Documenting Community by Barry Dornfeld

Volume 27
Spring-Summer
2001

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Indivisible is a project of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona. Indivisible is funded by the pew Charitable Trusts.

Barry Dornfeld (University of the Arts, 320 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102; dornfeldb@uarts.edu)
is the director and associate professor of the Communication Program at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and specializes in sound recording and documentary filmmaking. He has published research on media organizations, media reception, and cultural performance, including "Producing Public Television, Producing Public Culture," an ethnography of a PBS series.

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Village staff members Sally Hammerman and Andres Chamorro performing with puppets on Earth Day. Photo: Reagan Louie

Cultural documentarians have long explored the creative combination of visual image and sound in depicting social life with richness and depth. Their explorations often focused on combining still image and spoken word, usually rendered as written text. Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s collaboration on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, for instance, stands out as an exemplar of how to integrate words and pictures to represent a cultural world with complexity and passion, while not assuming these media accomplish the same things the same ways.

The recently completed Indivisible Project is a descendant of those image-text collaborations, applied to contemporary social issues. The book-CD combination Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible, edited by Tom Rankin and produced by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, is the most tangible manifestation of a complex project that also lives through a traveling museum exhibit, an innovative postcard exhibit, and a well-developed web-site at http://www.indivisible.org/. The Pew Charitable Trusts funded the project, which was codirected by Rankin and Trudy Wilner Stack of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona; Ray Suarez, public broadcasting correspondent, wrote a foreword and narrates the CD.

The Indivisible Project paired photographers and audio ethnographers (radio producers, folklorists, anthropologists) in twelve sites around the United States where grass-roots, community-based initiatives have thrived and enhanced the economy, health, or cultural life of the community in which they have grown. The project teams covered an impressive range of American communities:

Stony Brook, Long Island, New York, where the Doula Service of University Hospital and Medical Center trains women to offer prenatal, labor, and early postpartum support to mothers.
Eau Claire, South Carolina, where a group of residents work through biracial, faith-based initiatives to improve the community for all.
The Yaak Valley Forest Community in Montana, where residents interested in environmental conservation balance their concerns with those of loggers, sawmill operators, and others living off the land.
North Philadelphia, where the Village of Arts and Humanities, a community organization begun by artist Lily Yeh as a park building project on a vacant lot, has flourished into a constellation of education, arts, neighborhood development, and outreach programs. I worked on this site as audio ethnographer, collaborating with still photographer Reagan Louie.

The photographs presented in the book, and in a more limited version on the web, display an extraordinary range of styles and approaches, all within the genre of documentary—from grainy, evocative, black-and-white verité images to reflexive ironic color portraits to carefully composed, Evans-like interiors and landscapes to collages of multiple images on the book page. The text comes directly from interviews with local people and offers a wide range of discussions with activists, workers, cultural experts, artists, elders, and patients. The accompanying CD, also available through download on the web, contains audio pieces edited from ethnographers’ field tapes into short compilations of interviews and verité sound material.

Working as an ethnographer and audio documentarian in collaboration with an accomplished still photographer presented both unexpected challenges and found opportunities. At times, Reagan and I had to negotiate our work as a team so that we were intentionally documenting events and getting to know people together, or at least covering complementary subjects. When we worked together on site, I had to stay out of his frame, and I wanted his voice and shutter clicks off my audio track. On the conceptual level, I wondered how the editors would integrate still images and text in the various formats in which the project would be published.

Boy playing hide and seek, North Philadelphia

Boy playing hide-and-seek in Ife Ife Park, North Philadelphia. Photo: Reagan Louie

Given the specificity of Reagan’s images, I felt freed to include more ephemeral sound elements, like music, the sounds of work, the interior of a local tavern, and the broader city soundscape. As with other sections of the book, the images and text in our chapter are rarely literally coordinated, with photographs representing speakers or events depicted in text, but are more often suggestively connected, with text contexutalizing images of places and people.

Throughout the book, these two symbolic tracks either drift apart, with a less motivated sense of connection between image and words, or stand alone, with a page dominated by either photographic images or print. The audio material on CD or website adds texture and soundscape.

A tone of optimism undergirds the Indivisible Project, suggesting that community-based initiatives alone can redress society’s problems. The cynic in me wants to rebut this optimism, to point to the many ways that forces of power conspire against community-based change, and to reject Bush Sr.’s thousand points of light as the solution to social injustice and community disem-powerment. Nevertheless, one cannot help but be moved by the efforts of the individuals depicted here and be impressed with the passion and resourcefulness we see.

Perhaps as important, though, is to look to Indivisible as a model for documentary projects. A generous budget funded the many teams’ extended visits with these communities, underwrote the products in several formats, and enabled mounting a traveling national exhibit. Not many initiatives will be able to recreate this level of support, but the idea of pairing ethnographers, folklorists, and writers armed with audio recorders and still photographers to generate an archive of images and digital tapes offers a productive model for documentation. And the ability to make material available in multiple formats is possible only when you have documented it in a high-quality format. I hope that Indivisible will invigorate others to build on this model of creative community documentation.

The Indivisible Project museum exhibit can be seen at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, from July 14 through September 30, 2001. It then travels to Raleigh, Sarasota, La Jolla, Philadelphia, and finally Anchorage; check the website for specifics.

The Media Works column was published in Voices Vol. 27, Spring-Summer, 2001. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.