Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture after 1945

By Sara Blair, Joseph B. Entin and Franny Nudelman

After World War II, U.S. documentarians engaged in a rigorous rethinking of established documentary practices and histories. Responding to the tumultuous transformations of the postwar era--the atomic age, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the emergence of the environmental movement, immigration and refugee crises, student activism, the globalization of labor, and the financial collapse of 2008--documentary makers increasingly reconceived reality as the site of social conflict and saw their work as instrumental to struggles for justice. Examining a wide range of forms and media, including sound recording, narrative journalism, drawing, photography, film, and video, this book is a daring interdisciplinary study of documentary culture and practice from 1945 to the present. Essays by leading scholars across disciplines collectively explore the activist impulse of documentarians who not only record reality but also challenge their audiences to take part in reality's remaking.

In addition to the editors, the volume's contributors include Michael Mark Cohen, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Jonathan Kahana, Leigh Raiford, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Noah Tsika, Laura Wexler, and Daniel Worden.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469638706

Book preview

REMAKING REALITY

Remaking Reality

U.S. Documentary Culture after 1945

EDITED BY

Sara Blair, Joseph B. Entin, and Franny Nudelman

The University of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill

© 2018 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Rebecca Evans

Set in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover photographs: (top) A screen capture from the 1946 film Let There Be Light; (bottom) Yale March of Resilience, 2015. Courtesy of the photographer, Alexander Zhang.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blair, Sara, editor. | Entin, Joseph B., editor. | Nudelman, Franny, editor. | Kahana, Jonathan, 1966– contributor. | Tsika, Noah, 1983– contributor.

Title: Remaking reality : U.S. documentary culture after 1945 / edited by Sara Blair, Joseph B. Entin, and Franny Nudelman.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017036472| ISBN 9781469638683 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469638690 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469638706 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Documentary mass media—United States—History—20th century. | Documentary mass media—United States—History—21st century. | Documentary mass media—Political aspects. | Arts—Experimental methods.

Classification: LCC P96.D622 U666 2018 | DDC 070.1/80973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036472

A version of Rebecca M. Schreiber’s essay in this book originally appeared as Chapter 6 in her book Migrant Lives and the Promise of Documentation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

To our students past, present, and future

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

SARA BLAIR, JOSEPH B. ENTIN, AND FRANNY NUDELMAN

Let There Be Light and the Military Talking Picture

JONATHAN KAHANA AND NOAH TSIKA

Death in Life

Documenting Survival after Hiroshima

FRANNY NUDELMAN

I Saw It!

The Photographic Witness of Barefoot Gen

LAURA WEXLER

Speculative Ecology

Rachel Carson’s Environmentalist Documentaries

DANIEL WORDEN

Participatory Documentary

Recording the Sound of Equality in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

GRACE ELIZABETH HALE

After the Fact

Postwar Dissent and the Art of Documentary

SARA BLAIR

Working Photography

Labor Documentary and Documentary Labor in the Neoliberal Age

JOSEPH B. ENTIN

Counterdocuments

Undocumented Youth Activists, Documentary Media, and the Politics of Visibility

REBECCA M. SCHREIBER

At Berkeley

Documenting the University in an Age of Austerity

MICHAEL MARK COHEN AND LEIGH RAIFORD

Afterword

MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

FIGURES

1.1 AND 1.2 Intake interviews with psychoneurotic soldiers at Mason General Hospital in Let There Be Light 19

1.3  Lieutenant James Stewart addressing his audience in Winning Your Wings 24

1.4  Oh, God, listen! from Let There Be Light 26

3.1  Mushroom cloud 68

3.2  Front cover of Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It 68

3.3  Back cover of I Saw It 70

3.4  Page from I Saw It showing the bomb explosion 71

3.5  Page from Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima showing the bomb explosion 72

3.6  Double-page spread from Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen: The Day After showing the Aioi Bridge 73

3.7  Photo from The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, showing the bomb’s blast effects at the intersection of Bridge 23 and Bridge 24 74

5.1  Documentary album Freedom in the Air: A Documentary on Albany, Georgia, 1961–1962 110

5.2  Documentary album Birmingham, Alabama, 1963: Mass Meeting 114

6.1  Richard Avedon, The Chicago Seven 126

6.2  Richard Avedon, Lt. Joe Hooper, The Most Decorated Soldier in Vietnam, Saigon, South Vietnam, April 15, 1971 131

6.3  Richard Avedon, Napalm Victim, Saigon, South Vietnam, April 29, 1971 132

6.4  Richard Avedon, The Mission Council, Saigon, Vietnam 134

6.5  Martha Rosler, Booby Trap 140

6.6  Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes 141

6.7  Detail from Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems 144

6.8  Detail from Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems 145

7.1  Milton Rogovin, Untitled, Working People series, 1976–1987 158

7.2  Milton Rogovin, Untitled, Working People series, 1976–1987 159

7.3  Allan Sekula, Chief mate checking temperatures of refrigerated containers. Mid-Atlantic 166

7.4  Allan Sekula, Filling lifeboat with water equivalent to weight of crew to test the movement of the boat falls before departure. Port Elizabeth, New Jersey 167

8.1  Screen shot from undocumented youth Angelica’s video 180

8.2  Screen shot from Undocumented Youth vs. Border Patrol Round 1—Mobile, Alabama 185

9.1  Noor Jones-Bey, Tahirah Jones, and LaJuanda Asemota from Thanks to Berkeley . . . photo wall 196

9.2  Occupy Everything banner 198

9.3  Robert Lee, Occupy Oakland May Day General Strike 206

A.1 Alexander Zhang, Yale March of Resilience, 2015 211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank our contributors for bringing their expertise and creativity to this project and for sharing their vital commitments to the subject of documentary with such openness and flair. From the first, we conceived this book as a conversation—one that is ongoing—and we are grateful to our contributors for taking up the spirit of collaboration and improvisation and running with it. We have learned so much from the process of working with these essays, and the volume as a whole has been shaped and informed by each of them. We also want to thank our editor at the University of North Carolina Press, Mark Simpson-Vos, who has shepherded this book into being with great care, and the press staff for their exacting work and warm encouragement. Our families took an interest in the ins and outs of the project as it unfolded and diverted us when the time was right; our debt to them is a given as they make our work possible day to day. We dedicate this volume to our students as it is their tireless work, and inspired observations, that daily remind us why documentary matters.

Introduction

SARA BLAIR, JOSEPH B. ENTIN, AND FRANNY NUDELMAN

During the post–World War II period, a wide range of practitioners remade documentary expression in an effort to respond to a contemporary landscape that was, in the moment of its unfolding, both urgent and bewildering. Confronting in turn the atrocities of World War II, the social rebellions of the 1960s, and the inequalities of globalization, documentarians engaged in a rigorous rethinking of established practices and ideals. While they remained committed to portraying the world accurately and in realistic detail, they often did so in order to argue for its transformation and, by extension, to imagine alternatives to the conditions they recorded. They reconceived reality as the site of political conflict and collaboration, and documentation as instrumental to anti-institutional struggles for justice. At the same time, they understood that collective survival necessitated speculation—imaginings not tethered by observed detail—that might prefigure new forms of community and relatedness.

Our volume explores some of the signal developments in the field of documentary practice in the United States after 1945, with a particular emphasis on documentary activism and the formal innovation it engendered. We focus on documentary work that is committed to acting on the world it records and to activating audiences as participants in the making of that world. We argue for a broad conception of documentary that encompasses the varied, formally self-conscious experiments of postwar documentary: across a range of media and a sweep of some seventy years, we find practitioners—journalists and photographers, filmmakers and psychiatrists, professors and students—committed to documentary as a means of what Elaine Scarry calls world-making. The documentarians represented in this volume build on and experiment with earlier modes and traditions as they explore the agency of documentary in unanticipated conditions and, in the process, create new and visionary forms of aesthetic, social, and cognitive practice. In response to Scarry’s demand that ‘making’ itself become better understood, Remaking Reality explores the dynamic life of documentary in key postwar contexts, accounting for the work of documentarians as they innovate in response to the challenges of the present and, in the process, redefine both documentary and the reality it records.¹

DOCUMENTARY MAKING

With our contributors, we develop a comprehensive portrait of documentary after 1945 that is at once formally inclusive and historically situated. Such consideration is timely. The last decade has witnessed a remarkable surge of critical interest in documentary practices and forms, produced by scholars in a variety of fields, as the urgency of questions about the social value of documentation has intensified.² Collectively, the essays gathered here allow us to revisit certain claims and assumptions often advanced by scholars of postwar documentary. Almost uniformly, this scholarship has focused on visual culture. While we explore developments in documentary film, photography, and video, we also consider the constraints that an exclusive emphasis on visuality places on our understanding of documentary practice. In his study of activist nonfiction, for example, Rob Nixon notes that visual media cannot easily capture the delayed effects of violence that occurs gradually and out of sight.³ The inclusion of documentary sound, drawing, and writing in this volume allows us to probe such delayed effects and, on this basis, to question the identification of documentary expression with the promise of immediacy and exactitude. Working across the media of sound recording, narrative journalism, drawing, photography, film, and video, we offer an expansive view of postwar documentary culture as it is characterized by diversity and intermediality. While this approach cannot produce an exhaustive account of that work within or across media, it makes visible the wide range of documentary practices, including interviews, collaborative documentation, and public testimony, that drives formal innovation in various expressive modes, and it demonstrates the relevance of new forms, like the graphic memoir and cell phone videos, in attempts to grapple with political and epistemological crises.

In addition to its multimedia scope and approach, our volume is also marked by a consistent yet flexible historicism. We are committed to accounting for the power of documentary expression in the specific historical contexts in which it unfolds, and the essays herein examine the relation between documentary practice and a range of crucial post-1945 moments, movements, and transformations, including the detonation of the atomic bomb, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the emergence of the environmental movement, the financial collapse of 2008, and more. We consider the circumstances and events that shape documentary production as well as the ways in which documentary texts exceed these contexts, acquiring new meanings and establishing new lines of influence as they circulate and recirculate over time. Further, as we explain below, these texts often reach beyond the realist, indexical conventions of traditional documentary in order to confront historical conditions—such as nuclear war, ecological collapse, and globalization—that seem impossible to represent.

On the basis of this interdisciplinary, historicist approach, we find that many of the binaries that have traditionally organized discussions of documentary—between objectivity and subjectivity, realism and experimentalism, neutrality and participation, reformism and radicalism—prove to be fluid. Indeed, we argue that such binaries have obscured the dynamism of documentary making: many of the practitioners we examine cultivate and explore a dialectical relationship between documentarians, their subjects, and the conditions they observe. Documentary making is rarely solitary or univocal but rather engaged in the broadest sense as documentarians converse with their subjects, contend with events, critique their predecessors, and collaborate with other artists and activists. In our account, struggle and participation take center stage as documentarians reimagine their relationships to their subjects and audiences and create innovative, experimental forms of art that can reanimate our sense of what documentary is and what it can do in the world.

DOCUMENTARY ACTIVISM

Discussions of documentary have often assumed that documentary is essentially a pedagogical, even didactic, genre, marked by its capacity to shape policy and move audiences to action. This view of documentary practice reflects a focus in the U.S. context on New Deal–era documentary, specifically tied to state agencies charged with managing relief efforts through federally designed labor and rehabilitation programs. Indeed, New Deal documentary has provided an influential model of documentary practice in the United States that continues to shape the expectations of practitioners, scholars, and audiences.⁴ As a result, discussions of documentary often take immediate social impact as their key evaluative criterion and implicitly reinforce an understanding of documentary as offering a transparent or objective rendering of social reality. We find that many postwar documentary makers did indeed see themselves, like their counterparts during the 1930s, as directly involved in shaping policy, building social movements, or advocating for individuals and institutions. The intensification of political life during the Cold War and the ominous specter of nuclear annihilation prompted a heightened urgency among many activists and artists for social transformation. In turn, the social movements of the 1960s sparked new attention to the role that culture can play in broad-based political change.⁵ As a result, many postwar documentarians experimented with modes of advancing social and political struggle, recording the existing world not merely to improve reality but fundamentally to remake it.

In the aftermath of World War II, however, the reputation of objectivity was tainted by what Bill Nichols terms the treacherous simplicities of unquestioned empiricism, now closely associated with genocide, total war, and the ominous power of large-scale institutions.⁶ If the coevolution of documentary imaging and new weaponry prompted some to think critically about claims to transparency, others, inspired by anti-imperialist movements at home and abroad, took a closer look at the inequalities that structured the relationship between documentary makers and their subjects and tried to find ways to make visible and challenge this fundamental asymmetry.⁷ Often, these critical reflections on the institutional history of documentary prompted practitioners to develop subjective approaches to their craft. From Michael Renov’s exploration of the autobiographical mode in documentary film to recent studies of affect in photography, scholars have elaborated on the subjective turn in postwar documentary.⁸

Thus, even as they inherited a positivist model of the social agency of documentary texts, documentarians after 1945 were also—and often at the same time—skeptical about claims to transparency, accuracy, and objectivity, which they often associated with institutionalized violence and inequality. In step with these developments, documentary criticism from the 1970s through the 1990s, especially in photography, advanced a critique of the institutional ends of documentary observation by asserting that there is no innocent documentary. In this view, every act of documentary recording exercises power not only by shaping what can be seen and understood but also by extending the reach, authority, and disciplinary force of dominant institutions.⁹ Yet even as these critics and practitioners warned against the capacity of documentary observation to extend the eye of the liberal, corporate state, they called not for the abandonment but rather for the reinvention of documentary as a critically self-reflexive, even radical practice that refuses both overinvestment in the subjectivity of the artistic and a naive faith in realism’s presumed objectivity.

More recently, debates over the politics of documentary and its power to produce change have unfolded in a global context as documentarians work to identify the systems that structure the distribution of dwindling resources, producing extreme wealth and poverty in the age of global capital. In recent years, the agency of documentary has been mapped transnationally and the very idea that rousing compassion is a means to producing ameliorative action widely interrogated. Today, scholars weigh the power of documentary to make inequality visible and concrete against its tendency to naturalize or to sensationalize the suffering it depicts.¹⁰ Debates over compassion fatigue and sympathy porn rage as scholars continue to attack, and to defend, what T. J. Demos refers to as the ethnographic gaze and compassionate heart of conventional documentary.¹¹ Even as they make the case for social change, postwar documentarians engage in ethical deliberation on what it means to document and consume the pain of others and ask, as Susan Sontag puts it, whether the very privilege of witnessing may be linked to distant suffering in ways we prefer not to imagine.¹²

In sum, analyses of documentary activism have been hindered by a contradictory characterization of post-1945 documentary—distinguished, on the one hand, for its embrace of subjectivity and, on the other, critiqued for its embrace of objectivity and, by extension, its complicity in imperialism, militarism, and neoliberalism. Our volume acknowledges both a history of experimentalism that explores extraordinary perceptual and affective states and a tradition of critique keyed to the opposition between objective and subjective modes, institutionality and resistance. We also work to complicate and move beyond these descriptions and debates in multiple ways, offering an account of documentary creation that is sensitive to uneven developments in the field and to the uncertainties surrounding the documentarian’s own agency and intentions. We understand that documentarians not only are agents of power but also can themselves be subjected to power and are often made vulnerable by the documentary act. We recognize that documentarians can work both within and against dominant institutions, at the crossroads of multiple and conflicting channels of influence, inspiration, and intention. We understand that documentary’s aspirations to spark direct action can coexist with long-term analysis and indirect effects. For these reasons, we read post-1945 documentary as engaged in, but not strictly confined to, complex, concrete, historically specific struggles, in which the terms and conditions of resistance are frequently quite fluid. Through such struggles, we maintain, the uneasy work of building counterpublics and social movements proceeds.

AFTER 1945 (OR, DOCUMENTARY TIME)

In histories of the twentieth century, 1945 signifies a violent rupture ushered in by the twin catastrophes of holocaust and atomic war. We perform a kind of balancing act by insisting that documentary practice after World War II was not radically discontinuous with its prewar traditions and at the same time adopting after 1945, with all its rhetorical power, as our point of departure. We do so in order to foreground the sense of crisis that has been, paradoxically, a commonplace in contemporary culture and has proved immensely generative for documentary makers. Many postwar documentarians believed that the events of World War II had, as John Treat puts it, split human history into halves, ushering in a present that was best defined by its extreme fragility and consequent unreality.¹³ Indeed, the panic over collective survival triggered by the advent of nuclear weapons and, more recently, by the threat of climate change provides one explanation for the peculiar combination of pragmatic documentation, structural critique, and utopian speculation that characterizes documentary during this period. Since 1945, documentarians have innovated out of a sense of historical rupture, playing with the properties of recollection and the effects of trauma on representation as they rethink what documentary can accomplish in the face of possible extinction.

1945 signifies the end of a war that made real the unthinkable of total war, systematic genocide, and planetary annihilation and occasioned the slow and ongoing work of documenting violence that is systemic and largely invisible. The documentarians represented in this volume simultaneously explore their own role as agents of social change and as creators of new and visionary forms of aesthetic, social, and cognitive practice. Their approaches extend the radicalism of earlier documentary in new and at times remarkable directions and, in doing so, generate our sense of documentary itself as a pliable, improvisatory form that has a special power—and responsibility—to respond to difficult and unexpected conditions. Together, the essays in this volume demonstrate a recognition among postwar documentarians that history moves in unpredictable ways and that cause and effect is a process riddled with gaps and uncertainties.

More specifically, our work expands on conceptions of time, and the temporality of action, that have shaped canonical understandings of documentary engagement and outcomes—and obscured the range of documentary experiments in the postwar era and beyond. In his widely influential account of documentary film, Bill Nichols contends that the linkage between documentary and the historical world is the most distinctive feature of the documentary tradition.¹⁴ If anything has united the now vast body of critical work on documentary, it has been the presumption that this linkage is not only clear and instantly legible but instantaneous in effect—that documentary representation will produce immediate calls to action, real-time public campaigns for political or social reform, drives for swift and measurable amelioration or change. Frequently, the documentational act is instantaneous, and its temporal unity with the historical events it records conditions the expectation that it must produce immediate social change. But that structural tendency, we argue, obscures the rising interest among documentarians, across media and forms, in other temporal registers—slow time, variable time, experiential time—and the modes of knowledge, resistance, and transformation that they may enable. How then, in the wake of this legacy, to document—and ultimately create—change on a longer scale?

The inclusion of writing, drawing, and recorded sound in this volume helps us to probe and question the identification of documentary with the promise of immediacy, and exactitude, and to consider its largely unexamined role in producing a record of memory, reflection, and speculation that is by definition imprecise. Increasingly, documentary makers in the United States have explored the realities of trauma and threat, as well as the possibilities of resistance and recovery, that unfold beyond the scale of immediate capture and the framing of an ostensibly objective point of view. As Thomas Waugh notes, while some committed documentaries address their audiences through gut-level calls to immediate, localized action, others represent more cerebral essays in long-term global analysis.¹⁵ Our documentarians not only intervene in concrete policy debates but also try to shape shared experience over time, exploring the power of foreknowledge, speculation, and retrospection in rendering the slow violence of inequality, cold war, and ecological disaster.¹⁶

This concern with temporality encompasses both the documentary response to urgent social needs and also the labor of documentary itself. In the face of the depredations of late and then global capitalism, the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, and intensified environmental damage, documentary makers have explored the possibility of alternative timelines for documentary expression. Postwar documentarians across media and forms, we stress, experiment not only with direct results—for example, direct action in cinema, or direct experience as the grounds of photographic practice—but also with new forms of what Martha Rosler has identified as politically directed affect, individual or collective but always "directed toward change."¹⁷ For some documentary makers, that directedness involves close attention to the indirect, mediated nature of documentary expression and to the institutions of documentary art that critically refine and mobilize the will to change. Exploring documentary production across media, we open a wider view of documentary’s evolving concerns with realities of social injury, and the possibilities of resistance and recovery, that unfold beyond the scale of immediate capture or even experiential time, in generational, planetary, or extra-human time.

CROSSCUTS AND THROUGH-LINES: WAYS OF READING

The organization of this volume reflects our commitment to a historicism that is at once local in its focus on individual cases and expansive as it thinks broadly and speculatively about the complex relationships between eras, influences, and texts. We identify important developments in documentary practice that belong to the period after 1945. At the same time, we resist a progressive or triumphalist logic in which postwar and contemporary projects supersede or move definitively beyond the assumptions of earlier practice. Accordingly, the essays in the volume follow a roughly chronological order that suggests, rather than makes structural, a thematic organization, as they move across varied terrain.

The volume begins with three essays that deal with the aftermath of World War II and explore the impact of military violence and state-sponsored documentary on the broader field of documentary expression. The three essays that follow broadly consider the anti-institutional stances of activist and revisionist documentarians of the 1960s and 1970s. The last three consider documentary projects that, in different ways, record the impact of neoliberal globalization on conditions of labor, learning, and citizenship. The range and richness of these case studies well serve the complex, ongoing evolution of documentary making from the immediate postwar moment to the present. But even as we remain committed to a historicist framework, we recognize that chronological ordering alone cannot do justice to the unexpected movements and unfamiliar synergies that the essays collected here produce and make legible. As photographer and theorist Allan Sekula has imagined late twentieth-century documentary practice, it takes unexpected step[s] backward . . . and forward as it revisits its aims; indeed, to go forward, he suggests, its practitioners have had to take several steps backward and recover abandoned paths.¹⁸ In order to highlight the degree to which our cases reach backward, as well as forward and sideways, we offer the following through-lines, or crosscutting interests, that have shaped and emerged from the essays, extending and enriching the key concerns that generated the volume.

Participatory Documentary

In her essay, Grace Elizabeth Hale coins the term participatory documentary, which helps us to conceptualize the role of documentary activism in combining the work of building social movements with the work of representing them. Several contributors to this volume examine activist documentaries in which populations, often positioned as objects of state-sponsored or liberal-reformist documentary, become agents, adopting innovative documentary forms to represent themselves and forge counterpublics united in common cause.

Hale’s Participatory Documentary: Recording the Sound of Equality in the Southern Civil Rights Movement examines the work of noted New Left documentary makers Guy and Candie Carawan, who recorded documentary albums of mass meetings and protest actions during the southern civil rights movement. The production of these albums, Hale argues, which render the voices of African Americans denied official political representation in a segregated society, enacted a mode of participatory documentary, prefiguring the world to which its participants aspired. If Hale demonstrates the role of documentary sound in producing political participation, Rebecca M. Schreiber’s Counterdocuments: Undocumented Youth Activists, Documentary Media, and the Politics of Visibility analyzes the role that digital videos play in building an oppositional community of undocumented youth in the contemporary moment. Specifically, Schreiber explores the circulation of digital videos—counterdocuments—by activists who recorded their personal stories and political actions through social media and other online platforms. In this way, young migrants challenged Obama administration policies that aimed to conceal or minimize publicity around the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants and created an open, public space in which activists could share information and forge lines of mutual support and collective resistance. In At Berkeley: Documenting the University in an Age of Austerity, Michael Mark Cohen and Leigh Raiford also address documentary’s evolving capacity for political mobilization, focusing on the role of documentary photography and film in the struggle around austerity at the University of California, Berkeley. While the university administration used documentary’s graphic appeal to enlist alumni in a fund-raising campaign that effectively naturalized the privatization of public higher education, students took up documentary forms to challenge the logic of neoliberalism. Working with Cohen and Raiford, who teach at UC Berkeley, student activists produced their own counterdocuments, repurposing documentary images that the university uses to sell education in an era of skyrocketing tuition fees, and rendering themselves as active participants in the struggle to reshape the university and the broader society. Read in conjunction, these essays suggest how a history of documentary making committed to participatory democracy continues to resonate in the key of the present and how that history continues to inform the project of documentary as it responds to and explores new medial and communicative forms.

Documentary Histories

A second strong thread or through-line for the volume is an interest in the way that documentary makers of the later twentieth century and the twenty-first have contended openly, deliberately, and generatively with the histories and limitations of the documentary project. Several essays make visible some of the ways in which documentary makers have departed from, and returned to, the legacies of documentary itself and argue that a key aspect of this self-consciousness about the labor of world making is a careful attention to documentary form. As they query and repurpose formal conventions, and the attendant assumptions, that precede them, these documentarians invite us to think about the history and the historiography of documentary in new ways.

Laura Wexler’s "I Saw It! The Photographic Witness of Barefoot Gen" argues that Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa used the art of redrawing to challenge and rework aerial photographs taken by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. In doing so, Nakazawa contested the documentary practices of the U.S. military and, more broadly, their power to produce and regulate knowledge. Claiming the perpetrator’s perspective as his own, Nakazawa employed the formal flexibility of documentary manga to counter the military’s mechanical objectivity, empower his own witnessing, and produce new forms of documentary truth. Sara Blair’s essay on the redirection of photo-documentary practice by visual artists Richard Avedon and