A speaker emphasizes his point with a hammer during a rally to support dairy farmers in Manchester, Iowa
A project I worked on last week reminded me of work we were doing in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s with story telling on the web. Before I tell you about that, let me explain how I got to Manchester, Iowa for rally to support dairy farmers last Saturday.
The work of college faculty isn’t just about standing at the head of a class. In professional terms, faculty members on most college campuses have three components to their job description: teaching, service, and research. There are many nouns for these primary responsibilities. There are also a myriad of way to define and divide a faculty member’s time spent on these activities. This is collectively called the “workload policy” which is something similar to the Loch Ness creature and Sasquatch…a great deal of fun to discuss and debate, but no one has actually seen one.
Service is work a faculty member does, often at no fee, for the community in which he or she lives and contributes. They become the public scholar, sharing their expertise with those who want and need it to make a strong an move vibrant community.
If you follow farm and consumer news, you are aware of a very difficult time in dairy farming. As I reviewed my Twitter account last week, I learned of Farm Aid’s search for volunteers to help at a rally. So I reached out to the people of Farm Aid and offered to help them document the efforts in Manchester to bring attention to the problems facing dairy farmers in Iowa and the US.
Self serving disclosure: Not only is this “service” but it is providing background for an elective I am co-developing with colleagues from several disciplines tentatively called “We Are What We Eat: Nutrition, Policy, and the Public Health of America’s Diet”. That elective deserves a post of it’s own.
A mother fans her daughter following surgery in Yerevan, Armenia in this 1999 photo. It is one of the last film images I shot on mission trips.
The project in Manchester was easy, compared to what we did in 1999. I needed to shoot the images and hand them off or post them to Flickr. There is even a coffee shop with free wi-fi in town. I was shooting with Nikon D1 – a gift from a friend. It took me back the early days, shooting from Armenia with Tom Burton, and the first time I saw a Nikon D1 digital camera. After shooting with it for a day, in 1999, I never returned to film except as a back up. Photography for me had changed.
I also recalled going into countries with only the hope of a modem line and access to AOL as a way to publish our work in real time. Huy Nguyen’s photo of me in surgical garb, listening to the modem sounds on an Apple G3 Powerbook reminds me of that November, being in Ha Noi on election night 2000 and trying to explain to our Vietnamese hosts what was going on in American politics. Later that week, we were evicted from our hotel room a few days early to make room for the secret service and President’s Clinton’s entourage.
Thinking of those trips, and how we crated remote live Web reporting, and producing some projects for clients like MAG - the Mines Advisory Group featuring the brilliant lens work of Sean Sutton, there is still something powerful and immediate about Web documentary making. It is even more powerful with the addition of so many new storytellers. it required a strong edit and a producer who can focus the message. That’s what I’ll be doing with my colleagues as we put together our elective….the subject of my next post.
[...] may recognize a few of the still images from the April dairy rally in NE [...]