Stranger With a Camera - response

Elizabeth Barret, an eastern Kentucky native talks of the relationship the photographer and the photographed, through an incident that took place in September of 1967 where Hugh O’Connor, a director on the Nation Film Board of Canada, was shot and killed by Hobart Ison, a local landowner. O’Connor, a well renowned filmmaker, was directing a piece about the Appalachian people, how they came to be so poor, and how they needed help to reincarnate their prosperity. Ison, a proud man and annoyed of the media’s negative attention on eastern Kentucky over the last decade, felt threatened by O’Connor’s cameras and shot him to “avoid character assassination by camera.” Ison felt, and so did many of his community, that he did the right thing by killing O’Connor.

Barret on the other hand, was worried that Ison’s actions would make the world see her people as all hillbillies, which happened to some extent. The truth was, a good percentage was impoverished, but definitely not all. And this negative depiction of Kentucky was angering a good percentage, which showed through the support of Ison’s shooting of O’Connor. A trial was held, but no jury could be mustered, so the court accepted a plea bargain giving Ison one year in prison.

Many other of the people involved in this event, both insiders and outsiders, were interviewed in this documentary: from Ison’s relatives to O’Connor’s coworkers. Mason Elbridge was the man that caught O’Connor’s eye as he was leaving, making him want to stop for one last photo shoot. Elbridge had just gotten off work at the coal mines, and was sitting on the porch, still dirty with all the coal dust, playing with his daughter. Elbridge allowed O’Connor to take his photos, but Elbridge was just a renter on Ison’s land. Ison was warned that there were photographers on his land and rushed to scene, where he told the camera team to leave. They were attempting so, and O’Connor was shot in the chest.

Barret uses this event to portray the affect of the camera. She asks if filmmakers can show poverty without embarrassing the impoverished. The camera is like a gun, exploiting peoples in ways that are often harmful or threating.