From taking Documentary Research this semester I have had the opportunity to watch and learn how documentarians tell the stories of themselves, others (through the documentarians location). I have also had the privilege to apply the methods and techniques from readings, films, and class discussions to tell my own stories. Being able to share my own stories with the my professor and peers has been a vulnerable, liberating, and supportive experience.
While this theme was touched upon throughout the semester, It definitely resonated with me the most from our class discussion on Freeing The Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. A key takeaway that I have is the power of detail and importance of particularity within the general. Goldberg mentioned the significance of the names of over six million people that died during the Holocaust who are memorialized today at Yad Vashem (Holocaust remembrance center/museum). As someone who visited Yad Vashem in Israel this past summer, I very much experienced first hand how meaningful details are. We all deserve to be remembered as individuals and not just statistics. I do not believe any of our lives are ordinary and we need to stop associating documentary work with only documenting the lives of people who are labelled as being “special”, “extraordinary”, or “unusual”. While I believe it is important to help make the voices heard for people who do not have the privilege to document their own lives by themselves, everyone should be recording the details of their important lives. What might appear as being ordinary or normal might not seem important but ultimately is part of who we are and our own life story.
I leave this course feeling that we are all documentarians. In today’s digital age, we are all documenting our own personal narratives without even thinking about it. We must document our own lives to allow future documentarians to do the same, thereby offering their own personal perspective and narrative that they wish to share with the public.
While a selfie might seem mundane or orginary, it is worth recording. There is a memory and story behind every photo!