Common Ground and documentary photography

I’ve watched the Common Ground multimedia piece by Scott Strazzante on MediaStorm a couple times now. Mostly I am a sucker for multimedia – I think that using the multiple senses of viewers is a great way to tell a story, and in a very accessible way. But I’m also a sucker for stories about land and people’s relationship to it. I think about this a lot regarding my own long-term project, Twist of Fate Farm, where I’m documenting the small, natural farm that my father and his partner run in southern New Hampshire. So I enjoyed Common Ground a lot, because it tells a couple loosely-connected personal stories to address a trend that is common and timely right now: sub-divisions popping up where farmland once was.

From the website: On July 2, 2002, Jean and Harlow Cagwin watched as their home – the last remnant of their 118-acre cattle farm in Lockport, Illinois – was torn down clearing the way for a new housing development. Several years later, Ed and Amanda Grabenhofer and their four children moved into the new Willow Walk subdivision, their house just yards from where the Cagwin’s home once stood.

Strazzante uses an interesting visual tactic, where he pairs similarly composed images of the couple who once owned the farm, to the family that now lives in a development on the same land. I think these diptychs are effective in showing the passage of time and the before and after. At then end of the piece I feel a little unresolved though. At one point the audio says “It’s the next step in the next generation. That farm land changes to suburban, and you still see the same qualities of life even though it’s no longer a farm land.” I’m not sure that I’m convinced the same qualities of life are there now. Certainly the images show similar emotions between the two families, like joy, playfulness, exhaustion, love, sadness, etc. But I don’t think a Walmart provides the same qualities of life as a farm. This is of course my own bias against how we view certain kinds of “progress”, and not necessarily an issue with the photographs or multimedia piece.

I also enjoyed this interview with Scott Strazzante on Sports Shooter (which is a few years old, but very relevant) and his ideas about the significance of documentary photography, respect, time spent on projects, and personal relationships with subjects. A lot of his comments resonate with me and force me to think about my own work and also the marketability of my documentary projects.

I definitely see the outcome of Twist of Fate Farm taking multiple forms, although it’s tough to imagine the end or outcome since I’ll probably be working on it forever. I would like to do a multimedia piece and I want to start collecting audio, although I don’t own a good quality recorder yet. For now I just write a lot in my journal, each time I visit. I’m always learning more about the farm and the project is still evolving, although I often have hang-ups about it. My latest is that I think it might actually be a color project, not black and white anymore. This is a big change. But I’m “shooting through it” and trusting that my images and time on the farm will lead me where I need to go.