Candid thoughts on the Not-so candid Camera

White, Shirley, ed. Participatory Video: Images that Transform and Empower. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003. 412 pp. ISBN 0761997636

Chapter 7: "Candid thoughts on the Not-so candid Camera: How Video Documentation Radically Alters Development Projects" by Barbara Seidl

In this chapter Seidl uses her own PV experiences from the past 10 years to outline some of the positive and negative impacts from the presence of a camera in development projects. Within the 3 stages of documentation (pre-production, production, and screening), there are many intentional and unintentional changes that occur due to the camera team. Seidl focuses heavily on bias.

In cases of public broadcasting, there is the bias of the audience as well as the director. Depending on the topic of the research or audience, the frame excludes a large amount of potentially interesting and educational material (p. 162). The director's bias, "operationally, ... means that while documenting someone else's story [the director] knows what is and is not important (p. 162). Many of the below positives and negatives are a result of bias.

Pre-production benefits include (1) focusing of mission, by asking for a definite mission, (2) clear identification of leadership, (3) clear identification of priorities,(4) increase in project's productivity,and (5) increase in organization's credibility.
Pre-production hazards include (1) inadvertently changing the leadership structure, (3) discovering disagreement about the mission or objectives, and (4) Diluting the power of the story.

Production benefits include (1) increased exposure and (2) creation of an opportunity to publicly recognize supporters, leaders, and participants
Production hazards include (1) creation of a very visible and public forum for dissention and (2) a radical drop in productivity because of the presence of the camera.

Chapter 4: "Participatory Video that Empowers" - Renuka Bery

Through the power of the video maker's ability to engage viewers to internalize stories, redefine issues, and take initiative to exercise their own power, "PV helps to rearticulate the locus of power within individual communities and ultimately politics." (p. 103). Empowerment is not inherent to PV, and in fact, is only a tool for achieving an empowered status. The author outlines many steps towards achieving empowerment through the use of PV. reminding the reader that "the strength of the tool is only as powerful as the person wielding it." (p. 105).

Reflection

Contrary to my style with the other books, largely due to the prodding of a friend I delved into this book by first picking out the seemingly most relevant chapters.

In chapter 4, Bery unashamedly refers to PV as though it is completely contained within the realm of successful empowerment strategy, without bothering to remind the reader that this is only under very certain conditions. For instance, she uses the example of a woman interviewing politicians with a camera as giving her an immediate shift in power as she was suddenly noticed by the politicians. This may be an extreme example but it certainly illustrates the point. In this case, she does not bother to mention why the woman was interviewing the politicians, and how much of it was her own initiative, and whether or not she had prior experience in journalism, etc.

If there is one thing that my summer fieldwork taught me, it is that although PV has the potential to disturb the power balance, I don't really think that the immediate impact of physical cameras on the power dynamics in a rural Third World community is likely to be a positive one. Logically, power structures can only be changed as quickly as new ones can be rebuilt and old ones torn down. The introduction of PV into a community, however, is much more immediate, and therefore incapable of fundamentally affecting power structures in a sustainable fashion. On the contrary, immediate effects seem intuitively more likely t0 disturb the structure just enough to agitate it into action, with the more powerful agents feeling threatened.