Reading Response to Defiant Images

Turners general point in his article Defiant Images is “The act of video making itself, when done by an indigenous person or member of a local community, begins to 'mediate' a variety of social and political relationships within the indigenous community in a way that has no exact parallel when the video maker is an outsider, as is the usual case in documentary and anthropological film and video-making” Throughout his article he uses many different examples to support this theisis. He talks about the Kayapo encounters with western culture (brazil) and how their cameramen were included in the footage of the political events going on. Here, the Kayapo began to see video as an event to be recorded rather then just seeing video as just a way of recording an event. Being a cameraperson means combining an important role in the community with a “culturally and politically important” form of mediation with the west. It is this relationship that provides us with a way of interacting with and communicating ideas to the world.