Why Document at All?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to look...

Since 2013, I’ve been documenting my niece Emeline—one of many obsessions born from an impulse I rarely question. Like the clouds and trees I return to again and again, she is both familiar and always changing.

I continue to make documentaries because of what I have watched happen, film by film, in rooms and prisons and community centers and living rooms, in the faces of people who did not expect anyone to show up with a camera and stay.

But I have also started asking harder questions about what it means to look. What it means to keep looking in a world where the image of a person often replaces the person, where the photo becomes the performance, where we are so saturated with images of ourselves and each other that I sometimes question the point of documenting at all.

What do we gain by pressing record? What do we lose?

I started documenting as a kind of correction. I was watching the place I love being flattened into a caricature, either tragic or toxic, either poor and helpless or angry and dangerous, and the people I knew were more complicated than that, more surprising and softer and sharper and funnier. So I began filming to push back, to reframe, to honor what I saw and felt. John Berger wrote that the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe, and I believed in Appalachia’s complexity. I believed that if others could see it through my eyes they might understand it differently. I now recognize that belief as arrogant and naive, even though it came from love.

When we began making Hollow in 2013, I knew McDowell County the way you know a place you grew up near. For decades it had been defined almost entirely by its losses. Nearly eighty percent of its population gone since 1950. Young people leaving every year for places with work. The county appearing in national stories as shorthand for American decline, a place where things had happened to people rather than a place where people were still actively living and building and deciding. I had grown up in Logan County, close enough to know that the full story of McDowell was nowhere in those articles. There was pride there, and humor, and a fierce sense of belonging that never made the news because it never confirmed what the news already believed.

So we gave people cameras. We asked thirty residents to document their own lives, to show us what they saw when they looked at the place they had chosen to stay. As people looked at their own community through a lens, they began to see it differently. Young participants turned the camera toward the future. Older ones turned it toward what they wanted to preserve. All of them, in the act of documenting, began to develop a more acute sense of agency. They were authors now, and the act of telling the story changed their relationship to it.

Hollow also taught me something about the limits of good intentions. Despite everything the team poured into that project, the deep-seated obstacles of infrastructure, institutional politics, and limited access to technology proved harder to move than any of us had anticipated. Some of the young people who had been so energized during production became disheartened when the tangible change they hoped for didn’t come. I carry that. The camera can redraw how someone sees themselves, but it cannot fix a broken school system or restore a broadband connection or hold a corrupt local government accountable. Knowing what stories can do, and what they cannot, is part of the education.

I think my work has had a net positive effect. I hope it has. But I am not sure it has helped in the way I imagined it might. The systems remain. The poverty persists. The extraction continues, of natural resources and labor and land and stories, images taken and circulated without care for generations before I ever picked up a camera. It is no wonder people are skeptical when someone arrives with a camera. I do not blame them. I am them, in many ways.

When there were floods recently in McDowell County, my instinct for the first time was not to go film. I did not believe that would help. I did not believe that adding one more image of disaster to the pile would move anything forward. Susan Sontag warned about this in Regarding the Pain of Others, about the moment when witnessing becomes consumption. When journalists covered the Vietnam War or the War on Poverty, there was still the potential for shock, because people had not yet seen it all and a single photograph could rupture an illusion. Trauma is ambient now, constant and scrolling and clickable, and I no longer believe that most people are moved in any lasting way by what they see.

Which brings me to these questions: Do I want to serve up another dose of dopamine dressed as devastation? Is that what my love for this place asks of me?

By the time we made Heroin(e) in 2017, I was aware of the narrative already surrounding the opioid epidemic. Huntington, West Virginia had become, by almost every measure, the epicenter of the crisis in America, with an overdose rate ten times the national average. What I kept asking was: who is missing from this frame? Whose work is invisible because it looks like ordinary life rather than emergency? The answer, in Huntington, was three women. A fire chief who spent her days reviving people who had overdosed and returned the next day to do it again. A judge who handed down empathy alongside court orders. A woman who fed meals to women selling their bodies for drugs, out of a conviction so deep it had become indistinguishable from breathing. Their stories were ones of daily, quiet, unglamorous courage, the kind that makes no dramatic arc and simply keeps going. Centering them changed what the film was able to say. The devastation was still in the frame. So was the answer to it, in people who had been standing there the whole time.

Tutwiler, made in 2020, asked me to bear witness to something I did not know how to hold. Alabama’s Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women had long been considered one of the worst women’s prisons in the country. Many of the women there are incarcerated for drug-related offenses, survivors of domestic violence, mothers. Every year, dozens of them spend their pregnancies inside those walls, are transported to a hospital to give birth, have twenty-four hours with their newborn, and are sent back. As one woman told us: when you were locked up your whole pregnancy and it was just you and that baby, and then you have to walk away from the person who has been there with you, it makes the strongest person break. My job in that film was to be in the room. To let the camera stay on a face long enough that the audience could feel the weight of what they were watching. When you put a human being on screen with enough honesty and time, it becomes very hard to treat them as a statistic afterward.

Recovery Boys, made between 2016 and 2018, asked me to stay with four men long enough, eighteen months, that they stopped performing recovery for the camera and started actually doing it. King Coal asked something different of me: to be seen myself. That film required me to narrate my own grief about a place and an industry and a family history I had been circling for years without naming. Being seen changes something in a person. I know that because I felt it happen to me, in the edit room, listening to my own voice say things I had not known I believed until I heard myself say them.

My Love, a Netflix series released in 2021, gave me something I had not expected: the experience of filming ordinary love over twelve months. My episode followed David and Ginger Isham, a Vermont couple married for more than sixty years, fourth-generation farmers living on land that had been in David’s family for over a century. There was no crisis in that farmhouse. There was something harder to film and more interesting, the dailiness of two people who have chosen each other so many times, over so many years, that the choice has become indistinguishable from life itself. What that film taught me was that love is a practice. It shows up on an ordinary Tuesday with nothing to prove.

That film sits alongside the others as a continuation of the same question: what does it look like when a person is seen? In McDowell County the answer was a community reclaiming its own complexity. In Huntington it was three women doing invisible work. In Tutwiler it was a mother walking back through a door. In Vermont it was two old farmers reading in bed. The camera does the same thing in all of those rooms. It stays. It pays attention.

But I have also begun to wonder whether documenting has sometimes been a way of excusing myself from deeper forms of involvement, a way to stay near without getting dirty. I am not proud to ask that. And I think people who do this work need to ask it. Fred Moten once asked what kind of debt we owe to the things we cannot know but that we must witness. I do not have an answer. What I know is that witness is not always enough, and that sometimes the work is not in the telling.

Stories are structural to how communities survive, not supplemental. When we lose them, we lose our history, our identity, and the thread connecting us to each other across time. The people I have filmed in McDowell County, in Huntington, in Tutwiler, in the recovery houses of West Virginia, on the farms of Vermont were already doing the work of building and insisting on their own complexity long before I arrived. The camera offered a record. A way of saying to the world: look, really look, at this person and their world.

Being seen changes something in a person, and being the witness changes the witness too. You cannot spend years in the places and spaces I have been in, trusted with what I have been trusted with, and come out the same. The camera moves both ways. That is why I keep picking it up, even when I am not sure it is enough, even when the question of whether I should is the one I cannot yet answer.

Sweet dreams, Emeline.

P.S. If you got this far and you're a documentary filmmaker, check out this Legal Toolkit to better protect your work. I’m hosting a Google Hangout on April 15 at 12pm to talk through it together with the early-bird buyers. Join us.