Visual Storytelling, the Center for Documentary Studies’ first e-book, is for anyone who wants to make a watchable short documentary using a consumer camcorder, digital SLR camera, or cell phone. Nancy Kalow, who has taught at CDS for twelve years and is the co-chair of the selection committee of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, has written a step-by-step and comprehensive guide to making a low-budget video with a one-person crew. The Visual Storytelling approach guides you through shooting and interviewing, editing, and the ethics of telling someone else’s story.
Click the page immediately above to view the e-book full screen.
Nancy Kalow, a longtime instructor at CDS, is co-chair of the selection committee for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Her video documentary Sadobabies was a winner of a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the Special Jury Trophy at the San Francisco Film Festival. In addition to teaching, she is working on a documentary project about “dead media” and maintains a blog called Documentary Starts Here.
Through the collaborative project Nuestras Historias, Nuestros Sueños/Our Stories, Our Dreams, the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University and Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) collected stories about the experiences of Latino immigrants, illuminating their reasons for coming to this country and the obstacles they face once they arrive. In particular the project focuses on farmworker families in the Carolinas and their dreams for the future; on their traditions, their educational aspirations, and their challenges as they try to pursue higher education.
In this book, a traveling exhibition, and a multimedia Web site, Nuestras Historias, Nuestros Sueños/Our Stories, Our Dreams uses the documentary arts to amplify the voices of Latino migrant youth and their families so that their stories can be heard.
El proyecto Nuestras Historias, Nuestros Sueños/Our Stories, Our Dreams es un esfuerzo conjunto del Centro para Estudios Documentales en Duke University y la organización Estudiantes en Acción con Campesinos (SAF). La colección de historias sobre las experiencias de inmigrantes latinos presenta las razones por las cuales vinieron a este país y los obstáculos que enfrentan al llegar a los Estados Unidos. En particular, el proyecto se enfoca en familias de trabajadores agrícolas en Carolina del Norte y del Sur y sus esperanzas para el futuro; sus tradiciones, sus aspiraciones educativas y las barreras que enfrentan al tratar de continuar sus estudios e ir a la universidad.
En el libro, la exposición itinerante, y el sitio en Internet multimedia,Nuestras Historias, Nuestros Sueños/Our Stories, Our Dreams utiliza el arte documental para presentar las voces de jóvenes latinos migrantes y sus familiares para que sus historias sean escuchadas.
Vea imágenes de la exposición y la publicación Nuestras Historias, Nuestros Sueños/Our Stories, Our Dreams
Youth Document Durham: The Book
A Five-Year Retrospective, 2000–2004
Edited by Hong-An Truong
With photographs and essays by Youth Document Durham participants
"Young people of all sorts have often been the subject of documentary
photography. In Durham, North Carolina, as perhaps in many places,
youth have also often been the subject of intense debate among local
leaders and politicians, discussions which include the high school
drop-out rate, perceived youth gang issues and teen violence, the
rising teen pregnancy rate, and the growing numbers of Spanish-language
learners. Youth Document Durham, a program at the Center for Documentary
Studies at Duke University, grew out of a simple idea. We wanted
to put cameras and audio recorders in the hands of a group of racially
and culturally diverse young people so that they could represent
their own lives through words
and pictures to each other and to the community."—Hong-An
Truong
"I take pictures at home and bring them back to my family,
and they ask me, 'Where'd you get that picture from?' and I say,
'I took it when you weren't paying attention,' and they say, 'I'm
gonna rip that picture up!' I would never let them, because these
pictures show my real life. My pictures show the important people
in my life, and the way that I see my life-sad, fun, awful, and
happy all at the same time."—LaShauna Rogers
Putting Documentary Work to Work is a step-by-step guide
designed to help community organizations develop and conduct their
own documentary projects using a camera and tape recorder. This
booklet outlines the basic principals of developing projects, writing
budgets, making photographs, and conducting interviews and provides
creative ideas about how the results of documentary work can be
put into action. Putting Documentary Work to Work also
shows, through real-life examples, how documentary work at the local
level can provoke important community discussion and lead to collaborative
problem solving.
Both the English and Spanish editions are available on-line in pdf format at www.indivisible.org under "Resources" memo.
Document
Document is a biannual publication that features some of
the best documentary work supported and produced by the Center for
Documentary Studies. "As with any true center, CDS serves as
a meeting ground, a central gathering point for the exchange of
ideas on the role of documentary studies in our collective community,"
Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies, wrote
in the inaugural issue. "Document, we hope, will become
a visible record and continuation of our regular gatherings, an
important ingredient in our ongoing conversation about the work
of the Center and also about innovation and ideas in documentary
studies."
Each issue of Document includes a range of stories; for
example, engaging interviews with photographers and other documentarians
working locally, in their own communities, and on projects across
the United States and abroad; compelling images and writing by young
people documenting what's important in their own lives; excerpts
from books and exhibitions produced by CDS; a sampling of documentary
film projects from around the world; ideas for creating your own
documentary projects; and much more.
Poets & Writers magazine (March/April 2007), in a discussion on the definition of what makes a "literary magazine" had this to say: "Document is, on the one hand, a newsletter—albeit beautifully produced—about the fine work being done at, and funded by, the center. On the other hand, it's a collection of creative essays, poems, and photographs, which sounds a lot like a literary magazine. . . . The last issue included an essay about plainclothes cops in Dneprodzerzhinsk, a city in central Ukraine, by Larry Forlick (who, with photographer Donald Weber, won the CDS's 2006 Lange-Taylor Prize); a poem by Natasha Trethewey who delivered a lecture at CDS last March; and photographs of the Black Panthers in the 1960s by Stephen Shames. No matter what one chooses to call it, Document is a compelling read."
If you would like to receive a sample copy of Document,
send your request, along with your name, mailing address, and a
check for $7.50 (made payable to the Center for Documentary Studies),
to:
Document Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
1317 W. Pettigrew Street
Durham, NC 27705
SPECIAL ISSUE
Document
(Summer/Fall 2005) Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years
of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize
104 pages, more than 100 photographs
Send your request, along with your name, mailing address, and a
check for $15 (made payable to the Center for Documentary Studies),
to:
Document Special Issue
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
1317 W. Pettigrew Street
Durham, NC 27705
Portraits of Louisiana prisoners with a political and historical
background of American prisons, from the winners of the 2000 Lange-Taylor
Prize. More.
