A Camera is a Gun: A Discussion of "Stranger With a Camera" in 2000
A Camera Is a Gun
A Discussion of Stranger With a Camera. Reprinted with permission from the Appalachian Journal (2000)
Participants
Diane Price was born in 1953 in Rogersville, Tenn. Trained as a nurse, she volunteered to join a humanitarian effort in Afghanistan during its war with Russia and became the first American nurse to enter that country after the Russian invasion. Subsequently, she worked with Mother Teresa and her Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, and she has been a health and environmental reporter for a Knight-Ridder newspaper. Currently, she is assistant editor of the Appalachian Journal.
Ruth Ellen Blakeney was born in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 1978, "the first daughter of hippie parents." Although she did most of her growing up in Richmond, Ky., very near the hills where Hugh O'Connor was gunned down, she traces her true connection to Appalachia to her maternal grandmother's house in Morristown, Tenn. Both her parents are professors at Eastern Kentucky University, and she grew up being taken to Appalachian Studies and Women's Studies conferences, and from an early age she knew the names Jim Wayne Miller, Loyal Jones, and Bill Best
Donavan Cain was born in 1974 in Corbin, Ky., the grandson and great grandson of coal miners. He attended the University of Kentucky and Union College in Barbourville, Ky. He tried briefly to shed his mountain roots: "I spent my time reading Shelley, Keats, and T.S. Eliot, trying to be a vegetarian, and eventually denounced my Baptist/Pentecostal/Holiness background and joined the Episcopal Church." Working as a reporter for a small paper in Corbin, he was assigned to cover a Ralph Stanley bluegrass concert. That experience awoke "something deep inside of me that had been in a coma for most of my life."
Erica S. Collins was born in Johnson City, Tenn., in 1973 and grew up a "TVA brat," moving over 15 times before she went to college. She says, "On both sides of my family I'm descended from poor white trash that wasn't as white as it ought to be. My family runs moonshine when we're not in church." She experienced the "Appalachian outcast" identity when the family moved north to Indiana and is now glad to be back home in the mountains.
Amanda Deal was raised in rural Rowan County, N.C., a part of the seventh generation to live on and farm the same 500 acres. She grew up with her grandparents within walking distance, so her experience of childhood was a rich tapestry of family stories, told and retold. She has become an ardent advocate for farmland preservation.
Kelly H. Elliott grew up in rural Ashe County, N.C., attending small rural schools. When she started fifth grade in town, she suddenly discovered that she was a "hillbilly" in the eyes of the other students.
Kristina Marie Heiks was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1955, lived in rural northwest Ohio from 1960 to 1980, in the Ozarks from 1980 to 1985, and in Bat Cave, N.C., which has been her home for the past 15 years. Raised a Mennonite, she absorbed a long tradition of political activism. When Kriss was 13, her sister married a medical student who did his residency in Harlan, Ky., where Kriss made extensive visits and saw first-hand the poverty of the coal fields. Of 1960s activism, she comments, "I can't help but believe that part of the reason Northerners felt such a need to rescue Southerners during this era involved an effort to ignore their own social problems. It's just so much easier to clean up someone else's back yard."
Patricia Lyn Kilby was born in Ashe County, N.C., in 1977 and grew up there, "a country girl and a first-generation college student." Through the influence of her cousin Dean Sturgill and under the tutelage of Thornton and Emily Spencer of Whitetop, Virginia, she has become an accomplished old time musician. She plays clawhammer banjo and in 1993 won first place at the first fiddlers convention she ever competed in. She has played with several groups and toured Europe in 1997 with the Farmers' Daughters.
Laurie Lea Lyda was born in Lincolnton, N.C., in 1976. Her father's side of the family is from the mountains; her mother's side were textile mill workers from the piedmont. She thinks of her mother's family especially as accomplished story-tellers.
Jeannie C. Parker was born north of Atlanta in 1977 and recently discovered her family connections to the people of Sand Mountain, Ala., after reading Dennis Covington's book on serpent-handling Christians. She now feels a very strong attachment to Appalachia with an equally strong aversion to the urban sprawl of Atlanta and most of the rest of urbane America.
Scott J. Sebok was born in Findlay, Ohio, in 1975 but spent most of his growing-up years in Ft. Lauderdale and Jacksonville, Florida. His grandfather's father left Budapest seeking the "American dream," and as a descendant of that trans-cultural movement, Scott feels very much the need to connect physically and emotionally with every part of the world. He has lived in Norway and traveled extensively in Europe and South America.
Jinny Turman was born in 1975 and lived most of her childhood in Horseheads, N.Y., where her father was human resource manager for Coming Glassworks. In 1984 he was transferred to Hickory, N.C., where Jinny faced a crisis of identity as well as a crisis of culture, feeling at first that she had been marooned in white trash hell. Gradually, Jinny began to relate to her parents' backgrounds in the Virginia Blue Ridge, especially through her father's affection for his country past. Her mom's premature death became a further catalyst for reorienting and redefining her life. She is now pursuing the craft of weaving.
compiled from participants by DIANE PRICE
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On the surface, Stranger with a Camera is an artfully constructed film based on the killing of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor by native Kentuckian Hobart Ison. O'Connor came to the United States in 1967 to produce a film for the United States pavilion at HemisFair '68, and instead of something purely scenic or self-congratulatory, O'Connor decided to complicate viewers' reactions by showing the failures of the American dream.
During the late '60s, the coal-mining regions of Appalachia were a dependable source of "poverty pictures." Due to coal strikes, radical organizing, and political campaigns, photographers, newspaper and television reporters, and assorted national politicians committed to an activist agenda constantly visited communities in eastern Kentucky. Some mountain residents felt that the images subsequently broadcast of their reputed poverty would help fix the problem, while others resented the media attention as embarrassing or distorted or inherently unfair.
On that fateful September day in 1967, when O'Connor and his film crew were leaving "the depths of Appalachia," they found the perfect photo opportunity of deep poverty right on the side of Ky. Rte. 7 at Jeremiah in Letcher County, Kentucky. They began filming ramshackle rental houses owned by Hobart Ison. Not surprisingly, Ison did not want his property shown to the world. Little did the Canadians know that this last stop would tum into disaster, with their director Hugh O'Connor shot down in cold blood by a rage-filled Ison.
Elizabeth Barret, an eastern Kentucky native, constructs an insightful background to make sense of this tragedy. She struggles to show objectively what happened, all the while consciously pointing out but avoiding the stereotypes portrayed in films so often in the past. "Some [filmmakers] wanted to show ... a contrast to help bring about social change; others mined the images in the way the companies mined the coal," says Barret.
In choosing to explore the why of this murder, Barret opens the door for a conversation on a number of underlying issues. Her viewpoint contains numerous pertinent comments and questions. First, why did Ison do it? What set him off? To understand Ison's rage, Barret explores the history of image-making in Appalachia and unpacks the issues of power and social class. Who has access to make films? What are the social responsibilities of filmmakers? Who has the power to take the images of others for their own uses, and what can a disempowered people do if they don't want their pictures taken? What does it do to people when they're made the objects of the nation's pity?
Barret explores the largely taboo subject of social class within her community, both those, like herself, who were "well-off" and those living in poverty just a few miles down the road. Trying to come to terms with these two contrasting worlds means dealing with powerful and unresolved emotions on both sides, including guilt, rage, frustration, and hopelessness. As Barret sets out to find her own understanding of why Ison shot O'Connor and what it means to her, all of these issues emerge as parts of a complex whole.
Barret is careful to balance both sides of the story. We come to understand the stranger with a camera as a positive, non-exploitative filmmaker who made a fatal mistake. All of Barret's outsider interviewees claim O'Connor's motives were pure. O'Connor's past film work is described as having the ability to "bring people together." Tom and Pat Gish, publishers of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, sympathize with the mountain people's frustration at negative media coverage, but they do not agree with lson's actions because O'Connor was not attempting a negative portrayal. New York writer Calvin Trillin states that O'Connor was filming expressive family groups, not the poverty of the area. Ann O'Connor McGoey, O'Connor's daughter, claims that her father had a real sensitivity for people and was shooting in Kentucky for the "underdog."
Likewise, we get a rich context for Hobart Ison and his violent reaction. Barret asserts, "I could understand where Ison’s rage was coming from." She weaves together a context not only from the historical exploitation of Appalachia in "poverty films," Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberands, the controversial activities of VISTA volunteers, and LBJ's War on Poverty but also from her own career with Appalshop, the famous Letcher County media "workshop" that began in 1969 self-consciously to make its own home-grown images of Appalachia as an antidote to outsider images.
The British Broadcasting Company's 1967 film The Crusader, about Harry Caudill and his book Night Comes to the Cumberands, portrayed only the poverty of Kentucky and its victimization. The film's narrator called the region the "center of America's poverty belt," stating flatly that for the people in this region the "American dream has become a nightmare." But Barret asks Mason Eldridge, the very miner who was being photographed in 1967 when Ison killed O'Connor, what he thinks of the American dream, and Eldridge replies, "I've had a good life."
Other poverty films seen in Stranger With a Camera are the 1967 Canadian Broadcasting Company's All's Right as well as the 1964 National Council of Churches' The Captive, in which the narrator claims one can see "a visible hunger when you look at the kids." Other examples include the CBS news report in which Charles Kuralt called the residents of eastern Kentucky "permanently poor." By using such negative footage, Barret vividly contrasts insider/outsider viewpoints. From the insider platform, she shows personal home movies of her family and of her early days as an Appalshop crew member. Perhaps in a subtle way she has set up her audience to view a "native with a camera" as the only accurate way to portray the region's history. Barret says, "I found these [other) films insulting ... when filmmakers focused only on the deprivation, and didn't look past it to the lives of the people that are the real wealth of the culture."
Instead of clearing up gray areas of uncertainty, Stranger With a Camera prompts viewers to ask more questions of themselves and of the gatekeepers of culture. The movie makes viewers more aware of images and how they may be manipulated. Anne Caudill asserts that "a picture never lies." But Colin Low, Hugh O'Connor's friend and collaborator, says in the film: "A camera is like a gun. It's threatening .... It's invasive. It is exploitative ... and it's not always true." Unless we understand the context of a picture, and the motives of those who made it, it can indeed misconstrue the truth. Barret's struggle as a native filmmaker prompted her to unpack the ambiguities of this tragedy. She felt the need to reconcile her own feelings about the blessings and the curses that cameras and filmmaking bring into the region. On the one hand, the camera is what allows America to see itself. It captures millions of people and their lives, and it can render the ordinary heroic. The camera can also demolish the same people. The camera can both change people's perceptions to the good, and it can also reaffirm debilitating stereotypes.
Barret wisely does not try to resolve this ambiguity. She carefully balances interviews between the two factions, the wounded and resentful insiders and the wounded and resentful outsiders. Even Barret's voice-over is one of calm neutrality. She allows the viewers to decide for themselves which, if any, side they are on.
Barret's own place in the film is one of self-exploration as neighbor, wife, and mother with a camera on a quest to understand an event that shook her community and left lasting scars on her chosen profession. In her personal home movies filmed at the same time as the "poverty pictures," we see a typical middle-class neighborhood. A 12-year-old Barret playing in the snow in front of her well kept home is a striking contrast to the images of hungry children on the steps of shacks, filmed just a short distance away.
More than three decades after the Ison and O'Connor incident occurred, the small community of Jeremiah, Kentucky, is still haunted by echoes of the deed as well as by the rallying of the community behind a murderer. As Barret points out, "The ties that bind communities together are not always positive."
Reactions...
Jinny Turman
Many middle- and upper-class citizens believe that they are separate from the undesirable parts of their communities. However, when the media comes in to document an unfortunate event, such as a murder, or film an impoverished area, the community as a whole becomes associated with those images just by simply living there.
O'Connor, like many other filmmakers and reporters before and since, felt that he was doing a justice to the people of Appalachia by exposing the truth of poverty. Perhaps his intentions were honorable. But the insiders, who have the cameras pointed at them, sometimes refuse to consider that the motives of the outsiders may indeed be pure. And those that come by swarms to document the insiders' lives may not take the time to understand the situation and may not consider feelings of pride and the love of place.
Laurie Lyda
None of my family ever worked the coal mines, but many lived on hills, enslaved to owners who paid barely enough money to sustain them and their families. The opening segments of Stranger With a Camera feature Mason Eldridge, the original "subject" that O'Connor was filming when Ison confronted him on that fateful September day. With his stuttering speech and his reluctance to meet the gaze of the camera, Eldridge reminds me of so many of the men in Lincoln County, coming into the Winn-Dixies and the banks from the textile mills, where many gave up their youth and education for a steady income. With their careful way of dressing, as if to camouflage the poor quality of their clothes, and the generous helping of grease to comb back unruly locks of hair, these are men of a time when living was a fight for survival.
The cameras of the '60s went looking for these men and their wives and their children. Some allowed the camera to invade their domiciles and forever etch a way of life in photographs. I think of photographs as souvenirs and, to borrow a term from Toni Morrison, they serve the purpose of re-memory. I can understand how Hobart Ison allegedly wanted to protect his people and his land from being represented - and therefore remembered- badly. This understanding comes from my experience in protecting my own image and the image of my community from media representation.
During my time as a staff writer for my hometown paper. I received a call from a mother ecstatic over her daughter's engagement. The daughter's boyfriend had mowed "Brooke, Will You Marry Me?" into the turf of a large field his family owned. Then, as a surprise, he took Brooke on an airplane ride above Lincoln County and popped the question. At first glance, this story had definite "cute" qualities and the quirkiness often favored by the Associated Press. I thought this was my chance to break onto the AP wire - until I asked a few pertinent questions, including Brooke's age. Turns out she was a minor and her fiancé, in his late '20s. This information raised an office debate and ultimately nixed the story. We settled for a simple photograph of the mown message and a not-too-detailed caption.
The majority opinion in the office was that not only would the AP pick up the story, but so might the local Charlotte news stations. As both venues have a history of portraying Lincoln County residents as living in trailer parks, with curlers in their hair and heavy country accents, we decided against divulging a story that could be used to stereotype our residents negatively.
I think of this experience as an example of small-town preservation. Why shoul4 the town's poverty be made public knowledge? I can identify with those who turned bitter against the prevalence and popularity of the "poverty pictures" in the '60s. On the other hand, I can understand the media's desire to help those in need. In the '60s the government was fighting a foreign war, and the media reasserted the evils plaguing the American people on their home turf, churned out stories seeming to hype ·revolution, and Americans responded to the imagery. Anyone who makes his or her living by the camera or the pen knows that to follow the path of popular interest is a smart business decision - whether the artist's intentions are purely self-serving or truly in earnest. And, unfortunately, it is difficult to tell 30 years later whether Hugh O'Connor's project and his presence in eastern Kentucky was an endeavor of the heart or of the purse.
Even after watching the film twice, I can't place blame. I can see the perspective that explains Ison's actions, just as I can see a perspective that explains O'Connor's. No one knows the truth. No matter what Ison was thinking, it wasn't what O'Connor was thinking, or the miscommunication that led to the shooting would never have happened. What did happen was a collision of two worlds that resist fusion with all their might. What happened was a horrifying moment that affected those of the community so deeply, one of them had to grow up to make this picture-memorial, to make some sense out of it.
Ruth Ellen Blakeney
Murder is never right. But I am not at all surprised that it happened in this instance. Perhaps I should feel deep down that what Ison did was wrong, but that conviction just won't make its way out of my head and into my guts. I wish Ison had used his fists - anything but a gun - but apparently it wasn't a fist-kind of threat that O'Connor and his camera represented.
I grew up with my daddy saying that he'd defend his own, and right or wrong, I share that same feeling. I abhor violence, and I hate guns, but if I were in lson's shoes I'd probably want to do the same thing. I hope that I wouldn't act on it, but you can never say for sure what you'd do in a situation until you're in it.
This film does an excellent job of recognizing the fact that there are different kinds of violence, and many people in Appalachia have been subjected to the insidious kind, the camera kind, for a very long time, too long for something like this not to happen. That doesn't justify murder. Nothing does. The history of image-taking in Appalachia has been another kind of murder, though it is repeatedly justified and praised, all because of who was doing the killing.
Kriss Heiks
Stranger With a Camera is a film struggling to portray honestly the struggle for honest portrayal. It attempts to turn the camera in on itself, using images to question filmmaking, a photojournalist's confrontation with photography.
The film intends to raise questions regarding the power of the media, but it grows into something much larger. It tells an entangled story which painfully addresses issues of community commitment and community guilt. More than anything, the narration reflects local filmmaker Elizabeth Barret's personal struggle to define her role as both a good neighbor and a responsible documentary filmmaker. The result is a film both emotionally charged and compelling.
Stranger with a Camera attempts to untangle the social, cultural, personal, and filmic conditions which led to the crisis of communication culminating in O'Connor's death, pointedly questioning the role of the camera in providing service or disservice to local communities and individuals.
Relating the history of exploitation by the coal industry and the Johnson administration's War on Poverty, which produced an onslaught of VISTA workers, poverty volunteers, and photojournalists into the region, Barret incorporates a barrage of '60s "poverty pictures" juxtaposed against images of her own middle-class neighborhood and background. That these two seemingly different worlds are, in fact, images from one community and represent the cultural and economic mix existing in any given American town speaks very directly to the questions Barret attempts to articulate.
Although photojournalists like Hugh O'Connor came to southeastern Kentucky with nothing less than good intentions and the desire to expose the mining industry's blatant exploitation of Kentuckians and the effective theft and destruction of their land, local residents resented representations of their neighborhoods as impoverished. Pictures of gray, worn shanties, barefoot children, and old cars left dead and abandoned on creek beds were ubiquitous on national TV sets in the '60s, depicting a people who appeared hopeless and helpless. Southern values of pride, independence, warmth, and religious tradition were all noticeably absent. Despite journalists' well intended efforts to expose the mining industry's long history of abuse, and despite their self-perception that they were acting in the interests of humanity and decency, local residents found in their images a reflection of themselves as something less than human, less than decent.
Elizabeth Barret remembers the shooting death of Hugh O'Connor and her community's rapid rise to defend Hobart Ison, a man who was essentially a rural slum lord but who, in that place and time, became a sudden representative of any individual's right to privacy and a community's means of defending its honor. Barret struggles to sort through her own reactions to the shooting, understanding the act as indefensible and at the same time, experiencing an emotional responsiveness and kinship, with the resentment of local people tired of the camera's one-sided construction of reality. She seeks to establish an objective point of reference but seems to find herself on slippery and shifting ground, identifying herself as both fellow filmmaker and community member. It is this tension and struggle which defines the emotional intensity of the movie and most clearly articulates questions of sensitivity and responsibility when raising and pointing a camera.
There is a subtext to the film which depicts the nature of poverty far more accurately than any '60s War on Poverty photojournalist ever could. In the community's overwhelming defense of Ison, the viewer becomes aware of society's insidious treatment of the poor, with its willingness to blame them for their poverty. The poverty-as-a-character-flaw mentality is clearly so pervasive that hard-working people who nonetheless live in impoverished conditions suffer from an acute embarrassment and fear that the outside status quo will view them as failures. The irony of the local people being angrier with Hugh O'Connor's attempt to expose the mining industry's exploitation than at the exploiting companies themselves speaks volumes. The implication that it is better to be silently exploited than to have the embarrassing conditions of exploitation exposed is nothing short of tragic. Barret's seeming inability to address this issue head-on creates a kind of wrenching and confused heartache. Empathy for those who are uneasy or embarrassed by poverty images comes across with much greater force than any acknowledgment that the community's sense of shame is misplaced. It is the coal industry that should hang its enterprising head and elicit local wrath. Until both the working poor and the middle-class mainstream understand poverty as a result of economic systems and are willing to risk exposure and get angry with the institutionalized structures that are at the root of the problem, there can be relatively little hope for change.
The movie closes with footage from Barret's interview with one of Hugh O'Connor's daughters who articulates that over the years she has come to terms with her father's death and confesses that she has reached a degree of forgiveness for Hobart Ison. The moment is laden with emotion because Barret's own reactions are still so clearly unresolved. The questions she introduces in the beginning of the film regarding the role of the camera and the responsibilities that come with creating filmic realities hang twisting in the air. Although the film provides no concise answer to the issues it raises, the questions are left to resound with a gut-wrenching clarity.
Donavan Cain
Appalshop films have played an important role in the way I see myself today. Through their images, I found my history, or rather I began to reexamine that history and make some sense out of it. Through those pictures I found my place and rediscovered a home worth returning to for myself, my wife, and our newborn daughter.
I remember watching those films for the first time, one after another, in Dr. Herbert Reid's "Appalachian Politics" course at the University of Kentucky. It was a summer course, eight weeks of Appalshop films with occasional lectures by a man who truly changed my life through his understanding of the power of recorded images. It was from inside that classroom that my life took an unexpected u-turn that would lead me back to where I had come from. Back home.
That electrically charged memory returned to me as I watched Stranger With a Camera. It is a different film for Appalshop in that it does not simply focus on an issue like strip mining or a practice like traditional culture, driving cause-and-effect home with the expressive faces of mountain people. Rather, Stranger With a Camera starts with two individuals and through their unfortunate intersection turns the camera upon itself, points at the filmmaker, at Appalshop, at mountain social class, and at the deeply complex web that binds each one to the other and to the outside world.
Stranger With a Camera is on the surface the story of two men, mountain native Hobart Ison and Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor, and the day their paths crossed, one with a gun and the other with a camera, on a rural road in Letcher County. These are the simple facts in a film that is anything but to focus on Ison and O'Connor as insider/outsider is to miss the shape-shifting shadow of media imagery which hangs like a heavy cloud over the film. Somewhere in the middle is Elizabeth Barret, the filmmaker, struggling to find her own place in the events that occurred on that September day in 1967.
Barret represents me as well as generations of eastern Kentucky coal field residents who grew up during or soon after the Ison/O'Connor incident With Barret, we are generations who still feel the legacy of the '60s and its War on Poverty programs. We see the results of that time on a daily basis, whether it be the lines of old, rusty cars and trucks in the drive-thru lanes at the banks on the first of the month or a film or television show with the name Appalshop attached to it is still there, even if the War was long lost many years ago.
The camera still frightens many eastern Kentucky people, just like a back-firing car or a firecracker might frighten an aging veteran. The camera, when randomly flashed in the strip-mine scarred mountains of my old Kentucky home, to this very day can induce its own post-traumatic stress effect, reminding folks of our own war, waged with the flash of a camera rather than a gun. People in Kentucky and the Central Appalachian coal fields may know the power of the camera better than anyone else. They've seen it help, and they've watched it destroy. Brandishing a camera in eastern Kentucky today will almost certainly produce worrisome stares, wrinkled foreheads, and maybe even confrontation. These are the memories of the 1960s, and we are the descendants of Hobart Ison and Hugh O'Connor.
Stranger With a Camera isn't about who was wrong and who was right.
Barret doesn't find resolution at the end of the film, and neither do I, but what is left there for examination is the power of image-making, like a deadly cannon, ready to protect or tear down. Barret knows she is connected to O'Connor and to the films of poverty shot during the 1960s. As the film begins to wrap up, suddenly the images originally shot by O'Connor for the film he was making at the time he fatally met Ison, in their odd, multi-screen pattern are replaced by the early films shot by Barret and Appalshop. This connection speaks volumes and connects O'Connor and Barret as filmmakers. What is different is identity and place and the looming figure of Hobart Ison, who represents something else. Ison is the one on the other side of the camera, either directly in firing range or just to the side sharing the place but ignored by the camera's gaze.
In my mind and in my heart I know it is never right to take another person's life, even in a case of self-defense. To Hobart Ison, though, that's exactly what he felt he was doing. He was defending himself. For many of the people who rallied around Hobart, that's exactly what he was doing as well, defending himself and maybe defending them. Certainly, he was looking out for himself, first and foremost, but his reaction involved something else, which he instantly recognized as he grabbed his gun and stepped out of his truck to face O'Connor's camera. It was something he had witnessed numerous times in that Fall of '67 on his television screen, in magazines, and in stories in his newspaper. He most certainly saw the camera as a devastating, invading weapon of war, which he, like many other eastern Kentuckians, took great offense at. He fired a shot for all of those eastern Kentuckians who felt they were being misrepresented, and maybe, just maybe, he fired a shot for those who felt that Kentucky's poor were being exploited by a cold, careless camera crew there to mine Kentucky for images like the miner mined for coal.
What dilutes this simplistic response to such a horrible act is that Hugh O'Connor may very well have been one of the good guys and, regardless of which side he represented, he was a human being. "Why did you have to do that?" Hugh O'Connor asked before he dropped to the road. That's the same question I find myself asking over and over again, and it's a question I still cannot answer. This film ripped me in two, and I still haven't put the pieces back together. For me, as for Barret, there is no resolution, no peace, and maybe no easy answers.
Being from eastern Kentucky has something to do with this, maybe to a degree beyond what others may experience while viewing this film. In the end, Stranger With a Camera is about me and my fellow mountain people, rich and poor, town and country. A telling line from Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin' comes to mind and maybe speaks to all this directly. Bragg writes, describing religion, particularly the variety found in the upland areas of the South: "Even if you deny that faith, rebuke it, you still carry it around with you like some half-forgotten Indian head penny you keep in your pocket for luck."
The mountains of eastern Kentucky and to varying degrees the Kentucky mountain people, including myself, still carry Hobart Ison and Hugh O'Connor with us, even when we'd much rather leave them behind. We now also carry Shelby Lee Adams's Appalachian Portraits and Rory Kennedy's American Hollow with us, just as we once carried Charles Kuralt and numerous cover stories and photos from the pages of Time and Newsweek and Life and Look. Fortunately, we also now carry Appalshop and Elizabeth Barret too, as well as our own memories and thousands of our own pictures, snapshots covered in plastic and glass on thousands of walls and in thousands of picture albums. These images have their own stories to tell and give us balance and foundation from which to view everything else, stranger or native.
Stranger With a Camera is an incredible film, and like all images, reflects the viewer as much as, if not more than, the individuals and issues represented in the film.
