He communicates through visual medium

By Phyllis Lehrer
Staff Writer

Published on March 28, 2008

Shimmering trees, pink and lavender sunsets, and rushing water were some of the images videographer Carlos Fontes of Shutesbury used to portray the elements and echo dancers at a recent Amherst Ballet production.

It's expression through moving images, said Fontes, who teaches in the communications department at Worcester State College. Sitting in his Shutesbury home, Fontes described how images give people a voice, tell a story, display his technique and helped give him a career.

Journalism was his first story telling-choice. He grew up in Lisbon, Portugal and earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from the university there.

However, romance brought him to the United States and an eventual career shift.

Living in New York, he took a video class in Global Village, a video center. "It was a very active, creative environment that awakened me to the possibility of expression through moving images." While he made several short films, he said he needed to make a living. "I let go of the expressive stuff." He worked as a cameraman for UN TV and ABC, including doing soap operas.

The family left New York after their daughter's birth, moving to Shutesbury 18 years ago. He has two daughters in college, Ana Lua and Marlena, and a son, Gabriel, 11. Since there was little work in his field, he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, earning a masters and doctorate in communication studies,

His dissertation was on alternate video by a grass roots group. He worked with grass roots media with a social service agency that no longer exists. For three years he worked with at-risk students and mothers of sexually abused children to create videos. He said he used media "to help heal, healing is a way to gain a voice that has been shut out in so many ways," said Fontes. He thinks of video as a means of social change.

The equipment to produce the videos have also changed from the porta packs with cables to camcorders to hand held cameras with a difference in portability and in terms of quality. The quality of the image between an affordable camera and a professional one has narrowed a lot. The next change will be high definition.

He said he likes Italian cinema. "The camera really looks at things, pay attention to the world via a camera. There's a restful quality I like," he said. He noted Michael Moore who brought innovation to documentaries.

At Worcester State, he is the director for the Center for Global Studies. For the past three years, he has taken students to Ecuador to learn about the indigenous people, specifically the Sarayacu. The tribe of 2,000 does not allow companies on its land to prevent it being damaged. Yet they integrate into the global economy on their own terms. "They use technology to preserve ancestral traditions. They are models of how to live. They have one foot in the ancestral and the other in the modern world. They hunt and fish have computers, solar panels and Internet access. They built a border of flowering trees," he said.

Fontes said he would like to take an affinity group, such as teachers or healing professionals, to Ecuador next January for a 10-15 day trip. His goal is a genuine exchange of information. "We need exchanges to create bridges to find the best practices of how to be a human being in the community." He is also interested in creating a non-profit foundation for the indigenous people. Those interested in either project can call him.

"It's a kind of home. I have friends there. Each each time I go and leave, a bigger part of myself stays."

The footage for the recent ballet program was a collaborative effort with dancer/choreographer Alison Ozer and composer John Cooper. (Cooper has asked him to work on visuals for a cantata that he composed.)

For the four-minute segment he shot eight hours of film in Peru, Ecuador, on a beach in Portugal with shadow of Alison dancing, the sky at Machu Picchu and in his backyard. He said the camera, he used a Canon XL1, has a role both to collect the image and use as an instrument to bring forth some sense of the element you want to use. "How close to a rock, how smooth a pan, there's some thinking and some planning and it's intuitive."

To get the four minutes, he honed the images into three, then two-hour chunks in his studio/office with a computer, camera and speakers. The key was to match the color, movement and rhythm of the music. "The section may be perfect but the length doesn't match the length of the musical phrase. It's an intuitive part of me, an aesthetic sense. You can't doubt yourself. When I feel it fits, I work with that. I try to do things in an organic way," Fontes said.