Professor Paul Shambroom in Conversation with Frederick Wiseman
As in many of his earlier works, Frederick Wiseman takes a long, slow, immersive look—without commentary, without interrupting—in his newest documentary, a portrait of life in a rural town, population 1,083, in central Indiana. In anticipation of the November 2–3 screening of Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, we turned to another master of the slow look, Twin Cities–based photographer Paul Shambroom. A Walker collection artist, Shambroom has offered nuanced views of some deceptively banal-seeming topics, from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to domestic nuclear weapons facilities to, most fitting for an examination of Wiseman’s documentary films, municipal meetings in small-town America. Here, their recent conversation.