Duke University. Center for Documentary Studies

The Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor documentary prize is awarded by Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies to a writer and a photographer in the early stages of a documentary project. The prize was created to encourage collaboration between documentary writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor.

Center established for the study of the documentary process.

Youth Document Durham and Durham Works were programs sponsored by Duke University and the Center for Documentary Studies, bringing together young people ages 12 to 16 from diverse Durham communities to document their lives, local history, and contemporary social issues through photography, oral history, and narrative writing.

American Communities: An Oral History Approach was a course associated with the oral history project Behind the Veil at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. The course was taught by Paul Ortiz at Duke University in 1996-1997.

The Center for Documentary Studies opened in January 1990 and is an outgrowth of and replacement for the Center for Documentary Photography (1980-1990). The Center combines traditions of documentary photography and film, writing, oral history, and scholarly analysis in seeking to capture life experiences.

Documentary photographer and writer based in western North Carolina.

The Behind the Veil Oral History Project was undertaken by Duke University's Lyndhurst Center for Documentary Studies in 1990. It seeks to record and preserve the living memory of African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950.

The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program (LHDFP) is administered by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to support documentary photographers who address humanitarian issues in the U.S. and abroad.

Center established for the study of the documentary process. "Indivisible ..." is a national documentary project the Center completed in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

John Moses, a professor of pediatrics at Duke University, spent eleven years documenting teenage parents in North Carolina counties, including Durham and Orange. Jocelyn Lee is a professor at the Maine College of Art and worked for six years in parts of Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Nova Scotia, living and working with young mothers.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University was established for the study of the documentary process. Indivisible: Stories of American Community was a national documentary project which took place primarily during 1999-2001, and was sponsored by the Center for Documentary Studies in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. The project captured the experiences of individuals participating in grassroots community organizations and activism in twelve American communities at the end of the 20th century.

The Center for Documentary Studies opened in January 1990 and is an outgrowth of and replacement for the Center for Documentary Photography (1980-1990). The Center combines traditions of documentary photography and film, writing, oral history, and scholarly analysis in seeking to capture life experiences.

25 Under 25 is a project sponsored by the Center for Documentary Studies that showcases twenty-five of America's most promising photographers, all aged twenty-five years old and younger. In 2003, the book 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers was published by the Center for Documentary Studies and powerHouse Books, including photographs and essays from 25 selected photographers. It was edited by Iris Tillman Hill. Accompanying the book was a traveling exhibit featuring selected images, which exhibited in 2003 and 2004 at both New York University and the University of North Carolina.

Volume 2 of 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers, featuring a new group of twenty-five photographers, was published by the Center for Documentary Studies and powerHouse Books in Spring 2008.

The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program (LHDFP) is administered by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to support documentary photographers who address humanitarian issues in the U.S. and abroad. The LHDFP is the first postgraduate program at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies (CDS), and is part of a long-standing commitment to youth-focused work at the CDS. In order to work toward fulfilling this commitment, LHDFP places Fellows with organizations seeking creative solutions to the specific problems faced by women, adolescents, and children in poor, marginalized areas. Each year, Hines Fellows work with local organizations to document their chosen topic over the course of ten months. They then return to work with documentarians on their projects. Hine Fellows, selected each spring, are graduates of Duke University, the Robertson Scholars program between Duke and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, or of the Continuing Studies Certificate Program at the CDS. The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program is supported by The Philanthropic Initiative and the Jessica Jennifer Cohen Foundation.

(Biographies are from the Center for Documentary Studies web site)

Alex Fattal

Alex Fattal graduated from Duke in 2001 with a B.A. in comparative area studies. Alex is a photographer who has made images of rural family life in Russia, Cuba, and most recently, in Colombia on a Fulbright Fellowship. During his time in Colombia, Alex also collaborated with local NGOs on programming related to issues of sustainable development and children's rights. He spent he time as a Fellow in Durban, South Africa, where he worked with a local NGO in its efforts for children's rights advocacy. As part of his work there, he developed the body of work contained within this collection, entitled: Images of Childhood in South Africa Ten Years after Apartheid.

Maital Guttman

Maital Guttman is a documentary filmmaker. As a freshman at Duke University her interest in documentary work began through the Humanitarian Challenges at Home and Abroad FOCUS Program. During her senior year she produced her first full-length documentary titled Mechina: A Preparation. The film follows six Israeli teens three months before they become soldiers, and sheds light on Israeli society in a way that reaches beyond general images of conflict. As a Lewis Hine Fellow, Guttman worked with an NGO in Nekkie, South Africa, and documented the stories of children that attend an arts-based HIV education center in South Africa.

Kate Joyce

Kate Joyce studied sociology and photojournalism at San Francisco State University and, during fall 2003, worked on her Certificate in Documentary Studies through the Center for Documentary Studies. Kate is a photographer interested in the relationship between documentary processes and art. She spent seven months photographing in Chile, where she focused on female-headed households. Her fellowship project was spent in Bloemfontein, South Africa, photographing the body of work known as Site Insight: Mapping Grassland Phase II, and working on documentary projects with a local NGO (DEDI) that focuses on early childhood education and parental-empowerment in rural and informal settlements. She has also photographed in Iceland, Guatemala, Spain, and the American West.

Elena Rue

Elena Rue is a 2003 graduate of Kenyon College, where she studied anthropology and photography. During an intensive semester at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS) in 2001, she completed a number of undergraduate documentary studies courses and was involved with CDS’s Youth Document Durham program and Student Action with Farmworkers, an organization housed at CDS. She spent that following spring semester in Ghana documenting the unique sign language of the isolated deaf community of Adamorobe. Rue spent nine months as a Fellow in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia working with an NGO that supports children whose families have been affected by HIV. The project she developed while working with these families is called Love After Loss.

Amanda van Scoyoc

Amanda van Scoyoc graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 with a B.A. in psychology and a minor in fine arts. For the last six years, she has worked on a variety of documentary projects, including a series of photographs, interviews, and writings about the impact that adopting nine-year-old Russian twin sisters has had on her family as well as on their own adjustment and development. She has also volunteered as a photographer with two nonprofits in Guatemala and Honduras, and worked as an art teacher at a Boy's Club of America, where she has incorporated journaling into her teaching. As a Fellow, van Scoyoc worked with an NGO in Chelsea, Mass. that helps at-risk youth become self-sufficient, responsible citizens. Her project regarding low-income and teenage mothers is entitled: Raising Them Right: Young Motherhood in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Lucy Wilson

Lucy Wilson graduated from Duke in 2001 with a major in public policy studies. After graduation, Lucy lived in Ghana, where she worked for the United States Refugee Resettlement Program - Overseas Processing Entity (OPE), interviewing refugees throughout West Africa and leading circuit rides for the OPE field team. While at Duke, Lucy initiated Teaching Together, Learning Together, a partnership between Duke professors and Durham public school teachers. She was also a research assistant with CARE's Office of Public Policy and Governmental Relations, where she worked on a public advocacy campaign to increase international family-planning funding. As part of her coursework at the Center for Documentary Studies, she photographed a Nigerian family living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Wilson's project as a Fellow ( The Highfield District of Harare, Zimbabwe ) reflects her time with the NGO Child Protection Society (CPS), a local child rights advocacy organization in Zimbabwe.

The year 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor documentary prize, an award given by the Center for Documentary Studies. First announced a year after the Center's founding at Duke University, the prize was created to encourage collaboration between documentary writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. In 1941 Lange and Taylor published An American Exodus, a book that renders human experience eloquently in text and images and remains a seminal work in documentary studies. The Lange-Taylor Prize honors their important collaborative work.

The Lange-Taylor Prize is offered to a writer and a photographer in the early stages of a documentary project. By encouraging such collaborative efforts, the Center for Documentary Studies supports the documentary process in which writers and photographers work together to record the human story.

[Overview from the CDS website, August 2010.]

Youth Noise Network (YNN) is a youth radio project based at the Center for Documentary Studies. YNN brings together a diverse group of Durham teenagers to produce a weekly radio show that addresses current issues of particular concern to teens. YNN participants learn various aspects of the documentary arts and produce their own audio documentaries.

In 2003 a group of teenagers who had participated in the Youth Document Durham summer program at CDS decided that they were interested in continuing to do documentary work throughout the year. They worked with CDS staff members to create Youth Noise Network, which remains a youth-led and youth-driven project. Originally started to explore race, racism, and culture in Durham, YNN has since become a way for teens to creatively express their ideas and document a variety of topics, including education, family, immigration, civic engagement, young artists, and politics.

Rob Amberg's photographs and writings have been exhibited and published nationally and internationally in journals, magazines, and galleries. He lectures frequently and performs regular documentary assignments for non-profit organizations, philanthropic foundations and editorial publications. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from numerous organizations, including: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies, Alternate Roots, the North Carolina Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

His book, Sodom Laurel Album, was published in 2002 by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina Press. The book received the 2003 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association. In 2005, his work was included in the book Quartet: Four North Carolina Photographers, which was published by Safe Harbor Books. His latest book, The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress, was published in 2009 by the Center for American Places and the University of Georgia Press.

Dellie Chandler Norton (1898-1993) was a much-loved storyteller and ballad singer whose songs were recorded by Alan Lomax and John Cohen. In 1990, she received a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award.

The Center for Documentary Studies, an interdisciplinary educational organization affiliated with Duke University, is dedicated to advancing documentary work that combines experience and creativity with education and community life. Founded in 1989, CDS connects the arts and humanities to fieldwork, drawing upon photography, filmmaking, oral history, folklore and writing as catalysts for education and change.

The North Carolina Self-Portrait project (NCSP) was directed by Alex Harris at the Center For Documentary Studies, Duke University. The NCSP project was modeled after a similar project conducted by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. The objective of these projects was to photograph the family pictures of African Americans, and to record on audio tape the family member's descriptions of the photographs.

Part of the larger Community Programs department in the Center for Documentary Studies, "Youth Document Durham" was a summer program that brought together young people, ages 12–16, from diverse Durham and surrounding communities to document their lives, local history, and contemporary social issues through photography, oral history, and narrative writing. Many of the students are African American or Hispanic and their topics often highlight social conditions and race relations in African American and Hispanic communities in their neighborhoods. Topics explored by participants, both interviewers and interviewees, include crime, food cultures, jobs and education, music, racism, technology, teen violence, work cultures, and tobacco cultivation and its social context. For four intensive weeks, students learned the skills to create photographic bodies of work with a manual camera, the techniques required to process film and develop prints, interviewing skills, computer-based audio editing, and how to write narration reflecting their experiences. They also made decisions about how they would explore their group's topic; they chose who they might want to interview, where and what they would photograph, and what project or event might reflect their work so that they could then share their ideas, stories, and photographs with the larger community. The program produced public forums, web sites, exhibits, and publications. The Youth Document Durham program received funding support from the City of Durham and the Triangle Community Foundation, through the Quintiles Give Back Fund and the Fund for Women and Girls of Durham. Originally called "Community Stories," it is sometimes referred to it in this way in the collection.

Also part of Community Programs, Durham Works was an after-school career exploration program that encouraged young people to focus on questions about education, jobs, and the world of work. Using cameras and tape recorders, middle-school students met with community members who were working in jobs that the young people found intriguing and appealing. Their documentary work was presented back to the community in various ways, including exhibits, videos, art installations, and posters.

Other related projects included in the Additions series are Youth Treatment Court, which seems to have been a division of Youth Document Durham, and the Connect Program, which included projects from Old Five Points as well as special group projects for youth.

John Moses, photography instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and a practicing pediatrician, spent eleven years documenting teenage parents in North Carolina counties. Jocelyn Lee, a photography professor at Princeton University, spent six years in parts of Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Nova Scotia, living and working with young mothers. Friendships of support and caring developed between the photographers and the teens, and the trust resulting from these relationships deepened the character and meaning of their work. The Youngest Parents exhibition of twenty-five black-and-white photographs taken from 1986 to the present day included follow-up photographs of the young parents, now adults, and their children, now teens and young adults themselves. The exhibit also included text panels with young mothers’ candid reflections.

This exhibit was displayed by the Center for Documentary Studies from May 28 through September 19, 1998.