Nov./Dec., 2000 — A common criticism of documentary photographers is that, despite the best of intentions, they often wind up victimizing their subjects, casting them as characters or symbols rather than as individuals. An ambitious project organized by Tom Rankin at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and Trudy Wilner Stack at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona has set out to present a more nuanced version of the photo-documentary. Through photographs and oral histories, Indivisible: Stories of American Community (on view through November 26 at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago) presents local activism and grassroots democracy in a dozen communities throughout the United States. The exhibition is based on the "fieldwork" (generally between two and three weeks worth) of 12 photographers and 10 interviewers who documented, among other local organizations, a marine conservation program in North Pacific Coast, Alaska; a street patrol in a community of recent Haitian immigrants in Delray Beach, Florida; a group of Navajo Nation cultural activists in the Southwest; and a midwife practice in Stony Book, New York. Funded by the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, the exhibition is scheduled to travel to nine museums through 2003, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum in Ohio, and the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas. By allowing the photographers and interviewers a certain degree of artistic freedom, but also focusing on the voices of those being interviewed, Rankin says the project has "wedded the methodologies of ethnography with that of a public art commission, creating a portrait of this country that is interdisciplinary in nature."

Dawoud Bey, Bill Burke, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Lucy Capehart, Lynn Davis, Terry Evans, Lauren Greenfield, Joan Liftin, Reagan Louie, Danny Lyon, Sylvia Plachy, and Eli Reed are the photographers: the interviewers are journalist Merle Augustin, National Public Radio (NPR) contributor Dan Collison, documentary filmmaker Barry Dornfeld, writer/producer George King, radio producer Jack Loeffler, folklorist Jens Lund, NPR reporter Karen Michel, scholar Daniel Rothenberg, documentary photographer and writer Jeff Whetstone, and writer and editor Joe Wood. In addition to the exhibition, the project includes a Web site, a book, Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible, and a postcard exhibition with some three million postcards available free on charge at about 30 venues nationwide, including train stations, libraries, student unions, and airports. "The postcard, that most vernacular presenter of the photographic image, in also a profound metaphor for seeing these images, and the interview excerpts on the back, as part of community life and understanding," says Rankin.

Some of the project’s "local heroes" include members of CHALK (Communities in Harmony Advocating for Learning and Kids), a San Francisco-based toll-free phone service run from noon to midnight by staffers between 16 and 22 years old, who are trained to help young callers; Diné bí’íín’ Inc. (Navajo Lifeways), a group of Navajo herders and weavers who are trying to revive sheep farming in the Navajo community; and HandMade in America, which is attempting to breathe new life into local North Carolina economies based on handmade objects—furniture, quilts, and clothing.

Indivisible has some obvious predecessors in the documentary tradition: Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and the Farm Security Administration photographs come to mind. But what makes the project unique, according to Rankin, is the way it gives voice to so many individuals, matching "the documentary artistic expression of photographers and oral history interviewers with work and action in 12 distinct communities, bearing witness to what it means to live responsibly in a particular place."

For the exhibition schedule or more information about the project, visit the Web site, www.indivisible.org, or call 1-877-INDIV99.