When we first read through Kirsten Johnson’s Director’s Statement, what first stood out was the way she uses binaries to explore her thoughts regarding documentary work. First, she opens by writing about the “joys of being a documentary cameraperson”, such as sharing intimacy and using documentary film as a way to engage with others and the world. She then introduces the dilemmas she faces “while holding [her] camera”. Within this is another binary: the “concrete” problems versus the implicit problems. Johnson mentions framing, focusing and choosing “the direction to follow”, but seems to be more concerned with the troubles audiences usually don’t think of. The implicit troubles all seem to relate to the themes of trust, cooperation and intimacy. Joys of doing documentary work versus the dilemmas documentarians face and the concrete challenges such as framing a shot as opposed to the implicit troubles Johnson highlights are just two of the binaries she constructs in her exploration of her experience as a cameraperson. At the end of her Director’s Statement Johnson writes, “We know that this fragmentary portrait is incomplete and are interested in the ways it points to how stories are constructed”. The end of her statement reminds me of the term “location”. Robert Coles (1997), the author of Doing Documentary Work, offers the theory of location and its implication in documentary film. He conceptualizes location through his description of what documentarians bring to their work and field. Coles (1997) writes, “Each of us brings, finally, a particular life to the others who are being observed in documentary work, and so to some degree, each of us will engage with the others differently, carrying back from such engagement our own version of them” (5). Here, Coles is highlighting the fact that because each person brings a unique location, or set of personal experiences to the projects they take on, their engagement will differ from others. In another sense, who you are affects what you see, and accordingly, how you tell a story. Similarly, Kirsten Johnson suggests that the way we construct stories might be based off the problems we uncover in the work we do.
