
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Cathedral Square from the air".
A photograph of furniture on the site of Christchurch: A Board Game.
This article is a critical commentary of how political documentary embodies the traits and functions of alternative journalism. I explore this notion through Obrero (‘worker’) my independent documentary project about the labour migration of Filipino workers to Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, after the earthquake in 2011. This article maps out the points at where the theories and practices of alternative media and documentary intersect. Analysing political documentary as a format of alternative journalism has links to the long tradition of film and video production as a tool for social critique. As a form of practice-based research, Obrero falls under the rubric of alternative journalism—able to represent the politically marginal sectors of the polity and report on issues underreported in the mainstream press. This article concludes that a distribution plan that is responsive to fragmenting audiences works best when alternative journalism no longer targets a niche but transborder audiences.
An aerial photograph of Cathedral Square.
This has made a huge mess for the residents to clean up. I heard on the news that homes have been damaged by subsidence in areas of earthquake-caused liquefaction like this.
Sand volcanoes put the silt all over the road.
It would have been a glorious Spring day in Christchurch had it not been for the magnitude 7.1 earthquake at 4:30 am. All the water and silt you can see covering the street in this photo erupted from the ground following the earthquake.
Lots of people were out and about in the streets checking on everyone after the earthquake. When it was clear that everyone was OK, the sand volcanos became the feature of interest.
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The earthquake knocked over the bird bath.
Debra points at the beginnings of a sand volcano not long after the big earthquake.
And, yes, the newspaper always gets through! The Press newspapers were delivered in our area of Hoon Hay in the hours after the earthquake.
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These were scattered across the park.
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(I righted the bird bath after the initial earthquake. None of the after-shocks were sufficient to knock it over again.)
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This one was really flowing out of the ground.
Yes, it was a joke. The tours, that is, not the yard filled with earthquake-caused sand volcanos. They were very real. You can see one covering the driveway in this photo. The signs read as follows. "Tours run 1/2 hourly. $5.25 admission. Eftpos unavailable." "If you think this is bad... you should see the back!"
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An usual thing to see coming from the ground in Hoon Hay, Christchurch.