Exercise: What makes a document?
Read the post ‘What Makes a Document?’ on WeAreOCA, including all the replies to it, and write your own comment both on the blog page and in your own blog. Make sure that you visit all the links on the blog post. http://www.weareoca.com/photography/what-makes-a-document/ Make sure your reply is personal and authoritative. Express your opinion on the topic of the blog and substantiate your comments with solid arguments, ideally referring to other contributions to the blog (Open College of the Arts, 2014:22)
So what does make a document?
This blog subject began in August 2011 and there have been another 8 and ½ years of comments since, and as others have said it is hard now to find something new to say on the topic.
All I can do is share what I think and respond to some of the bog post that have gone before.
To answer the question what makes a document it is necessary to visit the definition of document first of all. According to Wikipedia “A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought. The word originates from the Latin documentum, which denotes a “teaching” or “lesson”: the verb doceō denotes “to teach”. In the past, the word was usually used to denote a written proof useful as evidence of a truth or fact.
The oxford dictionary says the noun document, is a piece of written, printed, or electronic matter that provides information or evidence or that serves as an official record.
This seems quite straight forward, however the header question “what makes document” does seem to have been appropriated in the blog posts to, is a photograph a document? So according to the above definitions of a document and my own understanding of it photographs are without question documents as they are a material representation of a fact – as long as they are not tampered with of course.
In terms of “what makes a document?” I found the discussions on the importance of time and context interesting. Rob TM (27.8.11) says that his view is whatever the context a photograph is always a document even when the context changes. Others like Amano (27.8.11) believes that without context documents can be misleading and that a photograph can only be a document when there are details that give clues to more than just a representation (28.8.11). Or curriehannan (25.9.13) who feels like a photograph needs to have context explained to be a document and is not a document just by being. Personally I’d say that a photograph is a document either with or without context as it gives us evidence of something. Clarke (1997, p19) says that on a functional level a photograph depends on its context; this is true but even without context a photograph can still function just as a document.
With the issue of time and documents, Hannah fountain oca suggests that “every photograph is a document but with time can be more” (22.1.16). This ties into the argument about the importance of context as time, or rather knowing the time/history of a document can give an article context. Indeed Stan Dickinson (27.8.11) suggests that time and context are not mutually exclusive, and I would say that they are intertwined. I don’t think the actual time period or passing of time is relevant to whether a photograph is a document, however as Clarkes says time must also be important in making a photograph a document as it fixes something in time (Clarke, 1997, p 24), and therefore creates it as evidence of something that was.
I was also interested in the discourse on whether an online image is a document compared to a physical print (Judy Bach 31.7.14); this question would apply to any online evidence. I would say that as long as the document is pure (untampered with) then online evidence or representation are as much document as a physical documents.
So to answer the question “What is document?” I would say anything that represents something authentically, that is that is an accurate representation of something, however I don’t believe that we need to understand a representation or a photograph for it to be a document. As far as acknowledging that photographs are documents I agree with David Fletcher’s statement that “All photographs are in a sense documents, but not all are documentary” (5.9.17).
Reference:
Clarke, G. (1997). The photograph. London: Oxford University Press. ? (2014) Photography 2: Documentary: fact and Fiction. Barnsley. Open College of the Arts
Open College of the Arts (2014) Photography 2: Documentary-Fact and Fiction (Course Manual). Barnsley: Open College of the Arts.
Photography 2: Documentary 