Skip Blumberg

Skip Blumberg is a videomaker and early member of the Videofreex, one of the pioneering portable-video collectives that helped shape grassroots television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Videofreex, which began at Woodstock in 1969, eventually established a pirate television station called Lanesville TV in the Catskill Mountains, broadcasting locally to a rural community in what may have been the first community television operation of its kind. Through Portapak video, street documentation, and the rejection of broadcast television's passive audience model, Skip and the Videofreex helped demonstrate that ordinary communities could use video to document their own experience and create media on their own terms.

The Videofreex's work predated public access television as a regulatory category, but the argument their practice embodied, that communities should control their own media, was precisely the argument that advocates took to the FCC and Congress in the years that followed.

Skip's place in this archive is at the origin point of the community media idea, in the moment before it had a policy framework, when it was still primarily a practice and a conviction.