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August 4, 2011
The term conceptual documentary has been used increasingly in recent years in response to certain shifts in documentary photography. An exponent of conceptual documentary is Stephen Gill.
His pictures show billboards from the back. According to the brief captions, the unseen images advertise corsets, health drinks, Gordon’s Gin, the BBC, Elton John’s greatest hits, and L’Oréal – “Because You’re Worth It”. What we see are not the bright, seductive confections of adland, but the rough timber poles and frames that support these messages.
Stephen Gill, Your money should work harder, not you. Make more of your money – DWS Investments from the series “Billboards” (2002–04), Crystal C-type print.
What we see are piles of rubbish – old tyres, breeze blocks, oil drums, and skips full of trash. It’s a world of raw, recalcitrant matter, of things in a state of chaos and ugliness that stands in marked contrast advertising’s immaculate illusions and beauty.
Stephen Gill, from the series “Billboards” (2002–04), Crystal C-type print.
Melissa Miles in The Drive to Archive: Conceptual Documentary Photobook Design in Photographies (no. 3, Issue 1, 2010) outlines the critique of traditional documentary photography. She says:
Over the last thirty years, documentary photographers' claims for objectivity and neutrality have been challenged as the product of power, discourse and ideology, and the emotive qualities of humanist documentary photography have been reread in terms of a double violence in which the victims of traumatic events also become the victims of the photographers' and spectators' voyeuristic gaze. The institutionalization of photography in museums, universities and book publishing, and the aestheticization of documentary photography as an expressive practice have also contributed to what Stephen Dawber refers to as a “profound crisis in documentary photography's conditions of possibility”
Conceptual documentary photography is a response, in part, to this apparent “crisis” in a positivist construction of documentary photography as a mirror of or a window on the social world. It also marks a conscious effort to shift documentary photography away from the very emotive humanism that dominated much of the twentieth century; a rejection of the black and white photography that in the mid-twentieth century became code for heroic modernist documentary whose naturalism expressed a visual truth.
The focus on the everyday and the cool, distanced aesthetic that characterizes Conceptual documentary (eg., the 1930s FSA Documentary project in the US) are symptoms of this shift away from humanist or moralist documentary traditions (eg., the Family of Man) that builds pathos or sympathy into the image in an era of compassion fatigue (eg., human suffering in African famines).
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