The moment I found particularly interesting was when William Carlos Williams described his experience with writing about the low-income families he encountered while practicing as a doctor. His writing would be in the form of recollection- writing from his home in Rutherford, an incredibly wealthy area, while remembering events from an impoverished town. The safety of the location he was in caused Williams to struggle with his writing, and the morality of the fact that he could simply leave when he was done gathering experiences, yet the people he was writing about were forced to remain there. This helps illustrate the idea of location through the problem of presence. When Williams is working as a doctor, he is participating in the lives of the subjects he writes about, but when he writes about them, he isn’t even in the same town as them. In describing location in this way, Williams and Coles show to me that location can be completely literal in meaning the actual place where documentary work is being done, a particular moment in time that cannot be replicated in words in a future tense. This description reminded me of an experience I had a few years back, when I went to a CSI camp at Stockton college. For one of the days, we visited a jail, a group of teenage girls being walked through the hallways by wardens and counseled. We were leered at and catcalled by the prisoners, yet a thick pane of glass separated us, and we were never really “there” with them- when we left, we really left, back to the freedoms and comforts of the dorms we were staying in. I imagined myself as a prisoner and how I would feel when I left, and when that day ended, so did my experience with that location. I couldn’t tell you half of what I saw that day, simply because I don’t remember, but also because it was just that: a day. This was not my life, and I would never be able to translate it in words like it was.
harryhurley. “Here’s How Atlantic County, NJ Keeps Defendants in Jail Pending Trial.” WPG Talk Radio 95.5 FM, 29 Apr. 2025, wpgtalkradio.com/heres-how-atlantic-county-nj-keeps-defendants-in-jail-pending-trial/. Accessed 18 Sept. 2025.
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