CDS director Tom Rankin began photographing African American sacred rituals and expression in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1980s. Interested in the confluence of land and faith, place and time, and the profane and the sacred, this early work resulted in the book Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993). Over the years he has continued to photograph in the Delta, returning to many of same places and subjects with his 8 x 10 view camera. This exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art includes over forty recent prints from his sustained look at this storied region and the nature of hallowed and changing landscapes.
Kendra McNair-Worley, CDS intern, experiencing the DiVE on Duke's campus. Photograph by Christopher Sims.
a dive into virtual reality
While working as an intern at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) this summer, I was offered the opportunity to visit the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment, also known as the DiVE. Created in November 2005, it is currently located at the Pratt School of Engineering on the campus of Duke University. Rachael Brady, a Pratt research scientist and adjunct associate professor in the computer science department, oversaw the planning and construction of the DiVE, one of only seven such systems worldwide at the time. She was also the host for my visit and welcomed my CDS colleague, Chris Sims, and I late one afternoon in June.
DiVE is often times described as a six-sided “cave” — a chamber measuring roughly 9.5 feet per side. The four walls, as well as the ceiling and the floor, are used as screens onto which computer graphics are displayed.
Babygirl with scratches she got fighting another woman while she was in prison. Hunts Point, South Bronx 2007. Photograph by Tiana Markova-Gold from the project "you must not know 'bout me..." (Sex Workers Project / Hunts Point).
announcement of 2010 prizewinners 2010 winners: tiana markova-gold and sarah dohrmann
honorable mention awarded to kitra cahana and chris urquhart
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University has awarded the twentieth Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize to photographer Tiana Markova-Gold and writer Sarah Dohrmann, both Americans. The $20,000 award is given to encourage collaboration in documentary work in the tradition of acclaimed American photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. Lange and Taylor worked together for many years, most notably on fieldwork that resulted in American Exodus (1941), a seminal work in documentary studies.
Tiana Markova-Gold and Sarah Dohrmann’s project, “If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public, You Are a Prostitute: Women and Prostitution in Morocco,” is an investigation of female prostitution in Morocco and the experiences of two American non-Muslim women documenting women’s lives in a country where pre-marital virginity is considered sacred. With their project, they “seek to dismantle Americans’ preconceived notions of the prostitute as sexual deviant and the hijabed woman as ‘exotic’” and examine the negotiation of relationships “between the prostitute and the society she lives in, between the artist and the subject, between non-Muslim and Muslim women, between women.”
Tsehaye, Lory, and Zoe looking out over Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile and the largest lake in Ethiopia. Photograph by Elena Rue.
shared origins: an adoptive family’s journey back to ethiopia
Photographs by Elena Rue
July 19–September 3, 2010
CDS Porch and University Galleries
Reception: Tuesday, August 3, 5-8 p.m.
Elena Rue is a documentary photographer who explores issues associated with international adoption and orphaned children. As a 2006 Hine Fellow, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies, she spent nine months working with a local non-governmental organization in Ethiopia to document the lives of AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa. From 2007 to 2010, she worked for the Literacy Through Photography program at the Center for Documentary Studies, and she is currently pursuing a master’s degree at UNC–Chapel Hill in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Installation of the Jazz Loft Project exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. Photograph by Courtney Reid-Eaton.
jazz loft exhibition opening reception july 23rd in chicago
The Jazz Loft Project exhibition features never-before-displayed vintage black-and-white prints and rarely heard audio recordings by photographer W. Eugene Smith, who spent eight years documenting the jazz musicians, artists, and underground characters who inhabited the scene at 821 Sixth Avenue. Curated by Sam Stephenson and Courtney Reid-Eaton of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the exhibition features more than 200 images, several hours of audio, and 16mm film footage of Eugene Smith working in the loft. The Jazz Loft Project will be on display from July 17 to September 19, in the Sidney R. Yates Gallery at the Chicago Cultural Center. Admission is free.
Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois 60602
(312) 744-6630 www.chicagoculturalcenter.org
Open: Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m.-7 p.m.; Friday, 8 a.m.-6 p.m.;
Saturday, 9 a.m.-6p.m.; and Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Closed holidays
opening reception
July 23, 6-8 p.m.
Free admission
gallery talk
August 26, 12 p.m.
A conversation with Sam Stephenson, Jazz Loft Project director and curator of the exhibition. » Continue Reading…
CDS undergraduate instructor Kelly Alexander was recently recognized for her teaching excellence. During the spring semester 2010, her course evaluations were among the top 5% of all undergraduate instructors at Duke. You can read more about her course, Our Culinary Cultures, here.
Kelly Alexander is a writer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is a consulting editor to Saveur magazine and the author of numerous feature stories for that publication. Her article “Hometown Appetites,” an homage to the great American food writer Clementine Paddleford, won the James Beard Journalism Award and was the basis for a biography and cookbook published by Penguin in 2008. Prior to joining Saveur, Alexander worked as the restaurant editor of Microsoft’s New York Sidewalk and as an assistant editor at Food & Wine magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, and many other publications. Her story “Multicultural Meat,” about the cross-cultural significance of brisket, was nominated for a Bert Greene Award for Food Journalism from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Alexander is also a regular contributor on the subject of food to the NPR program “The State of Things,” which airs daily on WUNC, North Carolina Public Radio. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied journalism, creative writing, and anthropology.
Student Jametta Davis filming on site during the 2010 Summer Video Institute. Photograph by Maggie Smith. June 21, 2010.
video institute summer 2010 photos
In this eight-day intensive, students are fully immersed in the process of documentary filmmaking. They collaborate with a partner to direct, shoot, edit and screen a documentary short. This year’s institute was produced in collaboration with The Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, and each project focused on an environmental theme.
Final projects were screened on Saturday, June 26, and are now available for viewing on the CDS iTunesU site and the CDS Vimeo site.
Continuing Education Certificate student Kim Best in front of the screening of her final project "Better Late Than Never." Photograph by Maggie Smith. May 21, 2010.
continuing education certificate graduation and reception photos
May 21, 2010
Throughout the year, CDS offers continuing education courses in the documentary arts for the general public. These courses, taught by working professionals, are designed to help students of all ages and backgrounds gain the skills they need to explore doing documentary work on their own terms. Over the past eleven years, students in the certificate program have produced photography, film and video, audio, multimedia, and writing projects on a diverse range of topics. These projects often move out into the world to larger audiences in the form of exhibits, installations, websites, and other creative artworks. This event showcases the latest of these final certificate projects, completed in the Final Seminar in Documentary Studies, taught this spring by Nancy Kalow.
