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This collection of essays presents new formulations of ideas and practices within documentary media that respond critically to the multifaceted challenges of our age. As social media, augmented reality, and interactive technologies play an increasing role in the documentary landscape, new theorizations are needed to account for how such media both represents recent political, socio-historical, environmental, and representational shifts, and challenges the predominant approaches by promoting new critical sensibilities. The contributions to this volume approach the idea of "critical distance" in a documentary context and in subjects as diverse as documentary exhibitions, night photography, drone imagery, installation art, mobile media, nonhuman creative practices, sound art and interactive technologies. It is essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students working in fields such as documentary studies, film studies, cultural studies, contemporary art history and digital media studies.

Critical Distance in Documentary Media

1. Introduction: Critically Distant, Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard.- 2. Indexicality in the Age of the Sensor and Metadata, Craig Hight.- 3. Shot in the Dark: Nocturnal Philosophy and Night Photography, Bruno Lessard.- 4. Approaches to Xianchang: Documenting the Real in Post-socialist China, Madeline Eschenburg.- 5. Ai Weiwei: Grafting as a Documentary Tactic in Art, Luisa Santos.- 6. Unsatisfactory Devices: Legacy and the Un-Documentable in Art, Angela Bartram.- 7. From Above: Critical Distance, Aerial Views and Counter-Images, Blake Fitzpatrick.- 8. Phantom Rides as Images of a World Unfolding, Gerda Cammaer.- 9. Mobile Media: A Reliable Documentary Witness?, Anandana Kapur.- 10. Redefining the 'Document': Social-Media Photographs as Narrative, Performance, Habitude, Kris Belden-Adams.- 11. Instagram as Archive: Constructing Experimental Documentary Narratives from Everyday Moments, Patrick Kelly.- 12. That Seagull Stole My Camera (and My Shot)!: Overlapping Metaphorical and Physical Distances in the Human-Animal-Camera Triad, Concepción Cortés-Zulueta.- 13. Longitudinal Listening: Documenting the Soundscape of Intermedial Vancouver, Randolph Jordan.- 14. From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through Multi-linear Documentary, Kim Munro.- From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media, Adrian Miles, with Bruno Lessard, Hannah Brasier and Franziska Weidle.