Is this ethnography?
The making of this film was extremely difficult. It takes the viewer from horror to the possibility of joy. I suffered a tremendous emotional downturn for the first four months working on those first three acts. While the two final sections pulled me back towards the living, it took another eight months to fully climb out of that pit of despair and anger. I have never experienced such emotional upheaval as when constructing this piece. There were occasions I sobbed like a baby, even woke up crying in dreams. As I researched and dug, the story wove itself one image at a time. I must have viewed well over 100,000 images from several thousand searches across the world, and by the completion of the project, my mind and spirit were bled near dry. It took a year to stop crying at every little thing. As I viewed and searched and viewed and read and searched and viewed and searched some more, images began to connect to other images and frame by frame, image by image, the story emerged. When it first started, I had no real plan in my head, just to search through images. I had no clue what would emerge, and it wasn’t until parts of the first three sections had manifested that I understood the story and pieced it together. So much context and content.
I see this work as socio-anthropological and as ethnographic because it is a visual and auditory story of us, modern Homo sapiens sapiens as told by our own artifacts. Massive amounts of research and peer review gives the context and content integrity, and what we see, can not be denied. The visual evidence is like a bombardment on the senses; so over-demonstrative and evidenced, especially when seen together, that most challenges to the integrity could not stand, but, what do you think? Is it ethnography?
us_a-trace-taylor-and-the-world-film_dvd.mp4
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Trace Taylor 