About

"Today, with the advent of computer and small DV cameras (unintentional homage to Dziga Vertov), would-be directors need no longer submit their fate to the unpredictability of producers or the arthritis of televisions... by following their whims or passions, they perhaps see one day their tinkering elevated to DVD status” - Chris Marker

Camera-Stylo is a twice-monthly TLDR-styled video & digital text-based newsletter covering, reviewing, and suggesting alternate futures of and for contemporary culture, politics, and audiovisual critique. All forms of audiovisual essays are treated as equally worthy of consideration including cine-essays, critical documentaries, essay-films, docu-tutorial videos, video lectures, & video essays of all kinds. 

Access

Every other Camera-Stylo newsletter issue is available free of charge, once per month, for a total of twelve issues a year. To receive the complete subscription of twenty-four newsletters per year, released twice per month, please subscribe to our Substack.

Financial

From Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-Ha to Contrapoints and Then & Now, the interventionist audiovisual essay has continuously transformed perceptions of culture and politics and is doing so even more broadly than ever before, in our own time. Support the ever-expanding Public Sphere open-access audiovisual essay archive through your subscription to Camera-Stylo, benefitting you in two ways at once. Doing so supports our capacity to fulfill our central mission, while inspiring some of them to create and contribute their own works to the Public Sphere archive.

Contributions

To contribute your own audiovisual essay to be included in Camera-Stylo, first check out the existing archive to get a sense of what our main approaches are. These can include a review of several recent or historical, outstanding audiovisual essays in TLDR format, while also covering them critically. Or you can make a brief "YouTube Shorts"-style intervention into a contemporary cultural or political question. You may be as abstract and poetic as you like, but remember the idea is to use audiovisuality in a way that centers words as much as images or sounds, and no less than them, either. For any other foci, please check with us first.

The audiovisual essay should be 1-3 minutes long, and arrive in an email along with a digital text comprising the entire script used within it to jmadams@publicsphere.org. As for deadlines, Camera-Stylo there are none and you may do so at any time, just ensure that your contribution is either timely or timeless, otherwise we cannot include it. Our TLDR and other types of brief, interventionist audiovisual essays are all 1-3 minutes so that they can appear in YouTube Shorts. If you would like the text version to include an additional subsection with more text and links than are available in the video itself, that is also fine.