Documentary Fieldwork: Influencees

Introduction

In the first semester of the MFA/EDA program at Duke, the Documentary Fieldwork seminar is taught as an opportunity for students to create a new body of documentary work, in a sense to define what they mean by documentary work through their own artistic practice. This new work – presented at the end of the semester – shows where students are going. But students are asked to look back as well, to show us where they have come from. Once a semester each member of the seminar presents his or her influences: the films, photographs, artists, books, music, and experiences that have most influenced their own work. This blog is a record of those presentations, a syllabus of inspiration for the rest of us.

During the first class of the semester, I presented my own influences to the class. One key influence is Eudora Welty. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was living in Inuit villages in Alaska, working on a photographic portrait of village life there. On one of my trips north I brought with me a thin volume of Mississippi photographs by Eudora Welty, a book called One Time: One Place.

Welty’s photographs struck me as absolutely genuine and real. No artifice. I wanted to understand how she got inside a world and captured a joyful quality I hadn’t seen before in photographs of the Great Depression. But it was Welty’s writing in the introduction to her book that had perhaps the most influence on me. She wrote, “Every feeling waits upon its gesture. Then when it does come, how unpredictable it turns out to be after all.” The idea of a feeling waiting for a gesture is something I’ve never forgotten. At the end of her text, Welty described what she knew, even in those early days, before she became a writer of stories, that “my wish, indeed my continuing passion would be to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.