WHAT IS NEW DOCUMENTARY
The Tate Museum London
www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/…/photography-new-documentary-forms
Tate glossary definition for documentary photography: A style of photography that provides a straightforward and accurate representation of people, places, … Lisette Model’s close-up views of people on the streets of Paris, New York and the French Riviera were often taken without the subjects’ awareness or permission.
This five-room display explores the ways in which five contemporary artists have used the camera to explore, extend and question the power of photography as a documentary medium.It includes recent work by Luc Delahaye, Mitch Epstein, Guy Tillim and Akram Zaatari, as well as two important earlier works by Boris Mikhailov. Between them they cover subjects as diverse as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, studio photography in Beirut, elections in the Congo, everyday life in pre- and post-Soviet Ukraine, and power production in the United States.
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photography has been used to provide accurate representations of objects, people, places or events. The twentieth-century concept of ‘documentary’ photography, however, is more complex than simply using the camera as a piece of recording technology and suggests a concern with the ways in which photography can bear witness to the world. The documentary value of a photograph is implicitly based on its claim to objectivity, which may depend on the choice of subject matter, the perspective from which it was taken, and the context in which it is shown or reproduced.
Throughout the twentieth century, photographers have sought new ways to document pressing social and political issues, and sometimes even to influence them. In recent years, however, these same forms of documentary photography – with the kinds of subject matter and perspective familiar from newspapers and magazines – have been produced by artists to be exhibited in museums and galleries. Each of the five rooms in this display is devoted to a single contemporary artist whose work raises the question of the documentary role of the photograph today and offers alternative ways of seeing, recording and understanding the events and situations that shape the world in which we live.
Curated by Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian
This five-room display explores the ways in which five contemporary artists have used the camera to explore, extend and question the power of photography as a documentary medium.It includes recent work by Luc Delahaye, Mitch Epstein, Guy Tillim and Akram Zaatari, as well as two important earlier works by Boris …
The Metropolitan Museum New Yorkhttps://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ndoc/hd_ndoc.htm
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, American photographers reinvented the documentary tradition once again. This time the subjective tradition that had emerged in the 1940s and early ’50s became a kaleidoscope through which photographers like Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander looked at the world. Trained in the “astonish-me” aesthetics of Alexey Brodovitch’s Design Workshops, Winogrand (1928–1984) claimed to make photographs in order “to see what the world looks like in photographs.” Although he possessed a particular fondness for visual puns and tilted exposures, his images belie a mastery of the 35mm camera and a seriously innovative point of view. His formal acuity is undeniable in El Morocco(
in which the photograph’s slapdash style mirrors the thrill of the moment as a woman whirls around a dance floor. Such technical sophistication abetted an absurdist appreciation for the visual world, as is evident in works like Untitled (
where the disposition of three figures on the street enact an unspoken “Waiting for Godot” scenario. As these images and others prove, the significance of Winogrand’s chance observations of daily life delved far beneath their whimsical surface appearance.
Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was another 1960s photographer whose work deepened rapidly after its initial impact. Her training with Lisette Model encouraged her to develop her naturally perspicacious view of the world to produce photographic portraits with a disarming psychological frankness. While Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C.
may at first seem to portray a knobby-kneed kid goofing off in the park, he quickly becomes a cipher for the barely contained discomfiture that branded the country as it embarked on another war in Southeast Asia and picked at the frayed edges of 1950s conformist culture. Even a pillar of that culture, such as Mrs. T. Charlton Henry (
seems to bristle against the surface of Arbus’ image of her, revealing Arbus’ uncanny ability to evoke without overwhelming either her subject or her time.
The third in a trio of photographers that redefined social documentary photography in the 1960s was Lee Friedlander (born 1934). While Winogrand constructed existential situations with his camera and Arbus analyzed the inhabitants of the era with her lens, Friedlander sought to understand his era by examining society’s cultural furniture. In Nashville
the television becomes a surrogate for humanity, dramatizing the unsettling idea that all experience—even our sense of self—is dwarfed by the power of media. Friedlander also inserted himself into his photographs using shadows and reflections, as in Colorado (
in effect transforming a street photograph into a self-portrait that attempts to ferret out the significance of individuality within the flotsam and jetsam of an increasingly mediated world.
While these photographers imaged the “social landscape” of America in the 1960s, others like Robert Adams (born 1937) addressed the actual outdoor landscape. In works such as Outdoor Theater, Colorado Springs (
mankind’s incursion into the natural world becomes a blatant threat to the integrity of the nation’s natural resources—a dangerous situation not because it is a deliberate campaign of destruction but because it is the product of developmental forces (such as the popularity of drive-in movies) that, if left unfettered, will envelop everything in their path. Adams’ work was included in a seminal 1975 exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester entitled New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, along with other contemporary landscape photographers including Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Stephen Shore. Training his lens on the topography of suburbia, Shore (born 1947) often worked in color, which punctuated his scrutiny of the area perfectly (
Another great innovator in color documentary photography is William Eggleston(born 1939)
who by the mid-’60s had virtually abandoned black-and-white photography. Eggleston is one of the few photographers to have overcome the problem inherent in color photography, which curator John Szarkowski described in the introduction to the photographer’s debut exhibition in 1976: “Outside the studio … color has induced timidity and an avoidance of those varieties of meaning that are not in the narrowest sense aesthetic. Most color photography, in short, has been either formless or pretty. In the first case the meanings of color have been ignored; in the second they have been considered at the expense of allusive meanings. While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky.” By allowing the contemporary world’s colors to speak for the character and flavor of contemporary life—instead of enhancing them so they become saturated blocks of designer hues—photographers like Eggleston and Shore have succeeded in conveying the atmosphere of their subjects photographically, making their works among the most incisive in contemporary art.
Lisa Hostetler
Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
APERTURE MAGAZINE NEW YORK
Toward A New Documentary Expression
The following first appeared in Aperture magazine #214 Spring 2014. Become a subscriber today!
Stephen Mayes, former director of VII Photo, has supported the careers of many celebrated documentary photographers. Here, he reflects on the field’s radically shifting terrain.
Chris de Bode, Exodus from Libya, 2011. Courtesy Chris de Bode and PanosPictures
In twenty years of working with artists, commercial photographers, fashion photographers, and most recently with photojournalists at VII Photo (Agency), I’ve been privileged to witness transformative moments in photographers’ careers, and, very occasionally, a transformative moment in the medium of photography. None, though, match the significance of acclaimed photojournalist John Stanmeyer commenting on reaching three hundred thousand Instagram followers, observing, “We’ve got to stop thinking of ourselves as photographers. We’re publishers.” Clearly he understood that the smartphone is more than just another camera: it redefines the image maker’s role.
The consumption of information has been disaggregated, fracturing the advertising economy and multiplying the style and nature of images. A reconfigured field requires a root-and-branch reassessment of what is valuable about photography, identifying new audiences, understanding their interests, and finding new ways to communicate. Although some of the changes are painful, we have a rare and privileged opportunity to challenge the conventions that have limited the understanding of photography, and to create new models for visual storytelling.
In fact, the door is open to a much older and far deeper understanding of what it means to narrate a story. Ironically, inventing a new role for photography might mean embracing cultural references considerably older than the daguerreotype. Looking back, we don’t know if the wars of Homer’s epics actually happened. The role of the ancient storyteller wasn’t to relay facts but to impart greater truths: archetypes, emotions, political structures, and the nature of human experience. It’s only recently that we’ve conflated storytelling and factual reporting, but twentieth-century conventions are dissolving rapidly as photography explodes into the online universe.
Photographers are no longer constrained as humble suppliers to platforms managed and controlled by others; thinking as publishers allows them to choose their themes, audiences, and the means of expression and distribution. How we grasp the opportunities before us becomes partly a matter of problem solving and, more significantly, a challenge of imagination.
Although over the years theorists and practitioners have questioned, expanded, and revised the notion of documentary photography, the field has more or less remained locked into static narratives that were fixed at the point of publication—with discrete, authored story packages that illustrated people, places, and situations. Photojournalist Bill Eppridge is often cited as the poster boy for the photo essay ever since Life magazine published “Panic in Needle Park” in 1965, which epitomized the sequential format that has dominated narrative documentary for more than fifty years. Indeed, the legacy of the photographic linear narrative stretches back to the nineteenth-century magic-lantern slide show that required a sequential parade of images, and remains entrenched today in the slide shows that proliferate on magazine and newspaper websites. But these straight narratives are beginning to age out in a dynamic online environment that feeds on shared information that continues to evolve after publication. Online imagery is centered less on presenting photographs as objects of memory and more on the sharing of current experience. Pictures are endlessly streaming and reflect the messy realities of life as it’s lived. Snapchat, an application that allows a recipient a fleeting, ten-second view before the image is deleted, is the latest phenomenon, accounting for an estimated quarter of daily image uploads. Professionals no longer define the aesthetic and functions of our image culture—the vernacular is the vanguard—but that does not mean professionals can’t avail themselves of these new modes.
Photographs from the social-media project Everyday Africa. Clockwise from top left: Charlie Shoemaker, Caretaker in Zimbabwe, June 1, 2012; Kofi Acquah, Photoshoot in Accra, Ghana, August 2, 2013; Peter DiCampo, Man reading the newspaper in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, January 15, 2013; Glenna Gordon, Traffic in Bamako, Mali, January 23, 2013. © and courtesy the photographers
Indeed, documentary photographers are already experimenting with new protocols for storytelling. Chris de Bode’s powerful and evocative reportage on Bangladeshi migrant workers fleeing Libya in 2011 is remarkably innovative seen in a traditional print context, wholeheartedly embracing the story by deploying repetition of panoramic scenes of the displaced as a means of emphasizing migrant misery. Photographer Peter DiCampo and writer Austin Merrill are developing something very fresh with their ongoing project Everyday Africa (see images above), an Instagram and Tumblr feed started in 2012 that reveals daily life on the continent from multiple perspectives. The group’s mission statement articulates their motivation: “As journalists who have lived and worked on the continent for years at a time, we find the extreme not nearly as prevalent as the familiar, the everyday.” Their journalistic experiment, a shared creative process among a growing group of photographers, both Africans and expatriates, harnesses the casual immediacy of the phone camera and the rolling evolution of multiperspective narrative to reframe the widely accepted and hackneyed story of Africa as a place of widespread tragedy to that of a continent where people live, love, and work, like anywhere else. Their approach is made possible by social media, where some fifty-six thousand followers (as of last fall) become participants by adding their commentary, underscoring how photography now operates as a conversational tool.
If such a shift—from static linear narrative told by a single author to dynamic time-based stories told from multiple perspectives—were the only major change, we’d already be living in very different times. But there are other notable changes to consider. Documentary, long an interpretative genre, has generally been regarded as a vehicle for factual information, but this is up for review as audiences shift effortlessly between social media, traditional media, game consoles, and galleries, becoming accustomed to reading images less literally. Over the years, new approaches, some provocative, to documentary have stirred debate in the field. Luc Delahaye famously upset many traditional photojournalists when his practice dramatically shifted in the early 2000s and he abstracted his role as a documentarian by mixing art and reportage. Antonin Kratochvil’s multimedia 2007 project Roadworks blurred all the boundaries of constructed art and reportage when he took the autobiographical words of Sgt. Jack Lewis describing a military episode in Iraq and re-created the scene in a studio with actors. The piece was part of a larger work whose value was recognized, receiving an Oscar nomination for best documentary, but left Kratochvil’s colleagues and clients at VII scratching their heads about the project’s place in a photojournalistic context. Today, the challenge is for photographers to build on such precedents and push further into experimental spaces.
Photographs by Michael Christopher Brown: former secret government police cell, Tripoli, Libya, August 27, 2011 (top left); lightpost damaged during shooting, Sirte, Libya, October 27, 2011 (top right); arrival by boat during the siege of Misrata, Libya, April 15, 2011 (bottom left). © Michael Christopher Brown/ Magnum Photos. Bottom right: Ron Haviv, Rebel soldier on Colonel Qaddafi’s statue, Tripoli, Libya, August 25, 2011. © Ron Haviv/vii.
It’s fitting that photographers have made artifice and experimentation a strategy in their work now that the factual credibility of most images we consume is increasingly under suspicion because of uncertain provenance and concern about manipulation and falsification. Less discussed, perhaps, yet equally significant is how images are increasingly divorced from context: if context defines meaning, there’s a serious credibility issue when images are plucked from an intended context and thrown into unexpected environments. This happens on the Internet and mobile media on a grand scale, as the 2012 “text from Hillary” meme demonstrated so dramatically when thousands of social media users repurposed images of the then secretary of state, using her cellphone. In his 2009 book After Photography, writer Fred Ritchin describes the online image as a sort of quantum photography whereby pictures exist simultaneously in multiple contexts, often with contradictory meanings. In short, it’s downright difficult to trust any picture that we see online, where the vast majority of images are consumed, influencing our reading of images elsewhere.
Even the fact-driven field of hard photojournalism has evolved to embrace metaphorical references. Building on the symbolic journalistic language developed by Gilles Peress, Kratochvil, and others, photographers using camera phones have somersaulted into new territory. The smartphone aesthetic is casually intimate and connects easily with an audience that may be using the same technology on a daily basis. Ron Haviv and Michael Christopher Brown both made work in Libya in 2011 using their mobile-phone cameras to reveal, through a fluidly vernacular style, the emotional realities and physical circumstances of their subjects.
Experimentation does not supplant the evidential role of the image, though it does force a reconsideration of the photograph as “evidence.” Photography now exists in a world that is fluent in visual metaphor and understands the image beyond the limitations of the merely representational. The possibilities for richer, more nuanced forms of storytelling are ever-present, opening the door to profound modes of communication—making it all the more important that photographers, and all participants in the field, take advantage of what this transformative moment offers, so that like the earliest storytellers, the next generation of documentarians can fully impart tomorrow’s greater truths.