“The Family” of Gardiner Maine came together out of necessity. This group of young adults, ranging from 14 to 30 years of age, developed a kinship with one another, a relationship that grew out of the common experience of troubled home lives. Spending their time in the small city square, or in bars or apartments, The Family, as they came to call themselves, became a source of consistency in their day-to-day lives.
Monthly Archives: November 2009
I’ve been thinking a lot about the index lately, specifically about the sort of “spooky” language that surrounds it. Within the above film the index is turned into an active agent. Rather than something our world is directly mirrored off of, the index in my film is an active agent with its own agenda. As a kid I thought that if someone were to leave a camera in a room overnight, that all sorts of paranormal occurrences might be caught on film. In other words, there was a world teaming underneath our very eyes just waiting to be “captured.” Through this film I’d like to enact that fantasy, but substitute the paranormal with the index, a switch that I think is productive in terms of the language used by Barthes, Lacan and others in writing about the index. I’ve used techniques of film and video that produce “realism” with the express purpose of pointing to an attempt at capturing the index through filmic means.
The following excerpts represent sections of my written thesis from the University of Florida’s masters program. As a documentarian, it was important for me to question the tenants of my practice. I would like to encourage feedback as a means to further grow an understanding of what it means to make documentaries…(read on)
The good folks at Western Kentucky University just finished their 34th installment of the Mountain Workshops, one of the best week-long photojournalism workshops in the country. This year’s students were rewarded with their own slideshow on MSNBC! Congrats to all the 2009 students, faculty and staff. Great work guys.
Alecia Wall and her son, Mason Tibbs, know about struggle. Mason has Chorea, a rare disease that affects his ability to control the movements of his body. In addition, Mason is almost continually sick, having pneumonia for all but three weeks in 2004. “It’s always life and death with Mason when he gets sick,” says Alecia.
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