Another form of documentary imaging is participatory photography projects which are a grassroots approach to documentary photography. Such projects allow members of the community, who have often been the subjects of documentary photography, to experience individual and collective empowerment by engaging in the creation of their own photo stories, that depict their life from their own point of view.
Participatory Photography was first used by the worker-photography movement in Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s ‘to promote international relief for Russia’s famine’ document the rise a fascism in Germany and record the working conditions of the factory, railway, dockland and countryside workers in America. (Braden, 1983 p. 9) The idea is to put the camera into the hands of those who were traditionally the subjects of the photographer, and let them record their own predicament. This form of documentary photography has mostly been used for the benefit of an oppressed or disadvantaged group of people.
YAK and Family Planning Victoria was funded by the City of Melbourne to create a photographic arts project. The YAK members took photos and created a series of images that expressed what it is like to be young and same sex-attracted in Melbourne in 2007. As professional photographer, I worked with the young people to develop the theme, teach photography skills and produce a documentary slide show of their work.
One of the issues of documenting people in other countries is the way we ‘capture’ other people for ourselves like ‘trophies’. Photography critic Susan Sontag writes ‘Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends and neighbors’. She believes its ‘A way of certifying experience’ and continues by arguing that ‘travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs’. (Sontag, 1977).
This is a film of people who live on Phuc Tan Street in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is a very simple short film put to music showing a memory of my time living there. Is it a trophy? Did I travel there to satisfy a need to accumulate photographs or did I simply document my time there? Does it even matter? A short blurb about the footage or images provides a context as to why the film has been made and what is being said about subjects ‘captured’. This is my reflection:
‘Life in Hanoi happens on the street and this is very evident on Phuc Tan Street. It is a vibrant place on the Red River with an amazing sense of community and is where people from the countryside come and live to find work in the city. The work they predominantly do is street selling and are known as the traveling sellers. My friend Le Van Do, also from the countryside, lives in a boarding house on Phuc Tan Street. When I lived in Vietnam I often spent the evenings eating, drinking and playing pool ON the street with Do and his friends. With his help we created this little video which we later took back and showed to them’.
Photo essay
‘A photo essay is a set or series of photographs that are intended to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer’. They are particularly important to help create a more detailed story of an event or issue.
‘The Backyard’ is my current documentary photo essay which explores the way we use our ‘out-the-back’ spaces. When I arrived back from having lived in Vietnam for nearly a year, I was struck by the difference of how we live out the back of our separated zones compared to the incredibly public ‘life on the street’ in Viet Nam.
