Doument Fall 2012

CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

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fall 2012 Colors of Confinement Interview with Eric Muller on Rare Photos of Japanese American Internment

Certificate in Documentary Arts Spring 2012 Graduates and Final Projects

On View Harvey Stein’s Photographs of Coney Island, 1970–2010

John Hope Franklin Award Student Documentary Prizewinners

Graduate Program MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Incoming Class

+ awards EVENTS COURSES MORE

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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: 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: no. 102, Khadija fumant une cigarette, Morocco, 2011; no. 63, Mère célibataire, Morocco, 2011; Femmes Ombres no. 4, Morocco, 2011. Photographs by Tiana Markova-Gold.

CONTENTS PAGE: Paste paper collage from the Student Action with Farmworker exhibit Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá. Collage by Fredy Ambriz.

BELOW, left to right: From Coney Island. Photograph by Harvey Stein; Subject and date unknown. Photograph by Hugh Mangum; Bill Manbo, from Colors of Confinement. Photographer unknown.

Fall 2012 HIGHLIGHTS September 20

October 4

September 27

Coney Island 40 Years

Keep All You Wish

Colors of Confinement

Talk & Book Signing with Harvey Stein

Curator’s Talk with Sarah Stacke

Talk & Book Signing with Eric Muller

Please check the online CDS calendar for a full events listing:

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Interview with Eric Muller | Editor of New CDS Book, Colors of Confinement

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n the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were deported from their homes by the U.S. government starting in the spring of 1942 and placed in internment camps throughout the interior of the country. Bill Manbo and his family were among that group; the Kodachrome photographs he took at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming are featured in a new book from the Center for Documentary Studies and the University of North Carolina Press. In this excerpt from an interview with communications intern Matt Phillips, Colors of Confinement editor Eric Muller talks about Manbo’s images and their relevance to us today.

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mass distribution in the late 1930s. So Bill Manbo was just a little ahead of his time. At least to my eye what the color does is remove what you might call the historicalness of the images. Manbo’s photographs look like something that’s happening before your eyes. The immediacy that comes along to a current viewer from seeing this historic collection in color is really palpable. The cover image [above] is a good example. Manbo chose to document a great deal of identifiably Japanese cultural activities;

Matt Phillips: Let’s start with how you came across Bill Manbo’s photographs from Heart Mountain.

Eric Muller: Totally by happenstance; I was developing a museum exhibit at the Heart Mountain site with [former Heart Mountain internee] Bacon Sakatani, and he sent me a bunch of photographs that we might consider using.

In them were a couple of Bill Manbo’s. I did a triple take because I had never seen color photos of this time period before. I immediately emailed Bacon and said, “What are these?” He said, “Oh, they’re Bill Manbo’s. He lived at Heart Mountain with his family and he took color pictures.” I asked if there were more, and Bacon said, “Yeah, his son has them.” So Bacon reached out to Bill Manbo, Jr.—Billy as he was called when he was a little boy—who is now in his seventies. The next thing I knew I had a CD of all of these images, and I knew that there was something really special about them.

MP: You say you did a triple take on seeing these photos.

What’s unique about the medium?

EM: Well, we have a pretty large visual history of the Japanese American imprisonment in World War II by professional photographers like Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange and also by hobby photographers in the camps. But the whole visual imagery of that era is black-and-white because it’s what everybody was shooting. Kodachrome [film] had just begun to be marketed for

ABOVE, top to bottom: Young women chat during Obon, a summertime Buddhist festival commemorating one’s ancestors.

Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Wyoming. July 1943 or July 1944; one of the fifteen guard towers at Heart Mountain atop a hill overlooking a residential area. Photographs by Bill Manbo.

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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because these are in color and the kimonos are so incredibly beautiful and the makeup the dancers are wearing is so striking, I think the photos give a sense of the vibrancy of the more Japanese components of life in the camps than other existing photographs of this period do.

MP: What makes Manbo’s images unique in terms of their content?

EM: I wouldn’t say it’s unique, but what’s unusual about the content is that Bill Manbo was a hobby photographer. He’s not a trained professional. He’s just a guy who likes to take pictures. He’s wandering around with his camera doing what any hobby photographer does—taking pictures of things that are interesting to him, that are beautiful to him. He’s taking lots of pictures of his little son, Billy, doing all of the things that we take pictures of our children doing. Learning how to ice skate, playing marbles, playing with a toy airplane, eating an ice cream cone. So you get these simultaneously very intimate and also somehow very typical standard American snapshots happening in this really, really strange place where you would not expect to see those kinds of images. It’s this weird juxtaposition of joy and suffering that is really special about these photos.

MP: Can you talk about that juxtaposition? Manbo’s answers to the “loyalty questionnaire” [required of all adults in the camps] and later in front of the Loyalty Hearing Board seem almost satirical. He’s obviously angry about the injustices he and his family have endured, but by and large makes the choice to not have that manifest in his images.

EM: I think that Manbo was functioning in two different registers here. In his interfaces with the government he was resentful, he was angry, he was suspicious. My interpretation is that when Bill Manbo was walking around taking pictures he didn’t think of himself as really relating to the government or his keepers, he’s probably thinking about F-stops, you know? His camera was a personal object for him. It was something that he was using to try to create some semblance of normalcy.

Jasmine Alinder in her essay in the book talks about how in Japanese American photo albums there is a gap of the camp years when most people were not taking pictures. Manbo is trying to fill that gap; he is trying to create, the way we all do, a visual legacy of his son’s childhood. His camera was more an extension of his private life, rather than a tool to express some grievances that he had towards the government.

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MP: Are there photos that stand out for you that deviate from the “exceptional, exciting, and beautiful images” you describe Manbo trying to capture in your introductory essay?

EM: Several really stand out in my mind. He liked to take pictures of the camp itself; one is of a barracks and a laundry building and a mess hall [previous page]. Right smack dab in the composition of the photo is a guard tower on a hill. He could have shot a thousand pictures of the camp that didn’t have anything other than barracks in them, but in this picture your eye goes directly to the guard tower that’s looming over everybody’s heads. That to me is a clear illustration that Manbo was trying to do something more than simply document what the camp looked like. He did a couple portraits in which he positioned Billy right at the barbed wire and actually had him hold on to it. Again I think those photos illustrate that Manbo was seeing their confinement, their imprisonment as a central subject, so much so that he’s got his little son gripping the very fence itself.

MP: Alinder’s essay talks about the issue of internees even having a camera in the camps.

EM: When Japanese Americans were forced from their homes, cameras and shortwave radios and a few other things were contraband. They had to either pack them away or surrender them. But by the end of 1942 the War Relocation Authority, which ran the camps, began to realize that allowing Japanese Americans to take pictures might actually be a way of helping them adjust. So the agency began facilitating efforts by Japanese Americans to get their cameras out of storage. Presumably, that’s how Manbo got his camera in 1943. He wasn’t the only photographer at Heart Mountain.

There’s a black-and-white photograph of the Heart Mountain Camera Club taken by a man named George Hirahara. It’s a group of ten or twelve guys; Manbo is the only one we know of who was shooting color.

MP: In Bacon Sakatani’s essay he says that he learned two new words in the Heart Mountain schoolhouse during the eighth grade: environment and adaptation. How do those words relate to the images in Colors of Confinement?

EM: Those are words that really do summarize a great deal of what this project is about. What you’re looking at are photographs of the environment in which this community was forced to live, and of their efforts at adapting to those circumstances. These are photographs that show many things, but among the things they show is an extraordinary resiliency.

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American community has had to work very, very hard for many decades to establish as the truth. Which is that they were a community whose patriotism and loyalty was unjustly and illegally questioned, who went through great suffering in circumstances of mass confinement. I do hope that viewers will spend enough time with the photographs and stories of the families pictured to recognize the fullness of what’s going on.

MP: You’ve delved into the history of Japanese American incarceration in two previous books, and now again in Colors of Confinement. Why is documenting and revealing this history so important today?

EM: That history is really our salient example of an extreme overreaction to understandable fears about national security and the ways in which hysteria, fear, racism, political opportunism, led to what is now nearly universally acknowledged to be a gross violation of human and civil rights. If you want to understand the dynamic in the United States today, specifically about Arabs and Muslims, the obvious place to look is to the experience of Japanese Americans in World War II. I think a deeper issue for me that is not unique to September 11 is that these camps were created under the guise of law, they were administered by a civilian agency that was created by law, that operated by regulations drafted and defended in court by lawyers. They were policed by military regulations and a military bureaucracy. Were these camps like the Nazi death camps? Absolutely not. But did they share with that system and other systems of racial oppression in the world certain themes? Yes, they did, in the sense that they were a legalization, you might say, of racism. I think that’s a timeless story, an American story that has obvious parallels. I look at [Manbo’s] photographs and I see a kind of warning.

MP: Do Bill Manbo’s images challenge the viewer?

EM: I think there’s the potential that former internees might look at these photographs and feel a certain sense of discomfort, because the images do not, on their surface, depict the kind of overt sadness and suffering that we tend to associate with these camps. You see people smiling, dancing, people in a makeshift swimming hole in the summertime. And the color itself, the vividness, the beauty of what’s pictured creates a different emotional impression than black-and-white images do. Some of those folks might be a little worried that other viewers will say one of two things, both of which are very raw wounds in the Japanese American community: “Huh, see, they didn’t have it so bad,” or, “Huh, what do you know? Kimonos. Sumo wrestling. They weren’t really so American after all.” So I think the pictures are challenging in that sense, challenging to a story the Japanese

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These are people from a temperate climate now living in the high desert mountains of Wyoming, and of course they’re living in barracks with virtually no privacy—six, seven, eight people living in a 24-by-20-foot room. These photographs document a community that is confronting circumstances, the likes of which it has never encountered before. On the basis of no criminal charges, no individualized proof, no individualized suspicion. Nothing. Just picked up and dropped in this environment. More or less expected to fend for themselves.

Colors of Confinement Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II Edited by Eric L. Muller | With Photographs by Bill Manbo In the series Documentary Arts and Culture Published by the University of North Carolina Press and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies 136 pages | 65 color and 6 black-and-white photographs $35 hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8078-3573-9 Available in bookstores or by ordering from UNC Press Eric L. Muller is Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill School of Law and director of the university’s Center for Faculty Excellence. He is the author of American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II and Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II. Bill Manbo was an auto mechanic and amateur photographer from Riverside, California. In 1942 he, his wife and young son, and other relatives were deported to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. After his release he took a factory job in Cleveland before returning to California with his family, settling in Hollywood. He died in 1992.

To learn more about Colors of Confinement and other CDS Books: documentarystudies.duke.edu > books

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Bill Manbo poses with the camera he used to take the photographs in this book. Photographer unknown.

ABOVE, left to right: Billy Manbo eats ice cream in his pilot outfit; a Boy Scout, and behind him a drum majorette, at the head of a parade; Billy Manbo poses in his soldier outfit with his father’s model racing car. OPPOSITE: Billy Manbo clutches a barbed-wire fence.

Photographs by Bill Manbo.

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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awards

CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography 2012 Competition Judge: Deborah Willis The Center for Documentary Studies and the Honickman Foundation, based in Philadelphia, co-sponsor this prestigious biennial prize. The only prize of its kind, the CDS/ Honickman First Book Prize competition is open to American and Canadian citizens of any age (and residents of the U.S. and Canada for at least fifteen years) who have yet to publish a book-length work of their photographs. Winners receive a grant of $3,000, publication of a book, and inclusion in a website devoted to presenting the work of the prizewinners. The winner will also be given a solo exhibit at CDS. Submissions accepted through September 15, 2012.

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New: CDS Documentary Essay Prize The Center for Documentary Studies is launching a new prize in fall 2012. The CDS Documentary Essay Prize will honor the best in literary nonfiction and documentary photography Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, at cdsporch.org

Current & Upcoming

in alternating years: one year, writing; one year, photos. The focus will be on current or recently completed work (within the last two years) from a long-term project—fifteen to twenty pages of writing; fifteen images. 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 November 2012 to January 2013.

Relaunch: Dorothea Lange– Paul Taylor Prize The Center for Documentary Studies is proud to relaunch the Lange–Taylor Prize, which supports documentary artists 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 winner will receive $10,000, a solo exhibition at CDS, and inclusion in the Archive of Documentary Arts at the Rubenstein Library, Duke University. Submissions accepted in January and February 2013.

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2012 John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Prizewinners

Established in 1989 by the Center for Documentary Studies, the John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards are named for the noted scholar John Hope Franklin, the late professor emeritus of history at Duke University, in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments and his dedication to students and teaching. CDS makes these awards to undergraduates attending North Carolina’s Triangle-area universities to help them conduct summerlong documentary fieldwork projects using audio, oral history, photography, film/video, and/or narrative or creative writing. This year’s winners are: Alice Soo-Hyon Kim (Duke University) Alice Kim is producing a documentary that “maps the immigrant identity” through black-and-white 35mm photographs and audio recordings she made of her grandmother, Kyung Jo Seong, as she returned to South Korea for the first time in more than a decade, perhaps for her last visit.

Mrs. Seong’s family left Korea in 1939, when she was twelve, to work on a farm in Japan; in 1950, married and with two children, she returned to South Korea. In 1977, shortly after her fiftieth birthday, she moved to California and has lived there since. Alice writes, “Mrs. Seong adamantly considers herself Korean . . . even as a young adult living in Japan . . . after being naturalized as an American citizen, after living and working here for thirty years. . . .

What is it about this Korean identity that prompts her to cling to it? There is still so much I do not know about my grandmother, her life before coming to America, and our family history. This project will be as much a self-discovery for my grandmother as it will be for me.”

David Mayer (Duke University) David Mayer is producing a documentary video that will offer an intimate retelling of his grandfather’s Holocaust story as a parallel to his own comfortable suburban upbringing. Paul Mayer was twenty years old and living in Frankfurt, Germany, when he began to keep a journal on January 1, 1945. His father had died in Auschwitz; his sister had died when the Nazis refused to give her medical treatment. “On March 15, 1945, along with his

brother Heinz, Paul Mayer headed to Central Station in Frankfurt with orders from the Nazi Party to board a train headed for a concentration camp . . . deep in the Hartz Mountains,” David Mayer writes. The journal goes on to describe their daring escape out of the camp and through the mountains to the American lines. For his video, David visited and filmed Paul Mayer’s childhood home in Frankfurt, the train station where he left for the camp, and the camp itself. He says, “Time and time again my grandfather writes of how one should react to hardship. . . . Would I make him proud with how I live?

Would he see himself in me? This documentary is about what it means to try to understand a man I never met using only what he left behind.”

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Elyse Pate (University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill) Elyse Pate is collecting oral histories, along with photographs and recipes, to create a documentary narrative essay that reflects on the importance of a celebrated event in the Brunswick area of coastal Georgia. “In my family, tradition, especially any tradition involving food, is sacred,” Elyse writes. Her father grew up in Brunswick and she spent time there as a child, where she loved to listen to her grandmother’s stories. “Being a very social lady, many of my grandmother’s tales centered on social events, and many of these events, in turn, centered on food.” The “low country boil” was and remains one of the main events, as well as the seafood-based dish of the same name that stars at these gatherings. “Like all traditions, low country boils have changed and are constantly changing to fit the times,” says Elyse. “Without documentation, the changes in tradition, while not necessarily negative, often mean the loss of a specific variation. My grandmother, for example, can no longer tell her stories. . . . I hope . . . that by documenting the stories of ordinary people these traditions will not be forgotten.”

Submissions for the 2013 John Hope Franklin Awards will be accepted the month of February.

Deadline: March 1, 2013.

y documentarystudies.duke.edu > awards OPPOSITE: no. 51, Femme enceinte célibataire. Photograph by former Lange-Taylor prizewinner Tiana Markova-Gold. BELOW: Photograph by former John Hope Franklin prizewinner Cassie Elizabeth Condrey, from her series on Lake Providence, Louisiana.

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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MFA in Experimental and Documentary duke Arts mfa Incoming Class eda of 2014 The North Carolina Triangle area’s venerable arts and news publication, the Independent Weekly, called the 2011 launch of Duke University’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts program “one of the great art stories” of the year. “Although no one really knew what the program would be like going in, the initial class has turned out to be the antithesis of graduate studio art students. These folks are everywhere—making and showing work across the Triangle, curating shows, organizing film series—and they’ve enlivened Duke’s faculty in the process. . . .” Now those folks welcome the incoming class of 2014 to their digs at the renovated Carpentry Shop, making this the first academic year with the program at full capacity. “The infusion of energy that comes with this new class combined with the remarkable experience of our first class will elevate everyone’s artistic work, as well as the arts scene at Duke,” says CDS director Tom Rankin, who also heads the MFA program. “As with the first, this second group comes from diverse geographies and artistic backgrounds, promising to enrich the documentary community in many ways.” The class of 2014: Runa A is from China and holds a BFA in sound recording art. She spent the last two years in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focused on film, video, and new media and creating films and video installations. Runa is partial to artists John Cage, Douglas Gordon, and Cindy Sherman.

Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org

Reading fiction and listening to music are high on her list, especially punk and electronica, but her favorite pastime is watching movies. Favorite director? Alfred Hitchcock.

Kristin Bedford considers art and activism to be one and the same. Using both analog and digital photography, she focuses on the overlooked and disregarded while exploring themes of displacement, discrimination, and acts of faith on the streets of Los Angeles. Her activism for social change has included work in L.A’.s Skid Row and on staff with Obama’s presidential campaign. Kristin’s engagement with art and street culture is also relevant in her work with the Filmmobile, a mobile cinema project that screens films in their actual or implied cinematic locations throughout L.A. Amanda Berg is a New Jersey native. She graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a BFA in photojournalism and a concentration in philosophy. Amanda is coming to the MFA program hoping to continue exploring issues that young women face in contemporary American culture.

Rachel Boillot grew up in New York and Singapore. Following her graduation from high school, she entered the combineddegree (BA/BFA) program at Tufts University, where she studied sociology and photography. Her photographic work explores the concept of “home” in America and the changing social landscape. She has spent the past two years working as a photographer and archivist for the Boston Housing Authority.

Erin Espelie is a filmmaker, writer, and editor specializing in representations of science and nature; her films have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the British Film Institute, and elsewhere. She designed and taught a course—Environmental Issues and the Documentary Arts—at Duke University this spring and at the

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University of Colorado, Boulder, this summer. Espelie is executive editor of Natural History magazine, where she’s written a monthly column since 2002.

Sarah Garrahan is a documentary filmmaker and editor from San Antonio, Texas. She has spent the past few years studying and working in Austin, Texas, and Barcelona, Spain. Her work has focused on documenting underrepresented communities, specifically focusing on issues of indigenous and human rights. She currently works as a documentary editor for KLRU, Austin’s local PBS affiliate.

Caitlin Margaret Kelly has more than seventeen years of experience as a photojournalist, mostly working for newspapers in Southern California. Her focus on social issues and women’s rights inspired her current project, I am: Women Living with HIV, exhibited during the XIX International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. Kelly recently returned to live in the United States after four years in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While there, she exhibited her work in Buenos Aires and Colonia, Uruguay, and volunteered at a program that teaches digital photography to at-risk teens.

You-Jin Kim is interested in the relationship between human emotions and technology, specifically, how people develop special feelings toward everyday technological objects, like an attachment to an old cell phone you might find difficult to discard. You-Jin’s work attempts to show the positive side of rapid technological change by building robots designed to elicit a strong emotional bond with the viewer. He wants to continue making kinetic art that will positively engage and intrigue the viewer’s heart.

Jonna McKone has been working for the past two years as a journalist, writer, and radio producer in Washington, D.C., where she grew up. She has covered a wide range of topics and believes strongly in participatory methods and finding underreported stories. Starting in 2011, she produced a series on D.C.’s changing neighborhoods for WAMU 88.5. She earned her BA from Bowdoin College.

Jing Niu is interested in creating avant-garde media forms that explore isolation, nihilism, and our age of modernity, which “progresses” on a fundamental mindbody dualism. Born in Sichuan, China, Jing moved to the United States at a young age and began her filmmaking adventures as a visual artist who rummaged through the mediums of sculpture, painting, and collage. She recently completed degrees in filmmaking and geology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Her passions include the study of the Earth, eco-feminism, Buddhism, and radical politics. Through her medium, Jing hopes to produce whatever society needs from artists to grow and transform.

John Rash is an instructor of digital photography and multimedia production at Randolph Community College.

A North Carolina native, he earned a BFA in art education from the University of North Carolina–Greensboro in 2000 and has since worked as a high school AP art instructor, published a magazine, and helped found the GreensboroFest music festival; more recently he has spent five years teaching himself Mandarin Chinese. The highlight of his year is organizing and leading student groups on photography tours of Hong Kong and mainland China.

Jennifer Stratton is a researcher, educator, thinker, and maker. She grew up with a strong spirit of exploration, constantly moving around the globe with her family. For the past several years she has worked as a data visualization specialist, production fabricator, and instructor for photography, film, and stop-motion animation workshops.

Her work is centered in collective imagination, interdisciplinary collaboration, community storytelling, interconnectivity, and the ephemeral magic that happens when light meets surface.

Shanshan Wang is an experimental filmmaker who often approaches her work as an artistic platform to raise questions around contemporary social existence on both a conscious and unconscious level. She received her BA in cinema at Binghamton University. She later worked as an associate producer in both the film and TV industries, expanding her enthusiasm for film into another dimension.

Matthew Lewis works at the intersection between art and science, between tradition and modernity. His work focuses on inherent relationships between sensory experience, cultural memory, imaging technologies, and environmental patterning. His pursuit of relevant materials, processes, and practices has led him to study and work in the fields of art conservation, archaeology, bioanthropology, mining, land surveying, 3D scanning, and reverse engineering. His multimedia artworks and installations have been shown in the United States, Canada, Italy, Portugal, and Serbia.

y mfaeda.duke.edu ABOVE, left to right: Peter’s View, MFAEDA Carpentry Shop, March 2012, Impossible Instant Film; Wonder Horsee, MFAEDA Carpentry Shop, April 2012, Impossible Instant Film; Virginia Is for Lovers, MFAEDA Carpentry Shop, March 2012, Impossible Instant Film.

Photographs by MFA student Lisa McCarty. OPPOSITE: From Palimpsests of Public Space. Photograph by MFA student Peter Lisignoli.

Find out more about CDS at documentary studies.duke.edu

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Education continuing Meral Agish is a Brooklyn-based writer and oral historian; she was born into an immigrant family that moved between four countries in four decades before settling in New York.

On the eve of her wedding, she interviewed her parents over Skype, seeking advice and lessons from their thirty-five-year marriage. A Fairly Healthy Relationship is the introduction to a multi-part audio portrait of Agish’s parents.

Diane Bock lives in Santa Barbara, California; she attended her first summer audio intensive at CDS in 2007 and her work has since aired on The Splendid Table, Sound Medicine, and WAMC’s 51%. Bock’s audio documentary, It Keeps Me in Line: Brenda’s Story, follows a woman at WillBridge of Santa Barbara, a program that helps the homeless transition back to society. Brenda was four months into her stay when she and Bock first met.

Spring 2012 Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates Throughout the year, the Center for Documentary Studies offers continuing education courses in the documentary arts—photography, film/video, audio, writing, multimedia—to people of all backgrounds. Some choose to enroll in the Certificate in Documentary Arts program, which offers a more structured sequence of courses. Most certificate students are working adults who take a minimum of two years to complete coursework, culminating in the Final Seminar in Documentary Studies, in which students finish and present a substantial documentary work. These projects often move out into the world in the form of exhibits, installations, films, websites, and more.

The following ten students completed their final projects in this spring’s seminar taught by filmmaker Nancy Kalow.

In May they presented their work to the public and received their certificates.

Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, at cdsporch.org

Phil Fonville has been in the streets documenting demonstrations, rallies, and protests for several years. The photographs in My Occupy: Three Days on Freedom Plaza chronicle his stay at Stop the Machine! Create a New World!, later known as Occupy Washington, D.C. Though unaffiliated with Occupy Wall Street, the D.C. protest also drew Americans who sought to engage in imaginative, nonviolent direct actions to restore their democracy.

Beth Geglia is a freelance videographer in Washington, D.C., who has been involved in human rights activism in Central America for the last five years. Yo No Vengo Solo / I Don’t Come Alone tells the story of a musicians’ delegation to Honduras for the second annual Artists in Resistance Festival in October 2011 and the video ultimately speaks to the role and power of music in confronting climates of violence.

Jennifer Graves has a BA from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and an M.Div. from Duke University. In learning about her Polish Catholic ancestors and thinking about her “inheritance, the American Dream,” Graves found a story that is equal parts struggle, disappointment, and hope. In

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response, she created Immigrant’s Great Granddaughter— a multimedia collage of old family photos; her own poems, video, music, and photographs; and video found online—to represent the dreamlike way she contemplates this family history and “how to make it in America.”

Hermes Illana is from Brazil, lives in Durham, North Carolina, and works as a freelance photographer and landscape designer. His video, Day by Day: Living in the Margins, is a glimpse into the lives of Timothy and Cherokee, who are homeless; both had mainstream lives until accidents changed their paths. They now share a campground in the woods and panhandle in Durham every day to get by.

Leanora Minai directs the print and online news publications for Duke employees. Among her passions in her free time is reporting the underreported. Her video, The Mothers, is about the chapter leaders of a little-known Durham, North Carolina, support group that meets every month to share stories of loss and survival— Parents of Murdered Children. Through their sons’ deaths, Diane and Mina found each other, and the strength to carry on.

Ben Pagac lives in Annapolis, Maryland, and is an entomologist with the federal government. Counting Shadows on the Moon is an audio portrait of Dr. Chandler S. Robbins, a gentle, precise man who has devoted his life to the study of birds. Through the simple act of counting birds, and getting others to do so, he has helped answer important questions about our natural world and reveal the unexpected impact that we are having on it.

Krissa Palmer went back to college in her thirties and discovered a love of writing essays, which led to recording commentaries for her local NPR station, WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she is now on staff. Palmer met Traci while accompanying seven same-sex couples (and their friends, families, and clergy members) traveling to Washington, D.C., to get married. Her audio piece, Traci’s Dress, tells a story that haunted her.

Street Photography CDS is delighted that Harvey Stein (see pages 12 and 13) will teach a three-day Continuing Education workshop here this fall: Documentary Street Photography, September 21–23. The workshop will consist of lectures, demonstrations, slide presentations, critiques, and photographic field trips for participants to document their Durham environments and the people who populate them. Topics will include what it means to photograph strangers and strategies of approach and interaction, methods of controlling light and exposure, and the best lenses and cameras for street shooting. Students will be encouraged “to participate in the drama of the ordinary,” Stein says.

Harvey Stein has taught at the International Center of Photography since 1976. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, the Art Institute of Chicago, Bibliothèque Nationale, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and many other institutions.

y cdscourses.org y harveysteinphoto.com From Coney Island. Photograph by Harvey Stein.

Hannah Swenson was born and raised in the Midwest but migrated to the East Coast to explore, work, and study, completing her degree at a Quaker college in Greensboro, North Carolina. The New Conductors is her video about two men deeply rooted in their family histories: Jerry is the descendant of runaway slaves; Max is the descendant of Quaker abolitionists. In stories and wandering tours, these men illuminate the history of the Underground Railroad.

View/listen to the projects: cdsporch.org/archives/12053

y Register for fall 2012 CDS Continuing Education classes: y cdscourses.org

ABOVE: From My Occupy: Three Days on Freedom Plaza.

Photograph by Phil Fonville. OPPOSITE, top: From Yo No Vengo Solo.

Photograph by Beth Geglia. OPPOSITE, bottom: From Day by Day. Photograph by Hermes Illana

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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EXHIBITIONS On View

Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org

in the CDS Galleries

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Coney Island 40 Years

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Photographs by Harvey Stein Kreps Gallery | Through October 27, 2012

Coney Island 40 Years features black-and-white images from photographer Harvey Stein’s recent book of the same name as well as a small selection of color images from an earlier book, Coney Island. Stein first went to shoot at the famous beachside amusements and boardwalk in 1970 at the suggestion of a teacher, a trip that turned out to be just the first of hundreds over the next four decades. “I’d call anyone either crazy or a genius for doing anything photographic that long,” Stein said in an interview on the Lenscratch photography blog. “And I know I’m not a genius. I’m just moved by the crush of humanity and beauty and funkiness of the place.”

Coney Island has never lacked for photo documentarians, but a humanistic quality distinguishes Stein’s work.

His photos are meant to give viewers a sense of the place beneath its obvious surface, he writes on his website. “It’s not just a playground, it is where life is lived and looms large . . . a place where you can be yourself or who you ought to be.” A 2011 story in the New York Times describes the effect: “Thornton Wilder once said, ‘I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.’ Mr. Stein comes close. His photographs transform Coney’s audacious corn pone into a tone poem.”

A visual document of an iconic American place that is rapidly changing, Stein’s work is, in his words, “a meditation on time, history, persistence and longevity (of both Coney Island and myself), fate, and public social behavior.” coneyisland40years.com

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Keep All You Wish The Photographs of Hugh Mangum Curated by Sarah Stacke Lyndhurst Gallery | Through October 20, 2012

An itinerant photographer from Durham, North Carolina, Hugh Mangum traveled a rail circuit through North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia plying his trade. From the start of his photographic career in the early 1890s until the year he died of the flu in 1922, he took portraits of a remarkable variety of people from both the African American and white communities.

Curator Sarah Stacke selected the images for Keep All You Wish from the Hugh Mangum Collection housed at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Library. Stacke chose the name for the exhibit from a letter Mangum wrote to his sister shortly before his death, signed, “Give my love to all and keep all you wish.” Read as an expression of his pictures, the phrase “suggests Mangum’s generosity in creating an atmosphere— respectful and often playful—in which the hundreds of men, women, and children who posed for him were able to reveal themselves,” writes Stacke. Now, a hundred years later, we can gaze into the faces of the early-twentieth-century American South.

Beyond the Front Porch 2012 Porch & University Galleries | Through September 8, 2012

This exhibit presents documentary projects from the nineteen 2012 Certificate in Documentary Studies graduates. The certificate program involves undergraduate students from across the arts and sciences who work in the documentary arts while exploring a particular issue, community, family, or individual, and who complete a final documentary project for the Capstone Seminar in Documentary Studies.

ABOVE: Subjects and dates unknown. Photographs by Hugh Mangum. OPPOSITE: Man wearing bow tie, 1970. Photograph by Harvey Stein.

Find out more about CDS at documentary studies.duke.edu

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PEOPLE

Founded on the spirit, values, and actions of one of contemporary history’s most ardent artist-activists, the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program connects the talents of young documentarians with the resources and needs of organizations serving children and their communities around the world. A staff member for the National Child Labor Committee from 1906 to 1918, Lewis W. Hine traveled the country to document children at work on farms and in sweatshops, slums, and factories; his photographs were instrumental in the later passage of child-labor reforms. This year’s Hine fellowships have been awarded to Andrea Patiño Contrera and Cameron Zohoori. At the time of this writing their placements were still in process; both will be in the Boston area.

Andrea Patiño Contrera is a native of Bogota, Colombia; she graduated from Duke University with a BA in cultural anthropology and a certificate in policy journalism. Andrea became fascinated by photography while at Duke, both as a practice and as a theoretical subject. As a 2010 recipient of the John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Award from the Center for Documentary Studies, Andrea photographed slave castles in Ghana, exploring the relationship between those spaces, tourists, and locals. A year later, as the photography intern for Students of the World, she documented an NGO’s work with Palestinian women and children in the West Bank.

Simultaneously, through the Visual Studies Fellowship at Duke, she conducted research about the role of photography in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, culminating in a senior thesis on its potential to become an alternative political platform. She also worked with undocumented immigrants in Apopka, Florida, during her time at Duke. “Photography has given me a more nuanced understanding of the world and has made me realize that it is the human connections that this medium facilitates that remain most vibrant in our hearts and minds,” Andrea says. “This wonderful opportunity will allow me to take this belief even further: I want to explore how photographs can effectively trigger tangible changes in our society.”

Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org

2012–13 Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows

Cameron Zohoori has a degree in neuroscience from Duke University, where he was a Robertson Scholar. As part of that program he took film and photography courses at the Center for Documentary Studies, working on multimedia projects for a public elementary school and for state and local organizing groups. In 2009, he worked with the Thousand Kites organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky, using radio broadcasts to reconnect prisoners with their families, and in 2010 Cameron did rural community development work in Sierra Leone, West Africa. He returned to neighboring Liberia in 2011 as a trainer with the Together Liberia project, which helps journalists and media professionals tell the stories of their country using digital tools. While there he produced documentary pieces for literacy and youth agriculture organizations; he also explored the topic of Liberian musicians who are crafting new genres of socially charged music by publishing a photo story for Al Jazeera English in Depth and collaborating on a feature-length documentary. Cameron says, “The images we see every day, the stories we are told, directly shape how we think about our world. I hope to use documentary media to offer up new perspectives and provoke new ways of thinking about the issues facing people and communities. The Hine fellowship is an amazing opportunity for me to continue learning and exploring these ideas by engaging with new communities and supporting the ongoing work of vital organizations.”

For more information on the program and to see past work: documentarystudies.duke.edu/projects/hine

y Lookout, the program’s blog: lewishinefellowshipblog.org y

ABOVE: Children from Nablus, West Bank, line up before attending morning classes at Tomorrow’s Youth Organization, an NGO that provides a safe space to play and learn. Photograph by Andrea Patiño Contrera. OPPOSITE: Tom Rankin. Photograph by Christopher Sims.

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Tom Rankin to Step Down as CDS Director On June 30, 2013, Tom Rankin will step down after three five-year terms at the helm of the Center for Documentary Studies. “This is a natural transitional moment for any active, thriving institution like CDS,” Rankin says. “I look forward to continuing to help broaden and deepen our work involving the documentary arts.” Rankin will stay on at Duke, devoting himself to full-time teaching and to his directorship of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts program.

During Rankin’s tenure as director, CDS has become an internationally recognized documentary arts organization annually offering a wide range of undergraduate and continuing education classes along with exhibitions, books, awards, radio programming, multimedia production, fieldwork projects, and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which started as the DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival in the basement of CDS the first year Rankin arrived at Duke. “Tom has far exceeded our expectations. I can’t imagine anyone else who could have stepped in and accomplished what he has during this time,” said CDS cofounder and board chair William Chafe, who is heading the national search for a new director.

Applications are being accepted until September 1, 2012.

To read the job description: documentarystudies.duke.edu > about > jobs

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children led to the formal founding of SAF in 1992, which brings together students, community members, and farmworkers to work for justice in the agricultural system, blending advocacy with documentary expression. Each year SAF develops the leadership of fifty young people, conducts outreach to over five thousand farmworkers, and raises awareness of farmworker issues among more than twenty-five thousand community members.

Some highlights from 2012: SAF received the North Carolina Folklore Society’s Community Traditions Award for twenty years of producing collaborative documentary work between university students and North Carolina farmworkers and their communities, and in a ceremony at the White House SAF executive director Melinda Wiggins was honored as a Champion of Change, a program created by the Obama administration to highlight leaders and innovators around the country. “SAF is proud to be celebrating twenty years of growing farmworker activists,” says Wiggins. “As we look back and honor our achievements, we remain focused on our vision, which is that one day all farmworkers will have dignity in their work and livelihood.” saf-unite.org

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OTHER NEWS

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Connecting with the Center for Documentary Studies Document Also Available Online

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New CDS Writing Blog “We often get asked what we mean by ‘documentary writing,’” says CDS writer in residence Duncan Murrell.

“One of the last things the broad field of nonfiction needs is another subcategory, or a new name for an old category, or a made-up name for a kind of writing that doesn’t exist but would be very cool. But we think documentary writing is a sufficiently real and necessary category of nonfiction writing, and it deserves its own term.” Find out why at the True/Story Lab, CDS’s new online home for documentary writing.

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Twentieth Anniversary for Student Action with Farmworkers At CDS we’re fortunate to share space with another nonprofit, Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF), whose work has been an up-close source of inspiration for twenty years. A CDS project involving Duke and UNC–Chapel Hill student documentarians and migrant farmworker

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 documentarystudies.duke.edu

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DOCUMENT a Publication of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University | Fall 2012

CONTENTS

FALL 2012

FEATURED 3 Interview with Eric Muller Editor of Colors of Confinement, a New CDS Book Featuring Rare Color Photos of Japanese American Internment

PEOPLE 14 2012–13 Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows

AWARDS 6 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography

Student Action with Farmworkers Celebrates Twenty Years

CDS Documentary Essay Prize Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize EDUCATION 7 Undergraduate Education 2012 John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Prizewinners MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Incoming Class of 2014 Continuing Education Spring 2012 Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates EXHIBITIONS 12 Coney Island 40 Years Photographs by Harvey Stein, 1970 to 2010 Keep All You Wish: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum Portraits from the Turn-of-the-Last-Century South Beyond the Front Porch 2012 Work by Certificate in Documentary Studies Graduates

OTHER NEWS 15 Search for New CDS Director CDS Launches True/Story Lab Documentary Writing Blog FRIENDS OF CDS 15