At Berkeley

In “At Berkeley: Documenting the University in an Age of Austerity,” Michael Mark Cohen and Leigh Raiford address documentary’s evolving capacity for political mobilization by 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.

Counterdocuments

In “Counterdocuments: Undocumented Youth Activists, Documentary Media, and the Politics of Visibility,” Rebecca M. Schreiber 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.

Working Photography

In “Working Documentary: Labor Photography and Documentary Labor in the Neoliberal Age,” Joseph B. Entin analyzes the work of Milton Rogovin and Allan Sekula. The chapter emphasizes the self-consciousness with which these acclaimed photographers of labor generated new formal strategies to contend with the limitations of conventional documentary realism. Each, he shows, produced forms of labor photography attuned to the conditions of contemporary work and responsive to the widening social and economic forces shaping workers’ experience—and each thereby reanimated, or reworked, the project of photo-documentary for a late industrial, emerging neoliberal context.

Participatory Documentary

In “Participatory Documentary: Recording the Sound of Equality in the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” Grace Hale 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.

Death in Life

Franny Nudelman’s essay, “Death In Life: Documenting Survival After Hiroshima,” considers the influence of military psychiatry on documentary writing about Hiroshima survivors and, more broadly, on the “new” narrative journalism that flourished in the post-war decades. Examining the documentary writing of John Hersey and Robert Jay Lifton, who participated in the experimental treatment of traumatized soldiers and went on to interview and write about Hiroshima survivors, Nudelman constructs a genealogy of documentary nonfiction that grounds the immersive practices of new journalism, and their fascination with survivors, in the experimental techniques of military psychiatry.

Let There Be Light and the Military Talking Picture

In “Let There Be Light and the Military Talking Picture,” Jonathan Kahana and Noah Tsika analyze John Huston’s Let There Be Light in its military-historical context. They argue that the traumatized speech of returning WWII veterans, documented by the “military talking picture,” is the foundation for a mode of documentary filmmaking that is characterized by its evocative elisions and gaps. The stammering, mumbling, and silence that characterize Huston’s traumatized veterans establish both traumatic memory, evasive and partial, and reenactment, which builds narrative from these absences, as foundational to documentary filmmaking after WWII.

After the Fact

In “After the Fact: Postwar Dissent and the Art of Documentary,” Sara Blair analyzes the redirection of photo-documentary practice by visual artists Richard Avedon and Martha Rosler. Specifically, the chapter emphasizes the self-consciousness with which postwar figures represent and conduct their labor for a context of urgent social crisis and dissent. Both photographers experiment with the properties and forms of documentary imaging, wrested from its familiar contexts: Avedon in an evolving series of portraits of New Left leaders, activists, war prosecutors, and dissidents made in the United States and on the ground in Vietnam, Rosler in projects focusing on the role of photojournalism, documentary, and the media itself in perpetuating both a fog of war and a set of presumptions about documentary as a form of knowledge and power.

I Saw It!

Laura Wexler’s “‘I Saw It!’: The Photographic Witness of Barefoot Gen,” argues that Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa uses the “art of re-drawing” to challenge and rework aerial photographs taken by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. In doing so, Nakazawa contests 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 employs the formal flexibility of documentary manga to counter the military’s mechanical objectivity, empower his own witnessing, and produce new forms of documentary truth.

Afterword

In the “Afterword,” Matthew Frye Jacobson notes that we live in a moment of flourishing documentary experiment that, like earlier moments, feels especially urgent. If the historical, social and political challenges we face seem frightening and strange, Jacobson contends, it is in part because we cannot fully comprehend them and are out of our depth as we try not only to reckon with uncertainty but also to write, teach, and agitate. All the more powerful, then, as Jacobson argues, is an understanding of documentary as “a way of knowing … an engagement with knowing.”

Speculative Ecology

In his essay, “Speculative Ecology: Rachel Carson’s Environmentalist Documentaries,” Daniel Worden argues that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is not only a path-breaking work of investigative journalism, but also a daring work of imaginative projection. Rereading this seminal book in light of Carson’s earlier writing about the ocean, which she portrays as vast and indecipherable, Worden reinterprets Carson’s storied career and demonstrates her contribution to contemporary writing about climate change. Tasked with describing catastrophe that unfolds incrementally, Carson’s speculative documentary defamiliarizes nature itself, performing the work of estrangement that survival may require.