"Stranger With a Camera" summary

In Elizabeth Barret's documentary, "Stranger with a Camera", she explores the diverse cultures and understandings of her local community in Kentucky, while giving a fair representation of Hobart Ison’s and Hugh O' Connor's stories. Ison and O' Connor are on opposite sides of the camera lens. Ison is a local, hard working and proud resident of Kentucky's Appalachian region whose biggest fear is being humiliated by his lifestyle; while O' Connor is a well acclaimed Canadian filmmaker who really values his work and was asked to do a segment on the breadth of American experience. "I had to do it. What would he have done to me picture-wise and all?" Hobart Ison says after shooting and killing Hugh O' Connor for trespassing on his property. When one of Ison's tenants-Mason Elbridge-allowed O' Connor and his crew to videotape him and his baby, after a day working at the coal mines, he thought it would benefit the town and bring more job opportunities to the area. Ison felt quite the opposite; he looked at it as an invasion of privacy, and a slap in the face. When Ison was contacted by a local woman that O' Connor was videotaping on his property, he went over and told him and his crew to, "get off my property". He fired two shots, hitting nobody and when O' Connor turned around to tell him they were leaving, Ison shot him. O' Connor's last words were, "Why did you have to do that?"
Elizabeth Barret takes into consideration both sides of the story and realizes that she's on the other side of the camera now and how careful she has to be while portraying the stories. "Can filmmakers show poverty without shaming the people we portray? I came to see that there was a complex relationship between social action and social embarrassment." She asks these important questions to further her search into filmmaker’s points of views and what their films are products of. She also states, "As someone who lives here, I have an instinct to protect my community from those who would harm it. What are the responsibilities of any of us who take the images of other people and put them to our own uses?" Barret questions if we should even be allowed to film such things as people living in poverty and if we should, how far do we take it and how should it be portrayed? I believe that people shouldn't have any right to film without permission from the people or letting them be very aware of what they’re filming for and why. It's a violation of privacy and makes people feel uncomfortable and unaware. Ison shot because he felt threatened and didn't want to face the embarrassment, he felt, of his lifestyle being broadcasted everywhere. What if it was the other way around; if the people in poverty were the ones filming the filmmakers, how would they feel? I believe that if we put ourselves in each other's shoes, we may gain more of a sense of reality as to what's really going on, and how our actions affect others. If, for in order for the truth to be told, it has to be caught on film, shouldn't there be some boundaries to follow in order to protect our rights as human beings? And if there are no boundaries, what will stop other incidents like the Ison and O' Connor one to re-occur?