|
|
|
|
 |
| Rankin: “We have
a mission, to share these tools of documentary work and then
turn them loose." |
 n
1968, as a gift for his eleventh birthday, Tom Rankin received a reel-to-reel
tape recorder. It was a miniature version of the old-fashioned machine
his paternal grandfather used for listening to classical music on
the family farm near Louisville, Kentucky. That Christmas, with some
encouragement from his elders, Rankin concealed the recorder’s
microphone in a poinsettia plant on the living-room coffee table.
When his voluble Auntie Ann arrived and positioned herself on the
couch, Rankin prompted her to launch into the most vivid Kentucky
folk tale in her famous repertoire.
The story, Rankin explains, was along the lines of a traditional “Jack
tale”—that family of Appalachian stories that have ancient
Celtic roots, brought to the United States by Scots-Irish immigrants
and passed along through generations by oral tradition. In these stories,
Jack is the common hero who meets danger and difficulty at every turn,
but always prevails by some combination of native wit and luck.
“Of course I violated the first rule of documentary
work by not letting the subject know she was being recorded,”
says Rankin, now director of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS)
at Duke. As it turned out, his aunt soon died after that clandestine
recording session, and Rankin put the tape away. He didn’t listen
to it again until he was sixteen; by then he knew he wanted to memorize
the spooky tale himself so that he could tell it to friends at late-night
sleepovers and camping trips.
In the story, an idle country boy is swinging on a fence when he is
approached by two old women dressed in silk petticoats and long green
veils. At their request, the boy first fetches water for them and
then, with his mother’s permission, leads them toward the crossroads
they are seeking. On the journey, the old women grow weary and are
soon walking on their hands and knees. All at once they are transformed
into vicious panthers and chase the boy up a tree. When the panthers’
tails turn into axes and begin to chop down the tree where the boy
has sought refuge, his mother, back home, intuits her son’s danger
and releases the family dogs. They race to the boy’s aid and
chew the panthers to death, sparing the boy and, implicitly, the entire
community from the wicked women.
In his first undergraduate course in folklore at Tufts University
with ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon, Rankin wrote a paper about
the story. By this time, he fully appreciated the treasure he had
captured and made copies of the original tape for various members
of his family. Today, his sons Julian, fourteen, and Alexander, ten,
can recite the tale word for word in the energetic style of the great-aunt
they never met.
 |
| Aristeo Orta works with
Proyecto Azteca, an organization that develops homes constructed
mostly by and for Mexican-American farmworkers in the Rio Grande
Valle |
That first coffee-table oral history project was
predictive of Rankin’s career. He has co-produced two documentary
record albums —one featuring fiddle-music traditions from Mississippi
and another presenting a sound portrait of a rural African-American
community in Tennessee. Three documentary films
—in which Rankin has served by turns as cameraman, director,
and co-producer—have all focused on the expression of the cultural
traditions of common people. Rankin’s still photographs of folk
and blues musicians, farmers, fishermen, hunters, and writers have
been widely published and exhibited in venues across the South. And
in his most recent role, co-director of a $4.2-million project funded
by the Pew Memorial Trust, Rankin has helped bring to light the stories
of common people performing heroic acts on the local level. Indivisible:
Stories of American Community is a nationwide, multi-media project
designed to encourage similar documentary efforts in local communities
across the county.
To begin the project, Rankin and co-director Trudy Wilner Stack of
the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona selected
teams of distinguished photographers and interviewers to spend a month
in a dozen communities across the country where citizen-driven projects
have brought about profound improvements. The fieldworkers were given
the freedom to pursue their own cultural and artistic interests within
the set goal of Indivisible—namely, to document the people and
initiatives that have made such an impact.
CENTER OF ACTIVITY
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke
originated in 1978 as a part of public policy studies and is
now an independent entity with an endowment of some $20 million.
While there is no undergraduate major in documentary studies,
students may participate in courses, internships, and volunteer
activities through a variety of center projects and programs.
Click the titles to find out more info.
Student
Action with Farmworkers is a non-profit organization
housed at CDS that provides support and advocacy for farmworkers
through a network of campus volunteers and interns. Students
provide direct services to farmworker communities, including
education, organizing, and advocacy.
The ten-year-old Literacy
Through Photography project directed by Wendy Ewald
brings established writers and visual artists to teach photography
and documentary writing to children in the Durham Public Schools.
Document
Durham is a new initiative promoting collaboration with
community partners on a number of projects that explore the
changing cultural, economic, and physical landscapes of Durham.
Behind
the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow
South is a major historical research project involving
more than 1,200 oral-history interviews and thousands of family
photographs.
The center conducts two annual competitions. The
Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize is given to a writer/photographer
team in the early stages of a project, and the John
Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards go to college
students to support field work.
The center also publishes books that feature documentary work
in partnership with
W.W. Norton and hosts the DoubleTake
Documentary Film Festival each spring. |
Reducing crime in Delray
Beach, Florida; revitalizing small towns in western North Carolina;
improving the status of youth in Chicago and San Francisco; humanizing
the practice of obstetrics in Stony Brook, New York; and restoring
marine habitat in Sitka, Alaska, are among the grassroots efforts
now presented in a large format, coffee-table book and an accompanying
compact disc, Local Heroes Changing America, published by CDS in cooperation
with W.W. Norton. Alongside intimate portraits of the people and the
landscapes where they live and work, citizens explain in their own
words how organizing direct action to solve a local problem has empowered
individuals and transformed communities. Local Heroes is less interpretive
than it is the beginning of what Rankin hopes will become an ongoing,
nationwide conversation about citizen activism on the local level.
As he writes in the book’s introduction, “Hero is used here
not to put certain folks on a pedestal above others or to shine some
kind of divine recognition down on particular individuals. Rather,
I have in mind the countless parables in almost all cultures of the
lone, ordinary soul, whose modest act reverberates throughout a group
as heroic, as an act that brings about a positive change.”
Arguably, these stories are contemporary Jack tales, though neither
fable nor sensational. The idea, Rankin says, is to offer a hopeful
vision of contemporary democracy at work. Or, as public broadcaster
and author Ray Suarez writes in his foreword to the book: “There
is a common thread running like a vein of ore through these stories.
It’s the surge of confidence, in themselves and in their neighbors,
that comes to people when they take those first, tentative steps toward
acting instead of being acted upon.”
The Indivisible staff has also created a traveling museum exhibit,
an extensive website (www.indivisible.org), a collection of free postcards
available in kiosks placed in a number of public spaces around the
country, and a K-12 teachers’ guide offered through the website
and the museum venues. Archived collections of the photos, interview
tapes, and other project materials will ultimately be housed at both
Duke and the University of Arizona, and each of the twelve communities
that participated in the project will receive a set of photos and
tapes from its portion of the project.
One additional resource that’s been created as a part of Indivisible
perhaps best represents the particular vision Tom Rankin brought to
Duke when he assumed his post nearly three years ago. “We have
a mission,” he says, “ to share these tools of documentary
work and then turn them loose.” To this end, the project staff
has also created a workbook called “Putting Documentary Work
to Work.” Offered in both Spanish and English on the Indivisible
website, the handbook is targeted to community groups interested in
conducting their own documentary projects about civic life and community
participation. As the handbook states, “Out of shared telling
and remembering grow identity, connection, and pride, binding people
to a place and to one another. These ties form the basis of community
life.”
This take on documentary work as a grassroots practice for community
building is a relatively new notion. In 1936, when novelist James
Agee and photographer Walker Evans received an assignment from Fortune
magazine to collaborate on a series of articles on daily life among
Alabama tenant farmers, documentary work was understood to be a form
of ethnographic study or investigative journalism performed solely
by outsiders, mostly academics. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the
classic work that came out of their assignment, Agee first expressed
his concerns about the ethics of such a practice—the voyeuristic
dilemma of well-meaning interlopers who seek to document the lives
of the less fortunate for academic analysis and/or popular consumption:
…these I will write of are human beings, living in this world,
innocent of such twistings as these that are taking place over their
heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered,
and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment
of others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into
still by others, who have picked up their living just as casually
as if it were a book, and who were actuated toward this reading by
various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera,
and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely
appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing.
Unwittingly, Agee, with his lyrical language, and Evans, with his
stark and startling photographs of Depression-era farm families, gave
notoriety to a discipline that has, by turns, been criticized ever
since as everything from an awkward marriage of literature and photojournalism
to fine-art-as-social-work. The problem, says Rankin, is that “it
has been the paradigm of documentary studies up until very recently
that the privileged are the documentors and that those in need are
documented.”
“In the 1960s, some came to believe that if you go and make pictures
of people who are impoverished and sick, you are ‘doing good’
by drawing attention to their plight,” he says. “However,
in that paradigm, documentary studies looks only toward problems,
what is missing in a community, rather than toward what might also
be that community’s gifts and assets. I think we need to do both.”
• continues on page two
|
|
