“Making art with other people’s lives”

“No matter the setup, the ethical responsibility of a documentary film falls on its director. You have no way of knowing what you’ll end up having to be responsible for when you start making a film. Doing this takes either great courage or a great deal of obliviousness.” (Pirjo Honkasalo)

This workshop invites members of the community who work with documentary photography and/or film to come together and ask questions around how we address the violence of visual representation. How can we work with the lives of real people without being extractive or exposing our protagonists to harm, particularly when working with groups who have historically been victimized – either in the name of science or art – by film and other visual media? How can we work with visual methods in ways that break down hierarchies, rather than reinforce colonialist structures that equate seeing with knowing? What can protocols of ongoing consent look like? And what artistic approaches can help us to make our work more relational and accountable?

An experiment in thinking together, this is a space to bring our own work and experiences, ask some uncomfortable questions, and support each other in committing to intentional, responsible uses of visual documentary forms.

Masking is encouraged at this event. Please do not attend if you are feeling poorly or have cold symptoms.

VMS coordinator and HUMA PhD candidate Magdalena Hutter has been making documentary films for 20 years, both as a director and a camera woman. In her research-creation dissertation project she uses oral history and documentary film to explore fatness as method in dance and movement art.

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Host or Publisher Visual Methods Studio, a working group sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture