Week 2 Reading

DOCUMENTARY AND STORY-TELLING

• ·        Emerging after the First World War, documentary photography drew on the idea of information as a creative education about actuality, life itself.
• ·        Documentary aimed to show, in an informal way, the everyday life of ordinary people to other ordinary people.
• ·        The photographer was a ‘reporter’ of everyday life who supplied the pictures for this growing market. Creating ‘picture stories’ – a sequence of images that could tell a story by itself with only basic, minimal contextual writing to accompany it.
• ·        The aim of social documentary work was not only to record and to document, but also to enlighten and creatively ‘educate’.

Editorial control:

• ·        The layout of pictures on the page became a key means of articulating a story. Pictures could be organised to indicate their significance and meaning. (small pictures surrounding a large picture could be used to show the different aspects of a character)
• ·        Editors had to think about their advertisers and audience, matters of social taste and potential legal or political issue. This division between the photographers handing control of their pictures to edits often highlights the potential conflict of interest between what a photographer and journalist saw and intended the photographs to say, and what the magazine wants.
• Auteur photographers:
• ·        ‘Auteur’- authors with control over their own work, publishing their photographic work as photo books. These photo-books were given more prominence than the writing that accompanied them.
• ·        Ironically, journalists such as Brassai became more remembered from their photos rather than their written work.

Democratic vision:

• ·        The impetus for the commercial development of documentary came from the rise of mass democratic movements, given inspiration by the Russian Revolution of 1917.
• ·        Factography- the ‘representation of the people’ was essentially absorbed widely into societies that had little or no tradition of it, like Britain. In addition, the early years of the 20^th century saw the birth of a whole range of documentary movements around the world.
• ·        Documentary photography was thus a tool in a broader movement of social change and liberal attitude. The idea was to inform and encourage the population to understand the life in the ‘century of the common people’.
• ·        In the 1930s, ‘worker photography’ movements across Europe inspired by the Russian example of 20s insisted that common people should represent themselves in photographs to show their shared ‘common condition’.
• ·        Self-representation was a form of self-knowledge, which would help transform social relations as experience, were shared with others around the world.

How the other half lives:

• ·        Documentary photographers took images out of social criticism or journalism. These projects used photography with written texts, combined as facts to demonstrate the truth of a social concern, the issues of poverty, child labour, etc.
• ·        They aimed to inform and disseminate the truth about an issue by using photography, alongside writing. They wanted to demonstrate that documentary seeing as a way of knowing which could improve humanity. The emphasis of ‘seeing’ was to know something as true.
• ·        These photographs represented a literally different view of the world.
• ·        By the 1930s there were two general modes operating within the idea of documentary photography: ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’.
• ·        Objective- neutral camera view (John Thomson, August Sander, Eugene Atget)
• ·        Subjective- instantaneity, the capturing of a fleeting instant as the expression of everyday life.

Reportage:

• ·        Reportage implied a greater expressive quality, ‘subjective’ both in its mode of production and the visual connotations it produced.
• ·        Objective = cold/ subjective = hot.
• ·        Social documentary employs three strategies, process, event, state. Moving across and between them to narrate the stories of everyday life through photography.
• ·        Documentary pictures can show social processes, the actors within it (events) and the conditions in which it takes place (state).
• ·        Reportage uses both event and process to show them as life story ‘experiences’.
• ·        Walker Evans believed photography should be a ‘photographic editing of society’. Anything that made up everyday life was scrutinised under Evans camera.
• ·        Documentary photography hovers between art and journalism, between creative treatment and actuality.
• ·        Reportage is similarly an ambiguous concept, ranging from the reporting of an event as news to the description of social processes and their impact on people, whether as individuals or as a whole social group.

‘Decisive moment’ as peripateia:

• ·        Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea of  the ‘decisive moment’ fuses a notion of instantaneity in photography (the freezing of an instant) with an older concept from art history: story telling with a single picture
• ·        Peripateia- showing the ‘pregnant moment’ of the story, where the past, present and future of the story can be summed up. The pregnant moment is the instant when the future of the story will be determined.
• ·        Cartier-Bresson formulates his concept of the decisive moment as ‘one unique picture whose composition possess such vigour and richness and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself’
• ·        The most common device in Cartier-Bressons own photography is his use of a figure whose foot is about to touch the ground. The striding foot indicate a future event, caused by the past whose outcome is anticipated by what we see in the picture. The viewer can imagine the sequence of events constituting the story, which a single picture can only imply.
• ·        The decisive moment is thus the instant when the photographer must click the shutter to capture not ‘reality’, but the dramatic instant that will come to signify it.
• ·        In this mode of documentary work, the camera is perhaps better thought of as a portable theatre, or studio, where the photographer ‘stages’, create a scene from the flux of life.

Staging Reality:

• ·        The medium involved in all photography, decisions about the position of the camera within and toward the event are what organises the staging of the scene. ‘Composition’ is here simply the organisation of raw material into photographic codes, a rhetorical form to create a reality effect.
• ·        By facing the subject matter head on, it is deploying the rhetoric of photographic codes too. This is not to dismiss documentary but for Grierson, a good documentary is a good ‘interpretation’ of real life, one that ‘lights up the fact’. It is about interpretation, not objectivity or truth.
• ·        Reportage signifies human involvement and expression of life in events
• ·        Objective/descriptive photography offers a more disengaged position to the scene.

Eyewitness:

• ·        The aim of documentary is to make the spectator into an eyewitness. The photographer becomes an agent of truth, producing ‘documents’ who responsibility to truth is ultimate and ethical.
• ·        Documentary as a subjective viewpoint appears involved and engages in the event, while the neutral picture seems to lack commitment, as almost indifferent or disengaged.
• ·        The ‘concerned’ photographer might find reportage more attractive as the rhetoric engagement in life.

Reality and representation:

• ·        Documentary relies on the construction of an image of reality in representation. This can also be described as manifesting a desire for reality.
• ·        The very recognition of what was not ‘recognised’ in public (homeless, poverty, excluded ethnic groups) as reality has given the justification for taking photographs of these people or their lived circumstances.
• ·        Documentary photographs construct representation of reality, according to someone’s view, their desire to see.

Desire to see:

• ·        Politics of vision comes to play a role in the crucial issue of what viewers do with the knowledge presented to them in documentary photographs. ‘confronting’ a situation is not something humans are good at, to it is not surprising if a documentary that sets out to change the mind of its audience does not succeed.
• ·        The idea of witnessing invokes the concept of voyeurism, defined as an illicit or obsessive act of looking. The often-felt sense of guilt or shame that accompanies voyeuristic looking manifests in being annoyed at the photograph.
• ·        Outrage and protest at photographic representation show that representation can intervene in a spectator’s belief in reality.
• ·        Jacques Lacan argues that looking can be invested with jealousy. Looking is the wish to observe, to make sure someone does not have what you have. This is relevant to the reality effect invested in the documentary genre. Whether conscious or unconscious, the narcissism of the viewer is involved in the capacity to recognise ‘alien’ matter.
• ·        The direct address to the viewer does not ensure that pity, empathy or respect are felt by that viewer. Under such conditions, documentary has had to renovate itself, adopting different strategies to attract audience.

Colour documentary:

·        During the 1980s, the use of colour photography began to appear in documentary and art.

·        Colour might bring a ‘new’ veracity to concerned photography. The more ‘authentic’ realism of the colour snapshot was gradually absorbed in to the style of documentary photography.

·        This shift of focus from the public social sphere to more intimate private spheres regenerated a completely new interest in documentary photography as art.

·        The use of medium and colour film has created a newer, higher fidelity colour documentary tradition.