During the sixties the Appalachian region was the image of poverty in America. Lyndon B Johnson had declared a “War on Poverty” there. Bobby Kennedy walked the streets of small eastern Kentucky towns for the cameras show the poverty little kids grew up in. Or at least that is what the documentary filmmakers showed and showing that cost one of them their life. Hobart Ison gunned down Hugh O’Conner an experienced director for the National Film Board of Canada out of fear of how he would represent his land and the area he had lived his life in. In “Stranger with a Camera” documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Barret explores the tension that led up to this murder and what the responsibilities are of the documentary filmmakers when they are representing a group. What had drove LBJ to declare a “War on Poverty” in southeastern Kentucky was the book “Night Comes to the Cumberlands” by Harry Caudill a lawyer that felt that it was necessary to tell about the poverty and how the region was being exploited for its coal. Once the war was declared the area was “inundated with picture takers” (Barret) wanting to capture the poverty to show the world. One of those picture takers was O’Conner a Canadian filmmaker that had been hired to film a piece on the Appalachians for a film called “US” that was going to show the achievements of the country and the underside of the country. O` Conner had spent sometime filming in Lecher County, Kentucky and was on his way out of town when he saw a coal miner sitting on his front porch holding his child still covered in coal dust. O` Conner and his crew stopped and got permission to film from Mason Elbridge to film him and his family. As they were filming Elbridge’s landlord, Hobart Ison, came driving up and jumped out of his car with a gun. He begin to yell, “Get off my property” but the film crew didn’t move fast enough for him so he shot O` Conner in the chest killing him. Mr. Islon’s reasoning for this was he feared character assassination by camera; he feared how he would be represented for renting out shanties and how the region would be represented when all the filmmakers filmed were the poorest people. This leads Barret to ask the question “[w]hat are the responsibilities of any of us who take images of other people and put them to our own uses” (Barret)? This is an interesting question to ask because you can do so much good and yet so much bad with a camera. You can alert the world to a crisis in some far off place or you can condemn a group to be known by a stereotype since that is all that the world ever sees. Colin Low a member of the National Film Board of Canada says it best when he says “a camera is like a gun… it’s threatening” (Low). And like a gun that threat can be equally used to bring about justice or condemnation.