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July 10, 2011
Facing Change: Documenting America is a non-profit collective that takes its inspiration from the Farm Security Administration's documentary programme of the 1930s.
Debbie Fleming Caffery, Enterprise Sugar Mill
The stories archive is diverse. I find the work by Debbie Fleming Caffery on her native Louisana fascinating. Caffery has been working this vein for thirty years photographing workers from the sugarcane fields and sugar mills in rural Louisiana, where she was born, as well as the community and her three children.
Anthony Suau explained that the Facing Change collective is covering aspects of daily life that might ordinarily have slipped under the radar.
There is a huge frustration with traditional media. I hear it constantly when I'm working in the field. We felt we were going out and seeing things that were not being reported, or not being covered in the way that we felt was appropriate. More than that, it's no longer necessary to communicate down to the audience. Facing Change intends to communicate laterally.....The idea is not to go out on assignment and spend 10 days watching people and photographing them in their very hard times and misery and then move onto the next story. We aim to create contact. We will bring the work back to the people we were photographing, and allow them to have a voice in the production of that story. And then we'll go back again and again, and keep that line of communication open.
An interesting approach that breaks away from the traditional photojournalism.
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