"Stranger with a Camera"

Elizabeth Barret in her documentary “Stranger with a Camera” talks about a murder of Hugh O'Connor in 1967. O'Connor was filming with his crew in Jeremiah, Kentucky, he was in the property of Hobart Isan. O'Connor was filming Isan's property, he decided O'Connor was invading his space, Isan thought they were laughing and making fun of him, states Barret. Isan yelled “[g]et off my property!” O'Connor turned to say they were leaving, but it was too late, Isan shot his gun. O'Connor died one day before the birthday of his 10 year old son. The next day people drove by the hotel that the filming crew was staying at yelling at them as if they did something wrong. No one wanted to admit that Isan did anything wrong, they did not want to think that someone in their community was wrong. Isan did not feel any guilt for this murder, he felt that he had to do it. Isan states “I am not crazy! I shot the guy for what he was doing.” A camera is like a gun, it is very threatening and not always true. You can take a picture and change it to be how you want it to be, or just take pictures of the things that interest you the most. Just like what the film makers in this documentary were doing. A family was interviewed and asked what they eat for breakfast. The mother states that the baby eats gravy and eggs and the rest of the family has coffee and cigarettes. Barret is saying that we seem to capture on film what is the most interesting to us, which in most cases is the poverty stricken areas. The people in the Kentucky community were pretty mad about this, they do not want people thinking they only live in poverty, because there are places in their community that are not poor. So we should not always only capture the bad moments in peoples lives, but also the good. Because when we only show the bad we will think that is all there is in the community, we wont realize how much more there is to these peoples lives.