Engaging Documentary
Community Values and Artistic Visions
A Series Presented by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

FALL 2007 / SPRING 2008

Documentary artists—photographers, filmmakers, writers, audio producers—work in the space where creative expression and community dynamics intersect. This series, with its focus on the documentary arts as active engagement, raises questions and presents perspectives on topics central to the pursuit of transformative goals in a complex society.

Personal Views / Community Goals + Relationships / Disconnection + Cultivation / Tension + Agendas / Self-reflection + Collaboration / Artistic Freedom + Public Impact / Singular Vision


SPRING 2008 EVENTS

February 8, 7:30 p.m.
BRUCE JACKSON
Death Row
Durham Arts Council

February 28, 7 p.m.
JULIA SCULLY
"Discovering Disfarmer"
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

March 17, 7 p.m.
WENDY EWALD & BRETT COOK
"A Dialogue on Art and Social Collaboration"
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

April 10, 7 p.m.
BILL BAMBERGER
"Boys Will Be Men: Surviving High School in Flint, Michigan"
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

April 17, 7 p.m.
MALINDA MAYNOR LOWERY
"Working from Home: Documenting Lumbee Stories"
Kresge Foundation Common Room, James M. Johnston Center for
Undergraduate Excellence in Graham Memorial, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

April 25, 4-8 p.m.
BRETT COOK
"Durham Get Together: The Face Up Project"
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University


SPRING 2008 EVENT DETAILS


Friday, February 8, 7:30 p.m. / Durham Arts Council
BRUCE JACKSON: Death Row
A Documentary Film by Bruce Jackson and Diana Christian

This documentary captures daily life on Death Row in Texas. When the film was made, in March 1979, 114 men were housed in the special death cells of Ellis Prison's rows J-21 and J-23. The men spend their time waiting for the State to kill them or fighting as hard as they can to prevent that death from happening. Their hardest job is staying sane. Except for four hours a week, the men are constantly locked in small one-man cells. Few outsiders visit the Row, and those who do never stay very long. The Row is the least known of all our prisons.

Bruce Jackson
Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at State University of New York at Buffalo. Before joining the UB faculty in 1967, he was for four years a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has received grants or fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, New York Council for the Humanities, and other agencies and foundations. He is the author or editor of twenty-five books, among which are The Negro and His Folklore in 19th Century Periodicals (Texas, 1967), In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972; French edition with introduction by Michel Foucault, 1975), Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Harvard, 1972; Georgia, 2000), Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (Harvard, 1974; Routledge, 2004), Law and Disorder: Criminal Justice in America (Illinois, 1985), Death Row (with Diane Christian; Beacon, 1980), Disorderly Conduct (Illinois, 1992), and The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple University Press, 2007). He is the author of hundreds of scholarly and general interest articles that have appeared in Ácoma, Harper’s Magazine, LatinoAmerica, Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs, Journal of American Folklore, Il Polo, Atlantic Monthly, Antioch Review, New York Times Magazine, Artvoice, Counterpunch, American Anthropologist, The Nation, The New Republic, Society, and Rolling Stone. He has been a guest on PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show, and many other programs. His documentary films have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, at the Library of Congress, and at major international film festivals, and have been broadcast in the United States, France, and Germany. He recorded and edited eight ethnographic sound albums and CDs, one of which, Wake Up Dead Man, was nominated for a Grammy. He is editor of the American Subcultures book series (Praeger), co-editor of the book series Folklore and Society (University of Illinois Press), and director of the Center Working Papers book series. He has been president of the American Folklore Society, editor of Journal of American Folklore, and chairman of the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. He is also a documentary photographer. In 2002, the French government appointed him Chevalier of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.


Thursday, February 28, 7 p.m. / Center for Documentary Studies
JULIA SCULLY: "Discovering Disfarmer"


Monday, March 17, 7 p.m. / Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
BRETT COOK & WENDY EWALD: "A Dialogue on Art and Social Collaboration"

Photographer Wendy Ewald and painter Brett Cook first worked together in 1999, when Ewald invited Cook to work with teachers in Durham. Since then they have been discussing and refining the ways in which they make collaborative art. Last fall, at Amherst College, they created their first public installation/exhibition together. In A Dialogue on Art and Social Collaboration, they will describe how they each formerly conceived and carried out a collaborative project, one that involved constructing rich, welcoming environments for their partners to work in—in addition to making their own photographs and paintings. They will also talk about how they melded their working methods in the making of Amherst College Portraits: A Community Collaboration with Wendy Ewald and Brett Cook.

Wendy Ewald
Wendy Ewald is a conceptual artist who has collaborated with communities in the United States and throughout the world for more than thirty years. Ewald's approach to photography probes questions of identity and cultural differences. She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. She has had solo exhibitions at major museums and was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. She is currently a visiting artist at Amherst College, a senior research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and an artist-in-residence at the John Hope Franklin Center, also at Duke University. Towards the Promised Land, published by Steidl/Artangel, is her tenth book.

Brett Cook
Brett Cook creates artwork and experiences that defy classification in any single discipline. His work has been shown at museums and galleries since 1991, concurrent with a practice manifested in public projects since 1984. The public works have been executed in the United States, from California to Maine, and internationally in Brazil, Barbados, and Mexico. His public collaborations include a South Central Los Angeles project addressing divinity; the Development/Gentrification Project installed in ten locations throughout Harlem; and a project addressing segregation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While some of his work has been commissioned by museums or public agencies, other projects have been self-initiated interventions on abandoned spaces. His use of participatory ethnographic strategies, progressive educational pedagogy, and community organizing connect his work to exceptionally wide audiences. He is a seasoned Ashtangi and student of many forms of yoga, meditation, and healing, which inform his process and products.

Cook is currently the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor for Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for Spring 2008. He is also working with Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life (www.faceupproject.org), a project of the Center for Documentary Studies in Southwest Central Durham.


Thursday, April 10, 7 p.m. / Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
BILL BAMBERGER: "Boys Will Be Men: Surviving High School in Flint, Michigan"

Photographer Bill Bamberger, known for the innovative ways he has engaged whole communities in the production and exhibition of his work, will share images and audio excerpts from his ongoing series Boys Will Be Men, which focuses on the time he spent at a public high school in Flint, Michigan.

In the year 2000, the National Endowment for the Arts funded one of the largest community arts initiatives in our nation’s history. Fifty-six artists, one per state and U.S. territory, were invited to generate a public work addressing issues specific to a community, yet universal in theme. In Michigan, hosted by the Flint Institute of Arts, Bamberger spent six months inside Flint Central High working closely with a core group of students. Together they produced a collection of images and interviews about boys coming of age.

Boys Will Be Men is about the culture of maleness. The Flint photographs were inspired by a similar project Bamberger undertook in the mid-1980s at Deerfield Academy, a private all-male New England boarding school. Although the Flint Central work and the Deerfield work reflect distinctly different times, locations, and cultures, they show striking similarities—how adolescence appears universal and classless. The project reveals how boys relate, their simultaneous camaraderie and isolation, and their identity as shaped by their expectations of what it is to be a man.

As part of his presentation, Bamberger will provide a brief look at exhibitions he has catalyzed in communities where exhibit resources are limited. He has had one-person exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution. However, the exhibitions that mean the most to him have been staged where galleries don’t exist, in such unlikely places as a gravel lot on San Antonio’s Mexican-American West Side, an old department store in Mebane, North Carolina, and a deteriorating classroom on the main hall of Flint Central High.

In 2002 he collaborated with designer Greg Snyder to produce a custom-designed mobile art gallery for a national project about the meaning of home ownership. Chrysanthe B. Broikos, senior curator at the National Building Museum, writes: “The mobile gallery presents a new, if not revolutionary, interpretation of what public art is—and means….We are talking about creating new work that is a true collaboration among artists, architects, and the residents of a community. And we are talking about bringing this very thoughtful, tangible, and accessible art directly to other underserved citizens in a way that can make them, and really all viewers, reevaluate and examine what home means to them.”

Bill Bamberger
Bill Bamberger’s work explores large social issues of our time by looking at how they are manifest in our families and communities. His book Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (DoubleTake/W.W.Norton, 1998), with Cathy N. Davidson, won the Mayflower Prize in Non-Fiction and was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. His photographs have appeared in Aperture, Doubletake, The Washington Post Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine. He has appeared as a featured guest on CBS Sunday Morning, CSPAN’s About Books, All Things Considered with Noah Adams, and North Carolina People with William Friday. A freelance photographer, he lives in Mebane, North Carolina.


Thursday, April 17, 7 p.m. / Kresge Foundation Common Room, James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence in Graham Memorial, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
MALINDA MAYNOR LOWERY: "Working from Home: Documenting Lumbee Stories"

Working with documentary film, photography, and historical documents, Malinda Maynor Lowery will explore the layers and tensions of telling the story of one’s own place and community.

Malinda Maynor Lowery
Malinda Maynor Lowery, an assistant professor of history at Harvard University, was born in Robeson County, North Carolina, and is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She received a Ph.D. in history from UNC–Chapel Hill. Currently she is revising a manuscript titled “In Blood and Name: Native American Identity in the Segregated South” for publication. She has published articles about American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, and religious music. Lowery has produced three documentary films about Native American issues, including the award-winning In the Light of Reverence, which showed on PBS in 2001 to more than three million people. Her two previous films, Real Indian and Sounds of Faith, focus on Lumbee identity and culture. They have been shown nationwide in classrooms, at conferences, and at film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 and 1998. She serves as president of the Board of Directors of the Carolina Arts Network, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Robeson County that produces Strike at the Wind!, an outdoor drama. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard University and a master’s degree in documentary film production from Stanford University.

Friday, April 25, 4–8 p.m. / Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
BRETT COOK: "Durham Get Together: The Face Up Project"

Brett Cook
Brett Cook creates artwork and experiences that defy classification in any single discipline. His work has been shown at museums and galleries since 1991, concurrent with a practice manifested in public projects since 1984. The public works have been executed in the United States, from California to Maine, and internationally in Brazil, Barbados, and Mexico. His public collaborations include a South Central Los Angeles project addressing divinity; the Development/Gentrification Project installed in ten locations throughout Harlem; and a project addressing segregation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While some of his work has been commissioned by museums or public agencies, other projects have been self-initiated interventions on abandoned spaces. His use of participatory ethnographic strategies, progressive educational pedagogy, and community organizing connect his work to exceptionally wide audiences. He is a seasoned Ashtangi and student of many forms of yoga, meditation, and healing, which inform his process and products.

Cook is currently the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor for Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for Spring 2008. He is also working with Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life (www.faceupproject.org), a project of the Center for Documentary Studies in Southwest Central Durham.

FALL 2007 EVENTS

October 18, 7 p.m.
NORMA CANTÚ, Ethnographer & Novelist
“Celebrating Identity: Three Fiestas in Laredo, Texas”
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

October 23, 7 p.m.
CHRISTIE HERRING, Filmmaker
“Community Documentary Filmmaking: The Tension Between Observing and Belonging”
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

October 27, 8 p.m.
JASON MORAN, Jazz Composer & Pianist
“In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959”
Page Auditorium, Duke University

November 8, 5 p.m.
DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER, Photographer
“Driftless: Photographs from Iowa”
Perkins Library, Duke University

November 16, 5:30 reception | 6:30 p.m. talk
ALEX HARRIS, Photographer
“The Idea of Cuba”
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

November 29, 7 p.m.
EARL DOTTER & TENNESSEE WATSON, Photographer / Audio Producer
“Farmworkers Feed Us All: The Work and Health of Migrants in Maine”
Hyde Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill



FALL 2007 EVENT DETAILS

Thursday, October 18, 7 p.m. / Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
NORMA CANTÚ: “Celebrating Identity: Three Fiestas in Laredo, Texas”
With additional support from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Department of English, and Latino/a Studies, all at Duke University; and Student Action with Farmworkers

In the first presentation of the series, Norma Cantú will focus on three fiestas—the quinceañera, a coming-of-age celebration; the matachines folk dance drama tradition; and the secular George Washington birthday celebration—in her hometown, Laredo, Texas. She will examine resistance to the hegemonic powers of Mexico and the United States and the hybrid nature of the confluence of cultures. Each fiesta can be read as a hybrid text that reveals what Gloria Anzladúa claims is “the wound that will not heal”: the U.S.–Mexico border. Even in celebratory expressions, there are hints of the ways that this community has had to battle for its own cultural survival.

Norma E. Cantú
Norma E. Cantú is a professor of English and U.S. Latina/o Literatures at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Author of the award-winning Canícula Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera and co-editor of Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change and Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, she is working on a novel titled Champú, or Hair Matters, and an ethnographic work, Soldiers of the Cross: Los Matachines de la Santa Cruz. Her scholarly and creative work focuses on life along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.






Tuesday, October 23, 7 p.m. / Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
CHRISTIE HERRING: “Community Documentary Filmmaking: The Tension Between Observing and Belonging”
With additional support from the Film/Video/Digital Program at Duke University

In this presentation, Christie Herring will delve into the ethics of community filmmaking, how filmmakers position themselves when community is the subject, and how their assumptions affect the choices they make in the field and the editing room. Herring will explore, among other topics, the degree to which making a film about a community makes the artist part of that community, whether a filmmaker ever has “honorary membership” in a community, and the assumptions film subjects may have about how the filmmaker will represent their community. How far is a filmmaker willing to go to show that she/he “belongs”?

See: Alum Finds Documentaries, Durham Engaging (The Chronicle, October 25, 2007)


Christie E. Herring
Christie E. Herring is an independent documentary film producer based in San Francisco. She entered the world of professional filmmaking directly after graduating from Duke University in 1996, when she collaborated with Andre Robinson in producing and directing Waking in Mississippi. This sixty-minute video about race relations in her hometown, Canton, Mississippi, has been widely screened, including a special community screening at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Herring’s film Bodies and Souls illuminates the efforts of Sister Manette, a Catholic nun running the only health clinic in rural Jonestown, Mississippi. This sixteen-minute documentary (a “gem,” according to the Arkansas Times) has won several awards and continues to be screened at film festivals across the country. Herring’s award-winning short documentary Chickens in the City was spotlighted in San Francisco magazine and has been shown at more than a dozen festivals worldwide. It is currently featured by the Independent Lens Online Shorts Film Festival and KQED-TV’s Truly California Online.

Herring received an M.A. in documentary film and video from Stanford University, and in 2007, was nominated for the prestigious Eureka Fellowship, sponsored by the Fleishhacker Foundation. She was recently selected by the National Black Programming Consortium to participate in the PBS New Media Initiative in the Mississippi Delta. Several of Herring’s films have been broadcast on KTEH, a public television affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has also worked on films for PBS, National Geographic, the American Museum of Natural History, A&E, the History Channel, and MTV. In addition, Herring spent several years as a project manager in health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health.


Saturday, October 27, 8 p.m. / Page Auditorium, Duke University
JASON MORAN OCTET: “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959”
Presented by Duke Performances, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, and funded in part by a Visiting Artist Grant from the Council for the Arts at Duke; the Office of the Provost, Duke University; and the Reva and David Logan Foundation

In this world premiere performance, a prodigy pianist, gifted composer, and heir to the Thelonious Monk tradition brings together an eight-piece band to debut a new, full-length original piece based on Monk’s legendary 1959 Town Hall show, W. Eugene Smith’s documentary work, and Moran’s 2007 pilgrimage to Monk’s ancestral home in Newton Grove, North Carolina. Moran’s creative rereading incorporates live performance, projected video, and recorded music samples to reflect on the Rocky Mount master’s historical legacy.

Commissioned especially by Duke Performances and four other major institutions, “In My Mind” world premieres in Durham, then travels to the Washington (D.C.) Performing Arts Society, Chicago’s Symphony Hall, and SFJAZZ. The unveiling of Moran’s major new work at Duke, just an hour from Monk’s birthplace, promises to be a singular event in jazz.

“In My Mind” uses archival material courtesy of the W. Eugene Smith Archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the heirs of W. Eugene Smith, and the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Jason Moran
Jason Moran, a force in modern jazz piano, is the visiting artist for the Following Monk series at Duke. Just thirty-one years old, he has a nimble, unapologetically eclectic piano style that’s already won him awards, critical appreciation, and a reputation as a young genius. It has also earned him comparisons to Monk, whom Moran cites as the reason he started piano in the first place.


Thursday, November 8, 5 p.m. / Perkins Library, Duke University
DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER: “Driftless: Photographs from Iowa”
Winner of the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman Foundation First Book Prize in Photography

Support for this event is provided by the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, which has produced an exhibition of Danny Wilcox Frazier’s work on display in the Special Collections Gallery, Perkins Library, from November 5 to December 16, 2007. Additional support is provided by Duke University Press.

Danny Wilcox Frazier, a freelance photographer who also teaches at the University of Iowa, will present selections from his extended documentary project of rural culture in his home state. Frazier’s images of Iowa were selected by Robert Frank, one of America’s most important and influential photographers, to win the 2006 Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

Frank noted that Frazier makes “passionate photographs without sentimentality. . . . His work reaches out: let me tell your story, it is important.” His book, Driftless: Photographs from Iowa, will be published in November 2007 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies. Copies will be available for purchase and signing on the evening of November 8.

“During winter in the Midwest, one can drive along endless gravel roads divided by windblown fields of black earth as dark as tar,” writes Frazier of the world he depicts in his arresting black-and-white photographs. “Snow drifts along fencerows, leaving the landscape a harsh contrast of black and white. But the feeling of openness that so defines the Midwest’s rural landscape is being replaced by one of emptiness. This work sheds light on people and places often ignored by mainstream media. As the economies of rural communities across America continue to fail, abandonment is becoming commonplace; these photographs document the human effect of this economic shift.”

Frazier made these powerful photographs over a three-year period. “Ultimately, many rural communities across the Midwest will die,” he writes, and “in some ways the pictures I have made simply document the process.” Frazier has immersed himself in the collective experiences he photographs—in the lives of people who continue to find comfort among friends and family in small communities, and meaning and purpose in the enduring traditions and customs which mark the seasons. His interest in rural issues is rooted in his own life as he was raised in a small Iowa town that sits on the Mississippi River, not unlike the places he reveals through his images.

Poetic and dark, but illuminated with flashes of insight, Frazier’s imagery has a brilliance of feeling. One turns away from his photographs feeling the heartbreak of our shared loss, for this is an America all of us are losing.

Frazier’s work was selected from four hundred entries in the third First Book Prize competition. Offered every other year, the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize competition is open to American photographers of any age who have never published a book-length work and who use their cameras for creative exploration, whether it be of places, people, or communities; of the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it; of objective or subjective realities. The prize honors work that is visually compelling, that bears witness, and that has integrity of purpose.

Winners receive a grant of $3,000, publication of a book of photography, and inclusion in a traveling exhibition. For more information, see http://cds.aas.duke.edu/bp/index.html.

Danny Wilcox Frazier
Danny Wilcox Frazier is a freelance photographer. Raised in Le Claire, a small Iowa town that sits along the Mississippi River, he now lives in Iowa City. Frazier has a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and he has received awards from the University of Missouri’s Pictures of the Year International, including its 2004 Community Awareness Award for selections of his work from Iowa. He has also received a Stanley Fellowship, as well as awards from the National Press Photographers Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. His images have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Mother Jones, U.S. News & World Report, Life, and Forbes.


Friday, November 16, 5:30 p.m. (reception), 6:30 p.m. (presentation)
ALEX HARRIS / LILLIAN GUERRA: “The Idea of Cuba”
Presented by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Additional support provided by the Cuban American Student Association; the Center for International Studies; the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library; and the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, all at Duke University; and Ann Stewart Fine Art and Fundación Amistad.

To mark the publication of a new book of photographs and writing, Alex Harris, a professor of the practice of public policy and documentary studies at Duke University and a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies, will discuss his remarkable journey into contemporary Cuba and how his perspectives have shifted over thirty-five years as a documentary photographer. He will be joined by Yale historian Lillian Guerra, an American daughter of Cuban exiles who has visited the island repeatedly to conduct research and to try to understand what it means to be Cuban.

Harris’s remarkable journey into contemporary Cuba is both a powerful and mysterious evocation of life on the island and an original meditation on the nature of documentary photography. Like his mentor, Walker Evans, who photographed Cuba in 1933 at a pivotal political moment, Harris arrived in Cuba with his camera at a crossroads in Cuban history. Well known for his photographic work in the Hispanic Southwest, Alaska, and the American South, Harris made three trips to Cuba to photograph a nation coming to grips with the economic and social devastation that followed the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989, a nation beginning to imagine a future without Fidel Castro.

On each trip, Harris used a different approach to peer deeper into the fabric of Cuban society. In the foreground of Harris’s photographs and text are some of the archetypes of contemporary Cuban life: the indomitable 1950s American car, the beautiful young woman, and the revered revolutionary hero. Yet Harris recasts these symbols. We don’t look at the car, but through it to consider the tangled relationship between Cuba and the United States. His portraits of young women challenge us to consider the nature of our gaze and to see the changing status of Cuban women in relation to Castro’s political survival. The Cuban hero José Martí, a repeated icon in Harris’s photographs and the focus of his text, evokes Martí’s constant physical and spiritual presence for the Cuban people. Indeed, Martí is at the heart of this book, a visual and textual mantra giving us insight into the Cuban national character and helping us to understand what gives Cubans—on the island or in exile—their enduring strength and their hope for the future.

Copies of The Idea of Cuba, published in August 2007 by the University New Mexico Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, will be available for purchase at the event. An accompanying exhibition, organized by the Southeast Museum of Photography, will travel from 2008 to 2010.

Alex Harris is professor of documentary studies at Duke University and a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies and of DoubleTake magazine. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including River of Traps (UNM Press) with William deBuys, a finalist for the Pulitzer Price in nonfiction. Lillian Guerra is assistant professor of Caribbean history at Yale University. She is the author most recently of The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba.


Thursday, November 29, 7 p.m. / Hyde Hall, UNC–Chapel Hill
EARL DOTTER / TENNESSEE WATSON: “Farmworkers Feed Us All: The Work and Health of Migrants in Maine”
Additional UNC–Chapel Hill support for this event is from the School of Public Health, the Department of Anthropology, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the Center for Integration of Research and Action, the Social Movements Working Group, the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, the Kellogg Health Scholars Program, the Center for Public Service, the Carolina Community Network, and the Ethnicity, Culture, and Health Outcomes Program.

Earl Dotter, widely known for his photographs documenting the lives of workers, and Tennessee Watson, an audio producer from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, will present new work from a project in Maine, where an estimated 10,000–15,000 migrant farmworkers are employed. Dotter and Watson photographed and interviewed Guatemalan, Honduran, Jamaican, and Mexican migrants, Native Americans, and Mainers at work and in camps from Aroostook County next to the Canadian border to the coastal region of Washington County to Western Maine. They also documented access to health-care services provided by the Maine Migrant Health Program, which reaches out to farmworkers involved in the state’s harvests via mobile health clinics.

An exhibit of this work will premiere in January 2008 during the opening of Maine’s Legislative Session at the Capitol in Augusta. In the spring the exhibit will travel to the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and then throughout Maine’s agricultural areas.

The project and exhibition were sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health (NIOSH Education and Research Center and NIEHS Center for Environmental Health), the Maine Migrant Health Program, the Maine Occupational Research Agenda, and the Maine State Department of Labor, and the Maine Health Access Foundation.

Earl Dotter
After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in graphic design at San Jose State University, Earl Dotter enrolled in the advertising and photography program of the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1967. It was here that his interest in photography first received recognition. While still a student at the school, his photographs were published on two covers of New York Magazine. And his pictures of the urban crisis taken after Martin Luther King’s assassination, appeared in the final revival of The Saturday Evening Post.

In 1968 Dotter joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and was assigned to the Tennessee coalfields, where he first photographed coal miners and their serious health and safety concerns. After leaving VISTA, he continued to work in the Appalachian region, photographing for the United Mine Workers Journal. Since that time Dotter has sought to document the lives of workers throughout the United States. In so doing, his goal has been to personalize the whole worker and his or her life on the job, at home, and in the community.

By 1996 Dotter had assembled his occupational photographs to create the exhibit The Quiet Sickness: A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America. In 1998, the book of the same name was published to accompany the exhibit on a tour of New England, sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1999 Dotter was invited to become a visiting scholar with the Occupational Health Program through the NIOSH Education and Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In 2000 Dotter received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship to document what is now this nation’s most dangerous occupation: commercial fishing. After the World Trade Center attack, he photographed the heavily impacted New York City firehouses and at Ground Zero. The Price of Fish and When Duty Calls are the exhibits that resulted from these projects. Dotter received the American Public Health Association’s Alice Hamilton Award in 2001.

In 2002 Dotter ended a thirty-year career as a film-based 35mm photojournalist. His current assignment and personal project work are now done exclusively in professional digital format. The tradition of processing and printing images as an integral part of the creative process informs his digital image making today.

Dotter’s recent exhibits include Our Future in Retrospect? Coal Miner Health in Appalachia: The Photographs of Russell Lee 1946 and Earl Dotter 2006 and Just a Nurse: A 2007 Nurses’ Week Tribute to Nursing Practice, With Appreciation to the Nurses at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Photographs by Earl Dotter and Writing and Interviews by Suzanne Gordon.

Tennessee Watson
Tennessee Watson coordinates Youth Noise Network, a youth radio project at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke. She is also an associate producer with the documentary radio unit at CDS. As a producer and community activist, her work focuses on migration throughout the Americas and Latino immigrant communities living in the United States. Watson spent four summers working with migrant farmworkers in Maine as an outreach worker with the Maine Migrant Health Program. She has also worked alongside migrant farmworkers, raking blueberries in Maine and planting trees in Texas. Her audio work has been heard on Maine Public Radio, North Carolina Public Radio, and KFAI Fresh Air Radio. The fruits of her labor with Youth Noise Network can be heard every Sunday at 2-3 p.m. on WXDU 88.7 FM. Her written work has most recently been published in Ms. Magazine.

The Engaging Documentary series is presented by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University with support from the Robertson Scholars Program.

Other Duke University support is from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Department of English, Latino/a Studies, the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke Performances, the Office of the Provost, the Council for the Arts, the Center for International Studies, the Cuban American Student Association, the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, the Film/Video/Digital Program, and the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

Other UNC–Chapel Hill support is from the School of Public Health, the Department of Anthropology, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the Center for Integration of Research and Action, the Social Movements Working Group, the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, the Kellogg Health Scholars Program, the Center for Public Service, the Carolina Community Network, and the Ethnicity, Culture, and Health Outcomes Program.





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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