS filmmaking workshops.” Hawkins had noteworthy news of his own—in November production began on Joe, for which Hawkins wrote the screenplay based on the novel by Larry Brown. David Gordon Green is directing the film, with Nicolas Cage playing Joe, an ex-con who becomes an unlikely role model to a teenage boy in small-town Mississippi. The film will debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2013.
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Connecting with the Center for Documentary Studies Document also available online:
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JOIN FRIENDS OF CDS You can support the programs and projects of the Center for Documentary Studies—a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization affiliated with Duke University—by making a contribution through Friends of CDS. Two Ways To Give: You may make a secure
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
Find out more about CDS at documentary studies.duke.edu
ALSO ON VIEW 5 The Restraints: Open and Hidden Gordon Parks’s Life Magazine Segregation Series FILM 6 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival AWARDS 7 CDS Documentary Essay Prize John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography ESSAY 8 “Why I Live at the Gallery” By CDS Writer in Residence Duncan Murrell PEOPLE 9 Katie Hyde Director, Literacy Through Photography in Arusha, Tanzania Sam Stephenson 2012–13 Lehman Brady Professor Ross Davidson, Ian McClerin, and Joel Mora CDS Interns
RADIO 11 “Little War on the Prairie” CDS Radio Doc Revisits History on This American Life BOOKS 12 One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia EDUCATION 13 Undergraduate Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Visiting Artist and Scholar Series Continuing Education Documentary Street Photography Student Work Spring Preview: Gift Certificates, Discounts, Classes
OTHER NEWS 15 New Books by CDS Cofounders Student and Faculty Film News Professor Diablo’s True Revue FRIENDS OF CDS 15
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FEATURED 3 LaToya Ruby Frazier CDS Exhibit Features Photographer’s Hometown Work from Braddock, Pennsylvania
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DOCUMENT a Publication of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University | Winter 2013
CONTENTS
winter 2013