Video Available: Photographer Danny Wilcox Frazier On His Book “Driftless”
Interviews with all five winners of the biennial CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography are available on the prize’s new website; here, 2006 winner Danny Wilcox Frazier talks about growing up in Iowa and going back to make the photographs in Driftless: Photographs from Iowa. Application information for the sixth biennial CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography competition will [...]
Video Available: Sales of “Iraq | Perspectives” Soar After Ben Lowy’s Guest Spot on “The Daily Show”
Sales of photographer Benjamin Lowy’s prizewinning book, Iraq | Perspectives, have spiked following his interview on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on Monday, December 5. The book has gone from #217,000 to #2,125 on Amazon, where it is currently the number-one bestselling book on Iraq, and ranks thirteen out of all books by or about [...]
Interview with David Pace, 2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize Winner
Interview with David Pace Winner, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize The images in Friday Night seem formally quite different from your other work, such as Re: Collections, or even the series Kiosks and Market Day from Burkina Faso. Would you agree? You are quite right that the images in Friday Night are different from my [...]
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 [...]
Photographer Chris Vail on Rural Mexico: The People, the Land, and the Music, December 5 at Perkins Library
A visiting artist at the Center for Documentary Studies, Chris Vail has been a documentary and news photographer for more than 30 years. He is currently documenting cultural regions of Mexico as defined by various forms of son, a genre of traditional Mexican music. Monday, December 5, 3–4:30 p.m. Mary Duke Biddle Rare Book Room, [...]
Undergraduate Documentaries: Stories of Homelessness and Finding Home Again, December 5 at the Durham County Library
Eleven Duke undergraduates from the Center for Documentary Studies and the Hart Leadership Program will present their short documentaries on homelessness or formerly homeless individuals living in the Triangle at an event hosted by Housing for New Hope, an organization that has been working for almost twenty years to prevent and end homelessness in Durham [...]
Podcast Available: “W. Eugene Smith’s Caregiving Photo-Essays,” By Sam Stephenson
In this talk, “W. Eugene Smith’s Caregiving Photo Essays,” writer Sam Stephenson examines Smith’s career-long concern with caregiving, including his famous photographic essays such as “Nurse Midwife,” “Country Doctor,” “Albert Schweitzer: A Man of Mercy,” and “Minimata.” Sam Stephenson (born in 1966 in Chapel Hill) is a writer who grew up in Washington, North Carolina. [...]
Video Available: Photographer Benjamin Lowy on His Book “Iraq | Perspectives”
Interviews with all five winners of the biennial CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography are available on the prize’s new website; here, 2010 winner Benjamin Lowy talks about his process for taking the photographs in Iraq | Perspectives, and viewers can listen to some of the conversations about editing the book. Lowy will be signing [...]
Interview with Tamas Dezso, 2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Project Prize Winner
Interview with Tamas Dezso Winner and Jurors’ Pick (Darren Ching and Sasha Wolf), Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Project Prize How did you become interested in photography? How did you decide it was to be something that you wanted to pursue seriously? Following the political changes of 1989 when the Russian army withdrew, having been stationed in [...]
Podcast Available: CDS Audio Director John Biewen and Radio Diaries Founder Joe Richman on Public Radio Documentaries
Listen to this keynote address given by radio producers John Biewen and Joe Richman at the second annual Harrisburg Book Festival in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 12. They share their own stories and lead an interactive discussion on today’s public radio documentaries, drawing from Radio Diaries and Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound. [...]
John Cyr, Juror’s Pick (Anthony Bannon), Project Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
John Cyr Juror’s Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Project Prize “Crisp, contained, conceptual, and attractively self-conscious. A charm. Couldn’t be better.”—Anthony Bannon From the mid-nineteenth century until today, silver gelatin printing has been one of the most utilized photographic processes, and until the mid-1970s, from classic reportage to fine art, a majority of photographs were produced [...]
Podcast Available: “Can Photography Make You a Better Doctor?: Reflections on a Life in Photography and Medicine,” By John Moses
In this talk, “Can Photography Make You a Better Doctor? Reflections on a Life in Photography and Medicine,” Duke pediatrician and photographer John Moses discusses how he has used photography over the past twenty-five years to better understand the lives of his patients and hopefully to become a better doctor. Moses first came to photography [...]
Kris Vervaeke, Juror’s Pick (Stacey Clarkson), Project Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
Kris Vervaeke Juror’s Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Project Prize “Kris Vervaeke’s collection of photographs documenting decaying images found on tombstones in China demonstrates tremendous grace and intelligence. With uncommon elegance, the project provides viewers contemplative space to ponder its many layers of meaning involving ritual, loss, time, community, and even photography itself. It is a [...]
Podcasts Available: Projects from the 2011 Summer Audio Institute
“Hearing Is Believing” is a one-week continuing-education course offered every summer at the Center for Documentary Studies. Each July, 24 people come from across the country to learn the basics of audio documentary-making and to collaborate with a fellow participant in producing a short piece. This year the stories emerged from a collaboration between CDS [...]
Duke Magazine Website Features “Documenting Duke” Audio Work by CDS Undergraduates
Through a collaboration between the Center for Documentary Studies and Duke Magazine, students in John Biewen’s undergraduate classes “Introduction to Audio Documentary” and “The Short Audio Documentary” have produced audio features to complement stories featured in the magazine. Among the recent audio pieces posted to Duke Magazine’s website is a piece by Elisabeth Michel, who [...]
Lorenzo Martelli, Juror’s Pick (Stacey Clarkson), Work-in-Process Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
Lorenzo Martelli Juror’s Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize “‘I am not my home,’ he kept telling me over and over, but one day he decided to let me in,’ explains Lorenzo Martelli regarding his endeavor to portray the private, melancholy world of Charlie, a disinherited Milanese count. Intimate and respectful, these thoughtful black-and-white photographs [...]
Sebastian Liste, Juror’s Pick (Whitney Johnson), Project Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
Sebastian Liste Juror’s Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Project Prize “For two years, Sebastián Liste has photographed the daily lives of over one hundred families who formed a community in an abandoned chocolate factory in Brazil. His long-term commitment to the project has revealed an intimate and complex story—one that captures not only the consequences of [...]
Register Now for “Performance Storytelling” Workshop November 12 with Jeff Polish
“Performance Storytelling” is a one-day CDS Continuing Education workshop (Saturday, November 12, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; bring a bag lunch) that will explore the process of developing a short personal narrative to be told in front of an audience. Students, with instructor guidance, will begin by analyzing successful stories and performances at “The Monti StorySLAM,” a [...]
Shane Lavalette, Juror’s Pick (Whitney Johnson), Work-in-Process Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
Shane Lavalette Juror’s Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize “Young Shane Lavalette has already demonstrated his commitment to the photography industry: As the founder and editor of Lay Flat, he is collaborating with photographers to create books that reflect each artist’s vision. Here, we see Shane’s own view, a series of color images that consider [...]
James Dodd, Juror’s Pick (Anthony Bannon), Work-in-Process Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
James Dodd Juror’s Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize “Whether in or out of the water, the series works with wonder and with purpose, and that is a winning combination. It is held tightly together by the grace of humor, awe, and consistent style that hold out promise for the work’s completion.”—Anthony Bannon Sport funding [...]
Baldomero Fernandez, Juror’s Pick (Sasha Wolf), Work-in-Process Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
Baldomero Fernandez Juror’s Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize “Baldomero Fernandez’s project on downtrodden America may not be unique, but his tight, often-beautiful compositions of people and places feel masterful and extremely thoughtful. This is a project with social documentary implications that soars above those often self-imposed, rigid boundaries to become a more poetic art [...]
Teka Selman on Duke’s New MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts
Teka Selman is the assistant director of Duke’s Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts. Her experience in the arts ranges from commercial to nonprofit arts management, most recently as partner at Branch Gallery in Durham, North Carolina. Selman received an MA in Art History and Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, [...]
Tamas Dezso, Winner and Jurors’ Pick (Darren Ching and Sasha Wolf), Project Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
Tamas Dezso Winner and Jurors’ Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Project Prize “Here, Anywhere by Tamas Dezso is a meditative series that presents an unresolved Hungarian post-communist identity. The outlook invoked is somewhat surreal, almost as though what is contained within the frame is caught in some sort of suspended animation—the beginning lost and an end [...]
Lydia Goldblatt, Juror’s Pick (Darren Ching), Work-in-Process Prize (2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards)
Lydia Goldblatt Juror’s Pick, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize “Lydia Goldblatt’s photographs of her father are a refreshing and eloquent shift from the straightforward document of family. These are visual gems—encapsulated memories of an intimate relationship between father and daughter. The somber light not only serves as a distinct artistic voice but somehow imbues these [...]
