Quotations, questions and thoughts
Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.
A large part of Rosler’s argument is that documentary does not aim so much to change the structures responsible for the world around us, but that it is designed to comfort viewers and confirm that there is no reason to act.
Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.)
Does documentary distance the real world and make it safe for us by pulling its teeth?
But which political battles have been fought and won by someone for someone else?
Does documentary really lead to meaningful change? Do the creators and consumers of documentary fool themselves into thinking that they are able to effect the “right” change or any change at all?
It is easy to understand why what has ceased to be news becomes testimonial to the bearer of the news. Documentary testifies finally, to the bravery or (dare we name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of
physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble.
Rosler goes on to name a Who’s Who of well-known “documentarian stars” to make a very sharp point: the focus of documentary is not the photographic subject but the photographer, whatever narrative is offered to the viewer.
An early –1940s, perhaps–Kodak movie book tells North American travelers, such as the Rodman C. Pells of San Francisco, pictured in the act of photographing a Tahitian, how to film natives so that they seem unconscious of the camera.
Documentary photography is not just subject to portraying a particular embedded viewpoint but is, at times, subject to manipulation to better make a point or achieve a desired effect.
…topicality drops away as epochs fade, and the aesthetic aspect is, if anything, enhanced by the loss of specific reference.
With the passage of time (and the reception of the images as art?), the specific content of documentary becomes less and less relevant. Whatever the original justification might have been (social benefit? newsworthiness?), the documentary subject becomes a free-floating object.
An analysis which reveals social institutions as serving one class by legitimating and enforcing its domination while hiding behind the false mantle of even-handed universality necessitates an attack on the monolithic cultural myth of objectivity (transparency, unmediatedness), which implicates not only photography but all journalistic and reportorial objectivity used by mainstream media to claim ownership of all truth.
This comes back to Rosler’s argument that documentary does not seriously challenge the established social order but actually helps to prop it up—the subjects are not us and we can make judgements about them from a distance and a superior height.
[A] new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has not been to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy (almost an affection(for the imperfections and the frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value(no less precious for being irrational. . . . What they hold in common is the belief that the commonplace is really worth looking at, and the courage to look at it with a minimum of theorizing. [quoting John Szarkowski]
Rosler has no time for Szarkowski’s misty-eyed view of the documentarians of the 60s and 70s. Instead, she sees in them an aloofness toward their subjects that produces images of spectacle and people as unwitting circus performers. This doesn’t seem to be any better than the moralizing of the previous generation of photographers and the result is the same in Rosler’s estimation: the established social order can sleep safe.
But the common acceptance of the idea that documentary precedes, supplants, transcends, or cures full, substantive social activism is an indicator that we do not yet have a real documentary.
Perhaps Rosler develops this thought somewhere else, but I found it a frustrating end to her article. We are aware of the contempt that she had for documentary photography until the 1980s, but what does she think “a real documentary” would look like? Her closing sentence implies that something of the kind is possible, but how would it avoid all of the pitfalls of what had gone before? Who would practise it? Would there be an audience for it?
This last point is something that I have wondered about as I have looked at the work of environmental (e.g. Burtynsky), conflict (e.g. McCullin) and journalistic (e.g. McCurry) photographers: if the images they show us are not aesthetically or emotionally compelling, will we want to look at them for long? And if we don’t want to look at their images, what would any of these photographers achieve? (Apart from recognition and money, of course.)
I found Rosler’s essay more complex than it needed to be, but important. Her questions and accusations have to be faced if we are to be honest about the nature of society and the motivations of individuals. People with any degree of standing or power have an interest in preserving the status quo, and more of us belong in that camp than would like to admit it. In some ways, her writing reminds me of the response I had to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing—Berger is gentler, but there is a persistent, useful Marxist social critique lying behind his observations and I suspect that the same philosophical strain lies behind Martha Rosler’s work.
I wonder, though, if Rosler’s argument was just too bleak. Having offered a withering critique of documentary, does she leave us with anywhere to go?
Reference
Berger, John (ed.) (1990) Ways of seeing: based on the BBC television series with John Berger. (Repr) London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.
Rosler, Martha (1993) ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography’ In: Bolton, Richard (ed.) The contest of meaning: critical histories of photography. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Context and Narrative 