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April 26, 2012
I'm at a bit of a loss to know how to continue with my Rethinking documentary photography after returning from Tasmania. So I thought that I'd do a bit of re-reading of some old texts on documentary photography that I'd read some time ago. Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) was one such text.
I came across an old essay by Martha Rosler, and in digging around on the internet I came across her 1990s essay 'Post Documentary, Post Photography' in Decoys, Disruptions: Selected Writings 1974-2001. She refers to the various challenges that radically undermine photography's fundamental claim to a unique capacity to offer a direct insight into the real. Or to put it another way the Enlightenment ideal that drove the invention of photographic technology in the first place—a form of representation that promised unmediated knowledge of the material world.
The challenges to this ideal of photography as a window on the world,t have, in turn, produced, something of a crisis among artists and intellectuals, and troubled some in journalism and the legal profession. This 'crisis of the real' is understood in terms of reality being sold out in favour of manipulation and artful practiced, as for example computer programs that easily manipulate and alter the image. This leads to a turning away from an interest in indexicality, the privileged viewpoint of witness, and embeddness in a particular moment in space and time.
Her argument is this:
documentary, a polarizing practice that must inevitably provoke opposition, is perpetually on the brink of its demise. Those hostile to the demands of "crusading " documentary may find it easier to call for its end, ironically enough, in the name of ethics and "responsibility. Second, as postmodernists claim, demands for "straight information" without interpretation are unrealistic, for there is no voice from outside particular human communities. Strict objectivity, a standard derived from journalistic ethics, may prove an inappropriate ideal for documentary---as documentation and photojournalists already know---but so is an alibi of personalization, sentiment and disengagement. Third, the partial melding of the photographic audience and its subjects has put great pressure on the institutionalized methodologies of documentary for interpretation has become a field of perpetual contestation. Finally, the art world embrace of photography can squeeze documentary to death---or maybe I've got cause and effect reversed, for it could be that all of photography is already a nostalgic craft, given the explosion of computer-based manipulations that drive our stepping off into the post-photographic moment, leaving behind both photograph and photographer.
Rosler says that we continue to defend documentary because we need it and because it is likely will to continue, with or without art world theorizing. This is because the division between rich and poor will widen in the US and that her idea of postmodernism does snot extend to the idea of a world with no coherent explanation of differential social power and advocacy of ways to right the balance. She finishes:
Documentary's best course, it seems to me, is to provide a balance between observing the situation of others and expressing one's own viewpoint--which ought to include some form of analytic framework identifying social causes and remedies.. In pursuit of this documentary will continue to negotiate between sensationalism on the one hand and instrumentalism on the other.
My initial reaction to re-reading this essay is that by documentary Rosler means social documentary photography, that is one dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged, disadvantaged, or marginalised people and highlights issues of power, representation and communication. Rosler, like Alan Sekula, was arguing for a new social documentary photography that could function as both as a form of social critique and an oppositional cultural practice.
What is missing is an account of the documentary mode of picture making . We could envision, for instance, probing how photographs are used to convey messages, how photography is related to consumerism, and how photography is employed to exert political control. It could be a critical commentary on questioning and commenting on photographic practice itself as employed in advertising, or modernist art photography where a photo with its concern for the value of originality and authorship.
The documentary mode of picture making is important because it would include include Eugène Atget, Karl Blossfeldt, Walker Evans, Albert Renger-Patzsch and August Sander. Rosler makes no mention of the Dusseldorf school of photography with its roots in the industrial landscapes and structures of Bernd and Hilla Becher in the 1970s. This reached back to the 920s German art tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity, and to August Sander, and it was continued in very diverse ways by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Elger Esser , Jörg Sasse, Simone Nieweg and Candida Höfer.
This suggests that hotography's distinctive value lies more in its humble documentary function, its intimate examination and commemoration of everyday life, than it does in its obsolete technology.
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"This crisis of the real is understood in terms of reality being sold out in favour of manipulation and artful practiced, as for example computer programs that easily manipulate and alter the image. "
A fundamental question about photography: when does a photograph become manipulated?
For most people digitally adding and removing objects in an image constitutes a manipulation. But what about an increase or decrease in contrast, cropping, darkening or brightening parts of an image?