Director and photographer Mark Laita is known for his controversial documentaries and projects. His journey began when he set out to do his photography book, Created Equal, which aimed to portray all Americans as equal and emphasize that we were all considered equal “until our environment, circumstances, or fate molded and weathered us into whom we have become.”
While on the journey, he took videos of his portrait subjects and that ended up morphing into a docuseries. His “Soft White Underbelly” docuseries has now taken the internet by storm, often featuring society’s extreme “misfits,” from extensive drug abusers to people who survived cults.
His approach is to casually interview his subjects, letting them tell their own story with little prodding. The goal is to educate America on the extreme cases of poverty, sexual abuse, and drugs that exist across the country.
When Laita got the idea to venture into Appalachia in Odd, West Virginia, he wanted to film and photograph the Whittakers, who are known as “America’s most inbred family.”
The clan started when the children of identical twin brothers Henry and John got married and had children. The interfamilial relations continued from there. Now, the family lives in its long-time home and is filled with members who suffer from severe disabilities due to the nature of the inbreeding.
When Laita first arrived in Odd, he was met with resistance from both law enforcement and neighbors, who he described as protective of the family. Talking to the Koncrete Klips podcast, Laita opened up about some of the first “disturbing” interactions he had with the family.
“We come to this trailer and then a little shack on the other side of the road. And there’s these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us,” he described.
“One guy, you would look him in the eye or say anything and he would just scream and go running away, and his pants would fall around his ankles, and he would go running off and go and kick a garbage can. And this would happen over and over. It was out of control — the craziest thing I have ever seen.”
Slowly but surely he built up a trust with them, and eventually returned to film Inbred Family — The Whittakers for YouTube. He admitted that early communication was tough, but ultimately he returned multiple times to film their everyday lives, even tagging along for Christmas and family outings.
Overall, Laita is aware that people have a lot of varying opinions on his work. And he acknowledges that his work is exploitative in nature.
“It feels exploitative but I think it’s good for us all to know that these things exist. The hotel I’m staying at, they’re exploiting my need for sleep. The restaurant I ate breakfast at is exploiting my hunger. Everything is exploitative. Photography and video are especially by nature exploitative,” he said.
