Elizabeth Barret's 2000 documentary from Appalshop, "Stranger With A Camera," raises many provocative issues we need to consider as journalists and students of journalism. Irate about media outsiders coming into his community, Hobart Ison of eastern Kentucky shot and killed Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor in Jeremiah, Kentucky in 1967. The documentary raises, among others, questions such as:
What is the role of someone who uses a camera to document a community?
What is the role of an outsider who goes into a community with a documenting camera? What is the role of an insider who wants to document his or her community?
In your comments on this blog, consider other questions and issues that the documentary brings to your mind.
Consider how Barret, as an insider of a particular kind, told her story. What raw materials did she use? What points of view?
How does this documentary work fit into the work of Agee and Evans in Hale County, Alabama; Shelby Lee Adams in Kentucky; Birney Imes in Mississippi; Jacob Riis in New York's Lower East Side; Rory Kennedy's in Kentucky; August Sander's in Germany; Adrian Le Blanc's in the Bronx; Alex Kotlowitz's in Chicago. And Nellie Bly, Barbara Einreich, Jonathan Kozol. And many more?
BH
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“Why did you have to do that?” Hugh O'Connor’s last words stick in my thoughts whenever I think of “Stranger with a Camera.” Imagine being in a position where you know that someone has done something terrible and most people in that person’s community still support what he did. When Elizabeth Barret said “Values that bond people together are not always positive,” it resonated with me.
ReplyDeleteWhile I’m trying to think about the everyday struggle which goes on in the name of freedom of speech, I can’t help but think about the people who are imprisoned in my home country and are still at risk every single day. I recently learned about a group of journalists who were arrested:
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL6319041 (I Couldn’t find “insert link” while posting this comment, sorry about that)
I wonder if I ever go back to my country, and work on a documentary about the situation of my own people, would I be greeted with guns or thrown in prison?
What is a person to do when fighting with a camera or a pen? Is it even a fair battle? In the documentary it was mentioned that the camera’s power is like having a gun. It is Invasive, exploitative and not always accurate because it can be editorially manipulated. If the duty as a journalist means that one has a responsibility to inform and educate people to help bring about social change by walking the fine line between separating fact from fiction, then any society should be prepared to accept the truth no matter how uncomfortable.
However, the truth sometimes hurts, and that’s why most journalists are ultimate targets. What one covers within a small period of time might not cover the whole story but it’s aim is always truth, in my opinion, unless someone has ill intentions.
While watching the documentary, I kept note of questions Elizabeth Barret raised throughout her narration. At one point she asks: “What is the difference between helping people see their own place and how other’s perceive it?” and I’ve asked myself the same question.
How could you take a picture and make someone look bad? Isn’t what you capture simply a moment in someone’s life?
According to the documentary, some of the people who lived in the same town where the incident happened lived a happy, middle-class life. Therefore, understandably, they considered anyone who came to cover the story of the poor and impoverished as telling an incomplete and unfair version of their town’s story. They viewed them as “outside agitators.” I kept on wondering if this means that anyone should justify Hobart Ison’s act of murder. Do you have to be an “insider” to cover and know about a situation?
How could you push for social action and social change without embarrassing the people you cover? Those were the questions still lingering in my thoughts. What hit home for me, though, is what Barret said at the end of the documentary
“Stay true to what you see and hope that it’s enough.”
The question Barrett posed "What is the difference between helping people see their own place and how other's perceive it?" resonated with me as well. She asked a lot of great questions that I wish I had the answers too.
ReplyDeleteI thought her documentary was so great, coming at an issue from a true insider's perspective and looking at the issue from as many sides as possible, not just her own. I think this is an ideal situation when documenting, but I do not think its realistic either. Not every place will have an insider with the capabilities, resources or even interest in playing journalist about their own area and its issues. This is where the journalist comes in.
I think this instance is a perfect example of the importance for journalists to be completely transparent, compassionate and communicate openly with the people they are covering. Hobart Ison felt used and abused. Maybe he wouldn't have felt that way if all the journalists who came through Appalachia had taken the time to be as open and honest with their subjects as they were with their audience. Maybe if they had tried to get to know their subjects as people and not just players in this drama of poverty, the hostility could have been minimized.
In Reporting class we talk about the differences between interviewing and approaching public officials and private individuals. A key to approaching private people is being completely open and honest about your intentions and what they are getting themselves into by agreeing to speak with you and having their picture taken. It seems to me that the people being covered were not given that courtesy. Reporters and documentarians assumed these people knew how it worked or didn't care and the people didn't fully understand how to deal with journalists. I wonder how it would have turned out differently if they had.