Category: Media Projects

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Media Projects

Reinvention Stories

REINVENTION STORIES > A new web project by Documentary Filmmakers, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar  that pushes how the Web can be used for storytelling. *Worth checking out

REINVENTION STORIES is an experiment in bringing real life documentary stories into the potential of an interactive environment. This includes a short movie. Sit back and watch it if you want, or choose your own path through.

You can add your own story. You can answer questions we ask. Or eventually you can see dozens of stories, of people, places and events in our city. read more

 

Interesting interview with Julia and Steve about their project and the process of making it @ POV films blog, Two Filmmakers Reinvent Their Approach for “Reinvention Stories,” a Web Documentary

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Highly recommend reading more on the POV | PBS blog: Another interesting and related story about community storytelling is My Brooklyn: Replicating Their Model in Your Community

 

 

Categories
Community Programs Media Projects

Photographing your own community

Came across this article Voices of NY » » The ‘Destruction of a Community’ Thru Another Lens which features an interview with Ricky Flores, a Bronx photographer whose work is featured in the exhibition Seis del Sur at the Bronx Documentary Center. The article and great website for the exhibition highlight what it means to photograph your own community.

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Media Projects

Gordon Parks and the power of photography

What Became of Harlem’s Fontenelle Family? – NYTimes lens blog

Gordon Parks’s Harlem Family Revisited
By JOHN EDWIN MASON and JESSE NEWMAN

In March 1968, Gordon Parks published a portrait of an African-American child with disheveled clothes in Life magazine. His lips were swollen and cracked from eating plaster, in a futile attempt to ward off hunger. His eyes were plaintive and haunting.

Richard Fontenelle was too young to understand, but he and his family became the faces of urban poverty for millions of Americans. The photo essay Mr. Parks produced — “A Harlem Family,” which is now on exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem — changed Mr. Fontenelle’s life, and the lives of every member of his family, forever. It sparked in him a desire to succeed, and a lifelong friendship with Mr. Parks. read more 

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You can view the original layout in the online version of LIFE magazine, March 8, 1968. It is quite powerful to see the original context in the magazine with the layout, other articles, other photographs, and advertising.

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Media Projects

Radio Diaries » Teenage Diaries

Radio Diaries » Teenage Diaries

Since 1996, the Teenage Diaries series has given tape recorders to young people around the country. They conduct interviews, keep audio journals, and record the sounds of daily life — usually collecting more than 30 hours of raw tape over the course of a year, edited into documentaries airing on NPR’s All Things Considered. Whether it’s the story of Amanda, a gay teen trying to understand her sexuality, or the story of Juan, who crossed the Rio Grande with his family illegally, these stories offer insight into the mysterious life of teenagers.

listen to stories

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Media Projects

How’s Your News?

How’s Your News? is a documentary news series which features reporters with various disabilities. The project began over ten years ago in a video class at a summer camp for people with disabilities.

Trailer for “How’s Your News?” Series from How’s Your News?

I learned about this wonderful project from a story on This American Life.

Link to all their videos on vimeo.

 

 

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Media Projects

Through Positive Eyes, a Participatory Photojournalism Project

 

Through Positive Eyes, a Participatory Photojournalism Project 

from the NYTimes lens blog:

The South African photojournalist Gideon Mendel spent more than a decade documenting H.I.V./AIDS in Africa. But despite his commitment and passion for the subject, he found he could not continue.“The time has come to hand over the camera,” Mr. Mendel said. “Me photographing H.I.V. positive people is just not appropriate anymore.”So Mr. Mendel, along with David Gere, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, created a participatory photography project that encourages people who are H.I.V. positive to tell their stories. Over the last four years, they have put cameras in the hands of 72 people living with H.I.V. in six cities across the globe. The project, called Through Positive Eyes and largely financed by the Herb Ritts Foundation and the Ford Foundation, operates in conjunction with the U.C.L.A. Art and Global Health Center, which Mr. Gere leads. It aims to dismantle stigma associated with H.I.V. using an unconventional form of photojournalism. read more

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Media Projects

Leaving Abuse Behind – Donna Ferrato

Leaving Abuse Behind – Lens Blog – NYTimes

After 30 years on the front lines, Donna Ferrato is ready to write the final chapter of her crusade against domestic abuse.SHOWCASEDonna Ferrato on LensDonna Ferrato on photography: “I’m just seeing it as it fossilizes. A photograph is a fossil. That’s what a camera does.”Helping Beyond the Pain »TriBeCa Chiaroscuro »Ms. Ferrato has been making raw, intimate photos of domestic violence since 1981. She has also been organizing, speaking publicly, counseling and even offering victims shelter at her New York City apartment.The photographs in her book “Living With the Enemy” helped make the problem brutally real. The images helped create and strengthen laws against domestic violence and raised public awareness of the issue. But domestic violence is still rampant, and women continue to return to their abusers. >> read more

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Donna Ferrato’s work speaks to the power of photography to enact social change. more at donnaferrato.com

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Media Projects

Miss Representation Blog & Keep It Real Challenge

Miss Representation » Blog The Keep It Real Challenge: Day Three.

The Keep It Real challenge was all about showing the media what real beauty looks like – without the photoshop. After using Twitter to ask magazines to print one unphotoshopped picture per issue on Day One, and writing a flurry of blogs yesterday explaining just how important and serious the issue is, today we used our own creativity and self-expression to challenge society’s limiting beauty standards! more

Read report on day two

Read report on day one

The Keep It Real Challenge is a collaboration between SPARK Movement, Miss Representation, LoveSocial, Endangered Bodies, and I Am That Girl. They are all doing amazing work – check them out.

 

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Media Projects

Question Bridge

January 13–June 3, 2012
Question Bridge: Black Males is an innovative video installation created by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Chris Johnson in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair. The four collaborators spent several years traveling throughout the United States, speaking with 150 Black men living in 12 American cities and towns, including New York, Chicago, Oakland, Birmingham, and New Orleans. From these interviews they created 1,500 video exchanges in which the subjects, representing a range of geographic, generational, economic, and educational strata, serve as both interviewers and interviewees. Their words were woven together to simulate a stream-of-consciousness dialogue, through which important themes and issues emerge, including family, love, interracial relationships, community, education, violence, and the past, present, and future of Black men in American society.
The video below gives an overview of the entire project
The Question Bridge Team has developed an incredible curriculum for educators. Register for the Educator Forum as a teaching artist. Their vimeo channel presents  many curriculum modules. This is an extremely rich resource.
Categories
Media Projects

HRW YOUTH PRODUCING CHANGE: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

I posted this on the CoCo website, but I thought I’d put it here as well. If anyone is working with youth filmmakers, the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival has put out their Call for Submissions for 2010. Check out the website for the submission form, and the deadline is December 10, 2009.

Please spread the word!