11/13• Business

– GoPost• No question this week, no response• I’ll explain entries later, but they will be due on Friday.

– Papers• Pushed to next Monday, 11/19 by 9pm.• Covers Famous Men or Stein.

• What is a documentary?• The Fortune Project• Challenge of representation• Our Project• Group meeting• HW

– Keep reading• Suggested schedule:

– Up to Education for tomorrow [61 pages]– Up to Intermission for Thurs. [60 pages]– Finish for Monday. [100 pages]

Documentary

• What is a documentary?• Have you seen documentaries before?• What was the photodocumentary model that

Daniel described on Thursday?– Dorthea Lange– Louis Hine

• What is the goal of documentary, as you understand it?

The Fortune Project.

• 1936• Walker Evans and James Agee were

commissioned to do an article for Fortune Magazine on the condition of white sharecroppers in the rural south.

• “a photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers."

Agee’s problem• The article was never published and the project was in

some ways the ruin of Agee’s career.• He labored over the text, finally cobbling together Famous

Men, which obviously doesn’t work as a magazine article and seriously stretches the boundaries of book forms [Is it a novel? Documentary? Photo-journalism?].

• The book represents Agee’s confrontation with representation as much as anything else. – “[the subject] cannot be seriously looked at without intensifying

itself toward a centre which is beyond what I, or anyone else, is capable of writing of: the whole problem and nature of existence”

• He goes over many of the difficulties in his project in his introduction. What are some?

That these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads… [12-13]

How will he approach this problem?

Let me say, then, how I would wish this account might be constructed.

I might suggest, its structure be globular: or should be eighteen or twenty intersected spheres, the interlockings of bubbles on the face of a stream; one of these globes is each of you.

The heart, nerve, center of each of these, is an individual human life. [101 in mine.]

So, Let’s take Agee’s advice

• We are talking a ‘globular’ approach to his book. Each group taking up one of the intersected spheres. – Find your group members. – Let’s have an initial discussion about your topic. • Just get out related ideas, places you saw it coming

together, important scenes, anything. • Appoint one or two people to take notes, someone to

look up lost passages, and a discussion director.

Next…

• Try to organize the brainstorming into 3-5 main subtopics.

• Then, expand on the subtopics.

Week project:

• Create an online resource on your topic using GoPost. – We will talk about this next time.