Stranger With A Camera

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