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http://www.salt.edu
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http://saltinstitute.blogspot.com
Graduate and undergraduate students attend the Salt Institute to study documentary radio, writing, or photography. The program entails fifteen weeks of intensive field research coupled with workshops and seminars. Throughout the semester, students gather cultural materials and develop their craft in order to create documentaries of professional caliber. While the immediate focus and location is Maine, approaches and skills learned at the Salt Institute travel well to any regional study or to comparative studies.
What Salt does has been called ethnography, cultural journalism, oral history, folklore, qualitative sociology, documentary photography, visual anthropology, and non-fiction writing. But we are less concerned about what to call what we do than how we do it.
"Salt is rising at the crack of dawn to sit in the branches of a Maine forest, zipped up in camouflage, smelling of doe urine buck lure, listening for the sound of cracking branches, and trying not to make a sound as you scribble notes in the darkness, hang from the trees to snap photos, and pray for a deer to approach so you can shoot it through the vitals—and have some grisly meat for your story."
- Salt Writing Student, Caitlin Van Dusen
