Robert Coles: DOing Documentary Work (1997)

Don't you see, that's been our story–the black story: everyone calls us something! It's so hard for any single one of us to be seen by you folks [white people], even the kindest of you, even our friends [among you] as a person, nothing more. That's where we are; that's where we're coming from; that's our 'place' in all this! You folks–can be yourselves! You can wander all over the map. You can be here and you can be there. You can go set up your tent wherever you think it'll do you good! That's great–for you! That's what it means to be white, and have a good education. You can look at things with a microscope or a telescope, and from way up in the mountains and down near the seashore, and when it's sunny and when it's raining cats and dogs, and then, later, when you write or you publish your photographs–you're not a white writer, or a white photographer. You're free of the biggest label of them all, the one that defines us every single minute of our lives! So, you can take all roads, and you can stop at any gas station or restaurant while on he way. Us–we're trying to get people to give us just a little break, to call us Mister or Missus, to let me go where I please without thinking I might get arrested, and even killed. So, it's location, man, location, for us: where we're at, and where you're at, and where we can go, and where you can go–that's why I favor stopping to look at one person, then the next, and not running all which ways to corral folks into someone's pen, some circle, with a fence around it.

Bob Moses, the leader of the Mississippi Summer Project, SNCC
quoted in Coles, page 40

Sometimes I have to distinguish between what I am hearing, and what I wanted to hear from the person, before I even met him! ... That's our job, to make sure where we stop and our patients start: their concerns as opposed to our sense of what their concerns 'really' are–or should be.

Erik Erikson, quoted in Coles, page 43

The issue, was not these people nearby [at the Harvard Faculty Club], eating their lunch and conversing spiritedly about matters of the intellect, but my own readiness to use them, to keep looking long and hard at them rather than inward at the turmoil of memories, aspirations, worries that inhabited my own head. Moreover, as is so often the case with the one who scapegoats, the issue was finally what bothered me about myself: the wish to follow suit, to join those professors, to be one of them down the line–and to do so by writing up the documentary research done in the very place I'd just left. The more I let myself get worked up about people sitting in the Harvard Faculty Club whom I really didn't know, the more time I spent bashing folks in the tradition of Agee and Orwell, the less time I'd have to do what Mrs. Bridges was quietly hoping I'd do–hold her "people" in memory, remain in touch with them in whatever way seemed suitable. We forget about others in many ways–sometimes by becoming newly preoccupied with a righteousness that turns into self-righteousness, and feeds on any and all victims, many of them made up on the spot.

pp. 72-73

When you say 'documentary,' you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder. . . that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

Walker Evans, quoted in Coles, p. 130

[Reporters and photojournalists] know so very well how to go meet people, talk with them, take pictures of them, right away take their measure, decide when and how to go further, look for others to question. They know how to make those utterly necessary first steps (find contacts, use them) that the rest of us can be slow in realizing will make all the difference in whether a particular project will unfold.

p. 138

We speak, especially, about "seeing for oneself," as [Erik Erikson] keeps putting it–the importance of "making a record that you the writer can believe, before you ask someone else to believe it."

p. 144

For [Dorothea Lange], making a shot is an adventure that begins with no planned itinerary. She feels that setting out with a preconceived idea of what she wants to photograph actually minimizes her chance for success.

Willard Van Dyke in 1934, quoted in Coles p. 154

I have a cousin who is a New Hopi; he went to a BIA school, and lived with the Anglos in Albuquerque. He came back to us and said that he doesn't look at the mesa anymore, he doesn't watch the clouds, see them meeting, leaving each other, doing a dance for us. He thinks about them; he talks to himself about them. He wishes his head could be quiet, the way it used to be. Stick with the Anglos, and you have a noisy head!

A 14-year-old Hopi girl, interviewed by Robert Coles, quoted on p. 161

I worry about who's doing the "documenting," and what a person has in mind to see–before they even get here to take a look or take a listen! I say to myself: will they "document" our tears, but not our smiles? Will they "document" our rough times, but not show us having a good time, now and then–no matter how poor we be, and how down-and-out it gets for us, and how bad the treatment we receive from Mr. White Man? I know we need outsiders to lend us a hand. The people who run this country won't budge, unless they're pushed, and no one hereabouts who's got dark skin is going to push very long, without getting a bullet through the heart, or being pushed right into the Mississippi River!

But if people come here, and they want to help us, and they try to help us–but they end up thinking of us as only in trouble, and only in pain, and only persecuted–then we'll end up with the world getting the wrong picture about us. We'll end up appearing the way the Klan people want us to appear–as bad off as animals, and all the time whining, like a cat or a dog. The truth is, we've got bad troubles, but we're children of God, and we know how to hold our heads up high, and we're not always slinking around like animals do, and we can pray and we can look ourselves straight in the eye and not be ashamed, and we can sing–oh yes, we can! I told some people who came by last week–they be from New York City and California–that I saw those records in their cars, the jazz and the spirituals: it was all our music, and if we can make that music, it's a sign of God smiling on us–amazing Grace! They should "document" that part of us, too, you know.

A black minister in Greenwood, Mississippi in Summer 1963, speaking to Coles' wife, quoted on pp. 169-70

[According to Wright Morris,] writers like Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe and Hemingway got caught in the traps of nostalgia; they allowed the past to define the present, to narrow their vision of what is in store for us, and ultimately they paid the price as writers. Henry James certainly sought out the past, and even left his native land to find it, but, says Morris, "We have had hundreds of exiles, and many of them talented. . . .Among all of these exiles, he alone is not a captive of the past."
p. 195

The experience of service can soon enough prompt a need for reflection–and so it is that documentary work can itself become a kind of service: the narrative work done among those vulnerable "others" can enable us to stop and reflect upon who "they" are, and what "we" are trying to accomplish.

p. 251