POST DOCUMENTARY ART

5.4 Exercise

Read the article ‘Images that Demand Consummation: Postdocumentary Photography, Art and Ethics’ by Ine Gevers (Documentary Now! 2005). Core resources: IneGevers.pdf

Summarise in your learning log the key points made by the author. (Open College of the Arts, 2014:105)

Ine Gevers is a Dutch art curator, activist and writer. Here she suggests that documentary should engage with the world not just record it. Where photographer, viewer and subject come together in a “consummation of the image”.

Here is a summary of her main points:

• Since the 70’s there has been a blurring of the boundaries between photography as document and as art- she calls this post-documentary photography.
• She is particularly interested in how image makers are stretching the boundaries of perception, expanding aesthetics.
• Aesthetics and ethics have been considered opposites post-documentary artists are trying to restore their former connection.
• She probes the concept of aesthetics, suggesting that it broadens and makes you notice what you’ve not before. However, that old style aesthetics can constrict viewing and viewpoints.
• Photography can open up our world by sharing experiences, but it can close down our view by turning subjects into objects and “murdering their individuality”. Sontag called this numbing our conscience.
• Photography can be democratising as it creates a reality that is more real than real, even though there are always efforts to expose the limits of representation.
• Martha Rosler is cited as one who though not a documentary photographer she regularly uses documentary photography in her work subverting objectivity in photography.
• Allan Sekula is also cited, who has appropriated documentary photography, using it aesthetically to show its ambiguity.
• She explains how the horrors of subjects such as the twin towers attacks made us look beyond instant immediately consumed images that cause one- dimensional reactions. Examples given are black pictures, with sound (Moore’s documentary), Alfredo Jaar’s images of the Rwanda atrocities that were all, but one contained in closed boxes for his installation (Lament of the images, 2002).
• Alain Badiou’s philosophy is shared- where artists remain faithful to personal truths, even in opposition- exemplifying artists and ethics being intertwined. He argues for interventionist ethics that are situation specific as the truth is an event, not an opinion.
• Photographs carry no weight in themselves but by acquiring meaning they can unleash a truth process, which can be followed by a process of completion encompassing artist, image and viewer. The viewer then as co author gives weight to the image.
• She suggests this may align with Barthes punctum, the extra that may seem to be added to an image.
• Gevers suggests that this truth moment, makes the viewer come alive, and teach viewers to perceive differently. This sets in motion something other than the observable, enabling “one that consummates to become someone”. For this the viewer must be able and willing to consummate the image. Then when the viewer is involved in the image, they can become autonomous, and ethics and aesthetics can be a partnership.

My learning:

To consider that it may be the way that images are consumed, viewed and interpreted that gives documentary photography its autonomy.

Reference:

lne Gevers curator \ writer \ activist (2005). ‘Postdocumentary Photography, Art and Ethics’ by Ine Gevers (Documentary Now! 2005). At: https://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/IneGevers.pdf (Accessed 04/04/2021).

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

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