Mission statement: The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University teaches, engages in, and presents documentary work grounded in collaborative partnerships and extended fieldwork that uses photography, film/video, audio, and narrative writing to capture and convey contemporary memory, life, and culture. CDS values documentary work that balances community goals with individual artistic expression. CDS promotes documentary work that cultivates progressive change by amplifying voices, advancing human dignity, engendering respect among individuals, breaking down barriers to understanding, and illuminating social injustices. CDS conducts its work for local, regional, national, and international audiences.

Overview: The Center for Documentary Studies, founded in 1989 at Duke University, offers an interdisciplinary program of instruction, production, and presentation in the documentary arts—photography, film/video, narrative writing, audio, and other creative media. Much more than a traditional educational center, CDS encourages experiential learning in diverse environments outside the classroom, with an emphasis on the role of individual artistic expression in advancing broader societal goals.

Created through an endowment from the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies has focused since its early days on cultivating new talent in the documentary field. Programs range widely to include university undergraduate courses, popular summer institutes that attract students from across the country, international awards competitions, award-winning book publishing and radio programming, exhibitions of new and established artists, nationally recognized training for community youth and adults, and fieldwork projects in the U.S. and abroad.

Programs: The Center for Documentary Studies serves as a resource for individuals and groups wishing to learn or develop documentary skills. CDS-sponsored courses taught at Duke University are open to area university students, and an undergraduate certificate program allows Duke students to further concentrate their academic work in documentary studies. Graduates have an opportunity to apply their knowledge through the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program, which connects young documentarians with the resources and needs of nonprofit organizations serving children and their communities. For other adult learners, CDS offers a thriving certificate program in the documentary arts on an open-admissions basis. In addition, a growing number of workshops and institutes provide short-term intensive training and discussion involving documentary tools and topics.

For more than fifteen years Literacy Through Photography (LTP), a CDS program founded by Wendy Ewald, has worked with teachers and children in the Durham Public Schools in learning the use of cameras and the written word as tools for observation and developing creative powers. LTP also offers workshops to help train teachers and community leaders in other parts of the country in the use of the LTP model. Adapting the LTP approach, a project in Arusha, Tanzania, engages Duke students and CDS staff in developing the capacities of local teachers to incorporate visual language in the teaching of many subjects in the country’s curriculum.

CDS offers a number of opportunities for individual documentary project support through its competitive prizes: the biennial CDS / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, the Dorothea Lange – Paul Taylor Prize for a writer / photographer team in the early stages of a project, the Daylight / CDS Photo Awards, the John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards for college students, and the CDS Filmmaker Award, selected from films in competition at the annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. CDS also takes the documentary process a step further, encouraging the effective presentation of documentary work through its book publishing program (CDS Books), an active exhibitions program, film and video events, and a growing involvement with documentary radio.

A national leader in the documentary arts, the Center for Documentary Studies encourages collaborative working arrangements across organizations, disciplines, and mediums. Recent examples of these projects include Five Farms: Stories from American Farm Families, a nationally broadcast radio series, exhibition, and multimedia website involving farmers, audio producers, photographers, students, and public radio stations across the country; Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life, a documentary / public arts project with visiting artist Brett Cook that involved more than 1,500 people in the creation of fourteen large-scale, permanent murals about priest, poet, and attorney Pauli Murray and a neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina; Nuestras Historias, Nuestros Sueños/Our Stories, Our Dreams, a project with Student Action with Farmworkers involving Duke undergraduates, interns from across the country, faculty members, seasoned documentarians, and young people from farmworker families who collected stories about the experiences of Latino immigrants, illuminating their reasons for coming to the U.S. and the obstacles they face once they arrive.

CDS also directs two extensive research projects incorporating in-depth fieldwork: Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South, a major project involving more than 1,200 oral history interviews and thousands of family photographs, and the Jazz Loft Project, devoted to preserving and cataloging audiotapes, researching photographs, and obtaining oral history interviews with all surviving participants from the Manhattan loft of legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith, where major jazz musicians of the day (1957–64), along with countless underground figures, gathered and played their music. Past CDS projects have included Indivisible, a national documentary photography and audio project examining the nature of civic life, community, and grassroots experience in America today, and Youth Document Durham, a nationally recognized program engaging young people from diverse local communities in documentary training and projects that examine their viewpoints and amplify their voices through publications, exhibitions, websites, radio and media projects, public art and community-service projects, and public forums.

For information on how to become a Friend of Documentary Studies, click here.

Click on the image below to see the CDS exhibition spaces with The Innocents: Headshots (Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries) and A Sense of Place (Porch Gallery) on display:














CDS Gallery Hours
Monday–Thursday: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Friday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday: closed





The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
1317 W. Pettigrew Street
Durham, NC 27705

telephone 919-660-3663
fax 919-681-7600
e-mail: docstudies@duke.edu




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Photograph by Christopher Sims