Abstract

Abstract:

This essay attempts to frame a decade-long photographic project within the tensions that accompany shifting ideas of best documentary practice. The project follows Jameska McKee, who was fifteen years old at the project’s inception and is now a twenty five year-old nurse, as she comes of age as a young woman in Appalachian Ohio. What is visualized through this endeavor reveals questions about gender roles under stressful socioeconomic circumstances and what self-determination is available in questions of generational poverty. Behind that, there are also the questions that arise as a documentarian across time and the deepening bonds that result from engaging in this kind of work.

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