Documentary in a post modern era

[working camera]

This forum is pretty much street orientated but I'd be interested in

seeing how folk around here view documentary.

 

We generally know it when we see it but what is it. I mean what

defines documentary these days against, reportage, photojournalism

and an objective recorded photographic document.

 

Are notions of realism and "the truth" still valid in a postmodernist

world? How much photographer intervention and or post capture image

manipulation is allowable before documentary becomes something else.

 

Don't really know how to kick off a debate like this so thought maybe

I'd chuck in a few old quotes to see what people recon.

 

"Documentary is the creative treatment of actuality"

 

the famous definition by British documentary filmmaker, John

Grierson. For those who may not be aware or actually cared Grierson

was the bloke who is credited with inventing the word "documentary".

 

"Applied to the motion picture as Grierson intended it infers the

photographic re-enactment of well observed facets of life in such a

way that that the subject is penetrated to its very depthsﾅobserving

the factors of its derivation and maybe its outcome in

perspective. ...All penetrating and because penetrating, dramatic."

Max Dupain (a famous Australian photographer)

 

"Documentary defines not subject or style, but approach..." Paul

Rotha a colleague of Greirson.

 

"once you start altering facts within a picture, you undermine the

strength of photography." David Moore (another famous Australian

photographer)

 

"The documentary photographer finds it worthwhile and satisfying to

use his camera in immortalizing the common lives of ordinary people."

Arthur Rothstein (FSA photographer)

 

A lot of contemporary street photography immortalizes the common

lives of ordinary people. But often presented in blogs as personal

photographer journals, it seems to me that the work is somewhat

introspective in that it is often concerned with the photographers

own environment. It used to be a tenet that documentary photographers

remain unobtrusive so as to capture external facts.

 

Don't know if folk would be interested in playing, but what are your

thoughts about documentary photography?

[jeremy freeland]

I keep remembering two things from Michael Ignatieff's introduction to 'Magnum.'

 

First, that 'Magnum photography existed to eradicate the alibi of ignorance.'

 

And second, that 'television seems to tell us everything we need to know. it drains reality of mystery by suggesting that what we see is all there is. good photogrpahy restores the mystery of the world by stopping time so that we can see and reflect upon what there is.'

 

So I guess I find myself thinking that good documentary is what makes us sceptics of the party line - that makes us look for the reality behind the illusion of what we get in 15 second news stories or 5 second sound bites, or stereotypes and convention.

 

Sorry, Craig - pretty shallow response to an interesting question.

[m_.]

Geez, Craig, are we having an exam? ;)

 

anything is documentary. but i always ask what value that documentary is to me. some has stories, others are just an eye pleasing thing for myself...

 

not much an answer i know. and no score is asked either. ;)

[over exposure]

Which is exactly the "edge" between a documentary project and personal manipulation in your opinion?

 

I don't think there's a definite one, expecially when we think to post-processing work...but even the shooting act is involved..

 

Of course when you shoot you have your language and style, we've got many example of documentary shots that explore the world of "unreal"...

 

What the shots inspire you to? which is the feeling you get from the view?

 

That's the value of the intent, away from technical tricks, IMO.

 

Cheers.

[wmwhee]

I guy named John Perkins posted a notice on the leica forum concerning a London exhibition featuring what I would refer to as a documentary series on Dubai. I know I have seen images from the series somewhere--but can't remember where--and I was impressed by the aesthetic and technical excellence of the photographs. Walker Evans seemed, to me, documentary in his approach to photography, as do a number of other FSA(?) photographers. I think of documentary photography as "straight-on" photography. I am including a recent picture of Beth-El Mennonite Church in Colorado Springs. I was interested primarily in photographing its form. Would you consider it "documentary" in subject matter and approach?<div></div>

[fjords]

My impression<p>Documentary: unaffected clinical observations.<p>Street: culturally

affected personal expressions.

[working camera]

Jeremy I don't think your response was inadequate at all. And m. no tests all the answers are correct.

 

John, ...yeah "unaffected clinical observation" I don't know about that. For arguments sake, if that is so, how does documentary differ from say crime scene or forensic photography, for example? A straight clinical recording of actuallity.

 

Walker Evans used a straight aesthetic but he was passionate about his work and considered himself an artist. (a creative being if you will) Another way of saying it is, there's a lot of Walker Evans in a Walker Evans pic. It's not the same as a straight record photographic document somehow. I'd tend to argue that there is a distinction between a photographic document and documentary. Both deal with a reality but the latter has creative input from the image-maker and must bring with it cultural biases and positions. Take Arthur Rothteinﾒs dust bowl pics and Dorethea Lange's "grapes of Wrath" on the road depression portraits. As well as recording an event-there's compassion in those pics. In the days before CNN the FSA was trying to convey a message to broader America. They were (the photographers) all pretty much liberals if not lefties. The FSA had a particular barrow to push in the context of the New Deal. Where does doumentary bump up against propaganda?

 

Then again Winograd said. "I don't have messages in my pictures...The true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film."

 

But on the other hand his aesthetic is hardly anonymous, we all know a Winograd pic we sees it.

 

hereﾒs one by Edward Cranstone my favourate doco photographer. And yes apologies he's an Aussie. Sorry, I'm not pushing a national barrow its just I'm more familiar with my local territory.

 

http://cas.awm.gov.au/pls/PRD/glbx.accept_login?screen_name=cas_search_pkg.pr_search_by_link&screen_parms=acid~ps_query_type=accnum~ps_query=008940~ps_referrer=oai:awm:267635/786322&screen_type=BOTTOM

 

What tilt! Way before Gary Winograd

 

 

Come to think of it wedding photography records an event, documentary? Ooh that is scary thought.

 

Thaks for you thoughts so far

[fjords]

Post modern documentary photography: Yeah, you got it; impersonal surveilance,

forensic, crime scene, insurance, scientific. photos unfiltered by cultural aesthetics.

[working camera]

Nah John I'm not disagreeing with yer

 

Look I know this is pretty much an arty-farty-wank probably-more appropriate-as-a-half-tanked-philosophical-bar-room-rant but I am interested in what people around here think documentary is or what it may be. Particularly from talented photographers like your good self.

 

But ok lets use our Dennis C's Katrina cyclone aftermath pics as an example. I think they are a great example of modern documentary. But many he had posted up at PN could also serve as insurance claim documents.

 

C.

[fjords]

Yeah, Jurors might appreciate a little comic relief!

[kent_tolley2]

In my mind some of the finest documentary work currently being done is by Ken and Ric Burns. I realize they go way beyond simple photography with narration and music but the basic material is old still photos sequenced in order to tell you the hiSTORY of a subject. (baseball, jazz, civil war, New York, young Freud). Since we gathered in caves around fires, story has been the way we STORE knowledge that is meaningful to us in order to make it memorable and pass it down to our children. <BR><BR>

 

Excepting purely scientific photographs (microscope shot of Ebola virus or a shot of Saturn through Hubble) I don't think the photographer can remove himself from the picture. He has a point of view. He stands at one point and shoots the subject from some angle and in doing that he literally takes a stand. He shoots the subject with light at some precise angle and he shoots at a particular instant in time. All of these decisions, whether you or he thinks about it, represent a POV. When I shoot, itﾒs important to me that my POV is not unconscious or my photograph will be incoherent. In this way, the act of shooting becomes a direct path to self knowledge. I have to look inside myself in order to take the photograph of the thing outside myself. In that way, the photograph is actually more a picture of whatﾒs inside me than the subject outside me. Considerations of inside and outside themselves become arbitrary and indistinguishable.<BR> <BR>

 

Some photographs have a clearer POV and their pictures grab you emotionally like Langeﾒs migrant mother. All that FSA stuff, to me, remains the finest document of America in the 30's. All accessible to every human being and all emotive. They were dramatic times and to shoot that stuff dry would have been to miss the point entirely. And it wasn't just the photographers who had an agenda; it also was the editors and ultimately the government that funded the project.<BR><BR>

 

The subject itself is often emotive like the shots of concentration camp survivors but perhaps those shots could have been taken by almost anyone with access and still had that emotional content. The shot of the pile of eye-glasses! You cannot look at that and not instantly put together the story in your mind and that story affects you emotionally. So the viewer also brings his or her own experience and his or her own POV to the viewing.<BR><BR>

 

So if what John Doane says that documentary is unaffected clinical observations, excepting the Hubble shots of the Eagle nebula, I donﾒt think there is any such thing as pure documentary.

[fjords]

craig, Kent (an eloquent response), Susan Sontag in "On Photography" wrote

ﾓPhotographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces

of it.ﾔ I assume in this case a 'statement' represents a point of view, and 'pieces' some

form of ubiquitous truth? thus the conundrum i find myself in.

[fjords]

above, ? = ".

[kent_tolley2]

Thanks John. I have immense respect for Sontag's mind and critical abilities. When she says "do not seem to be . . . so much as" it is a way of saying that the second consideration outweighs the first in her mind but not necessarily that the first consideration has no validity. It is a literary devise to steer the reader away from their prior thinking and into the argument that follows. But I would hazard to guess that Sontag herself would be the first to argue that the world is not either-or but instead both-and. I don't see how you can pick up a camera in any expressive way and not make a statement. Expression, by it's very nature, is a statement about the world.

[working camera]

Thanks guys, that's basically where I started. Its ambiguous and that presents a "conundrum".

 

I guess it comes down to *expressive* formulation a story or dialogue. The image-maker may maintain a degree of 'visibility' but this may not necessarily be overt. The aesthetic assumed can be quite clinical yet still have considerable impact. If documentary does have a grounding basis I guess it lays with the intent of the image-maker.

 

C.