Exploitation and documentary contributors

TY - CHAP

T1 - Exploitation and documentary contributors

AU - Coleman, Emily

PY - 2025/7/1

Y1 - 2025/7/1

N2 - Documentaries are increasingly understood as a site of exploitation, where ordinary people are manipulated by the media, their naivety taken advantage of, and their wellbeing sacrificed for the greater goal of making the film. From Nanook of the North (1922), who died in poverty whilst Robert Flaherty’s film shot to global success; to the Harlem drag queens whose subculture was allegedly appropriated in Paris is Burning (1990); to the children of Être et Avoir (2002), who were excluded from the documentary’s financial success – the academic literature contains numerous examples of ordinary people who are apparently exploited during the production process, casting doubt over whether documentary participation can ever be an ethical pursuit? But incidences of exploitation are often assumed by scholars, critics and audiences without a broader understanding of how these experiences are lived. The views of the actual people who are being represented have been largely absent from public debates, and the term ‘exploitation’ itself is often used without due consideration of what it means in this context. In this chapter, I explore the concept of exploitation and how it applies to the participation of ordinary people in documentary productions in the UK. Drawing upon a series of in-depth interviews, I consider whether documentary contributors inevitably feel exploited and abused by the media, or if they are getting something meaningful out of the arrangement too?

AB - Documentaries are increasingly understood as a site of exploitation, where ordinary people are manipulated by the media, their naivety taken advantage of, and their wellbeing sacrificed for the greater goal of making the film. From Nanook of the North (1922), who died in poverty whilst Robert Flaherty’s film shot to global success; to the Harlem drag queens whose subculture was allegedly appropriated in Paris is Burning (1990); to the children of Être et Avoir (2002), who were excluded from the documentary’s financial success – the academic literature contains numerous examples of ordinary people who are apparently exploited during the production process, casting doubt over whether documentary participation can ever be an ethical pursuit? But incidences of exploitation are often assumed by scholars, critics and audiences without a broader understanding of how these experiences are lived. The views of the actual people who are being represented have been largely absent from public debates, and the term ‘exploitation’ itself is often used without due consideration of what it means in this context. In this chapter, I explore the concept of exploitation and how it applies to the participation of ordinary people in documentary productions in the UK. Drawing upon a series of in-depth interviews, I consider whether documentary contributors inevitably feel exploited and abused by the media, or if they are getting something meaningful out of the arrangement too?

M3 - Chapter

BT - The Ethics of Documentary Film

A2 - Piotrowska, Agnieszka

PB - Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

ER -