Exercise 2.4 Discussing Documentary
Read the introduction and first section (pp.105–10) of the article ‘Discussing Documentary’ by Maartje van den Heuvel (Documentary Now! 2005). Write a short summary in your learning log. (Open College of the Arts, 2014:33).
Mirror of visual culture
A summary:
The author believes that the debate about documentary in an art context should take visual literacy as a starting point to enable the value of documentary photography in art to be better assessed; are these practices effective and legitimate or has the border into fiction been blurred too much?
- Much of our experience is not direct but found through the media so we are becoming more visually literate and able to interpret things
- Documentary images are part of a wider movement including journalism, advertising, games, pop culture and film where art is functioning increasingly as a mirror of visual culture
The author reviews the classical documentary tradition and then shares examples that show a documentary remix, as artists free themselves from traditional documentary images:
- 2 historical visual traditions: Western Anglo-Saxon human-interest film and photography and the Eastern Communist/socialist Russian and German.
- Documentary as a militant eyewitness, from around 1900: Jacob Riis (1849-1914), Lewis Hine (1874-1940) with reformist ambitions
- Documentary was connected to film, when John Grierson designated a film non-fiction. Documentary as a realistic counterpart to fiction as film a recorder of social conditions: FSA, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange. Magazine images in Life, Picture Post magazines, and the investigations of the Magnum agency.
- Documentary as a picture tradition in communist and socialist countries to support revolution for the working class.
- Documentary for left wing activism in the 50s and 60s with coarse grainy black and white 35 mm film images
- Documentary as art as from the 1970s moved from a belief in realism and transparency with the easy accessibility of TV and advertising in different forms as people learnt that media images could be manipulated. A move away from the traditional black and white grainy images previously associated with authenticity awareness of subjectivity in documentary
- Documentary with technical, stylistic or narratives, sharp detail and colour: Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff. This included functional directions such as topographical or architectural photography.
- Documentary with social narratives: martin Parr on the middle class, Karen Knorr on the wealthy. Nan Goldin on her own surroundings
- Documentary with depth: Allan Sekula’s project on economic and trading routes, Fazel Sheikh on people (Ramadan Moon). Giles Peress on the genocide in Rwanda (The silence)
- Documentary photographers focusing on the publicity and distribution channels of photography: Susan Meiselas on Kurdistan (In the shadow of history)
- Documentary using inside knowledge: Julian Germain collaborating with Don McCullin (Steelworks)
- Documentary questioning images: Hiroshi Sugimoto on how the suggestion of reality is constructed, and any artificiality that simulating documentary images in artificial surroundings such as waxworks and any artificiality that suggest reality
- Documentary that is staged: Jeff Wall imitating media pictures.
- Documentary through re-enacting: Pierre Huyghe Third Memory; it has three layers of time and imagery, original journalistic media about a bank robbery, the 1975 film (Dog day Afternoon) and his own images of a re-enactment of the robbery. Christoph Draeger (Catastrophes) where he imitates disaster scenes, and his Black September on the terrorist hijacking and murder of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic games
The author suggests though the artists differ as to how much their work reflects upon he documentary tradition, what these works have in common is that they analyse and comment on the structure and effect of documentary images in the mass media which testifies to increased visual literacy amongst the artists and appeals to the viewers to be visually aware also.
MY LEARNING
- I should consider carefully visual literacy and how much the viewer has.
- It was really useful to have these suggested stages/categories of documentary set out, it helps to clarify things for me. I may use this as a starting point to develop some ideas for assignment 2, in particular to research further, documentary as art and manipulation and documentary for questioning images.
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Photography 2: Documentary 