Read Online: Winter 2012 Issue of Document
The winter 2012 issue of Document is now available to read online, featuring the exhibition Full Color Depression: First Kodachromes From America’s Heartland, an interview with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival programming director, 2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Award winners, courses, and more. Document is a quarterly publication that features some of the best documentary work supported [...]
Second Printing of Photographer Jim Dow’s “American Studies” Now Available, Plus Podcast of His Talk at CDS
Jim Dow visited CDS recently to give a talk and sign copies of the few remaining first edition copies of American Studies, which was published earlier this year by powerHouse Books and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies. The second edition was published in November. Here, Dow talks about the road he followed [...]
John Biewen to Give Keynote Presentation at Harrisburg Book Festival November 12
John Biewen, a radio producer and audio program director at the Center for Documentary Studies, and Joe Richman, founder of Radio Diaries, will give the keynote presentation at the second annual Harrisburg Book Festival in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 12. During the multimedia event, they will share their own stories and lead an interactive discussion [...]
New Book: “Literacy and Justice Through Photography: A Classroom Guide”
In 1990, photographer Wendy Ewald, with encouragement from Durham, North Carolina, school administrators and support from the Center for Documentary Studies, started the Literacy Through Photography (LTP) program, working in the Durham Public Schools to make photographs the basis for a variety of learning experiences across the curriculum. Since then, LTP has worked with numerous [...]
CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Launches New Website
The Center for Documentary Studies and The Honickman Foundation (THF), based in Philadelphia, co-sponsor a prestigious biennial prize for American photographers, the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, the only one of its kind. Winners of the prize receive a $3,000 grant, publication of a book of photography, and inclusion in the prize’s new website, [...]
Fall 2011 Issue of Document
The Fall 2011 issue of Document is now available to read online, featuring the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts Fall 2011 Inaugural Class, John Hope Franklin Award Student Documentary Prizewinners, Certificate in Documentary Arts spring 2011 graduates and projects, CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography winner Benjamin Lowy’s Iraq | Perspectives, current [...]
American Studies: Talk, Book Signing, and Reception with Jim Dow
Photographer Jim Dow will be in Durham to talk about and sign his new book, American Studies, published by powerHouse Books and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies. Beginning with photographs Dow made in the late 1960s, this retrospective book covers almost forty years, ending with pictures made at the close of the [...]
Benjamin Lowy’s iPhone Photographs of Libya
Photojournalist Benjamin Lowy’s photographs of Libya, taken on his iPhone, are being featured on the MSNBC photoblog. Lowy is the winner of the 2010 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. His book Iraq | Perspectives will be published in fall 2011 by Duke University Press. Read the announcement about William Eggleston selecting Benjamin Lowy for [...]
“Whiskey and Geography”: “Spirits of Just Men” Excerpts Featured on Southern Spaces
The online journal Southern Spaces, produced at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, recently published two excerpts from Charles Thompson’s new book, Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World. The first excerpt, a video produced by Marissa Katarina Bergmann, offers glimpses of modern-day Shooting Creek juxtaposed with [...]
Video Interviews with Photographer Alex Harris
Alex Harris’s photographic work recently opened in a landmark exhibit at the Getty Museum show, A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Evans to Now. Harris’s 18 large scale photographs are featured alongside those of Walker Evans, and two other contemporary photographers. A student of Walker Evans at Yale, Harris is the author of, among other books, [...]
Press Coverage for “American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow”
Recent news and press coverage for the publication American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow and the accompanying exhibition at Janet Borden Gallery in New York: “Jim Dow Hits the Road.” The New Yorker Photo Booth blog. Posted by Caroline Hirsch. July 26, 2011. “Only in America: Roadside Scenes.” Life online photo gallery. June 1, 2011. [...]
American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow Artist’s Talk and Book Signing in Boston
Hosted by the Photographic Resource Center, this talk and signing with Boston-based artist Jim Dow features his recently published book, a compendium of many of his best-known images made over almost forty years of traveling the road with his large format camera. Copies of American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow, published by powerHouse in association [...]
Spring 2011 Issue of Document
The Spring 2011 issue of Document is now available to read online, featuring the First Book Prize in Photography, CDS Filmmaker Award, Travels with Mike, The Parchman Hour on tour in Mississippi, Summer Institutes, and more. Document is a quarterly publication that features some of the best documentary work supported and produced by the Center for [...]
Charlie Thompson on “Spirits of Just Men”
Charlie Thompson, director of the undergraduate program at CDS, holds the faculty position of Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Religion. His latest book, Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World (University of Illinois [...]
American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow Exhibition and Book Launch Party
Peripatetic artist Jim Dow has compiled many of his best-known images in this extraordinary love poem to America. Using a large format camera on the road, Dow has catalogued the stadiums, the road signs, the diners, and the ice cream parlors that pepper the landscape. Jim Dow: American Studies June 2–July 15, 2011 Janet Borden [...]
“Spirits of Just Men” by Charles D. Thompson Jr.
Spirits of Just Men tells the story of moonshine in 1930s America, as seen through the remarkable location of Franklin County, Virginia, a place that many still refer to as the “moonshine capital of the world.” Charles D. Thompson Jr., curriculum and education director at the Center for Documentary Studies and a lecturer in cultural [...]
American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow
In American Studies, Jim Dow documents places and things crafted and occupied by ordinary people for practical purposes that share inventiveness and resilience, that mix the makeshift with the carefully considered. For Dow, landscape is fashioned by those who leave their mark both in and out of doors; on signs and billboards, in barbershops, office [...]
Nancy Kalow on “Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary”
Nancy Kalow is a folklorist and filmmaker who has taught at the Center for Documentary Studies since 2000. She attended Harvard University (A.B.), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A.), and was a Rockefeller Fellow at UNC’s University Center for International Studies. She has documented southern traditional music and material culture, Primitive Baptist [...]
“Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary” E-book by Nancy Kalow
Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary By Nancy Kalow Visual Storytelling, the Center for Documentary Studies’ first e-book, is for anyone who wants to make a watchable short documentary using a consumer camcorder, digital SLR camera, or cell phone. Nancy Kalow, who has taught at CDS for twelve years and chairs the selection committee of [...]
Sodom Laurel Album: Photographs by Rob Amberg
Sodom Laurel Album features a selection of photographs from Rob Amberg’s book of the same name, published by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina Press in 2002, in which he explores the lives around him in his adopted home of Madison County, North Carolina. Amberg began [...]
Reading and Book Signing with Allen Tullos
In Alabama Getaway, Allen Tullos explores the recent history of one of the nation’s most conservative states to reveal its political imaginary—the public shape of power, popular imagery, and individual opportunity. From Alabama’s largely ineffectual politicians to its miserly support of education, health care, cultural institutions, and social services, Tullos examines why the state appears to [...]
Winter 2011 Issue of Document
The Winter 2011 issue of Document is now available—read about the 2011 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, forthcoming books published by CDS, exhibitions, and more! Document is a quarterly publication that features some of the best documentary work supported and produced by the Center for Documentary Studies. Each issue of Document includes a range of [...]
William Eggleston Selects Benjamin Lowy to Win First Book Prize in Photography
Benjamin Lowy, a war and feature photographer with Reportage by Getty Images, has won the fifth Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. Internationally renowned photographer William Eggleston judged the competition and chose Lowy to win the prize. He says, “Although I like the other photographers’ work, I felt that the Iraqi pictures [...]
The Jazz Loft Project Exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Named an exclusive top 10 photo show for 2010 by DLK Collection: “Undeniably one of the best photography shows of 2010 … this is a fantastic show, deep in scholarship and compelling in its imagery.” The Jazz Loft Project: W. Eugene Smith in New York City, 1957-1965, an exhibition of photographs and recordings of some [...]
