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Copyright & Fair Use Blog
Activating the Archive
Posted by Barbara Abrash on Oct 30, 2008 at 10:48 AM
Last week I visited Chimpanzee Productions for a sneak preview of an unprecedented experiment in marrying documentary filmmaking with multiplatform social networking.
Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People is a 2-hour documentary film and multimedia outreach project, Inspired by Dr. Deborah Willis’ path-breaking book, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (Norton, 2000), that reveals the ways in which African American photographers – known and unknown – have constructed representations of themselves and their social, political, and aesthetic worlds.
In what filmmaker and president of Chimpanzee Productions, Thomas Allen Harris, calls a “talking heart documentary,” contemporary artists explore their creative processes and talk about the power of photographs in their own journeys of self- and community identity.
Through a Lens Darkly is not just a documentary, but an interactive multimedia destination, which was incubated at BAVC’s 2008 Producers Institute for New Media Technologies. The Through a Lens Darkly team will soon launch their presentation website and social networking sites, which represent such key features of the project as documentary “behind the scenes”; links to photography-based events, museums and educational partners; and profiles of leading photographers, organizations, and archives focused on African American photo-based content.
The online presence of Through a Lens Darkly will be expanded through pages on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Blip TV. Team member Ann Bennett says, “This is a new kind of narrative direction with multiple voices in dialog”.
The project will encourage people to engage with their archives, and bring awareness of visual literacy to the fore. Critical thinking is built into a project that triggers immediate questions about images – who makes them, in what context, for what purpose? And how – as images are re-invoked, re-purposed, re-interpreted – do they signify in contemporary culture?
Harris says, “My films, like my earliest conversations with family members, have been through the lens of the family photograph. This project represents a way to allow other families to activate their archives.”
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