Production

The Center for Documentary Studies creates and supports the production of original work that challenges our assumptions, awakens our social conscience, and connects life, learning, and art. Our books, radio programs and podcast, and special projects create new ways of seeing and understanding the human experience in all its diversity.

Recent Publications

Overview

CDS Books at the Center for Documentary Studies are works of creative exploration by writers and photographers who convey new ways of seeing and understanding human experience in all its diversity—books that tell stories, challenge our assumptions, awaken our social conscience, and connect life, learning, and art.

Series

Documentary Arts and Culture with the University of North Carolina Press

In a time when the tools of documentary are becoming accessible to wider groups of people and universities are founding programs to teach theories and traditions in documentary studies, the Center for Documentary Studies and the University of North Carolina Press are joining together to publish a series of books that promote the practice of documentary expression. Drawing on the perspectives of contemporary documentary artists and writers, books in the series will offer new and important ways to think about learning and doing documentary work and help build a historical and theoretical base for the study and practice of documentary.

New Releases

Who We Are Now: Stories of What Americans Lost and Found during the COVID-19 Pandemic
O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South
The Pretend Villages: Inside the U.S. Military Training Grounds
Run Home If You Don't Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943
Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial
The Historian's Eye: Photography, History, and the American Present
Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922
Capturing the South: Imagining America's Most Documented Region by Scott L. Matthews

Full Catalogue