documentary strategies: examples from an american context

7/29/2019 Documentary Strategies: Examples from an American Context

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DOCUMENTARY

STRATEGIES

EXAMPLES FROM AN AMERICAN CONTEXT


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What is a document?

What is documentary?

A question of the real and relation to representation:to giving an account.

Real / Realism

Document / Documentary / Documentary style


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What is a document?


A question of the real and relation to representation:to giving an account.

Real / Realism



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What is a document?


A question of the real and relation to representation:A question of giving an account.

Real / Realism



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What is a document?



Real / Realism



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What is a document?



Real / Realism



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Molly Nesbit on the document (via Eugene Atget)

*The document before 1914 was seen to be without aesthetic properties

the document had no prescribed form: in absolute terms we could say it was a

detailed blank it was an impersonal, expository picture, the zero degree of the

image taking shape as its job became clear.

*A document is utilitarian, or functional it is put to use

A document could not exist alone it needed a viewer and a task

Molly Nesbitt, inA New History of Photography, ed. M. Frizot, p.401 + 403


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Whatisdocumentaryphotography?

The term documentary was first used on 8 February 1926, by thefilmmaker John Grierson. He used the term documentary in the New

York Sunto describe Robert Flahertys film Moana, about the daily life

of Polynesian Islanders.!!!


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What is documentary photography?

Theconceptofdocumenta7onisinherentinthenatureofthephotographic

process.Thatis,thecameramakesarecordoftheeventwithinitsfieldof

visionattheinstantofexposure.

thetermdocumentarycametorefertophotographsmadefroma

specificallyhumanis7cpointofview.

Preface,Observa0ons:EssaysonDocumentaryPhotography,David

Featherstone,ed,p.vii.

"Whatisadocumentaryphotograph?Withequaljus7ceonemightrespondby

saying'justabouteverything'oralterna7vely,'justaboutnothing'."

AbigailSolomon-Godeau,PhotographyattheDock,Minneapolis:Universityof

MinnesotaPress,1991,p.169.


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Documentary:

Arrives as a photographic genre as neither art nor advertising nor journalism;

a form of media predicated on picture-story

Concerned with a form of story-telling either as exposure of the unseen or

as visual commentary (on way-of-life or on how the other half live)

A concern for observingeveryday practices; presenting the world in action

Neither picture nor document: has attributes of both: a method of framing the

world to produce a story

A range of publishing platforms: newspapers, magazines, galleries, online


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Add Foto8


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Grierson defines documentary as a kind of educational media:

the observation of the ordinary or the actualand the discovery within the

actual of the patterns which give it significance for civic education

Not a servile accumulation of fact but an emotional map

A search for what actually moves: what hits the spectator at the midriff:

what yanks him up by the hair of the head or the plain boot straps to the

plane of decent seeing

cited in John Tagg, The Plane of Decent Seing, The Disciplinary Frame


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Grierson defines documentary as

The creative treatment of actuality

cited in David BatePhotography: The Key Concepts, p.56

(originally: The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology)


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John Tagg:

In the mutation from

document

to

documentary

, however, we are

dealing with a new level of activity of the extended State The history of

documentary is therefore the history of a specific management of

representation that has to be located in the cultural strategy of a particular

kind of governance: a hybrid of discipline and spectacle; a strategy of

management of meaning and identity

document > documentary

from surveillance (document)

to a rhetoric of recruitment (documentary)

in his The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning,

2009, University of Minnesota Press, p.xxxii


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John Tagg:

In the mutation from

document

to

documentary

, however, we are

dealing with a new level of activity of the extended State The history of

documentary is therefore the history of a specific management of

representation that has to be located in the cultural strategy ofa particular

kind of governance: a hybrid of discipline and spectacle; a strategy of

management of meaning and identity

document > documentary

from surveillance (document)

to a rhetoric of recruitment (documentary)

in his The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning,

2009, University of Minnesota Press, p.xxxii


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Martha Rosler:

it is customary to distinguish social documentary from documentary

per se The more general term denotes photographic practice having a

variety of aesthetic claims but without any involvement in expos

In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)


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Some examples for today:

Lewis HineWalker Evans

Robert Frank

Nan Goldin


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Lewis Hine (1910-20s)Walker Evans (1930s)

Robert Frank (1950s)

Nan Goldin (1980s)


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Lewis Hine / direct encounterWalker Evans / lyrical association

Robert Frank / subjective positions

Nan Goldin / intimate snapshot


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Lewis Hine / Jacob Riis [Jim Goldberg]Walker Evans / FSA, Dorothea Lange [Alec Soth]

Robert Frank / Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander

Nan Goldin / [Wolfgang Tilmans, Rinko Kawauchi]


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Notaportraitofthedreamsofthe

modernera

Theexposureofthelabourthatrunsthe

modernera

LEWIS HINE:bearing witness"generating evidence!


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Thethis-really-exists"Proof not picture

Documentary photography as thesocially-embedded imageExposingsocial practices, not sensibilities

LewisHine,wri7ngin1910:

Mychild-photoshavealreadyset

theauthori7estoworktoseeifsuch

thingscanbepossible.Theytryto

getroundthembycryingfakebut

thereinliesthevalueofthedataand

awitness.Mysociologicalhorizon

broadenshourly


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Theywereheredoingthis


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Pityvs.Empathy

JacobRiisvs.LewisHine


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An art of disclosureThe demand to participate

Alan Trachtenberg:

[Hines images seek]the socialact lay in communication. Hinedeveloped methods of presentinghis pictures as mute monumentsseeking avoice in the viewersimagination, a voice in dialogue

in hisCamera Work / SocialWork, in hisReading AmericanPhotographs, p,203"


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Jim Goldberg

GREECE. Lavrio. 2005.

Two detained Afghani refugees point to the refrigerator on which they wrote (approximate translation) 'The Sea

of Sadness has no shore'. (Their English translation is 'in the open see (sic) dont have border') Lavrio

Detention Center.2005


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Jim Goldberg

GREECE. Athens. 2003. Muzaffar "Alex" Jafari writes about his journey on foot from Afghanistan to

Greece via Iran. Now Alex is in school and supports himself by working in a call center.

2003


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Lewis Hine, Young Russian Jewess on Ellis Island,

New York, 1905


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Alan Trachtenberg on Lewis Hine:

his pictures invite and demand aparticular kind of participatory

viewing Social photography meantthat the photograph itself performed a

social act, made a particular

communication !


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Photography as motivationA spur into actionPhotography as motivated


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Fromfact toemotional map""The plane ofdecent seeing""A recruitment to a cause


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Hine:

Some comments on method:

*Clarity we see them clearly

*Equality we see them like us

*Communication we hear something, we make contact


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WALKER EVANS:the photographic series, the imaginative sequence, documentary as style

1. Photographer as poet of the actual

2. Interested in art photography as well as straight observation lyrical and frontal

3. Associated with theFarm Security Administration (also known as the FSA) who employed photographers to

document the plight of farmers during the Depression. Published two important photographic books -

American Photographs andLet Us Now Praise Famous Men (with James Agee).

4. Dis-associated fromFSA to show work in the museum (first photographer to show at MOMA, NY)


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From confronting human activity inperson

to an analysis of human activity

at large

:

From the face to the sign; documenting the structure of the street the public

sphere as more than just pavement; as places of entertainment, popular culture, social

practices

The photographer as analyst andflaneur


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A key influence:

For Evans, Atget did not make a

sentimental poetry of the street

but a precise:

editing of society, a clinical

process; even enough of a

cultural necessity to make one

wonder why other so-called

advanced countries of the world

have not also been examined and

recorded.

EUGENE ATGET"


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Documentary-style:Ambiguity in the face of"closed meaning / fixed forms""The edit ofAmercian Photographs

!!A work of sequence and association!!From to!!Photograph to photograph


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Documentary-style:

Ambiguity in the face of"closed meaning / fixed forms""The edit ofAmerican Photographs!!A work of sequence and association!!From to!!image to street!!Relation of image to !!1.real life /way of life!2.Desire!3.The realisation of desire?


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The places of social encounter""The street as:""The park bench / The movie poster""The cultural imaginary (its fantasies)""Thematerial conditionsof a culture


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John Roberts:""The FSA embodies the

unprecedented use of thephotographic archive by thestate to produce forms ofideological consensus [theFSA as a form of] structuralconsensus building""

the safe waters of humantragedy rather than themuddy waters of classstruggle"""In hisThe state, the everydayand the archive in hisTheArt of Interruption, p.81"


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Dorothea Lange, MigrantMother, 1936""A mythic representation?""The figure ofeternal

suffering?!


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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Walker Evans (images) JamesAgee (text), published 1941 (pictures taken 1936)

A discontinuous image-sequenceA chain of associations rather than a defined message


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Where are the people?How does Evans representthe people to themselves?

Is thetruthof these pictures self-evident or does it arrive through the sets of relationships?

(Does the viewer participate in this meaning production?)

A refusal of the self-evidenttransparencyof documentaryYet: A commitment to the socially-embedded image

A use of the modern fractured and discontinuous aesthetic for social purposes


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Alec Soth

Niagara

2006


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Evans:


*HotDisinterestedness

something presented

objectively

whilst

related to a subjective principle: poverty, street culture, culture of

love

*The everyday: an exploration of the poetics of the vernacular

*Association: between a number of related images a set of ideas

emerge


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A context:

The Family of Man

*an exhibition between 1955-1962

it travels from New York

across continental divides including Moscow

(approx. 38 countries, 9 million visitors)

Now on permanent installation at

Chateau de Clervaux, Luxembourg

*a book a popular photo-essay


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What familiar symbols or tropes do we see here?

How are they presented?

What methods of association or inversion are used?

(from between the frame to within the frame)


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Two models:


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1. How the other half live: bearing witness / sometimes accused

of middle-class voyeurism

2. Modes of living: observation on way of life critical analysis

of ones context


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Robert Frank: I wanted the view anybody could see


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DIANE ARBUS

To re-present the familiar

humanist subject

the mother

the home

the happy familyA presentation of a universal

human subject with a twist


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LEE FRIEDLANDER

To present the marginsof existence

The omni-presence of the television

The multi-perspectiveof modern life

From an aesthetics of clarity to ademonstration of fragmentation

A refusal of the moment to a demonstration

of the pressures of contemporary public life:

Media

Advertising

The commodity


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Frank:


*Theroving

eye; a perspective that is not fixed a wanderingviewpoint

*Symbolic detours: to address those symbols that are often used to

mobilise us (the nation, the family) in a critical fashion

*Fragment: to present a world that is not unified, that is not

complete


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NAN GOLDIN: THE SNAP-SHOT

Some defining features of this trend:

*Photograph as souvenir of experience not as objective document

*Seeming non-professional relationship to camera less

concerned with technique than the immediacy of the event

*Where is the distance in their work? The photographer / camera /event / subject become fused (the photographer doesnt observethe event but is implicated in the event)

*some snapshot photographers: Nan Goldin, Nobuyoshi Araki,Terry Richardson, Hiromix, Ed Templeton, Larry Clark!


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Snapshot method meets structuralgrouping:

The figure of the Couple


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Another figure:


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The lone figure coupled with the/ir image

(to search for an other)

*What does colour do here? (from analysis to mood, from

distance to proximity)


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Love, Violence, Death


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Another model of symbolic association

From the immediate to the eternal

From little moments to big topics

A treatment of epic topics through micro-event


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Goldin:


*A posing of the most intimate moment

*An exploration of where private and public meet how does the

intimate self encounter an exterior world; what is the interface

*A picturing of the social fabric in which the photographer is

weaved; not goingout there to bring back exotic images ofothers

documentary strategies: examples from an american context

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