Constructing Documentary Truth

The questions I set out to explore with this film revolved around our ideas about documentary truth. Simply put, I was concerned about how documentaries are produced to depict truth. Do documentaries reveal truth or do they construct it?

This question had become especially problematic when I started making films. For me it seemed the only true documentary would be one made with a continuous take. Like the early films of Edison and Lumiere where they just turned on the camera and let it run. To me this was truth. But that was before montage, that was before films came to be constructed. It was before Edison realized he could make money from films.

And that for me was where a documentary's claim to truth breaks down. When you put two different splices of film together who's to know that they have any relationship to each other that constitutes truth? How do you know if the first splice happened before or after the second splice? The whole continuity of a film is an illusion. It only exists in the viewer's mind.

Edison's Film, The Sneeze

Not that the still photographer isn't is without their own problems. For me the most problematic documentary aspect of still photography is that of framing. How does a photographer decide what to put in the frame and what to leave out? How do they decide who to photograph and who not to photograph? What detail is important and which one is not?

To think a documentary photographer just documents the situation is not how it works. Documentary photographers are sent to document a story that has usually been written before they arrive on the scene. If the story doesn't fit what they find (which is often the case), they have ways of making it work. They are not there to contradict the story they have been sent to get. Otherwise they'd soon be out of business. Like their film counterparts, documentary photographers construct their photo essays.

So at the beginning of this project, I was interested in how Rothstein constructed his story from the reality that was presented to him. I knew going into this that Rothstein's story did not fit how the locals saw themselves. Rothstein's story of poverty and illiteracy was a cherry picked truth. It didn't tell the whole story of the mountain people. It wasn't their story, it was an outsider's story. As I was told at the Madison Historical Society, 'Rothstein took his photographs to make everyone look poor.'

Not that anyone doubted there were poor people in the mountains. There were. Madison County already had in place a local welfare system of sorts to deal with the problem. The poor just weren't the majority of the population. As Jimmy Brown put it, it was like going to New York City and photographing Harlem in the midst of its poverty, and then using those photographs to define all the inhabitants of Manhattan. It wasn't the truth.

So I set up a series of formal devices to explore Rothstein's assignment to look at documentary structural issues, devices that came to comprise the basic structure of the film, and I decided not to construct my truth but to find it. I wanted to see what my subjects would give me and see how it fit with the traditional narrative. My only boundaries were to stay within Rothstein's assignment. All I would bring to my interviews would be Rothstein's photographs. I wanted my subjects to reveal their truth as it related to Rothstein's photographs.

On the left is Blanche with an unidentified child. Rothstein identifies her as Mrs Nicholson. On the right is Sam Corbin. Sam and Blanche are sister and brother and they are posing in front of the same house, probably at the same time (with one of the same children ). The camera is a large format camera, not a leica as is evidenced by the frame and the light leaks.



What I didn't expect to find was a story behind the story of Rothstein's first assignment. That Rothstein's story was not only a misrepresentation of the area in which he was photographing, but that it also was probably not the story he was sent to document. About half way through the film I started to find that there was another secret, incredibly sinister story behind the official narrative. A story that I had never heard, nor read about. A story most of the mountain people had never heard about either.

To understand that story I had to study the book Hollow Folk. Hollow Folk is a book that at the time was considered to be an important scientific study. Published in 1933 if focuses largely on the same people Rothstein would later photograph. Though now discredited, it provides an important window into the narrative that must have guided Rothstein.