I’m back from a road trip with family through PA, WV, VA and KY (really not the summer to do this, although gas was a lot cheaper down south). Along with some hiking and biking and fabulous roadside dioramas, I had the pleasure of making a short visit to Appalshop, the legendary arts, media and cultural center in Whitesburg, KY. My fellow archivist here at WITNESS, Chad Hunter, spent two years at Appalshop (and continues as a staff archivist, remotely); I got to see the great vault he was largely responsible for having installed (and in which my kids had no end of fun, crushing each other between the moving shelves.) I got a tour from Caroline Rubens, who took over from Chad about a year or so ago. The archive houses somewhere around 13,000 items, including multiple formats of film, video, audio, and photographs, all depicting myriad aspects of life in the region over the past half-century or so. And I met Elizabeth Barret, the Archive’s director, and a filmmaker responsible for (among others) Stranger with a Camera.

I had seen this remarkable film when it first aired on POV some years ago; I watched it again right before our trip. The film explores the relationship between camera-wielders – filmmakers, journalists, photographers – and their subjects, within the context of the 1967 murder of Hugh O’Connor, a Canadian filmmaker. O’Connor and his team had obtained permission from a miner to film him on his front porch; the owner of the property, a local man named Hobart Ison, got wind of their presence, arrived at the scene and shot O’Connor dead, despite the fact that the crew was retreating. The murder occurred in the wake of Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and subsequent intense focus by news media, VISTA volunteers and others, depicting the Appalachian region as the epitome of desperate rural US poverty. A considerable portion of the population felt belittled and humiliated by such scrutiny, and therefore sympathetic to Ison.

Of course this resonates. Because at WITNESS we facilitate the documentation of human rights transgressions, the stories of victims or abuses, marginalized individuals and communities. Regardless of intentions or means, there is a power relationship implicit in the wielding of a camera, the control of how and when and to whom images are disseminated.

As archivists in guardianship of the unedited, raw – in every sense – material, we are constantly wrestling with when, how and in what manner to allow access. We believe we are ethical and judicious in our decisions but it can be a source of anxiety. Several years ago I was on a panel with an archivist of materials depicting Aboriginal peoples; she believed that the images showing colonial-era subjugation and abuse of native people should suppressed, accessible only through permission of the group’s descendants. She had seen such images misappropriated, used for nefarious purposes, and identified with the humiliation and impotence of the subjects. I found this quite moving but also not tenable; it is easier to manipulate the truth when information is suppressed. But it’s important to be reminded of what it’s like to be on the other side of the camera.

Do see Stranger with a Camera.

–Grace Lile

The Guardian online has an interview with Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraqi National Archive and Library.  The former Kurdish resistance fighter returned to Baghdad in 2003 with a freshly minted Phd from the London School of Economics, and was appointed soon after.  It is an almost unimaginable job under heartbreaking and terrifying conditions;  he is a tremendously powerful voice for the necessity of access to culture and history in building civil society.

“I want to make the library a democratic model of how Iraq should be. From the start I hired Sunnis, Kurds, Shias, women, men. The national library must be a place - perhaps even the most important place - where Iraqis from many different groups come together.”

Eskander is also vocal about his opposition to the seizure of Iraqi records by US actors, most notably Kanan Makiya’s Iraq Memory Foundation (see 4/22/08 blog post), scoffing at the notion that the documents cannot be made safe in Iraq, and insistent that Iraqis need these documents to understand their past.

Now available on the Thomas J Dodd Research Center website are the proceedings of the meeting on human rights archives held March 3 & 4. Two notable outcomes of the conference include a new listserv, and the creation of a Human Rights Archives Information Portal.  A prototype of the portal is currently being created by graduate students in the Information Studies Program at the University of Maryland; it is ultimately envisioned as a joint project of universities with human rights collections and the Center for Research Libraries.

-Grace Lile

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) have released a joint statement calling for the return of five sets of records seized from Iraq during both Gulf conflicts and now in various US locations. They are (from the statement):

Records seized by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies during the Second Gulf War. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies seized millions of pages of Iraqi records during the military campaign. The U.S. military scanned some, if not all, of the seized records. The major issue with these records is to what institution in Iraq the originals will be returned – and when. As reported by John Gravois in the Chronicle of Higher Education (February 8, 200 , the Iraq National Library and Archives and the Iraq Memory Foundation each have made public claims of ownership of these records. For records of the Iraqi government, including the Baath Party records as an arm of the state, the archival principle of inalienability requires that they be returned to the national government of Iraq for preservation in the national archives.

Records seized from non-governmental combatants. In the fall of 2007 the U.S. military seized a quantity of records in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar from an al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq. The quantity of records seized is not known, nor is the records’ current location – although at least a portion were scanned and provided to the Army’s Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point, where an analysis was published based on the records. These records were never records of the Iraqi government. Returning them to the creator or its successors clearly is not plausible. A strong case can be made for sending these to the Iraqi government for deposit in the National Archives, as part of the national patrimony of Iraq.

Records obtained by the Iraq Memory Foundation. The Iraq Memory Foundation, a U.S.-based non-governmental organization (NGO), went to Baghdad shortly after the invasion and began gathering as many documents as it could find. Under the laws of war, such actions may be considered an act of pillage, which is specifically forbidden by the 1907 Hague Convention. The Foundation’s website says its main holdings are “a collection of 2.4 million pages of official Iraqi documents captured by Iraqi Kurdish groups during the 1991 uprising; …a collection of 750,000 pages of Iraqi documents captured in Kuwait after its liberation…in 1991; …approximately 3.0 million pages gathered from Baath Party Regional Command Headquarters in Baghdad following the fall of Saddam in 2003.” This is the body of materials that in January 2008 the Hoover Institution at Stanford University agreed to store. The records of the government bodies and the Baath Party should be returned to the government of Iraq to be maintained as part of the official records in the National Library and Archives.

Records seized by Kurds during the First Gulf War. During the First Gulf War, Kurdish groups seized an estimated eighteen tons of Iraqi records in northern Iraq. These included the records of the Iraqi secret police in the three northern Kurdish governates of Iraq, records of the Baath Party from the region, and records of local and regional governments. These records have been digitized by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. The United States government should appeal to the government of Kurdistan to return this material to the Iraqi government’s National Library and Archives.

Iraqi Jewish archives. In May 2003, the U.S. Army discovered a body of Jewish documents in the basement of the Iraqi Security Services. The materials had been damaged by flooding and mold. Ultimately the materials were flown to the U.S. by the military, freeze dried at a facility in Texas, and then transferred to the U.S. National Archives where they remain, pending conservation and possible digitization. The U.S. has signed an agreement to return this archives to Iraq. The documentary evidence of the historic Iraqi Jewish community is part of the archival patrimony of Iraq. We urge the government to repatriate the records to Iraq as soon as practicable.

posted by Grace Lile

This coming Monday April 14 at the New York Public Library:

“One of the most compelling issues explored by artists in recent years centers on the nature and meaning of the archive, that is, how we create, store, and circulate pictures and information.

Against the standard view of the archive which evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers and filing cabinets with historical artifacts or the dusty shelves of the library, an active archival impulse has emerged which engages the attention of contemporary artists and thinkers as a way of shaping and constructing the meaning of images.

Okwui Enwezor, curator of the exhibition Archive Fever—Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography, will sit down with Paul Holdengräber to talk about the archival impulse at work in museums, libraries, and in various artistic practices. This inquiry will be followed by two conversations between first Christian Boltanski and Luc Sante, and then Lorna Simpson and George Lewis.”

more info at http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=4169

-Grace Lile

The Archives and Human Rights Working Group of the International Council on Archives has published its first newsletter. According to the editorial,

“The newsletter will appear on a monthly basis until the ICA Congress in July 2008. A possible outcome of the Congress could be the establishment of a formalized Network, possibly within the ICA, on archives and human rights. Until the Congress, where new decisions may be taken, the contents of the Newsletter will reflect news and comments that each one of us decides to share. The languages of contributions will be English, French and Spanish. As a general rule, translations will not be provided. But, if at all possible, contributors are invited to send texts in at least two of these languages.”

posted by Grace Lile.

The Orphan Film Symposium made possible a fantastic convergence in NYC of archivists, filmmakers, scholars and students from around the globe this past week, with equal diversity represented in the film and video program. In addition to screenings of animated shorts, educational films, silents, newsreels and government sponsored films, we were pleased to see a number of presentations pertaining to human rights issues.  Along with an offering by our own Grace Lile on the work of WITNESS, some highlights included:

- Lucy Smee from the Asian Film Archive discussed political filmmaking in Singapore, and presented the banned video of Martyn See, SINGAPORE REBEL.  Because of his work, See has been threatened with prosecution by the government and had his camera and footage confiscated. You can see a low quality version of SINGAPORE REBEL here.

- Filmmaker Dan Drasin presented his amazing film from 1961, SUNDAY, considered to be one of the first social protest films of the 1960s. You can view SUNDAY here.

- Library of Congress Nitrate Vault Mgr. George Willemen presented a series of stills from a recently discovered lost reel from the 1926 film THE PASSAIC TEXTILE STRIKE - about the historic strike at six textile mills in Passaic, New Jersey.   You can see the prologue of this film on www.archive.org by clicking here.

- Marsha Orgeron of North Carolina State University and Mark Toscano from the Academy Film Archive (along with Sam Fuller’s widow, Christa Lang Fuller) presented newly preserved film of acclaimed director Sam Fuller’s Falkenau liberation footage from 1945.  You can see a segment here, which includes some of Fuller’s own commentary on the footage.

-Chad Hunter, WITNESS Media Archive

WITNESS Media Archive staff will participate in the Orphans Film Symposium this week.

What is an orphan film?

From the Orphans website: Narrowly defined, it’s a motion picture abandoned by its owner or caretaker. More generally, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, unreleased films, industrial and educational movies, independent documentaries, ethnographic films, newsreels, censored material, underground works, experimental pieces, silent-era productions, stock footage, found footage, medical films, kinescopes, small- and unusual-gauge films, amateur productions, surveillance footage, test reels, government films, advertisements, sponsored films, student works, and sundry other ephemeral pieces of celluloid (or paper or glass or tape or . . . ).

Taking place for the first time in New York City, this 6th incarnation of the Symposium will focus on “works of/about/by/against/under ‘the state,’ broadly conceived. Speakers will address the role of orphan films in recording, representing, constructing, and imagining the state, as well as the work of state-run AV archives worldwide.”

Included in the three day line-up will be this session listed below - focusing on human rights, and will include a presentation by WITNESS Media Archive Manager Grace Lile:

Watching Human Rights

• Laura Kissel (USC) Representations of Human Disability in Scientific and Educational Films
• Jason Livingston (Ithaca College) Onondagas vs. NYS (Phil Mallory Jones and the Ithaca Video Project 1972)
• Grace Lile (Witness Media Archive) amateur video as agent for human rights
• Mona Jimenez (NYU MIAP) chair

Stay tuned for a report from the Symposium.

Thanks to everyone at Duke for a great visit. I had the opportunity to meet and speak with a great group of archivists there, as well as to screen Missing Lives: Disappearances and Impunity in the North Caucasus to a more general audience. Produced with partner Human Rights Center Memorial, the video documents the problem of enforced disappearances and torture, as a hallmark of the second Chechen war, and now spreading to neighboring republics. For more visit the Hub.

On the plane home I read Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’s New Yorker article, Exposure: the Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib, a postmortem (as it were) on the Abu Ghraib photographs taken by Sabrina Harman and others. I haven’t seen Morris’s film yet but the article is superb. One comes away both repelled by and sympathetic to Harman, appalled at her actions and yet acutely aware that her drive to document, however perverse, allowed the Abu Ghraib story to emerge. Harman, along with a number of other recruits who took or appeared in photographs, was court-martialled and convicted; the interrogators were not. What’s fascinating to me - as an archivist of images, often of abuse and suffering - is knowing the story behind the images; even a single, static photograph is endlessly complex in terms of how it came to be, its creator’s motives or point of view, its literal truthfulness versus its symbolic truthfulness. Gourevitch/Morris describe the circumstances of the most famous of the photographs, of a man the MPs dubbed Gilligan, hooded, shrouded, attached to electrical wires, standing on a box. They write:

“…the power of an image does not necessarily lie in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information, while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent, in large part because they have a terrible, reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols…”

“The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.”

Next week I’ll be visiting and speaking at the Archive for Human Rights at Duke University. I’ll be screening a recent Memorial/WITNESS video, Missing Lives: Disappearances and Impunity in the Northern Caucasus, and talk about some of the production and archiving processes and challenges; the announcement is here. I’m looking forward to seeing the Duke Archive; it is a fairly new initiative but is off to a dynamic start under the guidance of Patrick Stawski, its first human rights archivist. Collections include papers of local grass-roots organizations, as well as the video collection assembled in the 1990s by the International Monitor Institute.