Documentary Resistance

Angela Aguayo reports on “We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media,” a touring retrospective of documentary media projects coprogrammed by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmermann, with archival assistance from the XFR Collective, and featuring forty projects produced by thirty-six nonprofit community organizations and cultural centers. “We Tell” dives into more than fifty years of media as developed by embattled communities with a shared political vision and a focus on advocacy and addressing problems more often excluded from larger public concern. In her review of the exhibition, Aguayo argues that participatory community media presents a critique of representational politics within the larger documentary field and offers a corrective to the tourism tendencies of contemporary documentary-production culture by foregrounding collaborative authorship and collective agency

Agency (philosophy) · Art · Citizen journalism · Exhibition · Foregrounding · Media studies · Participatory culture · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Resistance (ecology) · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Law