What Are The Origins of Participatory Video?
The first experiments in PV were the work of Don Snowden, a Canadian who pioneered the idea of using media to enable a people-centered community development approach. Then Director of the Extension Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Snowden worked with filmmaker Colin Low and the National Film Board of Canada's Challenge for Change program to apply his ideas in Fogo Island, Newfoundland, a small fishing community. By watching each other’s films, the different villagers on the island came to realise that they shared many of the same problems and that by working together they could solve some of them. the films were also shown to politicians who lived too far away and were too busy to actually visit the island. As a result of this dialogue, government policies and actions were changed. The techniques developed by Snowden became known as the Fogo process. Snowden went on to apply the Fogo process all over the world until his death in India in 1984.
The first community-made video in Canada was the 1969 Challenge for Change video VTR St-Jacques, filmed in a poor Montreal neighbourhood. In order to make VTR St-Jacques, directors Dorothy Henault and Bonnie Sherr Klein trained community members in video to represent their struggle for affordable and accessible medical care. VTR St-Jacques was shown across Canada and the U.S., inspiring other projects.
There has been no uniform movement to promote and practise PV but different individuals and groups have set up pockets of PV work, usually molding it to their particular needs and situations. PV has also grown with the increasing accessibility of home video equipment.
An early and significant book on participatory video was published in the UK in 1997 by Clive Robertson and Jackie Shaw, Directors of Real Time Video, and has informed many subsequent books and articles, including the book this article has drawn from. Real Time are an educational charity that pioneered many of the techniques and methodologies still used today, and have been working in the participatory video field since 1984.
Read more about this topic: Participatory Video
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)