Chapter 1: Positionality: Turning the Camera Around

The question is not only ‘Can I tell this story?’ The better question is: ‘Why me, why this story, and what does it cost the people in my frame?’

— Tamara Perkins, “Whose Story Is This?”

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

Define positionality and explain why it shapes every documentary decision, from subject choice to final cut.
Articulate your own background, values, and proximity to the communities you want to document.
Distinguish between story instinct (what compels you) and story access (what you have the right to tell).
Apply this book’s five guiding questions, beginning with “Why me, and why this story?”, to a story idea of your own.
Begin a filmmaker’s journal practice that will carry through the rest of this book.

1.1 The Film Begins Before the Camera

Most filmmaking guides begin with equipment, or with story. This one begins with you.

Every documentary starts long before anyone presses record. It starts with the filmmaker: with where you grew up, what you have lived through, what you believe, whom you trust, and what you have never had reason to question. Those things decide which stories catch your attention in the first place. They decide whom you approach, how you approach them, and which of their words you will keep when you sit down to edit. The camera records what is in front of it, but it is pointed, framed, and switched on and off by a person, and that person is never neutral.

This is not a flaw to be engineered out. There is no “view from nowhere” in nonfiction filmmaking, and the films that pretend otherwise often do the most harm, because they present one person’s perspective as simply the way things are. The goal is not to erase yourself from your work. The goal is to see yourself clearly enough that you can take responsibility for what you bring.

So this chapter asks you to do something that most production courses skip: turn the camera around. Not to make a film about yourself, though some of you will, but to understand what you carry into every room where you point a camera at someone else.

1.2 What Positionality Means

Positionality is the specific place you occupy in the world, and how that place shapes what you see, what you know, and what power you hold. It is formed by race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, language, immigration history, religion, age, education, and geography, and by the particular experiences that cut across all of those categories. The term comes from feminist and decolonial scholarship, where researchers began asking how the identity of the person doing the studying shaped what got studied, how, and to whose benefit.

It can be tempting to believe that the creative imagination floats free of all this: that a good enough artist can access universal emotions and tell anyone’s story. There is truth in that. You cannot give the people on your screen an emotional depth you have never found in yourself. But the poet Claudia Rankine and the writer Beth Loffreda argue that the imagination is not a neutral space outside history. It was formed in a particular body, in a particular community, under particular conditions. Your access to universal emotion is necessary, but it is not sufficient. My imagination, like yours, was formed by everything that formed me, and when I put a camera on a person, that history comes with me.

Three ideas make positionality useful to a documentary filmmaker rather than abstract.

Positionality is relational

You do not have one fixed position. You have a position relative to each story, each community, and each person you film. A first-generation college student filming her own family occupies a very different position than the same student filming a hospital’s administrators, or a neighborhood across town. The question is never only “Who am I?” It is “Who am I to these people, in this story?”

Insider and outsider are not the only options

It is tempting to sort filmmakers into insiders, who may tell a story, and outsiders, who may not. Real situations are messier. You may share a subject’s neighborhood but not their immigration status; their faith but not their generation; their diagnosis but not their class. Insiders carry their own blind spots: assumptions so familiar they become invisible, loyalties that make some truths hard to film, and the risk of exposing people who trusted them as a neighbor rather than as a filmmaker. Outsiders can make accountable films, usually by slowing down, building real relationships, and sharing authority with people who know the world from the inside. Think of proximity as a spectrum, and expect to sit at different points on it for different parts of the same story.

The camera is a form of power

Whatever your identity, the moment you pick up a camera to make a film about someone else, you hold power they do not. You decide what is recorded, what is cut, how they are framed, what music plays under their words, and who sees the result. Even a student with a phone, working on a three-minute class project, holds this power. Acknowledging it is not an act of guilt; it is the precondition for using it responsibly.

A Lesson from History: Nanook of the North

Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is often called the first feature-length documentary. It is also a case study in positionality. Flaherty, a white American explorer, staged scenes to show Inuit life as he imagined it had been rather than as it was, and he presented the result to Western audiences as authentic. The film shaped how outsiders pictured Arctic peoples for generations.

Writing on the film’s centennial, Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk) traces how the film’s gaze, and the “salvage” logic behind it, outlived the film itself. Flaherty’s position as an outsider was not the only problem. The deeper problem was that he did not reckon with it, and so his perspective was taken for the truth.

A Different Origin Story: Zora Neale Hurston

Documentary history is often told as if it began with Flaherty. It did not. Alice Guy-Blaché, the first woman to direct films, was making short nonfiction “actualities” from 1896 onward. And in 1928 and 1929, while Nanook was still shaping how the world saw Arctic peoples, the anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston was filming in the rural South: Black communities she belonged to, including children’s games, work, and song.

Hurston was an insider documenting from within a tradition that was her own, decades before anyone had a name for that approach. Same medium, same era, entirely different ethics of looking. Set her fieldwork footage beside Nanook and you can see positionality on screen: one camera explains a people to outsiders; the other is held by someone who belongs. Both are part of documentary’s origins. This book asks you to learn from both.

1.3 Story Instinct and Story Access

Filmmakers are drawn to stories for real and often good reasons: a sense of injustice, a personal connection, a curiosity that will not go away. Call this your story instinct. It is the engine of your creative life, and you should trust it as information.

But instinct is not the same as story access: the relationship, trust, and standing that would let you tell a story with integrity. Feeling drawn to a story does not mean you have been invited into it. Many of the most damaging documentaries were made by filmmakers whose instinct was sincere and whose access was thin.

A useful way to hold the difference is to ask a simple question of any idea you have:

Is this a story someone is asking me to tell, or one I have decided to tell about someone else?

Neither answer automatically rules a project in or out. But the answer changes what you owe, how long the work will take, and who should be beside you while you make it. If you find that question hard to answer, that difficulty is important. Sitting with it, rather than rushing past it, is part of the work this book asks of you.

1.4 Five Questions for Every Film

I have been making co-creative documentaries for twenty years. Over that time I have come to rely on five questions. I ask them before I approach anyone about a film, and I keep asking them long after the film is released. They are the framework for this book, and you will meet each of them again in the chapters ahead.

Why me, and why this story? Am I an outsider looking in, or do I carry proximity, through lived experience, family, or survival, that shapes what I see and what I am responsible for? (This chapter.)
What does my presence cost the people I am filming? What exposure, what vulnerability, what loss of control over their own story? Have I made it possible for them to say no, change their mind, or withdraw? (Chapters 3, 4, and 6.)
Whose gaze is operating in this film? Am I reproducing the extractive gaze of the ethnographic tradition, or making a different kind of film? (Chapters 1, 3, and 7.)
What will happen to the people in my film after it is in the world? Have I thought seriously about that, and done what I can so that the film’s success does not come at the cost of their safety or self-determination? (Chapters 5 and 8.)
Am I telling the story, or holding space for it? Both are legitimate ways to make a documentary, but they carry different kinds of power. Knowing which film you are making, and being honest about it, is essential. (Chapters 3, 5, and 6.)

Notice that none of these is a rule about what you may or may not film. They are practices of honesty. The first is also a decision you make before you send a single message to a potential participant, which is why this book begins with it.

In Good Company: The Documentary Accountability Working Group

Co-creative, accountable documentary practice has a long history, carried by community media makers, Indigenous filmmakers, and movement-based collectives long before it had the names we use now. One of the most useful recent contributions is From Reflection to Release (2023), a free framework from the Documentary Accountability Working Group (DAWG), a collective of nonfiction filmmakers and practitioners. It sets out six core values and walks through each phase of production, from the first reflection on whether a film should be made to its release.

I have been glad to be part of the community around that work, and I recommend the framework to every reader of this book as a companion to the five questions here. It is available in English and Spanish at docaccountability.org/framework. Each chapter’s Further Reading points to the part of DAWG’s framework that matches it.

From the Field: An Invitation, Not an Idea

I have been making documentaries for more than twenty years. I am a survivor of gun violence, and a family member directly affected by incarceration. These are not credentials; they are not what make a film good or its ethics sound. But they are part of why I chose this work, and part of what I bring into every room where I point a camera. The proximity that filmmakers like me carry into social justice documentary is rarely discussed as a formal condition of the work. I believe it should be.

I first came to San Quentin State Prison not as a filmmaker but as a yoga instructor, at a health fair co-organized by men serving life sentences and the Alameda County Public Health Department. I began teaching a weekly class there and mentoring men in an organization called The TRUST. I did not walk in without fear. I survived gun violence as a teenager, and I carried that fear through the gates of San Quentin. “I was really scared,” I told an interviewer years later, “because I was a crime survivor.”

But that experience also left me with a question I could not stop asking: What happened to push the people who hurt me toward violence? That question is what carried me past my fear. I kept coming back. For a year, I simply showed up and listened. Then, at the debrief for the second annual health fair, two of The TRUST’s leaders, Noel and Harrison, learned I was a filmmaker and asked me to tell their story. That invitation, extended by people who had spent a year deciding whether to trust me, is where Life After Life (2018) began. The film took ten years and more than four hundred hours of footage to become seventy-two minutes on screen.

My proximity mattered, and so did its limits. I am not Harrison or Noel or Chris, the third man in the film. I did not grow up in the system they grew up in, and I do not carry what they carry. The film is not my story, but it is my responsibility. The gap between those two things is where the ethics of documentary practice live.

1.5 Practice: Turning the Camera Around

The three activities below build on each other. Work through them in order, and keep what you write: you will return to these pages throughout the book, and the idea you choose in Activity 1.3 is the one you will develop, chapter by chapter, into a finished short documentary.

Activity 1.1 · Your Filmmaker’s Origin Statement

Write a Filmmaker’s Origin Statement of 250–400 words. This is not a formal bio. Write in your own voice, as honestly as you can. You will revise it as your project develops. Let these questions guide you, without answering them one by one:

Where do you come from, geographically, culturally, and in terms of the communities that shaped you? What do you know deeply because of where you have been?
What experiences in your life, including painful or difficult ones, have shaped what you pay attention to?
Which communities, issues, or stories feel urgent to you as a filmmaker? Where does that urgency come from?
Which communities or stories do you know you do not understand well, and what would it take to document them responsibly?
What do you want your documentary work to do in the world?

Warm-up option: If you are stuck, try a “Where I’m From” list in the spirit of George Ella Lyon’s well-known poem: a rapid list of the objects, foods, sayings, places, and people that made you. Write what you know before you decide what to film.

Activity 1.2 · The Story Instinct Map

List three documentary ideas you are genuinely drawn to. They need not be fully formed: a person, a place, a question, a community, a tension you have noticed. For each, complete the row honestly.

Story Instinct Map
Idea	What draws you to it?	Your proximity to this world	Who else has told this story, and how?
1
2
3

Then write a short reflection (100–150 words): What do your three ideas have in common? What do they reveal about where your attention goes, and why?

Activity 1.3 · Positionality Audit

Choose the idea from Activity 1.2 that you are most drawn to. This is the project you will carry through the book. Answer each question in three to five specific sentences.

Power check. Who holds power in the world of this story? Who is vulnerable? What is your relationship to each? Could your telling reinforce a harmful narrative, and how will you work against that?
Motivation check. What do you want from this story: career, understanding, justice, change? Be honest. The people you film will sense your motivations whether you name them or not. What would it look like to share them openly?
Proximity check. What do you know about this world from the inside? What do you know only from the outside? What would you need to learn, or whom would you need alongside you, to tell it with integrity?
The invitation question. Is this a story someone is asking you to tell, or one you have decided to tell about someone else? What is the difference, and does it matter here?

If Question 4 was difficult, do not skip past it. The practice described in this book works toward invited and collaborative storytelling, and not every story you are drawn to will be one you have been invited into. That tension is information, and later chapters will give you tools to work with it.

1.6 The Filmmaker’s Journal

Alongside your project, keep a filmmaker’s journal for the life of the film. It is a private record of your thinking, not a polished document, and it can take any form that helps you think: writing, sketches, voice memos. Each chapter ends with a prompt. Over time, the journal becomes evidence of how your understanding changed, and that record will matter when you write about your film in Chapters 5 and 8.

Journal Prompt 1

Return to your Filmmaker’s Origin Statement. Identify one thing you wrote that surprised you, or one thing you chose not to write and could not stop thinking about. What does that reveal about the story you are preparing to tell?

New to journaling? Begin with “When I think about the story I want to make, I keep coming back to…” and write until you run out of things to say.

Key Terms

Positionality: The specific place a person occupies in the world, shaped by identity and experience, and the way that place shapes what they see, know, and have power over. In documentary, always relative to a particular story and set of people.
Proximity: How close a filmmaker stands to the world of a story, understood as a spectrum rather than an insider/outsider binary.
Story instinct: The pull a filmmaker feels toward a subject, issue, or question.
Story access: The relationship, trust, and standing that would let a filmmaker tell a story with integrity. Distinct from physical access or permission to film.
Invited story: A story the people within it have asked, or agreed, to have told with the filmmaker, as opposed to one the filmmaker has decided to tell about them.
Salvage ethnography: The practice of recording a culture presumed to be “vanishing,” often by staging an imagined past, as in Nanook of the North.

Review and Discussion

Why does this book treat positionality as a production question rather than only a personal one? Name two specific filmmaking decisions it affects.
Describe a situation in which a filmmaker could be an insider to a story in one respect and an outsider in another. What would each position help and hinder?
What is the difference between story instinct and story access? Can a filmmaker build access over time? What might that involve?
Flaherty’s identity is not the only issue with Nanook of the North. What is the deeper problem, and how might the five questions in Section 1.4 have changed the film?
Think of a documentary you have seen recently. What can you infer about the filmmaker’s positionality from the film itself?

Works Cited

Brown, Natalie Bullock. “A Story of True Reflection — With Love.” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, 2023.

Documentary Accountability Working Group. From Reflection to Release: A Framework for Accountable Nonfiction Filmmaking. 2023. CC BY-SA 4.0, docaccountability.org/framework.

Flaherty, Robert J., director. Nanook of the North. Pathé Exchange, 1922.

Green, Pamela B., director. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché. Zeitgeist Films, 2018.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Fieldwork footage, 1928–1929. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

Kalish, Jon. “What Happens When a Director’s Camera Is Pointed at Their Own Family?” All Things Considered, NPR, 2023.

Perkins, Tamara, director. Life After Life. Apple of Discord Productions, 2018.

Perkins, Tamara. “Whose Story Is This? On the Ethics of Documentary Practice, Co-Creation, and the Responsibility of the Camera.” Lecture-essay, Apple of Discord Productions, rev. 2025.

Piron, Adam. “The 100-Year Stain of ‘Nanook of the North.’” Documentary, International Documentary Association, 2022.

Rankine, Claudia, and Beth Loffreda. “On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary.” Literary Hub, 2015.

“Tamara Perkins, 2019 MFA in Film.” Vermont College of Fine Arts, Summer 2021, vcfa.edu/stories/tamara-perkins-2019-mfa-in-film.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–40.

About this chapter. Written by Tamara Perkins, drawing on twenty years of co-creative documentary practice and her lecture-essay “Whose Story Is This?” The Life After Life account is adapted from that essay. For a companion framework, see Phase 1, “Reflection,” in the Documentary Accountability Working Group’s From Reflection to Release (2023), listed in Further Reading.

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