Reflection—documentary photography

Before beginning work on Part 1 of CAN, I suppose I had the idea that there were still distinct fields called ‘documentary photography,’ ‘photojournalism’ and ‘art photography.’

At the same time, I knew that there was some degree of blurring between the categories because of the attention paid to many Instagram accounts where individuals ‘document’ their lives in images that are presented as candid but clearly required a lot of work to set up. A similar approach appears in the work of photographers like Kevin Mullins, for example, who brands himself as a ‘documentary wedding photographer‘ and mentions that his approach goes under a number of names: “wedding photojournalism, documentary wedding photography and reportage wedding photography.” His approach is “completely candid” and all “about weaving the images together to tell the tale of your wedding day.” This results in photographs that are presented as a neutral and natural witness to an event while leaving nothing to chance and creating a narrative to please a paying client. No matter how unobtrusive Mullins is, however, everyone at the wedding will be aware that he has been hired to take pictures of them.

If blurring between categories happens because of the borrowing of techniques, another blurring happens when documentary photographs show up on gallery walls. One of the most obvious examples of this is in the work of Don McCullin, whose photojournalistic images of war zones and urban poverty entered the art world years ago. It is strange, then, to read that McCullin does not see himself as an artist:

I’m in a very funny place: I’m in an art gallery and yet I’m a photographer saying I don’t want to be an artist. The reason I’ve agreed to be involved, apart from the honour of it all, is that if I leave my photographs in yellow boxes in my house, no one will ever see the work I’ve done that condemns war, famine, starvation and tragedies. It’s a great opportunity to release the propaganda of all the evil things I’ve seen in the world, which are not humanly right. So that’s my justification in putting my work, as a photographer, in an art gallery. But I’m not an artist.
Don McCullin in Bond, J. (2019).

Similarly, McCullin rejects any description of his work as ‘iconic’ because “in a way it turns my photography into a kind of compositioned work that borders on the art world. But I like to keep photography really pure. I’m a bit prickly about this art stuff.”

Whatever McCullin’s views of his identity or the purity of his photography, three decades of representation by Hamiltons Gallery—whose clients include Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe—along with a retrospective exhibit at Tate Britain, would qualify anyone else as an artist.

Given the above, I would now see ‘documentary photography’ as an orientation to image-making that may exist in the mind of the photographer and communicated through the use of a particular set of visual conventions, but as a distinction which holds up less and less in practice. I think this is an issue both of ‘narrative’—as approaches and techniques to creating images are blurred within the photographic frame—and of ‘context,’ as photographic images created in one set of circumstances are regularly viewed in many different settings.

In short, the lines between documentary, reportage, photojournalism and art photography seem fluid to me and the terms themselves may no longer be very useful.

Reference

Bond, J. (2019) Don McCullin on why he is showing at Tate Britain even though he is ‘not an artist’. At: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/preview/tate-britain-celebrates-reluctant-artist-don-mccullin [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Don McCullin. (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/don-mccullin/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Don McCullin. (s.d.) At: https://www.hamiltonsgallery.com/artists/don-mccullin/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Wedding Photographer shooting across the UK and Europe. (s.d.) At: https://www.kevinmullinsphotography.co.uk/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Exercise—The real and the digital

As Liz Wells (2009) notes in her brief discussion of the real and the digital, “the manipulation of images is nothing new and […] photographs have been changed, touched-up or distorted since the earliest days.” This is correct. What has changed with the overwhelming prevalence and easy access of digital technologies is that it is no longer possible to accept that photographic images (still or video) are direct representations of reality. In other words, we cannot simply assume that a photograph bears an indexical relationship—”a physical or causal relationship between the signifier (i.e., the photograph) and the signified (i.e., what the photograph depicts)”—to its content (Hall, 2007, 16).

In the past, photographs generally had their start with an image of an object that existed, while realistic images now can be partially or entirely fabricated without the need of any photographic input.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to advance this thought as far as Jean Baudrillard has, to the point of asserting that everything is constructed. It will be difficult for us as a species to completely abandon confidence in our perception of the world around us, particularly when that perception plays such an important role in keeping us safe and generally serves us well.

I think we are more likely to continue on the path where we find ourselves now: we will accept as fact those things that confirm our existing biases and label anything dissonant as ‘fake news.’ My concern is that we will be both radically skeptical and naively vulnerable at the same time, making us easy prey for large-scale manipulation.

Reference

Hall, S. (2007) This means this, this means that: a user’s guide to semiotics. Laurence King Pub.

Wells, L. (2009) Photography A Critical Introduction. Taylor & Francis.

Exercise—Composite image

Creating a composite image is fairly new territory for me and I don’t use Photoshop for editing images. Fortunately, there are free alternatives available online and I found that Paint.NET would do the job for this exercise.

My first attempt at a composite is not perfect, but I will likely return to this type of image and improve my technique. My separation of the Trudeau image from its background is not perfect and I can see that trying to improve the colour balance between the component images would help to create the illusion of a single photograph.

Exercise—Pickering’s Public Order

I found Sarah Pickering’s Public Order series of images fascinating—the initial unease passed quickly as I noticed that most of the buildings are made of cinder block and that the photographer makes it plain that they are facades. The resulting street scenes are standard “types” of a UK urban setting and reminiscent of movie back-lots. We can see that they are artificial, but we respond to them with recognition because the types are so familiar to us. It is as though we are both aware and unaware of the artifice at the same time—we know it is false but we are ready to play along.

I am not sure how to respond to the question of whether “Public Order [is] an effective use of documentary or is it misleading?” As I suggested above, I think the series straddles a line of deliberate ambiguity: the documentation of artifice. If pushed to answer, I suppose I would answer ‘yes’ to both parts of the question: the work is both an effective use of documentary and it is misleading.

The title of the series also hints at ambiguity and double-meaning: the mock town and the structures and forms of our public life have been created in an orderly way, and the environment provides a training ground for law enforcement for those times when public order has broken down and will be reestablished by force. Both an ordered public and public disorder hinted at within a few photographic frames.

Reference

Pickering, S. Public Order. At: https://www.sarahpickering.co.uk/Works/Pulic-Order/workpg-01.html

Research point—Documentary and art

Paul Seawright’s Sectarian Murder series challenges the boundaries between documentary and art by deliberately blurring them. The locations of crime scenes he depicts are abstracted in several ways: time has passed since the events in question; there is no discernible evidence of a crime in the frame; we are told that the accompanying text has been redacted to remove any reference to the religion of the people involved; and the images have been framed and lit in a way that makes them visually interesting and appealing (rather than being strictly ‘descriptive’ as one might expect from a photojournalistic approach). Ultimately, there is no way of knowing if Seawright has shot a location associated with the crimes described in the accompanying texts or if he has fabricated a scene.

The core of Seawright’s argument is that the construction of meaning is not done by the artist but by the viewer and that the distinction between art and journalism is how quickly a piece “gives up its meaning.” I think this is true to a degree—in that there is no way to predict how a reader or viewer might understand the text or object in front of them—but it suggests a greater distance between the artist and the work than is actually the case. Given that Seawright has chosen a particular light, angle of view, framing and explanatory text, it seems a bit disingenuous for him to absolve himself of guiding the viewer toward meaning. The viewer is still free to come up with his or her own appreciation of the work, but the artist has already pointed the viewer in a particular direction. The range of possible understandings is not wide open but has been somewhat restricted.

If we accept the starting point of this course—narrative is what happens within the frame and context is everything outside it—then we must also see that there is an interaction between the two. Defining a piece of documentary photography as art immediately alters the context of the photograph and will influence how its narrative is read by the viewer.

References

(2018) Catalyst: Paul Seawright. At: https://vimeo.com/76940827

Sectarian Murder. At: http://www.paulseawright.com/sectarian

Exercise—Street photography

I was on holiday in London for this exercise, so I decided to shoot my 60 images in an area where I would be guaranteed a never-ending supply of movement and subjects: Piccadilly Circus.

The contact sheets for my 30 black and white images are here:

I set the camera’s electronic viewfinder to black and white mode for this series to help me to visualise the final product more easily. Without the presence of colour in the frame, I found that I was drawn to cleaner lines, textures and contrasts. I find that the same thing happens when I review the completed images.

The contact sheets for my 30 colour images are here:

For the colour series, I set the electronic viewfinder back to a colour mode and found myself more often looking for striking colour, such as the presence of a red object in the frame. For a few frames I also tried to exaggerate the effect of some of the colour by using a longer shutter speed and panning with the movement of the subject. The colour images are naturally more like the world we see, and it was perhaps for that reason that I wanted to liven things up a bit by playing with intentional blur. And it is fair to say, as many people have, that black and white images are already an abstraction for people with normal sight.

At the same time, I am hesitant to overemphasise the changes I made in my approach to shooting or viewing colour versus black and white. I expect that, unless it specifically plays to the strengths inherent to colour or black and white, an image might be strong or weak regardless of the presence of colour.

I can’t say that I prefer one set over the other. Each has its place. I did, however, have a preference for black and white images for quite a while. There were probably a few reasons for this: they were more similar to what I had seen produced by the ‘legends’ of photography; they telegraphed to viewers that I was trying to do something a bit more ‘serious’ with my photographs; I learned to develop and print in a black and white darkroom; and, frankly, I found it easier to rescue marginal images (mixed lighting, blown highlights, etc.) with black and white processing techniques.

Research point—Street photography

It is strange that the CAN manual takes time to distinguish documentary photography from reportage, but refers to ‘street photography’ without offering any definition. The most common features of street photography seem to be images made outside the studio, often as a result of random encounters with people in an urban setting. Nevertheless, some examples do not include people at all and others have been created in non-urban environments. Perhaps the most useful working definition of street photography is a broad one: “the impulse to take candid pictures in the stream of everyday life.” (Howarth and McLaren, 2011, p.9)

Helen Levitt (1913-2009, NYC) — worked for commercial photographer, inspired by Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Images of children and immigrant communities in NYC. Works included in the inaugural exhibition of MoMA’s photography department in 1939. Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1960.

Joel Meyerowitz (1938- , NYC) — an early advocate of colour photography. Worked with different formats for street photography, from 35mm to large format. Only photographer allocated unrestricted access to Ground Zero in Manhattan. Guggenheim Fellow twice and awarded a Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society in 2012.

Paul Graham (1956- , Stafford, UK) — sequential colour prints of people engaged in daily life. Twelve-volume photobook A Shimmer of Possibility (2007) calling attention to overlooked activities or places. First show 1986; color photographs with Martin Parr and Richard Billingham.

Joel Sternfeld (1944- , NYC) — large-format color photographs of American towns and cities. Disused places, derelict sites, dispossessed people. Influenced by roadside photography of Walker Evans. Began producing colour photographs during the early 1970s after reading both Johannes Itten’s and Josef Albers’s theories on colour. Has taught photography at Sarah Lawrence College since 1985.

Martin Parr (1952- , Epsom, UK) — themes of consumerism, globalization, and social class. Switched from black-and-white to colour photography in 1984, became a member of Magnum Photos in 1988. Photobooks, filmmaking and fashion editorial work.

Fred Herzog (1930- , Stuttgart, Germany) — moved to Vancouver in 1953. Substantial body of images of life in Vancouver over 50 years. Much of the work was produced on slow Kodachrome stock. Anticipated “New Colour” of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston? Active in Vancouver’s art scene while working as a medical photographer from 1957 to 1990.

Brandon Stanton (1984- , Marietta, GA) — photographer, blogger and author of Humans of New York. Set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot portraits on a city map. This became the “Humans of New York” Facebook page, which he started in November 2010 and later a book of the same name. Street portraits with short quotes from subjects.

References

Campany, D. et al. (2017) Fred Herzog: modern color. Hatje Cantz.

Howarth, S.and McLaren, S. (2011) Street photography now. Thames & Hudson.

Parr, M.and Phillips, S.S. (2007) Martin Parr. Phaidon Press.

Stanton, B. (2013) Humans of New York. St. Martin’s Press.

Westerbeck, C. and Meyerowitz, J. (2005) Joel Meyerowitz. Phaidon.

Research Point — Photojournalism

On balance, I think it is fair to say that photography by itself has rarely, if ever, moved the public to action. The Time article demonstrates this by showing how successive genocides have been documented and how the cry, “never again!” is more accurately “again and again.” Regimes have set up mini-bureaucracies to catalogue their victims, little realizing (or caring?) how these records will be used to convict the perpetrators of crimes against humanity once the inevitable change of fortunes occurs.

People who have participated in successive waves of mass murder and other crimes have had available to them the images of previous horrific acts, but it has not changed their behaviour. In some cases, photographs might have helped to motivate them and/or provide them with terrible trophies.

As for the viewing public, rather than the actors themselves, I think that photography can indeed distance us from, and inure us to, the horrific. Acts that could be called “unspeakable” are somehow viewable, and we can get used to it. Images that we might only have imagined imperfectly (mass murder, cruelty and abuse, violence) are now available to us at the press of a button — we no longer have to imagine them. Yesterday’s “unthinkable” can become today’s new baseline. And, as Rosler suggests, showing the disturbing in photojournalism can be passed off as altruistic and in the service of a higher good, while clearly benefiting (only?) the photographer. The danger is not just that photojournalism can feed voyeurism, but that it can make a commodity out of someone else’s suffering. Your pain becomes my art, becomes my reputation, my livelihood, my profit motive.

I wonder, too, if photography (including photojournalism) is more often a way to confirm opinions already held by viewers. The public does not feel compelled to change by the images it sees, but finds in them evidence for the views it already holds. We see what we want to see. And when the image in front of us is too challenging, we can always reinterpret it or reject it outright (“fake news”). In this way, the value of photojournalism may lie not so much in its ability to change opinion, but to galvanize and justify it once it has begun to form. So, should we stop producing photojournalism? I think the answer is clearly no, for there is a definite benefit to documenting happenings, even (and sometimes especially) those that are horrific. But we may want to think about how and where images are displayed — the context as well as the narrative — and be more honest as producers and consumers of images about their real and potential impacts.

References

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.

Time. 2019. Available at: http://time.com/3426427/syrian-torture-archive-when-photographs-of-atrocities-dont-shock

Martha Rosler on documentary photography

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.

Eyewitnesses?

Although a few years old now, one of the best examples of citizen journalism exposing abuse of power in Canada was during the 2010 G-20 Summit in Toronto. During the Summit, the Toronto Police Services corralled more than 1,000 demonstrators, journalists, spectators and passers-by and detained them in Canada’s largest-ever mass arrest. The Police were widely criticized for the action and the subsequent treatment of detainees, with some labelling the holding centre “Torontonamo Bay” (Kassam, 2016).

Although professional journalists were among those detained, many others claimed amateur journalist status and were responsible for some of the most immediate pictures of what was happening from inside the cordon. The distinction between professional and amateur journalists is an important one:

professionals generally have some kind of training, a professional code and file stories via an accredited media outlet;
amateur / citizen journalists may or may not have had training, have no code and may “publish” their reports via unaccredited media.

In short, whether we agree with them or not, professional journalists generally aspire to some sort of objectivity in reporting and work for a media outlet whose views are known (Basen, 2010). Amateur / citizen journalists, on the other hand, may have no such standards and may be acting on behalf of a known organization, an unknown actor or simply for themselves.

Now that everyone is equipped with a portable recording and transmitting device, the promise of citizen journalism is that it offers an immediate and unvarnished reflection of the reality of what is taking place around them—the lack of professionalism of the citizen journalist becomes a virtue and viewers gain access to unmediated truth.

With the current 24-hour news cycle, it is impossible for professionals to be on the scene of every happening and amateurs are often there first to provide a window on immediate experience. This sounds tempting, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Everyone, even a citizen journalist, has a viewpoint—these viewpoints are limited at best, and skewed at worst. A prime example is Nuseir Yassin’s daily blog on Palestine (Rezk, s.d.). Yassin offers brief news and views in English on a situation that many Westerners find puzzling and does so in a way that is irenic and appealing. His ‘moderate’ views on the Israeli-Palestinian situation (both sides are at fault and their problems could be solved by greater understanding) are comforting and appealing to many, but may arise from a position of privilege that chooses to establish a moral equivalence that does not do justice to the history of the conflict. This view of the world is easily grasped, but it glosses over a lot of inconvenient details.

The fact that everyone has a viewpoint should not be a reason to ignore citizen journalism, however, for there are places where state or corporate control of the media means that the only alternative to the approved narrative will have to come from citizens (see Zhang, 2018). Perhaps the better way is to acknowledge the existence of viewpoints, including our own, and to subject all of them to scrutiny.

References

Basen, I. (2010) The new journalism and the G20 | CBC News. At: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-new-journalism-and-the-g20-1.938517 (Accessed on 2 June 2019)

Zhang, P. (2018) Can citizen journalism work in China? Villagers give their verdict At: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2170419/can-citizen-journalism-work-china-villagers-give-their-verdict (Accessed on 2 June 2019)

Kassam, A. (2016) ‘More than 1,000 people detained during G20 summit in Toronto can sue police’ In: The Guardian 7 April 2016 [online] At: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/06/toronto-g20-summit-police-lawsuit-civil-rights-abuses (Accessed on 2 June 2019)

Rezk, D. (s.d.) Nas Daily: Palestinian blogger delivers upbeat message to millions – but he can afford to. At: http://theconversation.com/nas-daily-palestinian-blogger-delivers-upbeat-message-to-millions-but-he-can-afford-to-106828 (Accessed on 2 June 2019)

Toronto’s tarnished image – G20: Street Level (s.d.) At: https://www.cbc.ca/canada/g20streetlevel/2010/06/torontos-tarnished-image.html (Accessed on 2 June 2019)