Selecting Documentary Pictures: Art Versus Sociology

[I wrote this essay to accompany a 1985 exhibit of the work of Texas photographers set to travel to Mexico. The exhibit was organized by my photographer-photohistorian friends Rick Williams, Roy Flukinger, and J.B. Colson.]


I often think that what is most interesting about a picture, a book, an essay, a movie, a song—often more interesting than the thing itself—is the story behind its making. Consider this exhibition. Don’t you wonder what drove this or that photographer to the subject he or she treats? And don’t you wonder how his or her pictures got chosen?

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I think I know what is driving me to the subject I am going to write about here. I am writing this in the Dallas – Fort Worth Airport on my way to Poland, where I will talk about American culture with university students of English. I am acutely aware that what I say to them, and how I behave, may color their view of our country, which they know through the gaudy violence of our movies and news, and the gaudy nonsense of our celebrities. I would like to help them understand a bit of our true complexity. At the same time I’d like them to like us.

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I trust it doesn’t violate an important confidence to say that the other members of Rick Williams’ advisory committee and I saw the pictures in this exhibit before Rick made his final choice. Rick and Roy Flukinger had done a rough cut, and they wanted our opinion of what they had. The exhibit then was different from the exhibit you see now: a few photos have been added and a slightly larger number have been dropped.

As the committee discussed the pictures, we found ourselves talking about what I’m sure the pictures will make you talk about: truth and beauty. We love the beauty (by which we sometimes meant ugliness, strength, and artistic and visual interest, as well as handsomeness), but we talked much more about truth. It was easier to talk about, of course. More important, because this exhibit will be seen by people beyond the U.S. border, it seemed to use more important.

“Is this picture true?” we kept asking, though in words less bald. Was it a true image of what Texas life, American life, was like? Why were there—for instance—so many strong-looking men and so few strong-looking women? We actually counted the strong- and weak-looking members of each sex. The totals dismayed us, being ourselves women or having daughters.

“What will people who don’t know us think?” This was the crucial question, which we asked in oblique ways. Would this picture, for example, in the context of the others—especially of that picture, say—mislead a foreign audience?

We wanted to protect strangers from a small truth (half truth?) in the interest of what we felt to be larger (i.e., more statistically and morally significant) truths.

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“But this is cheating!” one of us should have said, but didn’t. “We’re using general, numerical Truth, with a capital T, to hide a particular, unpleasant truth. We’re like parents who come upon somebody crippled or drunk or demented on the street when we’re walking with little Jimmy or Jennifer. What do we do? We try to turn the child’s attention from the afflicted person because we don’t want Jennifer or Jimmy to think life is like that.”

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Though none of the committee pointed out how close we were to cheating, we all must have felt it, because we finally did something about it. We explicitly adopted a standard for inclusion that I’m sure is used in many cases where truth and beauty conflict but that I’ve never seen spelled out. If a picture was beautiful enough, we paid no attention to how true it was. On the other hand, if a picture showed a truth we felt we had to have for whatever reason (statistical, ethnic, sexual, vocational, religious, etc.), then we used it even though it wasn’t beautiful enough. “The photographer wanted to make a better picture,” we told ourselves. “Unfortunately, reality didn’t cooperate.” Thus, to the best of our ability, art and sociology were both allowed to make their strongest claims.

Bill's Premature Obit

The University of Texas at Austin, where I taught for 30 years, has a nice recent custom: a committee of faculty colleagues writes a memorial article about a faculty member who dies. I've preempted that job.

University of Texas at Austin
Faculty Memorial Resolution
for William Merrell Stott

In place of a resolution written by his surviving colleagues, Mr. Stott requested that this be published.


The idea of writing my own obituary isn't mine. It was done by my History colleague Oliver H. Radkey, Jr. (1909-2000), as a way of celebrating those who helped his career and of settling scores with unnamed faculty who didn't. I think also that Radkey wrote it because he, like me, was a neatness freak--he carried a bar of soap in a soap dish to the men's room--and didn't want to leave loose ends around for others to muck up.

I'm happy for others to muck up my memory any way they care to. And I wasn't afraid that the colleagues who wrote my memorial would say nasty things. I knew the bad things they thought about me--easy grader, intellectual sloth, son of money, buffoon--and I knew the good. When I retired, our wonderful administrative assistant, Janice Bradley Garrett, gave a party for me and Desley Deacon, who was returning to teach in Australia. My colleagues said nice things, one of which I'll never forget. Mark Smith said, "Bill reminded us we were human." And he said no more. I should have fallen to my knees in gratitude.

But even had my colleagues taken the time to remember things I did and said (J.B. Colson might have told you of the time when he and I were circling the lectern, talking in counterpoint in our "History of Photography" class, and I whispered to him, "I wish I were dead"; Tom Cable might remember how I wept--hesitantly, my emotions strangled as so often--when I got a letter from a Polish woman saying she wouldn't join me for a new life in America), they almost certainly wouldn't have given you as much of me as I can do with my own words.

How I wish Radkey's initiative had caught on long before he died--in 1970, say, so that I'd know some of the faculty memorialized and get to hear them speak again. For example, I didn't know well my History colleague Tom McGann (1920-82), though I could tell what a nice guy he was--no trick to that--and once gave him inadequate counsel about his son's wanting to be an actor. After that, when we crossed in the hall or met in the men's room (Tom brushed his teeth after lunch--the History men had better hygiene than we in American Studies), we would smile and joke. Once, at the LBJ School, I heard him give the funniest impromptu introduction of a visiting speaker I ever heard. Nothing of his genius and charm comes across in the canned memorial one of Bill Livingston's secretaries wrote on Tom's behalf because his History colleagues let him down. As so many excellent faculty I knew are let down in their memorials.

Not me! This is going to say what I want it to. And it will be published. That's important to me because of the (I'm guessing) 300 things I've written for publication, bleeding at the knuckles to make them clear, smooth, and stirring, perhaps 50 have been published. My fault, of course. I write for an audience, General Readers like you, gentle reader, that no longer exists--the sort of weirdos who would recognize that those bleeding knuckles I spoke of were stolen from advice poet Robert Lowell gave about writing poetry (why he didn't write bleeding fingers, I can't imagine). Moreover, I took one or two turndowns as definitive. Some editors sort of liked my work. "Nice try," someone at the New York Times scrawled on an essay I'd offered to their op-ed page. "Gee, this is interesting," a few editors wrote, then added the identical, killing words, "I wonder who'd publish it." I'm gathering my short pieces, published and not, on a website I hope you'll visit, http://billstott.blogspot.com, which I'll ask my kids to keep going when I cash in if I don't gather them into a book.

As for longer pieces, I published four books I'm proud to call to your attention:

Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Oxford University Press, 1973; paperback, 1976; second edition, with retrospective afterword, University of Chicago Press, 1986 (in print)

On Broadway, performance photographs by Fred Fehl, text by William Stott and Jane Stott, The University of Texas Press, 1978; London, Thames & Hudson, 1979; paperback, Da Capo Press, 1980 (out of print)

Write to the Point: And Feel Better about Your Writing, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984; second edition, hardback and paperback, with a foreword by Clifford Stoll, Columbia University Press, 1991 (in print)

Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately, John Lee, with Bill Stott, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1993 (in print).

The first book was my dissertation and was written in deeper version of the resigned sadness in which I'm writing this. The fourth book, the only to have been translated into another language (any guesses? German--who else acknowledges having anger problems?) was written in the heady years when my sadness was overcome.

Which leads me to what I most want to say. Some of you are like me--me as I was and me as I happened to be now because I'm recovering from having my cancerous prostate removed and have a fiendish flu. Some of you (and you know who you are) don't enjoy life enough. I had wonderful parents and sister, a world-class education, considerable talents, fascinating friends and girl friends, a fine wife, wonderful kids, a pleasant, useful job--and yet, looking back, I was generally miserable: would find myself singing, driving home, "When the rains come a pitter-patter and I'd like to be safe in bed, skies are weeping while the world is sleeping, trouble heaping on my head. It's so vain to remain enchanted and to wait for a clear, blue sky. Helter skelter, I must fly for shelter, till the clouds roll by." Besotted with the humanities, I felt everyone I admired felt like me (Melville: "That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped"), led lives of what Thoreau called quiet desperation.

I was 51 before I understood that I had an illness: was a lifelong, unrecognized major depressive. There followed a year and a half of counseling and trying antidepressants with a psychiatrist who believed in drug therapy until, thank God, I found an antidepressant that worked for me (Paxil; I now take Effexor). Since then, 15 years ago now, I haven't had a terrible moment. I've been sad and remorseful and nervous, but I haven't felt that total emptiness in the gut that makes living worse than death. I feel much less that I need people to validate me, tell me I'm interesting or gentlemanly or odd. I don't seek out women to admire me. On spring walks, I see the lime-green leaves shake their shadows across the dark leaves below. I live in the moment, not (as I used to) in the past, or the incredible future, when I would be happy. I'm happy now. One night, early on in being well, not really thinking what I was doing—you often don't think ahead when you're living here and now—I found I was on my knees, my palms to my eyes, saying, "Oh, Jesus, I'm so glad my pain has been taken from me and I will never know fear again!"

This is what I want to say to you: “If you’re not enjoying life much of the time--which doesn’t mean enjoying it as much as some of us oldsters say we enjoyed it at your age (life is easier in retrospect than at the moment)--if you find a drizzly November in your soul more than is normal, more than (psychologists say) two or three days out of ten, then don’t follow Melville down to the sea, see a doctor, because he or she may have a pill that will change your life as mine as been changed, to a happiness I despaired of finding. More than 80 of 100 cases of depression can be made much better; more than half can be 'cured,' as mine was, though the cure may not be as simple as a single pill."

I tell you this because it is the most important lesson life has taught me. Having recovered from mental illness, I feel a responsibility to testify to what is possible. I said this to one of my email pals, Shirley Showalter, an ex-student who was then teaching at Goshen College in Indiana (she was later its president and now works for a foundation that promotes world peace). She replied:

I think you are right to testify. I thought about your story as I read about suicide in the last Newsweek and as I listened to a young mother talk about the spot she had picked out on the L.A. freeway. She was going to arrange an accident for herself--and her little boy. The pain of such a thought is too much to bear. But there she was, a beautiful South African-American "coloured" woman able to speak of her pain in the past tense. It was just such a testimony as yours that saved her and took her to a doctor. She's on medication too and getting stronger all the time.

So I'm testifying to you, reader. If you're miserable too much, get help. Fight to make your one certain time alive worth living.

Anything else to say? The essay door is swinging shut.

Well, one thing I did well was revise--other teachers would say "grade"--student writing; I put years of my life into it. (On my website there's an unpublished article about how I did it in my last decade-plus of teaching.) My wife and children suffered from the time I gave to student writing, and I apologized to them then and apologize now. Had I been healthier and happier I wouldn't have done it. Still, let it be to my credit as a teacher.

Let it be to my credit, too, that I gave help and encouragement to such remarkable people as—just to name names that spring to my fingertips—Lisa Beyer, Greg Beal, Martha Boethel, Suzanne Shelton Buckley, Bob Byington, Christa Carvajal, Lili Corbus, Robin Cravey, Michael Eakin, Michael Erard, Mary Ford, Sandra Foster, David Gaines, Juliet George, Kerry Grombacher, Peter Hales, Benita Heiskanen, Caroline Herring, Jeff Levine, Randy Lewis, Paul Martin, Kherry McKay, Jeff Meikle, Sybil Miller, James Neff, Dean Ornish, Frances De Pontes Peebles, Lisa Rhodes, Irene Rostagno, Sheree Scarborough, Hal Sheets, Shirley Showalter, Mark Smith, Mark Singer, Beverly Spicer, Teri Tynes, Richard Trachtenberg, Qui Phiet Tran, and the following student who remembered my teaching kindly in her writing.


Gail Caldwell, the Boston Globe's chief book reviewer (her criticism won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001), was a grad student in our American Studies department in the early 1980s and portrayed our department and faculty in her memoir, A Strong West Wind (2006). To my astonishment, the longest portrait is of me. I am introduced as a "middle-aged teacher of literature . . . known to tap-dance on the seminar table to wake lethargic students"--a misremembering of what happened when one afternoon I got up on the table to do a Lindy step and show one way to put it into words ("a toe-in, ankle-out pivot").

Just as the Fool figures prominently in the tarot and Puck holds the secrets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the tap-dancing madman of Garrison Hall would have his due in showing me the break in the hedge [to get out of grad school]. Simmons was an English professor who had wandered into American Studies because, as was the case for most of its faculty, the program’s peculiarities mirrored his own. He spoke with the melodious enthusiasms of an Elizabethan actor, but his fractured smile disguised his love of literature and made you think he was making fun of it all—the students, the novels, the entire universe—every time he spoke. His seminars were filled to capacity, both for the guaranteed knowledge within and the anticipated show, and Simmons worked this atmospheric pressure like the performer he was: He once broke into a resounding chorus from the musical Oklahoma! —“Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends!”—to make a point about de Crevecoeur’s eighteenth-century classic Letters from an American Farmer. During class he addressed each student with formalities—Mr. Peters, Ms. Miller—and yet he could make even courtesy sound ludicrous. It was hard to get and keep your footing in dialogue with the man; the uninitiated couldn’t tell if they were being praised or mocked.

My first exposure to his magniloquence came during a seminar on major American writers, with a reading list devoted entirely to novels by white men. Because it was the late 1970s, Simmon’s curriculum was still standard fare. When a female student questioned his selections at the first class meeting, he obligingly, almost theatrically, added Edith Wharton to the list. He revealed no gender affinities, though, when it came to his students, each of whom he treated, beyond the mordant veneer, with an oddly precious regard. Deviating from the coolness cultivated by most senior faculty, he insisted at the beginning of each term that his charges explain why they were in attendance; if you gave an answer deemed vague or coy, he pressed mercilessly until he got the deeper truth he sought. So it was there that I publicly muttered that I wanted to write—“Yes, Ms. Caldwell, and what, pray tell, do you wish to write?”—and there, too, that he bestowed upon us the splendor of Light in August, the cranky reveries of Flannery O’Connor, the manic labyrinths of Moby-Dick. Simmons grasped and even applauded the mad sacrifices of creative fire, and he led us through the provinces of literary history as though we were scouts on our camping expedition, with him our merry leader.

Some days this gusto could be crippling: You could summon only so much vigor about Puritan sensibility or Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. But if the class seemed indifferent, Simmons got worse, railing and insisted we share what we know or intuited. One afternoon he was half swooning in his delivery of the onslaught of modernism, assuming we would join in his homage. His students, glassy-eyed one and all, refused to budge. Where, Simmons implored, can we locate the origins of modernism in the novel? No takers, though it was a standard American Studies question. The silence grew mortifying. Finally I blurted out what half the students must have known. “Uh, Ulysses,” I said. “Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness.” Simmons, of course, had been teaching for decades, and he was hard to rattle—he knew someone would take the bait, would crumple under the discomfort he had had spawned. “Yes, Ms. Caldwell!” he cried, grateful but unbowed. “Take us there!”

For a couple of years afterward, this became a departmental refrain, the joke summoned whenever anyone needed to know anything. “Take us there, Ms. C.!” And yet I remember it now with something kinder than the amusement we shared at Simmon’s expense. He knew, with that simple navigational imperative, that in fact there was somewhere to go—knew that literature was just a world over, like Wakefield’s old neighborhood, from our own third dimension, and that it was his task and joy to show us the way.

Simmon’s reputation for class antics sometimes obscured the heartfelt teacher he was; in his commentaries on the essays we gave him, his in-class formalities gave way to more intimate monikers. He addressed me in these written notes as Clever Girl, a reversal of my initials but also his friendly nudge that facility was not the answer for a writer—that one could be clever at the expense of anything deeper. Had I any doubt of this barbed-wired-and-honey interpretation, I was reminded of it explicitly several years after I had left Texas, when he sent me a copy of his book on writing that had just been published. Buried there within his fussy discourses on usage were the exact words he had written on one of my essays. He had changed my initial for publication, but not my epithet, and he had included a passage in which he accused me of wiseacre acrobatics. “There is too much cleverness in the world,” he quoted himself telling a Ms. R., “and too little truth. Let’s try to have more truth.”

Rediscovering his advice all this time later, I didn’t know which was more impressive: that Simmons would so precisely deliver the lesson I had needed, or that he could be so maniacal in his forethought. The book was proof that he had photocopied all his handwritten responses to students for years on end. So! What we had been getting was a calculated generosity that instructed us and served him. This seemed hilariously in keeping with the tap-dancing Fool—Puck, after all, understands the power of his elixir. But it also told me something invaluable about the writer’s soul: Even when dispensing fairy dust, take notes. Clever Man.

Golden Moments, Twisted People

[This essay was published in the Winter 2006 “Documentary Imagination (Part Two)" issue of The Michigan Quarterly Review. It is dedicated to J.B. Colson.]



The fields of documentary, oral history, first-person reportage, case-study and participant-observer social science, and human-interest journalism were little studied and certainly not understood to be related when, in 1970, I was in the suicidal throes of beginning my dissertation, which became a book, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973; second edition, with retrospective afterword, 1986), that established my small career as college teacher.

The book published, I felt I’d exhausted documentary (or it, me). I had aired the opinions I had, many of them lifted from conversation with the photographer Walker Evans, and felt I couldn’t teach documentary history or theory because I had nothing new to say to people who knew, or might read, my book. I set off looking for another theme of equal interest (never found it, but that’s another story).

Then, in 1988, while team-teaching an undergraduate history of photography course with J.B. Colson, a photojournalist and photohistorian at my university, he and I came up with the idea of team-teaching the practice of documentary: a graduate course where students would do documentary projects (“written, photographed, videotaped, or—God save the mark—sung, danced, or drawn,” as our final syllabus said) and we would comment and provide background: examples of paradigmatic earlier work (there’s the history), and theory.

We gave the course, which I called “Documentary Explorations,” a dozen times till I retired, and J.B. and our remarkable students taught me things about documentary that—like the existence of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and of American comic books of the late 1930s that horrifically pictured Nazi concentration camps—I wish I had known when writing my dissertation. This essay discusses the two most important things I learned.

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First: we all can’t do documentary, be photojournalists, anthropologists, reporters. Some of us aren’t personally secure enough to live in a different milieu; we never get over culture shock. Further, some of us haven’t the patience necessary for fieldwork. Frederick Wiseman says his documentary films—“subjective ‘fictions’ based in ‘reality’”—have their best sequences thanks to his doing nothing but wait: "If you hang around long enough, you stumble onto sequences that are funnier, more dramatic, and sadder than anything you can find, except in really great novels. You're not inventing them. You're just lucky enough to be there when they happen." Some of us are too antsy to hang around that long.

Finally, some of us are too shy or too well brought up to pry into others’ lives. We won’t thrust our camera in their faces. We can’t force ourselves to ask stinging questions. Hurrying back to school from lunch, a 16-year-old girl wraps her car around a tree, killing herself and one of three friends with her, and what is your job as the youngest reporter in the office? To get not only to her house but in it, get family photos of her, and ask her parents and anyone else on hand what she was like, what her hopes for life were, and—of course—how they, whoever you’re talking to, feel. Some of us flat can’t do it. Can’t do what Jim Goldberg did to get amazing personal confessions from the people he photographed in Rich and Poor (1985): he told some of his subjects what they had said about themselves wasn’t frank or interesting enough and they could do better, implying otherwise they wouldn’t get in his book.

Shyness, kindness, Episcopalian-taught politeness kept James Agee from making Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, revised edition 1960) the book the New Journalist Tom Wolfe would have liked. Wolfe, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on American Communist writers of the 1930s, is a close friend of my University of Texas mentor William Goetzmann, who in 1972 asked him if he’d blurb my documentary book when it came out. Wolfe wrote me a charming letter saying he loved to, but then, when he saw the book in galleys, wrote nothing. I wondered why till I read his 1973 essay on the New Journalism that blasts Agee for not giving us nearly enough of what the sharecropper subjects of his book said, felt, and did.

Wolfe is right: Agee was a crummy reporter. He couldn’t bring himself to impose upon what he called “terribly undefended” people. Because he couldn’t report on the sharecroppers themselves, he moved his attention to the things of their lives, their clothing, room furnishings, food, tools, and, more interestingly, to the issue of documentary itself; he called documentary into question—“problematized” it, as critics younger than I would say—and turned whether and how to do social propaganda into a moral debate.

A better reporter than Agee, but still wanting by Wolfe’s standards, was George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a documentary achievement to my mind of equal worth to Agee’s, equally rich in its moral vision (Orwell says the middle and upper middle classes, including his own “lower-upper-middle class,” believe the lower classes stink—who else had the guts to say it?), and half as long and a much easier read.

But Wolfe is right: what is missing in both The Road to Wigan Pier and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are the human subjects of the inquiries: the talk of the sharecroppers and of the miners and their families. Talk really matters. Almost always it is the most important way we have of knowing a person to whom we are not related. The Maysles brothers, who have brought us such celebrated documentary films as Salesman (1968) and Grey Gardens (1975), have made much of their money over the years running what is called a “reality-based commercial production company” that makes TV and radio ads that have actual people, not actors, speaking their own unscripted words. Susan Froemke of Maysles Films says, “People will give you things a copywriter could never come up with. It’s what we call the real golden moments.” She acknowledges that “sometimes clients are afraid it’s a little too real.” Sam Telerico, executive producer at Maysles, says the company’s work “involves an education process for clients, agencies, everyone. Often they don’t realize what reality is and want to modify it, make it a little nicer.” But to make it nicer usually saps its originality and strength. As the documentary playwright and actress Anne Deveare Smith has said, “There is a moment when most people can talk and they say something that nobody else can say. They didn’t hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and it’s gorgeous.” A golden moment.

The problem with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and The Road to Wigan Pier is that practically all the golden moments belong to Agee and Orwell.

“So we should be looking for golden moments?” a student asked J.B. and me in class. J.B. and I hadn’t been wise enough to be this blunt, but we said yes: their fieldwork should consist of hanging around until they felt they had a golden moment or two. Which of course begged the question of what a golden moment is.

For the oral historian Studs Terkel, it’s clear that a golden moment happens when people’s conversation shows contradictions in their values. In Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), such contradiction occurs when the advertising magnate William Benton speaks with pride and shame of having doubled his income every year of the Depression (“progress through catastrophe,” Benton notes ruefully); of having invented the documentary advertisement (with a Maxwell House Coffee radio ad in which “you heard the coffee cups clinking and the coffee gurgling as it was poured” and a man smacking his lips with pleasure; “I invented a lot of things for which I now apologize,” he says); and of having bought the struggling elevator-music company Muzak, vastly expanded its locations, and multiplied his fortune several times because he had a tin ear and didn’t know good music from bad. “My mother, who was a fine musician, held Muzak in contempt. Anybody who knows anything about music holds it in contempt.”

(Does such self-contradiction happen in great literature, as Wiseman suggests? All the time. Consider the scene in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night where the wealthy father, furious at having been mocked for miserliness by his tubercular son, shouts that the boy can spend as much as he wants on a private TB clinic, “Spend all my money!”, while he, the father, is standing on the dining room table, unscrewing some of the light bulbs in the chandelier because he says the room is bright enough and electricity costs money.)

Contradictory values are at the heart of many of the golden moments in Wiseman’s films. His High School (1967), about life in a suburban school that prides itself on empowering the individual student, shows the dean of girls at a school assembly reading a letter from a graduate, now a soldier in Vietnam. The soldier writes with pride of being what the school made him: a body doing just what he’s told. The dean is tearfully grateful that the school has succeeded in “doing our job.”

The golden moments I’ve cited so far—involving William Benton, O’Neill’s father, the dean of girls—are all ironic: speakers speak without being aware of the context in which their remarks will be understood. What they say by itself isn’t the last word. Much more commonly, golden moments occur when speakers put brilliantly, “originally,” exactly what they mean:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

Sighted sub. Sank same.

Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.

Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.

What constitutes a golden moment is of course a subjective judgment, though the speeches above have impressed enough people over time that I suspect most of us would put them in the pantheon. How does one know a golden moment when it’s brand-new, just spoken? Obviously by our individual emotional response to it—“belly feel,” as Orwell disparagingly called it. Fortunately, there’s a large overlap between human sensibilities, and I have little doubt that you will find some of the following statements—from the small anthology of golden moments I’ve collected on my hard drive—as striking as I do:

Queen Elizabeth I: “Had I, my lords, been born crested, not cloven, you had not treated me thus!"

Sydney Gaines, age 7, to his father, David Gaines, my friend and a professor of English at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas: “Dad, real friends are front-stabbers.”

Geoffrey Graham, 42, an Austin, Texas, artist and Gay Rights activist dying of AIDS: "I have no fear of death. It's a natural part of life. I trust the universe enough not to be fearful."

An unnamed woman overheard by a New Yorker music reviewer during the intermission of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2002 production of Anton Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: “I survived Auschwitz—I don’t have to sit through this.”

The pro golfer Mike Reid, who cried when he blew a lead in the PGA Tournament: "That's O.K. I cry at supermarket openings."

The composer Aaron Copland: "Agony I don't connect with. Not even alienation."

The soprano Renee Fleming: "I was so much the good girl that I didn’t know what I wanted to have for lunch. I only knew what I should have for lunch."

Another high-achieving good girl, the comedienne Carol Burnett, after she became her real, imperfect, happier self: “I liked me better when I wasn’t me.”

The documentary filmmaker and public-access-TV pioneer George Stoney: "Forgiveness is far easier to obtain than permission."

David Rappaport, a 3-foot 11-inch dwarf and character actor, complaining that he was discriminated against: "I want to be treated like a regular, boring, normal person. I look at boring people every day, and I say, 'God, I wish I could be like that.' But my lot is to be unique, special, so I have to put up with it. It's a hard life." Two years later, Rappaport committed suicide.

Staff Sgt. Hattie Brown, a radio operator who relayed battle reports to headquarters from the field during the 1991 Gulf War: "I've confronted the idea of death and I try not to be scared. If I die, though, I hope I do it with pride, trying to get the enemy."

From the New York Times' obituary of publisher and philanthropist George Delacorte, who died in 1991 at age 97: “Mr. Delacorte was an avid storyteller in his later years. One day, however, when he was in the middle of an anecdote he lost his train of thought. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘at 92 the memory is the first thing to go.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, the first thing that goes is sex. Then your memory goes. But the memory of sex never goes.’” [This golden moment, placed near the end of a long Times article like a chocolate mint at the end of a heavy meal, would of course be the headline in a tabloid: “‘YOU NEVER FORGET SEX,’ SAYS 92 YEAR OLD.” ]

The actor Cary Grant: "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."

Jean Sexton, an Orphan Train rider in 1914, speaking of her arrival in the Midwestern town where she was "chosen": "They marched us across a stage in the opera house. First, my two brothers got chosen. And then it was time to make my stage appearance. I was only three, and my mother tells me that I was wearing a little white dress that by that time was terribly wrinkled. So when I came out on the stage I was smoothing the wrinkles from my dress. And she called out, 'I want that one.'"

The New York Jets’ lineman Dennis Byrd, a devout Christian, paralyzed in a 1992 game, asked
whether he had wondered “why me?”: “I know why me. Because of the strength on the inside. I know I can handle this." Less than a year later Byrd was walking with the aid of a cane.

Samuel Johnson, asked what the greatest pleasure in life is: “Fucking. And the second is drinking. Therefore I wonder why there are not more drunkards, for all can drink, though not all can fuck.”

Yelena V. Kozlova, whose daughter, Darya, a ninth grader, was one of 45 Russian children, mostly high school honors students on their way to a vacation in Spain, who died in a 2002 plane crash over Germany; Ms. Kozlova was speaking to her daughter’s grieving schoolmates: "Dig into life and be joyful."

My friend Archie Hobson’s remarkable mother, Verna, dying of cancer: “If there is an afterlife, won’t we be surprised!”

So this was the first important thing I learned about documentary and its outrider disciplines in social science and journalism after writing my dissertation: you have to get the golden moments. And if you don’t have the patience and the boldness to, or if you don’t fancy dealing with parents who’ve just lost their child, documentary is probably not for you.

•

My second point is more complicated but more quickly made. Those who have done me the honor of reading Documentary Expression and Thirties America will remember that I distinguish between two sorts of documentary: social and human.

Social documentary deals with public phenomena that are susceptible, with however much difficulty, of being changed, improved: the sharecropping system in the American South during the 1930s; the outrageous cost of California funerals; the lard in McDonald’s French fries; racism; the lack of anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS in Africa; battered children; Kashmir, Palestine, Northern Ireland, North Korea, Iran, Darfur; white slavery; guns in the hands of untrained civilians; the bitter circumstances of poor Muslims in Europe; bad breath, body odor, drunk driving, and the heartbreak of psoriasis (advertisements often use documentary techniques). I said in my book that when we speak of “documentary,” we generally mean social documentary.

And yet, as I didn’t say, the second sort of documentary is in fact much more common. Human documentary shows us natural, necessary, and often agreeable phenomena: childhood, festivals, dementia, work, faraway places, unusual people’s normal lives, political activity, sport, hurricanes, friendship, dying, spiritual questing, life in a Moroccan or Michigan village. “A Hospice Austin patient, a policewoman, a Mexican-American Pentecostal church, middle class women's recipes, the Creative Rapid Learning Center, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, a tattoo parlor, people’s jokes about God or Bill Stott’s lawn, a school for battered children, the custodians of this building, or Ralph the Swimming Pig”—as a late syllabus for J.B. Colson’s and my documentary class said, citing some projects done in earlier years.

When writing my dissertation I understood but only briefly acknowledged that “human documentary” was just another name for what is normally called art. Documentary, now so firmly considered a tactic for social change, actually begins with a work of art, a celebration of an unusual life: Nanook of the North. Robert Flaherty, the film’s maker, didn’t intend to change Nanook’s life—far from it. He wanted Nanook to stay just as he was and for us to admire him that way. When the film was released in 1922, it was a worldwide hit. But Flaherty didn’t send any of the money it earned to Nanook or his wife and kids, and they all died of starvation while Nanook was leaping about the screen in first-run theaters on five continents.

What holds our attention in a social documentary—The River (1937), say, or Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)—is the issue being treated and—and I underline this—the complexity the issue is shown to have. (If an issue is simple—Buy Bonds; Don’t Litter—all that is needed is a public-service ad.) The issue and its complexity hold us, not the human complexity of the people shown; indeed, the people are usually ciphers, “the halt and the lame . . . victims,” as a critic, Brian Winston, has put it, describing the people in social-reformist documentary.

On the other hand, in a human documentary, a piece of art that hopes to hold our interest, the person shown—as the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm suggests in her brilliant The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), the last book of the semester in J.B.’s and my class—must have a certain kind of energetic, self-dramatizing richness of character, like buoyant Nanook. The center in non-satiric literature can’t be rigid and one-dimensional—can’t be Horatio or Fortinbras, must be Hamlet; can’t be Enobarbus, must be Anthony. Or Cleopatra, whose “infinite variety” “age cannot wither . . . nor custom stale.”

Are there successful documentaries that mix reformist propaganda with the depiction of a fascinating person or persons—documentaries both social and human? I’m tempted to say no for the same reason that the critic Lionel Trilling said there were no great New Deal (or “liberal” or “leftist”) novels: because propaganda privileges the community, art the individual; propaganda simplicity, art complexity; propaganda human possibility, art human limitation. Perhaps Grapes of Wrath comes closest—John Ford’s 1940 film, not John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel. The film can be considered a re-enacted documentary—there have been others of the kind, most notable Humphrey Jennings’ Silent Village (1943), Roberto Rossellini’s Rome: Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966)—and Henry Fonda is spellbinding because he makes us feel the tremendous, justifiable violence suppressed in his calm Tom Joad.

Having said there may not be successful documentaries that are both social and human, let me close by pointing to an extraordinary film that is almost an exception. The film is Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours (1988), which students in the documentary class brought to J.B.’s and my attention and which we thereafter closed the course with. The film shows Europeans on a tour in Papua New Guinea among people only a generation or two removed from the Stone Age and now selling souvenirs of their past while living on the margins of our (and their) civilization.

We see the tourists staring at, photographing and videotaping the natives and artifacts important in their past culture, having the natives explain the artifacts (“Is this the rock where you killed your sacrifices?” a fat red-faced German asks a wizened black man), and bargaining to get a lower price on souvenirs, though as one woman says to her companion, “This is so cheap”—at its first price—“I can’t believe it!”

Because the tourists and New Guineans interact only when the latter are in a subservient role—photographed, asked generally demeaning questions (“How do people taste?”), looked upon as retarded (“I don’t think they understand money”), haggled with over prices—we come to respect the few tourists who to a degree drop out of the tour, an Italian family who are having such fun together they ignore O’Rourke’s off-screen questions, a woman who sunbathes rather than do the scheduled activity, the handful who go to the last night’s festival dinner not, as they were supposed to, in New Guinean dress with war-paint on their faces, but in Western sport clothes.

It is O’Rourke’s genius in mid-movie to give us the obverse of what we have been watching. All at once, without explanation, it is the New Guineans—the wizened man and a plump middle-aged woman selling trinkets—who speak to us in their native language, subtitled in ours. “Why do they come see us and we not go see them?” “When I buy food at the store, they don’t give me a second price.” “Why do they have money?” “If I had money, I would travel.” “They don’t buy, and I need money to send my kids to school!” “When the white man came, we said, ‘Our dead ancestors have arrived; our dead have come back.’ Now when we see tourists, we say the dead have returned. That’s what we say.”

The polemical point is made: East is east and West is west, and so long as each sees the other as Other, there is no authentic, human way for them to relate. None of the people we have seen do it. As the film’s final credits pass on the screen, we in the audience realize sadly that, as O’Rourke says in a 1999 article he wrote about the film, tourism is not “a process which can lead to greater understanding between cultures. There must be a better way.”

But the film doesn’t end when the credits end. Suddenly, we see a huge greensward of mown grass, then a small propeller plane, and then people we’ve not seen earlier. One’s the pilot, a white man; another is a dark native. The third and fourth are a white middle-aged American couple in loud pastels, carrying handbags and tourist trophies, saying their goodbyes. The exuberant woman does the talking we hear. She exclaims about the plane, her upcoming trip, the greensward (“My lawn back home should look so good. I should look so good!”). She is, as Dean MacCannell, author of The Tourist (1976), has remarked, a “Bette Midler-type American”—which is to say a New Yorker and very likely a Jew with the huge energy and warmth such people have in a common stereotype. Among the things she’s carrying are several (MacCannell says five) painted wooden representations of fruit, tied together at one end. One can’t but think of them as anything but penises—MacCannell calls them “realistically carved dildos”—and that’s how the woman laughingly thinks of them. “I get to ride back with these in my lap!” she says. Before she gets in the plane, she gives their native guide a big hug—her husband shakes his hand and pats him on the back—thanking him and saying something about seeing him again. They get on the plane and we watch while it taxies up the greensward.

What we just have seen, I suggest, almost overturns the film’s earlier polemic, just as sexy Alcibiades’ arrival upsets all the philosophizing about love in Plato’s Symposium. If anyone could in two minutes, this wonderful New York woman would force us to admit that contact can be made cross culture: all it takes is a powerful, open heart to do it. But I find the scene strikes most viewers—MacCannell is one—as merely a flippant coda to the film, too brief and irresponsible to be treated seriously. The film’s point remains, again in O’Rourke’s words, “The promoted idea of tourism as ‘a dialogue between cultures’ is, I believe, a myth, because there exists such an economic and cultural disparity between the protagonists and all human encounter is inevitably distorted.” Even I must admit the New York woman’s farewell is almost certainly a distortion of the couple’s relation to their guide and his people.

Thus, as I said in my book, there are two sorts of documentary, and, as I didn’t say, each has a different sort of person at its center. Social documentary shows victims needing help in coping with their environment; human documentary shows people with a measure of command of their environment, capable not only of exciting our admiration (victims can do this) but of changing themselves and their worlds and what we think of both.

I respect social documentary, but I love human documentary, and the triumph of the profile in magazines, newspapers, and electronic media, of People Weekly and American Masters, of entertainment, historical, and sports biographies on TV suggests that I am far from alone.

Acknowledgements and Endnotes

My first thanks go to J.B. Colson with whom I joyfully taught for 20 years and from whom I learned most of what I know about photography and a good deal of what I believe about life. Next, thanks to Caroline Blinder of Goldsmiths College, London, who assured me I must have something to say about documentary after my years of silence. Finally, thanks to Tom Fricke and Keith Taylor of the University of Michigan, who invited me to contribute to their documentary issues of the Michigan Quarterly Review, and especially to Keith (Tom was doing fieldwork in Nepal), who emailed me encouragement.

I regret not being able to give citations for everything I quote. I kept the quotes for my delight (James Thurber: “Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts”), for self-improvement (Carl Jung: “The great thing is here and now: this is the eternal moment. And if you don’t realize it, you have missed the best part of your life”), and for classroom use—not for research.

Late 1930’s comic books depicting Nazi concentration-camp horrors: Alfred Appel, Northwestern University, in conversation. Maysles Films: “Advertising,” The New York Times, 11/26/1993. The student who asked J.B. and me whether the class should be looking for “golden moments” in interviews was Nancy Mims. Benton, in Terkel, pp. 60-65. Anne Deveare Smith: NYT, 2/1/1997. The authors of the phrases bowels of Christ, sighted sub, nobody goes there, and you’re no Jack Kennedy are readily available through Google. Moses und Aron: The New Yorker, 2/18-25/2002. Mike Reid: NYT, 8/21/1989. Renee Fleming: NYer, 11/12/2001. David Rappaport: NYT, 5/4/1990. Hattie Brown: NYT, 1/22/1991. George Delacorte: NYT, 5/5/1991. Dennis Byrd: NYT, 1/13/1993. Yelena V. Kozlova: NYT, 7/4/2002. I’m sure I know the post-Flaherty history of Nanook from Pauline Kael’s early writing: see her note in NYer, 4/15/2005, p. 50. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, Doubleday, 1950. Brian Winston, "The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary," in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal, University of California Press, 1988, p. 284. The students who brought Cannibal Tours to J.B.’s and my attention were Angela Alston and Rebecca Campbell. Dennis O'Rourke, “On the Making of Cannibal Tours,” at
http://www.cameraworklimited.com/download.html?oid=2250047090; this essay includes Dean MacCannell’s quotes.

When choosing social “victims” to document, reporters, propagandists, and artists look for subjects with—no surprise— human appeal. The filmmaker Ofra Bikel has been profiling imprisoned felons for 14 years and gotten 13 of them released for wrongful conviction. As she acknowledges, she selects those she documents with great care. “I pity everybody [wrongly put in prison],” she says, “but I can't take somebody who has molested a child and now is in for the wrong murder. If I want to convince people [in the viewing audience], I have to be smart about it.” A convicted murderer, Patsy Kelly Jarrett, had been in prison 28 years and was almost certainly innocent, yet Bikel was hesitant to profile her for PBS’ Frontline because starchy food and a sedentary life had beefed her up. “She looked, really, like a guard, you know,” Bikel told a reporter. “This short hair of hers, it’s really impossible.” She finally decided, as the reporter put it, “that the details of Ms. Jarrett's case compensated for any lack of telegenic appeal,” did a profile of her, and got her released. See Julie Salamon, “Crusading for Prisoners When the System Fails,” NYT, 6/27/2005.