The Documentary Camera Vol. 1 2018 \ An exploration of what documentary is, with an eye toward what it may become. 1 \ Volume 1 \ EDITOR GENEROUS SUPPORT PROVIDED BY Jason Fox Ford Foundation PUBLISHING DIRECTOR VOL. I SPONSORS Christopher Cekay Allen Hunter IMA MFA The MDOCS Storytellers' Institute at Skidmore WEB EDITOR College Jenny Miller A PROJECT OF DESIGN & ART DIRECTION UnionDocs Center For Documentary Art Christopher Cekay Allen Alison S. M. Kobayashi World Records Journal Bartosz Gawdzik Volume 1 The Documentary Camera FRONT END DEVELOPMENT Copyright © 2018 Lukas Steinman UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE Cover Design Danny Bowman Bartosz Gawdzik GRAPHIC DESIGN World Records is published by UnionDocs Inc., Bartosz Gawdzik 322 Union Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11211. Michał Dudek Single print volume $18 EDITORIAL BOARD Annual digital subscription (two issues) $28 Tarik Elseewi Institutional print subscriptions available Benj Gerdes Faye Ginsburg Subscriptions and correspondence to the Jennifer Hayashida Editors, [email protected]. Alexandra Juhasz Please correspond before submitting. Jonathan Kahana Alisa Lebow World Records is distributed by UnionDocs. Martin Lucas To place an ad in World Records Journal Scott MacDonald Contact [email protected]. Ivone Margulies Tess Takahashi World Records (Print) ISSN 2640-0030 ADVISORY BOARD Published Winter 2018 Josetxo Cerdán Cíntia Gil Carlos Gutierrez Rachael Rakes Lynne Sachs Shireen Seno Genevieve Yue 2 \ Volume 1 \ Table of Contents \ 7 Introduction: What do Cameras Do? \ 101 Representational Regimes: Jason Fox A Conversation with Abounaddara Film Collective \ 13 Not at the Click of a Button \ Jason Fox Text: Ariella Azoulay Images: Aïm Deüelle Lüski 107 Technologies of Seeing and Technologies of Corporeality: 23 Beyond the Expedient: Currents in Nonfiction Virtual Reality \ An Interview with Isaac Julien \ Mandy Rose Ernest Larsen & Sherry Millner 119 Camera Ministry: A Conversation 31 iDocument Police: Contingency, with Khalik Allah \ Resistance, and the Precarious Present \ Emily Vey Duke, Cooper Battersby, Jeffrey Skoller & Vashon Watson 45 The Present Moment: 127 “Something is there”: A Conversation with Kirsten Johnson \ Filmmaking in Multiple Realities \ Pamela Cohn Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan 53 Everything Can Be Optimized — Review, Comment, and Message 137 Targeted Killing: Ariella Azoulay Board as Proto-camera \ in Conversation with Miki Kratsman \ Benj Gerdes Text: Ariella Azoulay Images: Miki Kratsman 67 Archival Interventions: Cecilia Aldarondo and Thomas Allen Harris in Conversation \ 145 Action, Documentation, Documentary: Cecilia Aldarondo & Thomas Allen Harris The Early Photography of Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier 77 “All of our grievances are and Phil Steinmetz \ connected”: An Interview with Huffa Frobes-Cross The Illuminator Collective \ Eli Horwatt Many of the images and film clips discussed in this volume can be 85 The Sublimity of Document: seen at worldrecordsjournal.org. Carl Akeley, the Habitat Diorama, and Dioramic Cinema \ Scott MacDonald 3 \ Volume 1 \ Contributors \ Cecilia Aldarondo is Assistant Professor of Jason Fox is the editor of World Records. Film at Skidmore College, and her award-win- ning films have screened at such venues as Huffa Frobes-Cross is a Core Fellow in the the Tribeca Film Festival, the Metropolitan Department of Art History and Archaeology at Museum of Art, and the public television series Columbia University. He received his PhD from POV. She is a 2017 Women at Sundance Fellow Columbia in 2016 and is currently working on a and was named by Filmmaker Magazine as one manuscript based on his dissertation, "Various of 2015's '25 New Faces of Independent Film. Representational Tasks: Art and Activism in the Early Work of Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Comparative and Fred Lonidier, 1967-1976." Literature at Brown University and Modern Art, Culture, and Media at Brown University and a Benj Gerdes is an artist, writer, and organizer documentary filmmaker. working in video, film, and related public for- mats. His work focuses on the consequences Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s of economic and state regimes, as well as the films explore cultural and geopolitical land- critical methods through which art and cultural scapes like Europe’s borders (Grossraum, projects can contribute to social change. Prior 2005), sites of resource production and to assuming his current position at LIU Post, global trade and (Monument of Sugar, 2007, Gerdes held positions at Cooper Union, Bard Episode of the Sea, 2013), the (non) sites College, and Parsons the New School for Art of cultural heritage (Monument to Another and Design. Man's Fatherland, 2008 and subi dura a ru- dibus, 2010). Their works have been shown Thomas Allen Harris is an award-winning film- at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthaus maker, transmedia artist, curator, educator and Zürich; Argos, Brussels; SMBA and De Appel the founder and President of Digital Diaspora Amsterdam; CCA Vilnius; the Shanghai and Family Reunion, LLC, a socially engaged trans- Guangju Biennials; IAC Villeurbanne, France, media project that employs touring Roadshows and the Museum of Modern Art. and virtual gathering spaces to invite individ- uals to explore and share the narratives found Pamela Cohn is a filmmaker, writer, programmer, within their family photo albums. With the and documentary consultant currently based in support of ITVS, the NMC as well as the Ford Berlin. and Wyncote Foundations, Harris is currently developing a television series entitled Family Aïm Deüelle Lüski is a photographer based in Pictures USA. Tel Aviv and a Professor at Tel Aviv University. Contributors \ 4 Eli Horwatt has worked as the International Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby are long- Programmer at the Hot Docs International term collaborators who work mostly in video. Documentary Film Festival and as a program- Their work has shown at the Whitney mer at The Toronto International Film Festival. Museum, the Walker Center, the Institute of He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Contemporary Art and the International Film Media studies at Colgate University. Festival Rotterdam, among many others. A book about their work came out in 2012. It is Miki Kratsman is an Israeli photographer, pho- called The Beauty Is Relentless. tojournalist and activist. Vashon Watson is an emerging media artist and Scott MacDonald is author of A Critical Cinema: musician studying in the Art Video program at Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, now Syracuse University. He splits his time between in five volumes from University of California Syracuse and New York. He won the Gold Key Press, which also published his The Garden in Scholastic Art and Writing award for his short the Machine (2001), Canyon Cinema: The Life film The Sky. and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (2008), and Adventures of Perception: Cinema As Exploration (2009). Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen are anarchist artists who produce STATE OF EMERGENCY, an interventionist video project, in collaboration with more than 15 artists. Larsen is also a New York based media critic, novelist, and filmmak- er. Millner is a Professor at College of Staten Island, CUNY. Mandy Rose is an Associate Professor at the University of the West of England and a co-director of i-Docs: a bi-annual symposium dedicated to interactive documentary. Jeffrey Skoller is a filmmaker, writer, and an Associate Professor of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Contributors \ 5 \ Volume 1 \ What do cameras do? Lens-based recording devices are central to the work of documentary studies. Yet, this ostensibly straightforward question is of- ten sidelined. Ignored because it elicits dry, technical description, or because it suggests that cameras determine our actions a priori, before human perception and action occurs. One response to the question might come by way of the persistent cliché of the gun rights movement, that cameras, like guns, do not do anything. People do. In this view, both are technologies that may be employed in any number of different processes, but they do nothing independently of human use and hu- man will. As much as many might disagree with the politics of this stance as it pertains to gun rights, it is worth considering the ways that it too positions human agency entirely outside a INTRODUCTION \ technologically determined logic. In so doing, WHAT DO CAMERAS DO? its underlying assumptions preclude meaning- ful explorations of the imbrication of human JASON FOX actions within the socio-material technologies and environments that support those actions. This volume adopts an opposing perspective, framing cameras as technologies that are increasingly constitutive of our environment. Before the camera does anything else, it is conditional and recursive, providing and re- newing possibilities and limits for action within the ecologies in which we are enmeshed. “The Documentary Camera” explores cam- eras through the roles we attribute to them, and few analogies have been more durable over the past half-century than the compar- ison between cameras and guns. From the work of Newsreel to the writing of Solanas and Getino, and from Abounaddara to the activism surrounding the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, cameras are routinely invoked as an analogical tool of counter power in oppo- sition to the real violence of guns as a tool of the police,