So far in The Stringer it’s all he said/he said between advocates of two variant sentimental favorites: the young Nick Ut who (purportedly) took the photo and saved the girl vs. the lowly unsung stringer who had his glory stolen. Competing narratives with equally credible sources on both sides. […]
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Treated purely as dramaturgy, “The Stringer” is cinematic gold. If this came to you as a fictional Hollywood movie, you’d buy into its storyline in a minute. Which poses a problem in the documentary context, because a good story doesn’t have to be true. It doesn’t have to be credible in every detail. It doesn’t have to prove its case with hard evidence. It only has to be engrossing. […] I’ve tracked the uproar over The Stringer since it first became news. Watching all this unfold has evoked a number of ruminations — not just on that photo, the film, and the charges involved but on the forensic investigation of photographs as a project. […] Mainstream/legacy media’s abject surrender to the oligarchy, the sane-washing of Trumpism, the craven kowtowing and risk-aversion, make it clear there’s no hill they’ll die on. They’ll simply expire. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Straight Outta Stone Ridge: Small-Town Talk (4)
The Swiss architect Le Corbusier defined a private home as a “machine for living.” So this winter, just now ebbing, put our “machine for living” to the test. Which it passed with flying colors. […]