It is as concerned with, as he has elsewhere written, 'that central matter of moral inquiry: How should we try to live this life?' as any of his books and essays.īob writes that 'each of us brings, finally, a particular life to the others who are being observed in documentary work' and that 'to take stock of others is to call upon oneself.' His own life exemplifies the persistent call on one's own resources in those graced moments of encounter. For all that, Doing Documentary Work is far from academic.

The book, with its sensitive readings of such documentarians as James Agee, George Orwell, William Carlos Williams, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, displays Bob's approach to every topic he has taken up in his remarkable life: the focus on people as exemplars, the self-scrutiny, the refusal to fall into old orthodoxies or to replace them with newer ones, the recognition of and even the pleasures in ambiguity, irony, and contradiction, and the continuous emphasis on any human encounter as an opportunity for moral awakening. When, in the early 1990s, Bob Coles was asked to give a series of 'somewhat academic' lectures on the topic of his choosing at the New York Public Library, he replied, 'Academic! That's a scare word for me!' But he gave the lectures anyway and the resulting 1997 book, Doing Documentary Work, is a classic portrayal of documentary as personal engagement with the world. In each case I had in mind conveying to the reader what about that person, that life, that situation or problem, that series of interviews sheds light upon the central (and vexing) issue this book aims to examine: the relationship between individual lives and the life of a nation- where a crisis has come upon them both.' 'I had to weave together fragments and cut away at long monologues or dialogues. Robert Coles' 1967 study of children and adults in the South during the Civil Rights era is a landmark of documentary 'observation and participation' in modern American literature.

Dorothy Day by Robert Coles