MEDIA THAT MATTERS: Call for Entries-Deadline January 22, 2010

“Screen.  Act. Impact.”

Media That Matters is a showcase of films which are based around the idea of social change.  This international campaign is meant to create discussion and encourage educators, youth and organizers to “Take Action around these films.”
For information about submission criteria and festival details, go HERE.

Panel Discussion: Documentary Photography, Photojournalism & Visual Storytelling in the Digital Age

Visit Venice Arts for a conversation with Brett Abbott, associate curator for the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs; documentary photographer and photojournalist Jim Hubbard; BagNews editor Michael Shaw; and additional speakers.

When: Wednesday, October 20 – 7:00 p.m.

Where: Venice Arts  – 1702 Lincoln Boulevard, Venice, CA

Photograph by Jim Hubbard

FotoKonbit Social Photography Workshops

FotoKonbit is a non-profit organization created to empower Haitians to tell their own stories through photography. They teach photography workshops to children and adults. Fotokonbit is a community of photographers building an archive that shows Haiti through Haitian eyes.

Inspired by the Creole word “konbit” which can be defined as the coming together of similar talents in an effort towards a common goal, FotoKonbit use their skills as photographers, educators, and artists to make a positive difference, through photography. By partnering with established Haitian organizations, FotoKonbit is uniquely positioned to inspire hope through creative expression and provide Haitians with the opportunity to document their reality and share it with the largest possible audience.

For more information about FotoKonbit and how to get involved, click here.

Participation for Engagement and Impact: A Conversation with Jennifer Maytorena Taylor

Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor is a research fellow here at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her current work in progress is a web-based film project for Latino Public Broadcasting and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called Street Knowledge to College. It explores how a small community-run charter school called FREE L.A. High works with youth to interrupt the school-to-jail track, both for themselves and for others.

When it launches on PBS.org in May, Street Knowledge to College will contain 15 short pieces, including ten close-up profiles and first-person pieces by and about students. It will also include four “toolkit” shorts, each focusing on an approach that FREE L.A. applies to deal with a top drop-out/expulsion cause such as tardiness, pregnancy, fighting, and student disconnection from curriculum. And, finally, to provide an overall frame for the series, Street Knowledge to College will feature a three-minute “explainer” segment about the school-to-jail track, a critical issue in communities across the USA, both urban and rural.

All the pieces will be produced collaboratively with Claudia Gómez, who will work as the lead co-producer from the FREE L.A. High community. Many other community members will serve as story authors and camera people.

We recently caught up with Jennifer and asked her a few questions about the participant media aspects of her project….

Why did you decide to produce Street Knowledge to College collaboratively? Why not just make a traditional documentary film?

Seeing how social media and participatory media culture enhanced the engagement campaign for New Muslim Cool, my last film, I wanted to try to hardwire community engagement into the production of a project about mass incarceration, and I wanted to get youth from the “digital native” generation to participate.

And I had a question I wanted to answer: Could we increase a documentary’s engagement impact through the participation of community members as producers, while making those pieces well-crafted and journalistically sound?

How did the collaboration with Claudia and the rest of the FREE L.A. community take shape?

When I first met FREE L.A.’s organizers last year, they were polite but wary when I told them I was interested in developing a collaborative documentary project. When I suggested observing the school for a few weeks, they asked if I could instead teach a video class once a week. I agreed, and started building a relationship with the community that I am continuing to develop as we work collaboratively.

During the first year, I taught video classes at FREE L.A., produced several short videos with students and graduates about the effects of the correctional system on their lives, visited some students’ homes to edit projects, and experimented with different collaborative approaches and workflows.

Claudia Gómez worked consistently with me throughout that process and showed a lot of interest and ability, so, when the opportunity arose to create Street Knowledge for public broadcasting as a web project, I invited Claudia to work with me as the principal co-producer from the community.

Now that the project is underway, can you see any ways in which the collaborative approach will benefit the project?

I think our collaborative approach will go a long way to ensure authenticity, both in terms of how we develop the stories and content and also in terms of how people actually act on camera. I’ve noticed that people do a lot of self-conscious “acting” on camera now, more than I think they did about 10 or 15 years ago, and I ascribe that to the effects of reality TV. So there is a lot less acting when the camera crew is made up of other kids from your class.

Has collaboration with your subjects benefited any of your past projects? In the same ways as it is benefiting Street Knowledge to College?

I worked in a deep collaboration with the main character in my first feature-length documentary, Paulina, in 1998. The film mixes documentary material with fragments of narrative scenes to tell the life story of a working-class Mexican woman through multiple, conflicting perspectives in the manner of the classic Kurosawa film Rashomon.

My filmmaking partner Vicky Funari had started the project partly as an experiment in collaboration with our main character Paulina Cruz Suárez, who had worked for Vicky’s family when Vicky was a child living in Mexico.

By looking for ways in which we could work collaboratively with Paulina, Vicky and I were searching for a way to mitigate the power imbalances that often exist between filmmakers and their less affluent subjects.

Apart from appearing in all of the film’s documentary scenes, in which she tells her story and travels to her childhood village to confront different people from her past, Paulina’s main areas of collaboration with us happened during scripting in the early phases of work on the film, and again toward the end of the production in the final editing. When we were finishing the film she spent a couple of weeks with us looking at the cut in-progress, giving feedback, and recording a final interview with me in which she figured out how she wanted the film to end.

We premiered Paulina at the Sundance Film Festival soon after we completed it, with Paulina present for all the screenings and Q&A sessions. We were all nervous at first, but the response to the film was so positive that Paulina ended up marching into all the restaurant kitchens in Park City to invite the workers (who were overwhelmingly Mexican) to come see her film. Ultimately she traveled to screenings all over the world, speaking about her experiences confronting class biases and sexual violence.

So, to answer your questions: yes, collaboration with subjects has benefited some of my past work, but, no, not in the same ways as it is benefiting Street Knowledge to College. And I have not always worked in an explicitly formally collaborative way. For example, I made my most recent film, New Muslim Cool, in a much more traditional mode – with much more of a “firewall” between the production and participants, and no sharing of footage before the picture was locked.

How about your future work? Have you started thinking about your next participant collaboration?

Since my work is very oriented to public engagement and dialogue, and to getting disparate communities and people to talk to each other, I think I will always employ some kind of collaboration with the participants.

But I am not sure if I will create my next project using the exact same mode of collaborative production that I am using to make Street Knowledge. It could be more like New Muslim Cool, in which the main character got more involved in the community engagement once the film was done.

I think I’m coming to regard the formal process of collaboration not as something necessary or appropriate for every single project, but as an essential part of a filmmaker/journalist’s toolkit.

Through my own work as a filmmaker and through research I have been doing while working at Annenberg this year as a research fellow, I have uncovered a whole slew of different collaborative approaches that journalists and communities can try. It’s hard work that requires the commitment of everyone involved, but the payoffs can be enormous.

We Are The Future

Critical Exposure’s Photo of the Month for November 2011 is called We Are The Future:

 

Seventeen year old Salam, one of the Critical Exposure Fellows, took the picture.

The Critical Exposure Fellows, high school students from the Seattle area who applied to be part of an intensive, year-long program, rallied on December 5 for jobs for youth.

Upcoming PhotoPhilanthropy Events

On January 21st and 22nd, our friends at PhotoPhilanthropy will host a group of leading practitioners in the field of visual storytelling for a weekend of discussions and presentations in San Francisco.

On Saturday, January 21st, there will be a live judging event to decide the winners of the PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards, and, on Sunday, January 22nd, there will be a series of panel presentations on visual storytelling for non-profits.

Event details:

PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards, Live Judging Event
Date: Saturday, January 21st
Time: 10 am to 4 pm Pacific Time
Location: California College of Arts, San Francisco – Timken Auditorium
Registration: Here
Message from PhotoPhilanthropy: “Join us for this rare opportunity to go ‘behind the scenes’ see this esteemed panel of judges critique and select the top photo-essays submitted for PhotoPhilanthropy’s annual Activist Awards. Feel free to attend the whole session, or come for part of it!”

Social Impact Through Imagery: Panel Presentations
Date: Sunday, January 22nd
Time: 10 am to 1 pm Pacific Time
Location: California College of Arts, San Francisco – Timken Auditorium
Registration: Here
Message from PhotoPhilanthropy: “Don’t miss this excellent opportunity to hear from internationally recognized leaders in visual storytelling. A series of dynamic presentations will show how photographers and non-profit organizations can work together to make an impact. Panel topics will include: Visual Storytelling for Non-Profits, Multimedia and Photo Projects; Creative Ways to Leverage Images in Non-Profit Communications; Effective Collaborations: How Non-Profits and Photographers Collaborate to Make an Impact; The Value of Non-Profit Photography for Socially Concerned Freelance Photographers. To see a list of speakers and find out more click here.”

Robin van der Hoek: Participant vs. Professional Photography

Participant vs. Professional Photography by Robin van der Hoek

In Julia Ballerini’s piece “Photography as a Charitable Weapon,” she critiques projects such as Jim Hubbard’s “Shooting Back” for exploiting poor communities and unconsciously reasserting conservative values and ideologies about poverty. She explains that “given the absence of any political agenda or critique, his words reinforce those conservatives who would indicate the cause of the crime among youths as “the poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach the young right from wrong.”” Ballerini’s criticism reveals her misunderstanding of the intentions of the project, which simultaneously illustrates the distinction between participatory and professional photography. Her emphasis on the political message as a vital part of photography overlooks the sense of empowerment that technology grants impoverished communities. While Ballerini believes professional photography projects and volunteer acts need some semblance of a political agenda, participatory photography puts the camera in the hands of the subject for the audience to experience their world as they see it.

While Ballerini acknowledges Jim Hubbard’s altruism, she neglects the enjoyment and empowerment the camera gives impoverished children. With the camera, these children interpret and shape their world at their discretion as opposed to having it edited and exhibited as something foreign. Allowing the children the freedom of their own camera gives these children a sense of purpose and an outlet for self-expression. “Shooting Back” does not intend to suggest that with better parents, these children would be better off, but rather that these children still find moments in life worth capturing despite the desolate expectation that they live in complete misery. This project allowed children to celebrate their life and capture personal moments and subjects to realize their own voice and artistic vision. Having a physical photograph that they created is proof that they have a perspective in this world. Professional photography on the other hand would, as Ballerini suggests, typically have a larger, intentional theme that it serves, but for an amateur photographer the meaning of a photo can be as simple as meaningful subject.

With her definition that meaningful photography must have a social or political critique, Ballerini underestimates the potential of photo projects such as “Shooting Back.” Yes, they may have garnered a lot of media attention, but just because these volunteered acts of kindness are potentially commercial and mainstream does not mean they are without value. These projects bring a sense of excitement and opportunity that these kids need. They do not need an outsider to come in and tell them how poor their quality of life is or how corruption and corporate greed have overrun their state. They need the opportunity to capture what means the most to them and celebrate their life. Maybe participants are not aware of the factors that have lead to lower poverty rates, but this should not stop children from receiving cameras and defining what matters most to them.

Jennifer Leshkevich: Participant vs. Professional Photography

Participant vs. Professional Photography by Jennifer Leshkevich

In “Photography as a Charitable Weapon: Poor Kids and Self-Representation,” Julia Ballerini negatively critiques participatory photography works of poor, disenfranchised youth, stating, “my critique has to do with the ways such work is carried out and the messages that resulting books and exhibitions risk conveying to a museum- and gallery-going public. These messages tend to reinforce the status quo rather than question it” (169). She makes a valid point in describing how some participatory works do in fact, support the status quo. For example, some participatory projects (such as Born Into Brothels’ Hope House) have received severe criticism from the communities they are attempting to “save.” Many find these attempts to be neo-colonial and in support of western ideologies, therefore supporting the status quo.

However, participatory photography can be utilized in a way that is honest and informative in comparison to photojournalism. When I first saw the citizen photographs taken for projects such as “The House is Small,” and “Shooting Back,” I appreciated their honesty because they are not taken by professionals, but by uninhibited members of the same community (African families affected by AIDS and impoverished DC youth, respectively). Those pictures, in my opinion, paint a more realistic picture of everyday life as compared to a photograph taken by a journalist who is trying to find the “right shot” for a piece. Photojournalism images seem to represent only the most extreme predicaments (i.e. famine in African). Photojournalism, while sometimes extremely effective (i.e. Vietnam Girl Napalm and anti-war sentiments) must always be taken with a grain of salt. The process of “seeking out” pictures that fit a certain bias, editing them down to the select few that fit the dialogue, and finally circulating them in publications with words for “context” that may not always be 100% truthful, should always be taken into consideration. What would be interesting is to see how photojournalism, along with participatory photos, can work in conjunction with one another to paint a more comprehensive whole. While photojournalism finds the extreme, participatory photos seems to illuminate more of the joy and happiness in communities that are afflicted by what most would consider unimaginable.

Alex Steadman: Participant vs. Professional Photography

Participant vs. Professional Photography by Alex Steadman

It used to be that participatory and professional photography occupied very different spheres, and served very different purposes. Yet today, both participatory and professional photography must coexist in order to best serve society as a whole.

At the time of it’s invent, participatory photography was marginalized in it’s glorification of the novice photographer, whereas professional photography was seen as an art form, or at the very least a potential livelihood. Participatory photography has gained much more respect and presence on the global stage, and necessarily so. With the advent of digital photography and the internet, suddenly a photo taken by a local of his/her daily life can be broadcast to the world. And with the international, continual, and constant demand for instant knowledge, sometimes it just isn’t practical (or sometimes even possible) for a professional photographer to gain access in the same way a participatory photographer can.

That said, there is still a demand, and need, for photographs taken by professionals. A professional “eye” tends to see methods of framing and approaching subjects that a mere novice participant may not realize. However, this tendency has potential to become cliché, one-dimensional, and in some cases, stereotypical. There is also a palpable distance from the subject, a lack of holistic understanding, that can permeate professional photographs at times, due to the lack of specialization in the industry. Not to say this detachment is intentional or malignant, but the fact remains that this potential problem is a nonissue in participatory photography.

Participatory photography offers ample opportunity and is given to those who can best represent the issues at hand, fostered by professionals who impart their knowledge on the participants, and yielding powerful results. Programs such as these have been met with fierce criticisms, in particular by one Ms. Julia Ballerini, but while some of her concerns may be worth looking into, she has a problem common amongst critics—she critiques and nothing more, thus failing to offer any meaningful alternatives. Therefore, the options stand thus: give participants a chance to show the world what they experience from their perspective, or trust outsiders, albeit trained and mostly well-meaning outsiders, to do it for them. I choose the former. A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, and I wouldn’t want anyone else to write my autobiography.

Alesa Dunbar: Participant vs. Professional Photography

Participant vs. Professional Photography by Alesa Dunbar

In the realm of photography, there are numerous categories. Two distinct and widely discussed categories, though, are participatory and professional photography. There are numerous debates on whether one field is better than the other, (i.e.: professional over participatory and vice versa) but, in my opinion, both fields have their own values.

The main distinction between professional photography and participatory photography is the person taking the photographs and the context behind that photograph. In professional photography, the photographer is normally an outsider to his or her subjects. Therefore, the photograph depicts a different context than it would if the photographer was part of the community. Also, professional photographs are usually taken to depict a situation or person for the news, magazine, or some other published work. Due to the use o the photograph, the context of the photo is often altered to convey the point the photographer is trying to get across. The context of professional photographs is whatever the photographer wants it to be, and he or she will alter the photograph or take it in a certain way to get their message across.

Participatory photography differs greatly from professional photography in that the photographer is not a professional and is a part of the community he or she is depicting. In this sense, participatory photography is an excellent art form. It allows individuals to show their life, their reality, and their struggle through a camera lens. The context behind the photo is more real than that of professional photography. No alterations are made to convey a message, but, rather, what you see is what you get. The photograph is reality as perceived by the photographer.

Both forms allow a reality to be shown, but the difference lies in the way in which the reality is being presented. Both forms of photography have their own value, and I do not think one should be valued more than the other. It is simply a matter of what context you want to get from the photo. Do you want an altered reality taken from an outsider (professional photography) or a reality that is true to the individual who took the photograph (participatory photography)?

Ming Yan Lam: Participant vs. Professional Photography

Participant vs. Professional Photography by Ming Yan Lam

In “Photography as a Charitable Weapon: Poor Kids and Self-representation,” Julia Ballerini emphasized on participant photography as “a form of documentation plays a central role in determining the art establishment’s wholeheartedly promotion and display of images resulting from collaborative enterprises with down-and-out kids” (162). However, these projects are often rejected by the organizations in terms of funding and exhibition space and can never reach the public due to many different reasons. On the other hand, professional photography, as Ballerini mentioned, “can only be written in history by being normalized… and that could occur only by entering the art world as a commodity” (180). In one of examples, Ballerini described Shapolsky et al. such professional photography “is oriented towards the description of a social-economic system and its effects, and calls for a specifically informed anger on the part of it viewers rather than an empathetic but uninformed emotional response” (181).

As we can see that participant photography is the one as an insider that intended to help people in poverty; meanwhile, professional photography is the one as an outsider to take pictures that they considered as newsworthy in order to make profit and become famous. If both the amateurs and professional photographer can cooperate and help each other, they can both achieve their own goal. But this consensus might take a long time and much effort to reach. One potential solution would be the government’s intervention to create economic incentive for participant photography. In this way, participant photography will have its opportunity to reach out to larger audience while professional photography will have more motivation to involve in a more meaningful area.

Blair K. Strong: Participant vs. Professional Photography

Participant vs. Professional Photography by Blair K. Strong

While Julia Ballerini presents compelling arguments for the potential harm of photography social projects with underprivileged children, she fails to fully recognize the positive effects of the discussion in which she participates. Whether or not projects such as “Shooting Back” empower youths to make a difference is irrelevant to the projects’ success in bringing attention to the social issue of youth homelessness and poverty. Ballerini acknowledges the great amount of publicity that results from these projects, but does not credit the extensive publicity with inevitably raising awareness. These projects promote themselves and gain commercial momentum that, yes benefit the creators, but also open doors for community debate and discussion regarding these issues in a very public forum.

At minimum, these projects bring attention to people that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. What results from this new awareness is determined by each viewer’s perspective, but not even Ballerini can deny that it creates an open dialogue (one that she furthers with her own essay). I believe that these projects are; at best, catalysts for powerful public movements and at worst, doors for public debate. The key to these photographic endeavors is not the financial success of related foundations, but the link they secure between the given social issue and the public forum.

Like all other social projects and community service initiatives, these young citizen journalistic series risk isolating certain social groups further by “exhibiting” them as featured subjects. This risk is far greater, however, for productions created by professionals and outside viewers, rather than the subjects themselves. All great ideas are challenged, but it is this challenging that proves their worth and their potential for impact.

Next Page »