EXERCISE- WHAT IS DOCUMENTARY

Listen to Miranda Gavin talking about documentary photography at: http://oca-student.com/node/100125 . In your learning log, write a 200-word reflective commentary setting out your reactions to Gavin’s viewpoint. (Open college of the Arts, 2014:17)

Gavin mentions some of the different approaches to documentary photography such as documentary, reportage, photojournalism. Gavin describes how the terms used are affected by access to them changing currently due to the digital platforms that are now available and an increasing number of women photographers. This means that topics are changing or being shown in new ways; consequently, the terms that we use are being probed. Gavin also talks about how the magazine separate out categories explaining that magazine sections make decisions where to place photographs difficult. She concludes that the categories need to be flexible.

To complicate things further documentary photography has had various definitions. The French word “Documentaire” was used to describe serious films about travel and exploration (Franklin, 2017). Bates highlights the growth of the term documentary to the rise of the large-scale mass press in the 1920s and 30s, photo magazines with stories of everyday life (social documentaries) which are very different to documents as simply as evidence; so even early on it’s the use of the term documentary there is a problem of definition.

Today there is also the debate over whether documentary should only include objective images, and indeed whether any image can be objective. Indeed, even placing an image within a certain section of a magazine or in a certain arena or to a particular audience is editing in itself and may render an image less neutral. However, if we don’t separate documentary into sub groups then it becomes a huge and possibly meaningless category.

If documentary photography is there to inform, with the variety of documentary forms today some thought needs to be given to why the image was taken, when decisions are made what to do with an image as placing the image exercises control over its interpretation. Like Gavin I do not believe blanket subgroups can be created with hard borders, as the subjects and audiences are constantly evolving and categorisation needs constant evaluation to be useful – an awareness of some of the factors that may distort the purpose of an image is important when documentary images are evaluated.

References:

Bate, D. (2016) Photography: The Key Concepts. New York. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Franklin, S., 2017. The Documentary Impulse. London: Phaidon Press.

Open College of the Arts (2014) Photography 2: Documentary-Fact and Fiction (Course Manual). Barnsley: Open College of the Arts.

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