Tag: Reportage

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—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.