Certificate in Documentary Studies Final Seminar Presentations and Graduation
May 31 and June 1, 7 p.m.
CDS Auditorium


CERTIFICATE IN DOCUMENTARY STUDIES GRADUATES
Final Projects, Spring 2007

Final Project Presentations on Thursday, May 31:
Charles Duncan
Robert Schneider
Amanda van Scoyoc
John N. Wall
Tim Telkamp
Elena Rue

Final Project Presentations on Friday, June 1:
Martha Weeks Daniel
Kim Wiebe
Dan Willett
Jessica Grey Starnes
Amanda La France
Jack Christian
Durward Rogers

PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Jack Christian
Dead-Car X-ING
Video and Photography
[Haverkamp]

In the summer of 2004, Karin Bolender and Jack Christian journeyed in a donkey wagon made out of a 1980 Ford Pinto from the Martinsville Speedway, in Virginia, to Eden, North Carolina. The trip covered sixteen miles and took three days. They traveled with Karin’s two spotted donkeys, Aliass and Passenger; a jack named Bronson; and one yellow Lab, named Mosey. They arrived sunburned and dirty in an Episcopal Church parking lot. Since then, they’ve never been quite sure how to answer when someone asks why they did it. At first they had some reasons, but now they’re not certain that they know.

Jack Christian teaches English at Durham Technical Community College and previously worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer. In the fall he will begin the M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.




Martha Weeks Daniel
Miss Nancy Minds Their Manners
Video
[Kalow]

Southern people often pride themselves on their manners, and while proper etiquette and a more genteel way of life appear to be fast fading away, that just might not happen if “Miss Nancy” can help it!
This documentary follows 72-year-old “Miss Nancy” Rascoe and her twelve young charges as they learn and live manners and hospitality at her five-day “manners camp,” or as she calls it, “A House Party for Etiquette for Young Ladies and Gentlemen.” The setting is her family’s 200-year-old historic home, also a bed and breakfast, on the Perquimans River in rural Hertford, North Carolina. Both heartfelt and humorous, this is a portrait of a charismatic character and a glimpse into a social culture and a way of life still remaining in Eastern North Carolina.

A wife, mother, and grandmother from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Martha Weeks Daniel graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in art education and taught in Texas, Alabama, California, and Puerto Rico. She first had a taste of documentary work through a web site of her photographs documenting the flooding of Hurricane Floyd in 1999. She jumped into filming “Miss Nancy” in 2005. Not having any idea what to do with twenty-two hours of footage, she discovered CDS. She is especially interested in documenting people, places, and things “particular to and peculiar to” Eastern North Carolina.




Charles Duncan
Breaking the Law: Needle Exchange in Guilford County
Audio
[Haverkamp]

Public health advocates have run needle exchanges in North Carolina for more than a decade. The programs, in which volunteers give drug addicts clean hypodermic needles in exchange for dirty ones, are illegal in the state. In every session at the General Assembly for the past twelve years, legislators have filed at least one bill to legalize the programs. All have failed in committee. In 2005, a bill in the State House would have legalized needle exchange programs and funded three pilot exchanges with $550,000. In Guilford County, needle exchange volunteers and local officials teamed up to ask to run one of the three pilot programs.

Charles Duncan lives and writes in Raleigh, North Carolina. He’s on staff with the Courthouse News Service and has written for the Independent Weekly, Triangle Free Press, and North Carolina Public Radio, among other news outlets.




Amanda La France
When I Grow Up: A Conversation with the Women and Children of the Jeremiah Program
Photography and Audio
[Haverkamp]

Approaching the subject as a former program participant, Amanda La France explores the hopes and dreams of a group of women who have shared experiences in the Jeremiah Program in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through this program single mothers take control of their futures while maintaining full-time school schedules and part-time work schedules, empowering them to change the course of their lives not only for themselves but for their children as well.

A Midwesterner by birth and a Southerner by choice, Amanda La France made her roundabout journey from Minneapolis to Durham four years ago, by way of the American West and Northwest, to find her life’s calling in documentary work at CDS. She has an A.A.S. degree in media production, photography, and women’s studies, and has held a myriad of jobs, including being a farmhand at an organic farm, schlepping beers at a favorite local bar, and doing freelance photography work for a variety of organizations and projects. She lives in a restored Victorian house in Durham with her husband, two sons, and a menagerie of animals. When she grows up she hopes to travel the world as a freelance photographer while avoiding the frozen tundra of the Midwest during its nine months of winter.




Durward Rogers
About Jazz
Video
[Kalow]

“About Jazz” is a work of visual jazz describing this complex American art form. Much like a jazz piece, the film is a set of riffs and improvisations, each making a statement about the theme, each with its own unique viewpoint, and all grounded in the music itself. Music and commentary are provided by the nationally renowned North Carolina Central University Jazz Band and Vocal Ensemble.

After twenty-five years of engineering and managing the design of high-end computer graphics systems, Durward Rogers decided to turn his obsession with creating images to documentary filmmaking. He was drawn to documentary film because its broad range of forms and styles makes it possible to illuminate complex and subtle subjects such as human nature, science, politics, or even jazz.




Elena Rue
Love After Loss
Photography
[Haverkamp]

As a Lewis Hine Fellow in Ethiopia, Elena Rue spent nine months working with and documenting the local non-governmental organization Hope for Children (HFC), which addresses the basic needs of children whose families have been affected by HIV/AIDS. HFC’s support allows children who still have family, friends, or neighbors to remain in their own communities, and for children left alone, HFC provides group homes, where six to eight children live together as a family with a group home mother. During her fellowship Rue spent a great deal of time documenting these families. In this body of work she attempts to show family life within these group homes and to give a face to the statistics flooding the media about HIV/AIDS orphans.

Elena Rue escaped from the cornfields of Iowa to study anthropology and documentary photography. In recent years she has worked as a freelance photographer and has completed internships at the Maine Photographic Workshops and DoubleTake magazine. Her documentary work has focused on adoption and non-traditional families. Included in this body of work are international, interracial, single, and gay and lesbian adoptive families. As a 2006 Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow at CDS, she worked with Hope for Children in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She is currently juggling three jobs at the Center for Documentary Studies and is contemplating making CDS her permanent residence.




Robert Schneider
Return to Duty
Video
[Haverkamp]

Of the 22,700 soldiers wounded in Iraq, more than 500 are amputees. Only 25 of them have remained on active duty. Staff Sergeant Daniel Metzdorf is one of these soldiers, and “Return to Duty” is an exploration of the struggle he faced in order to continue to serve his nation.

Robert Schneider is currently a captain in the United States Army serving at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A 2002 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, he was deployed with Daniel Metzdorf to Iraq from 2003 to 2004. “Return to Duty” is Schneider’s first film, and he hopes to chronicle the experiences of the other 24 amputees who have also returned to duty.




Jessica Grey Starnes
The Glorious Maze of the Eno River
Video
[Kalow]

Tonight’s screening is a ten-minute segment of a longer film that will lead audiences along the winding banks of the Eno River in North Carolina, exploring its many historical and beautiful locations as well as the people who maintain the river and teach others about it. The documentary is intended to raise awareness of the importance of taking care of the amazing natural areas the Earth provides us and to encourage more people to discover and explore the Eno’s history.

A native of North Carolina, Jessica Grey Starnes has always had a passion for cameras and taking pictures. After attending the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, she pursued cinematography work. In 2005 she and her husband had a daughter and shortly thereafter moved to Durham, where Starnes began classes at CDS. After completing the Certificate, she will move to Asheville with her family to study video and production, with a forestry minor, at UNC–Asheville. She hopes to continue making documentaries that will highlight and explore the great outdoors.




Tim Telkamp
4’ 8 1/2”: A Year in the Life of the New Hope Valley Railway
Photography and Audio
[Haverkamp]

This “year-in-the-life” photo-documentary project of the New Hope Valley Railway spans almost three years, from the spring of 2004 through the winter of 2006. The photographs document the hard work of the staff at an all-volunteer railroad museum that operates trains for public rides. The New Hope Valley Railway is an amazing combination of history being preserved, relived, and even made. The project gives a glimpse of spikes being driven by hand, locomotives being lifted, track being straightened, efforts made to offer thousands of visitors the chance to ride a piece of history. For Telkamp, work on the project provided the opportunity to learn about the locomotives, railcars, and maintenance equipment used to run a railroad, but even more precious were the friendships he formed with the people who believe in the value of keeping this railroad alive.

Born in Virginia and raised near Orlando, Florida, Tim Telkamp is a photographer and technologist currently living in Apex, North Carolina. Wherever life has taken him, from crossing the Arctic Circle to South America and Europe, he has gone with camera in hand. His photographs have been published in newspapers and magazines, and his fine-art prints can be found in local galleries. The 2005 artist-in-residence for the North Carolina Railroad Museum, he is author/illustrator of “The Place That’s Always with You,” a children’s story set in Central North Carolina that celebrates home and history. Since graduating from the University of Central Florida with a degree in electrical engineering, he has been involved in many design and engineering projects, including Space Shuttle Launch control systems and the B2 bomber aircraft.




Amanda van Scoyoc
Maria and Ana Age Nine to Fifteen
Photography and Audio
[Haverkamp]

Merging still photography and audio, this short film explores the lives and thoughts of the filmmaker’s twin sisters. We watch and listen as the girls, adopted from Russia at the age of nine, struggle to find their place in the family and become American teenagers.

After researching adolescent clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, St. Andrews in Scotland, and UNC–Chapel Hill, Amanda van Scoyoc has happily not run any statistical analyses for three months and counting. Still interested in adolescents, she has been exploring this age group in her recent documentary work. She is currently the art teacher at the Wake County Boy’s Club, where with a bare bones budget she makes art projects that involve flour, water, food coloring, and number two pencils. Since working there she has reluctantly learned how to draw an awe-inspiring racing car and a basketball player in action. She looks forward to continuing to work with adolescents next year as a CDS Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow living and working in Boston.




John N. Wall
Of divers colors, and wonderfull plentie: Documenting Growth and Change at the North Carolina Farmers Market
Photography
[Kalow]

The North Carolina Farmers Market is a place where North Carolina’s history as an agrarian state meets its urban present and future, where the most southern of products collards and sweet potatoes now share space with goat cheese and fresh-baked croissants. This project combines what John Wall has been able to record of the Farmers Market with what he has come to learn about the practice of documentary photography.

John N. Wall lives in Raleigh and teaches at North Carolina State University. He is a native of North Carolina, where members of his family have been farmers for more than 250 years. His photographs may be found on his web site, www.jnwallphoto.com. He is grateful to the Center for Documentary Studies for supporting his growth as a photographer.




Kim Wiebe
Anathoth Community Garden
Video
[Kalow]

Anathoth Community Garden is a place where people from a wide variety of backgrounds gather for a common cause. It is here that language barriers, faith experiences, and generation gaps cease to exist in the conventional ways that divide us. This film shows the ways in which this garden in Cedar Grove, North Carolina, has built bridges in a once segregated community, one that has experienced a lot of tragedy. The church was destroyed in a raging fire, and then a community member was murdered at a local store. Relying on the use of hands and elbow grease rather than machinery and the oil industry, the garden has been producing so much food that members can’t give it away fast enough.

Kim Wiebe was born in California, where she spent most of her life. After high school, she moved to Winnipeg, Canada, where she obtained her undergraduate degree in film studies from the University of Manitoba. Several years later she moved to Durham, North Carolina, where she has actively pursued her Certificate in Documentary Studies while working for the dean of Trinity College at Duke University.




Dan Willett
Night – Time
Photography
[Kalow]

Savannah and New Orleans. Two port cities rich with history that grew to become popular tourist destinations. Through his work, Dan Willett is trying to capture the architecture and urban design that are unique to each city and also to develop an understanding of regional growth and transformation. He hopes to convey how history is preserved in these everyday (and nighttime) scenes. Over the years, thousands of people have passed through the streets and walkways captured in these images.

Employed as an account executive for Siemens Medical in its IT division, Dan Willett is originally from Philadelphia. For the past six years he has been working with medium-format black-and-white photography in a traditional darkroom setting, exploring his interest in urban settings. He loves cityscapes and is fascinated with the different environments in which people congregate, commute, and socialize. More of his work can be viewed at www.danwillett.com.





banner image:

Professor Alex Harris during a slide lecture accompanying the fall 2003 exhibition, Walker Evans at 100. Photograph by Christopher Sims.






Center for Documentary Studies
1317 W. Pettigrew Street
Durham, NC 27705

telephone: (919) 660-3663
fax: (919) 681-7600
email: docstudies@duke.edu

See: directions to the Center for Documentary Studies

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