I Am – The Library is an ethnographic video project, which documents the everyday ways a public library is used. Set in and around the Denver Central Library a few weeks before the 2008 Democratic National Convention, it is inspired by the social and oratorical work of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a former presidential candidate who's life's work as a civil rights activist was triggered when, as a twenty-year old college student, he fought to desegregate his hometown public library.
The film takes its title and finds its rhythm in Jackson's 1971 speech,
I Am – Somebody,* a rallying call and response poem, which invites people to stake their political claim by simply declaring who or what they are, be their status small, flawed or tired. In making I – Am The Library, Sociologist Audrey Sprenger. Ph.D along with Emily Crenshaw and Mary Grace Legg of the Denver-based Production Company Lockerpartners asked over two hundred residents of the city of Denver to do the same, then asked them to speak out for their public library, as a way to make clear the very obvious but also very often overlooked social truth that the stories of our lives and, in turn, our identities, are also the story of our structural institutions, whether we believe in or regularly engage with these structural institutions or not.
Inter-cut with footage shot at some of the free Fresh City Life events that took place at the Denver Central Library between January and July of 2008, Sprenger, Crenshaw and Legg invite you to add you face and voice to this story at Fresh City Life's last big event of the 2008 year, Outside of Convention. Some extra footage of our film is posted below.
Funding for
I Am – The Library provided by the Denver Public Library and Rocky Mountain PBS
