Documentary in the age of falsification

Current thinking has undermined the idea that photos represent

reality, and digital image editing has made a wide public more aware

of image manipulation than before. The conventional

documentarist/journalist's response to this has been to insist on

ethical standards and promote the idea of a relationship of trust

between them and their audience -- in effect, to attempt to keep on

doing what they always have. But is this the right approach?

 

Consider newsprint, where an "objective" style rules. But

objectivity doesn't really exist, and even before recent scandals at

the NYT and USA Today, readers weren't really buying it. The reader

today tends to reject news that threatens his ideas as false or

fabricated, accepting only "good" news.

 

The New Journalism (which some say wasn't really new) discarded all

that, and although factual told stories in a highly subjective way

which might include composite characters or even composite

incidents. The writer became not an observer, but a part of the

story -- in some cases, the writer's involvement was the story. The

style wasn't applicable to page one, but worked well in magazines

where deeper coverage was required.

 

So my question is, now that we've had the New Journalism, why not

the New Photojournalism? Why reject, in the context of "documentary"

rather than "news" photography, the photographer becoming involved

in the story? Why insist on claims to an objectivity that doesn't

exist? Why not recreate events for the camera, in a way analogous to

composite incidents or characters in writing -- or even stage off-

the-wall events (or use bizarre manipulations) for rhetorical effect?

 

Documentary film has Michael Moore. Where are documentary

photography's Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson?

 

It's a squirmy can of worms and some will reject the idea on the

basis of some definition of what documentary is. But look at it this

way: if documentary is distinguished by being primarily about its

subjects (a distinction used by Jeff recently) then what's wrong

with using other rhetorical methods to address the subject?

So do it. Is anyone stopping you?

Nobody's stopping me. I'm interested in what people think regarding the boundaries.

<i>Why reject, in the context of "documentary" rather than "news"

photography, the photographer becoming involved in the story?

Why insist on claims to an objectivity that doesn't exist?</i><P>

I don't. A very big part of my personal work is documenting

what's going on around, and I'm typically involved in whatever

that may be.<P>

<i>Why not recreate events for the camera, in a way analogous

to composite incidents or characters in writing -- or even stage

off- the-wall events (or use bizarre manipulations) for rhetorical

effect? </i><p>

Sounds like advertising photography (though I see that the intent

is different). While it sounds like an interesting and worthwhile

approach, I'm reluctant to call it documentary photography.<P>

In the social situations which are the subject of my documentary

work, the situation has a kind of life of its own-it's subject to

influence by the people participating, but it's not entirely under a

person's control. (My twisted view of that life is what I'm

photographing.) On the other hand, photographing staged or

recreated events seems a fundamentally-different form of

"documenting." In motion pictures, for example, <i>Schindler's

List</i> is based on true events and is meant to tell that story,

but it's not a documentary film.

It is a case of "everything old is new again" Andrew. W.Eugene Smith was doing this

wwith his story on Dr. Albert Schweitzer, where he made prints from montages of

negatives. This wasn't discovered until sometime after his death.

 

The problem it seems to me is one being able to clear and unambiguously

seeunderstand that there is an "author's voice" in the work of the people you

mention. Photographs tend to be seen without the larger context a book , an essay or

a movie is seen in.

Interesting questions. My feeling is that, like many other misleading and outdated labels, "documentary" should be abandoned for a more realistic label.

 

The problem is that the word "documentary" implies a level of objectivity that simply does not exist in photography or any other art. If "documentary" was redefined to reflect that all image making involves numerous subjective decisions about film, format, lighting, perspective, composition, timing, presentation, etc., then it may be saved. But I think the term is too misleading and carries to much "baggage" with it to be useful.

 

Are Shelby Lee Adam's Appalachian portraits "documentary"? Are photos in the Washington Post or NY Times documentary? IMO, no, none are documentary because all involve many levels of subjective choices that determine the final "product."

 

Interpretation of the "product" is another whole question!

"Documentary" is a funny word. When used to describe one of Michael Moore's pieces, as much as I agree with his viewpoint, it seems stretching to apply it to an effort that is so obviously intended to present a point of view. You could say it documents, I suppose, but using "editorial documentary" seems closer to the truth.

 

Eugene Richards used dramatic staging often in his work, including a big piece for Life on "the country doctor". He staunchly defended it, believing that the photographer had every right to employ artistic dramatization for purposes he believed in. It can be used lots of ways - Leni Riefentstahl was infamous for it in her work for the third Reich. Any use of (re-)staging, or other substantial digital manipulation should be overtly aknowledged unless it is entirely expected (in advertising, for example).

 

But using anything more than the most rudimentary editing should never be allowed for straight news photography, and imho some of the well publicized firings of news photographers in the past year or so are completely justified. Even cropping should only be done under specific conditions, for example. I'm sure there are well documented rules for this. Does someone have a link?

Seems like a worthwhile subject considering we have agreed to participate in a forum entitled Street and Documentary Photography. My guess is that the "Documentary" part of that was thrown in because of the fact that a lot of street photographers take candid pictures that are not made near a sidewalk, and yet they share some things in common with "street photography". That's ok with me, but I hope we can also develop a conversation and share some pictures based on broader and perhaps more conventional ideas of what documentary photography is.<br>    I suspect we are going to conclude as a group that the term "documentary" is too broad to use without qualifiers if it is to be of use. One reason is that so many techniques and styles can be the basis for documentary photography. For instance, a single photo can be recognized as having a documentary quality. However, we also think of documentaries as applying to groupings of photos in photo-essay format, and often the essay will deal with broad characteristics of culture and society over considerable time spans. Additionally, there are many areas of photography that might be classified for some purposes one way and for others in another way. I'm think here for instance of much of what is typically called "nature photography", or photography by artists who are essentially portraitists who may work in a mode that is seen as documentary. I would call Arbus, Mann and Maplethorpe practitioners of a documentary style. I think a case could even be made for including Avedon in the group.<br>    I consider myself to be primarily a documentary photographer. In fact, I have recently renamed <a href="http://www.zianet.com/connealy/" target="new">my web site</a> with that idea in mind. What I mean by that regarding myself and my work is that I prefer to shoot things as I find them rather than manipulating situations. I tend to focus my shooting around certain themes of long-standing interest, and I often group the pictures from collections in a way that I think communicates something that goes beyond what the photographs might reveal when looked at individually. I like to tell stories with my pictures which I feel reveal truths about the subjects under examination. Some of the stories may span a few minutes in time, others may deal with issues which can involve an attempt to characterize centuries of accumulated information, most of it having to do with people and the products of their activities.

Ellis, good point re everything old is new again. Not only did Smith build that portrait from multiple images, but there was Eisenstadt and a whole host of others who came from the pre-war German photojournalism school, in which photos were often staged. Then we have the controversy over Capa's Falling Soldier, which may have been staged; other photographers often staged photos of the Spanish Civil War so Capa would not have been out of step with the times. There's Doisneau's Kiss at the Hotel de Ville, which was staged using actors although Life said it was completely unposed in the caption.

 

What has changed is the sophistication of the audience. Any unusual photo is now questioned -- I showed someone an Elliot Erwitt shot the other day and her first reaction was, "That has to have been set up."

 

I've read that the Kiss at the Hotel de Ville, and the article in which it appeared, were instrumental in creating the American view of Paris as the city of romance. That claim may not be true, but it does raise an interesting question. If a staged photo can affect how we view the world, then most would say it's "wrong" because we'll believe in something that isn't "true" -- but truth is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. What if the staged photo represents something that is essentially true?

 

So in essence, the question is whether documentary photography as we know it is a dead concept -- whether, if ya can't beat them, ya might as well join them and make photos that, while "true," are presented as springing from an unmistakeable bias or point of view.

 

(Some will argue they already do, whether in the West Bank, on the front lines of an anti-globalization protest, or in some downtrodden slum. But does their presentation acknowledge their bias, or attempt to deny it? Most often the latter, I think.)

Here's another perspective on the idea of "staging" pictures. Most people would agree that Doisneau's Kiss falls outside the realm of documentary work because it is fabricated, but there are other ways in which photos can be set up or staged.

 

Consider the journalistic convention that says the reporter must remain outside the story and not become part of the action. The "New Journalists" broke this down by incorporating themselves into the story, moving from being the "fly on the wall" to being "the fly in the "ointment," as one critic said of Hunter Thompson.

 

In documentary work, a similar convention frowns on pix in which the subject is looking at the camera or reacting to the photographer. The photographer is not supposed to cause the events that he documents -- he's supposed to be a fly on the wall.

 

But suppose you're doing a series on urban paranoia, so you hang around parks taking pix of kids and hang around residential neighborhoods shooting the contents of people's trash cans -- until they call the cops, whereupon you get a shot of a cop walking toward you, apparently reaching for his gun (actually just a notebook), while passersby cast suspicious glances at you.

 

Over the line, or not?

 

You've made yourself part of the story, set up the photo, but does that make the story untrue?

The term "documentary" has been in use a long time and is not quite as ambiguous as is indicated in some of the responses above. I would recommend William Stott's book <i>Documentary Expression in the Thirties</i> for some historical perspective. Probably the most significant line in the book on this is <i>A document, when human, is the opposite of the official kind; it is not objective but thoroughly personal.</i><p>

 

What is at issue here is that "documentary photography" in its usual usage indicates a set of photographs that document something. It cannot be objective, because the photographer makes a set of choices of what is being documented. Just as an example, a documentary of war can show the soldiers on the "winning" side, the soldiers on the "losing" side, the people whose lives are affected by it, the politicians who send other people off to fight, the scarred landscape and buildings, etc. By choosing one particular set of images from these possible choices, a very specific and <i>subjective</i> viewpoint can be shown.<p>

 

Because of this, I don't think that "objectivity" rules, and I don't think it really ever has. Every photographer, painter, writer, filmaker shows a unique view of their subject, and it is the subject that is required in documentary activity.

Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear and you will live a long and fruitfull life.

I think I agree with Jeff, though I don't want to put words in his mouth. It seems like much of the discussion to this point has revolved around outlier issue rather than focusing on the core that allows us to distinguish documentary from non-documentary. I think one important thing is that we have different expectations for a presentation that is characterized as "documentary". If someone posts a picture of a wildflower on Photo.Net, we pretty much accept whatever is there and proceed to judge it on its esthetic merits including composition, color, sharpness, contrast to background, etc. However, if a picture of a flower is made to appear in a wildflower guide, the esthetic aspect tends to recede in favor of qualities such as accuracy of color and completeness of detail allowing easy identification. Of course it is nice to have esthetic values coupled to accuracy and completeness, but the focus on factual presentation clearly takes precedence. I know this is a simplistic illustration, but I think it does point toward one means of separating the documentary from the non-documentary.

One more point for now. Photojournalism is a small subset of the documentary genre with specialized ethics and procedural conventions. I don't think you can generalize very well from photojournalism (small) to documentary (large). For one thing, going from the taking of pictures to the publication of them only involves the photographer in the first step of the process. From there it is up to editors, editorial policies, publishers, boards, ad infinitum. The photographer chooses when to push the button and who to work for, but from there it seems like kind of a free-for-all -- and rather amazing that anything coherent and somewhat close to the truth ever gets published.<br>    At the same time, I think it is easy to overlook the fact that the Internet has presented the opportunity for a proliferation of coherent alternate viewpoints through self-publishing via web sites and blogs. If the commercial press is seen as falling down on the job of reporting things truthfully, it is easy to present and find alternative points of view. There may be no "Life" magazine to inspire budding documentarists today, but there are probably many more opportunities to get your documentary pictures out there than ever before. Of course, if you have to make a living from it, that may be a different issue.

news has become part of the commercial world of today BIGTIME...ratings and such play such a huge part of things today...$$$ as it is....hard to be subjective about anything when the driving force behind it all is $$ and ratings...just look at any news show and you will see...same goes with magazines....they publish what they know will sell....and sell they must!

Andrew, I think what you're looking for is already out there. Magazines like Harpers and the Atlantic use photos for illustration, and they're often highly stylized, either by the shooter himself or the mag's art department.

 

Then there are photographers with a distinctive style of their own, like Antonin Kratochvil. His work leaves me cold, but it's not straight documentary (though unmanipulated). It's certainly powerful.

 

Spot news is one thing. Magazine illustration is another. Of course, one market is huge and the other miniscule.

The question, really, is how you approach the work in the face of an audience that has learned to disbelieve it.

 

Styles, no matter how striking, don't in themselves deal with the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, which is really the issue.

"But using anything more than the most rudimentary editing should never be allowed for straight news photography, and imho some of the well publicized firings of news photographers in the past year or so are completely justified. Even cropping should only be done under specific conditions, for example."

 

Well then obviously allowing a photographer to just arbitrarily decide how to frame a shot in the first place is something we just can't take the chance on. I think photojournalists should be required to use 360-degree panorama cameras for everything they do.

 

As a culture, what we are slowly realizing is that there is no objective truth out there in the first place and no objective way to record it (even if there were), in the second. Advertising and photojournalisms are not separate (ontological) categories, but arbitrary points on a spectrum of possibilities. And that's just when trying to consider them as images with a discernable intent and purpose.

 

But as I have mentioned, it's not what an image "is" so much as what you do with it. Taking the example from the previous thread of a child supporter of Hamas, what better way to sell, say a t-shirt design like the one he might be wearing? Or what about selling a t-shirt with that image on it? What about finding him and his family and buying the rights to the image and trademarking it - using it to sell an entire line of clothing and other products? Once you admit to those possible appropriations, the concept of "documentary" becomes essentially meaningless.

 

A lot of the questions that come up are becoming problematic precisely because we are witnessing the power of Capitalism to commodify everything - indirectly including ethics, meaning, and value.

 

In fact, from a Marxist perspective I think I might define Postmodernism as a stage of late Capitalism where the ideology "ruptures" and foregrounds an inability to reconcile the humanist concepts of the self (the individual) with the metanarratives of Modernism.

<i>In fact, from a Marxist perspective I think I might define Postmodernism as a stage of late Capitalism where the ideology "ruptures" and foregrounds an inability to reconcile the humanist concepts of the self (the individual) with the metanarratives of Modernism.</i><p>

 

Yikes! I just wanted to take some pictures, and now I'm in danger of rupturing my ideology? That sounds painful!<p>

 

I agree that discussions centering around what "documentary" is aren't really helpful -- from a practical perspective the question may depend on what documentary means to you, but the real issue is what you do about that.

>>>The question, really, is how you approach the work in the

face of an audience that has learned to disbelieve it.

 

Styles, no matter how striking, don't in themselves deal with the

boundary between fiction and nonfiction, which is really the

issue.<<<

 

If you look at it from a postmodern point of view, these two

statements is almost a contradiction. Reality have been

destroyed in this society of infomation overload. There are more

and more information but less and less in their value to a point

where they *the spectacle and the real* blur into one

hyper-reality. The only possible form of resistance is the refusal

of their meaning (signifieds) though accepting them in surfaces

(signifiers). In another words, content (fiction or non fiction) do

not matter anymore (to the viewer). If any, it is the form that

matter most as stated by McLuhan and Baudrillard...

 

"the medium is the message"

I'm basically in agreement with those who say that there is no objectivity behind documentary styles. Everything is an interpretation. However, I don't think that means that a documentary approach cannot get at the truth. The key ingredient is the extent of the familiarity of the documentarian with the subject s/he is protraying. Most of the criticisms which have focused on the potential of a documentary approach are looking at what I think are superficial technical issues about how one goes about selecting and capturing images. However, I think the real issue is knowing enough about the subject to be in the right place at the right time. After the fact, the important thing is to edit in a way that capitalizes on real knowledge of the subject. A photojournalist who flies in for a few days' shoot and an editor in a highrise 5000 miles away don't stand much of a chance of producing a documentary with any integrity.

Except through extensive research, Mike. I agree in principle but the flipside is that someone closely connected to a subject brings a whole host of biases to it. That's a whole separate discussion.

 

Leslie, the line between fiction and nonfiction may be invisible or irrelevant to the audience, but I'm looking at it from the perspective of the author.

I'm not sure of your point. But "documentarians" using photographs to present a point of view isn't anything new. Photographic documentary, has included, since the days of the WPA photographers forward, pure and simply social commentary, with the intent to engender social or cultural change.,ie Eugene Smith, Salgado, on and on. Its usually called something like social documentary or some such.

 

I wouldn't get too hung up about definitions. If someone is out to purposely decieve you by fabricating photographs, or events and presenting them as "documentary", that's simply lying, not documentary. If someone is altering events, tranparantly to create some other meaning or insight or alternative reality or other story, that's post-modernisim not documentary (depending on your personal view:)

 

Generally, you will probably know when you are being given a message. Its just the term holds a broader usage than your semantics wants to give it,including the inclusion of the paradox.