“A true reflection of who I was at the time”: authenticity and artifice in video diary confessions.
Tony Dowmunt, Goldsmiths
In the offered promise of both access to television by outsiders and ‘non-professionals’ – and of less mediated, more authentic versions of themselves and their lives made by these outsiders, the video diary form was arguably the most important ‘genre’. Almost two decades later (the Big Brother Diary room having come and almost gone), the video diary, with its intimate confessions to camera, has become so familiar a convention that it is as easily parodied as previously valorised documentary techniques for capturing the ‘authentically real’.
So in what ways (if any) is the video diary form now still viable? Using a range of examples from my own and others work, this presentation will attempt to show how the (often reflexive) relationship of diarist to camera keeps alive an effective balancing act between mediation and ‘authenticity’, and so has continuing relevance.
Access All Areas Symposium 