Stranger with a Camera Summary

Both Larry Daressa's review and ITVS’ interpretation of the Stranger with a Camera documentary thoroughly and accurately describe Elizabeth Barret, the director/producer's objective in making the film. Daressa mentions Barret's key inquiry and reason for making the documentary, and that is, “'What are the responsibilities of any of us who take images of other people and put them to our own uses?'” (Daressa) ITVS talks of Appalachia, the place in the film that inspired the question, and the murder within that made one mostly poor, mining mountain town famous. Daressa explains how film maker Hugh O'Connor's death related to and supported Barret’s claim about the responsibilities of film makers and photographers. He continues on to explain that the murderer, local Hobart Ison, was passive about the matter: “At his trial he made the novel claim that he had shot O'Connor in self-defense in order to avoid character assassination by camera: 'I had to do it. What would he have done to me picture-wise and all?' Ison not only owned the land, but he clearly believed he owned what was said about it and about the people who lived on it.” (Daressa) When he brought this up, it appeared that he had the intention of portraying Ison's reasoning, and making the connection of why Barret used the murder as an unsettlingly real example of the point of view a subject might take if they were being exploited. Daressa talked about one of the only people shown in the film who was all for the camera coverage in Appalachia as much as Ison was against it, and that was Mason Elbridge. Mason's stance was that the camera was a tool to educate people fairly about every walk of life. This talk leads to Daressa putting his thoughts in that photographers can only capture small pieces of a community, and that a community as a whole can't be defined by one group the photographer happens to capture and use as the label for the community. His review also articulates how Barret believes photography and film making, specifically ethnography leads to the warping and misrepresentation of the community, while ignoring the true purpose or bigger picture of the ethnography, which in this case was fixing problems of importance. Daressa finally gets to the answer Barret finds to her question, which is just to stay true to the story and represent all points of view. Daressa claims heavily that he believes Barret is naïve in thinking that objectivity in filmmaking can be obtained. Yet, he seems to stand by the feeling that she has the innate ability of not taking out her own personal woes regarding the community that she speaks of in the documentary, which she happened to grow up in and was part of her motivation for creating the documentary. So, she herself was following her own advice about having open-ended objectivity as an element of her own document.

-Tristin