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June 10, 2010
The University of Michigan recently had a History of Art Symposium on "Contemporary Strategies in Documentary Photography" part 1 and part 11. The issue of image and text is raised.
The first part of the symposium, which does not appear to be online, is an Alec Soth lecture entitled The Democratic Jungle: Making Pictures in the Information Age, which plays off Eggleston’s idea of a “democratic forest,” in which everything can be made a subject of meaningful photography. He says:
In the ’60s and ’70s, photographers were realizing that the most mundane street corner could hold rich cultural information. In the digital age, these fragments, to me, mean less and less. The forest is overgrown — it’s tangled with images and information. So, jokingly, I say that photography should provide a narrative machete. It’s like cutting away the story to find your way through.
Soth's way out way out of the overgrown forest is the narrative, or storytelling, and he advocates a personalized documentary that he equates to the:
New Journalism of the 1970s — Tom Wolfe and people like that who were creating this new first-person journalism, where they are getting rid of that authoritative voice, that sort of all-knowing voice, and saying, ‘this is my experience,’
One example a personalized documentary is the photo book preferably without text---a fragmented narrative that allows viewers to connect the dots and fill in the blanks.
Why no text? Is this a left over from modernism?
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