River Runs Through Us - Engaged Documentary Practice

Without documentary photographs, so many of the realities of social life and history would be subject to memory, debate, and conjecture. The history of photography has always been closely associated with reality -- a visual proof of natural facts and an extension of human sight. Traveling cameras have provided us with distant lands, terrible wars, natural disaster, and human calamity. Little of the visible world has gone unrecorded, yet our understanding and response has moved at a slower pace than one might imagine. Can photographs still evoke the type of social change the early realists sought? Have our personal sentiments been jaded by a constant barrage of images to a point of over-saturation and insensitivity? Where do documentary photographs belong – the museum, the gallery, the newspaper, the picture magazine, the Internet, or in our college curriculum? These are some of the questions we hope to explore within the conference presentations, panels, and exhibitions.

The idea for this conference grew out of a multi-year project the University of Michigan-Flint undertook known as the Green Arts project. Partnering with academic units in Theater, English, Biology, Earth Resource Science and Visual Art, a group of faculty sought to explore environmental stewardship and information through diverse aesthetic expression. To date we have produced a theatrical play, a series of poems, and a series of student photographs that use the Flint RIver watershed as a model using their vision to advance the ideas with the mission of Green Arts.
This MWSPE conference and its topic is the culmination of these ideals.