The Fiction of Content

Guardia Civil from the series "Spanish Village" © W. Eugene Smith

A friend getting started in photography after abandoning a previous career wrote to me recently. No texts should be presented with photographs, he asserted, because the images should be able to convey their content completely. Accompanying photography with text was a sign that the images lacked something. He's from Philly, so I'm correcting his English to present his argument to you.

His comments are common and raise two fundamental questions of our medium: can photography alone communicate an idea clearly and what is the expected role of text provided by the photographer (or a selected surrogate writer) in terms of presenting content?

The observer can receive many ideas from staring at a photograph. It's part of why we look. The possibility of communicating an exact thematic agenda strictly through the image is a separate question.

Photography alone communicates specific ideas from creator to observer poorly, like catching the news through the crackle of static. Why? First, photography presents a truth value it does not actually have. Ron Jude said it well in a recent interview with Mark Alice Durant when he talked about "the space between what photographs promise to deliver and what is actually communicated."

This is probably part of what caused a lot of us to fall in love with photography and tattoo a Rolleiflex on our leg: it is reality as quicksilver, it's the manipulation of reality through lens choice, framing, exposure, and other decisions necessary to create a two dimensional image from three-dimensional reality, and the creation of an image that retains the trace of reality, yet becomes something else. That "something else" is sometimes close to where it began, sometimes very far from it.  Photography cannot communicate specific ideas well because while it works with reality as its source, it is mediated and ultimately muted by all that is stripped from it through this process of converting real life observations to ink or silver gelatin on a piece of paper.

As a vehicle of reality photography is an unreliable witness, perhaps especially because it retains this reality trace. It's a very good liar. It contains recognizable traces of the reality from which it started its path of transmutation, yet ultimately remains linked to reality through formal traces, not an actual physical connection.

Second, photography communicates specific ideas poorly because no matter how exacting the photographer is in their use of visual signifiers, he or she cannot control their audience once a photograph is released into the public sphere, they cannot control the context in which it is seen and cannot determine the social context it performs within. Context determines a reading of any object and context inherently changes. This results in a photograph evolving meaning over time and between viewing spaces. This idea was explored at length on this site here so I'll avoid retyping it out at length again, but in a sentence, a photograph can change meaning for us based on how it's printed, if it's seen online or in print, the information we know about its maker, if it's seen during war or peace and a myriad of other contextual factors.

If photography cannot communicate concrete ideas clearly because it is an unreliable witness and the visual elements it uses to convey meaning change based on how, when and why we view it, then just what does that tell us about the role of text provided by the photographer to accompany their images?

It depends on the intended use of the image. If the goal is to communicate a specific narrative or story, I think we've given up completely on the idea photography can do that and simply written out what it is that images can't tell us – see Agee and Evans, Lange and Taylor. Reread Szarkowski talking about futility of W. Eugene Smith's work to show the life and poverty of Deleitosa, Spain in 17 images which he believed strained the medium beyond its capabilities.

For more contemporary examples, we have the Sochi Project and the long essay that accompanies the photographs in LaToya Ruby Frazier's The Notion of Family. Look at the Everyday (Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc) projects and how images they post are often accompanied by a long (for Instagram) text that describes the image.

In this way, we see confirmation in the opposite: the limited capacity of photography to communicate the specific can be seen in what text is asked to do. We also see that in contemporary photojournalism and documentary photography the belief in photography to be strong enough to carry the specific has collapsed. The limited capacities of photography to communicate information are supported by text (as well as video clips, found object scans, historical documents, you name it). Its role is clear.

On the other end of the spectrum from this type of observational photography, text is also embedded in the presentation of conceptual work for reasons that seem clear, so I'm going to avoid getting into it here for brevity's sake.

This leads me to talk about the way text functions with all the work in the middle of the spectrum and the reason why I sat down to type this out to you'se guys (sorry, I lived in Philly for a while too). The work I am referring to is contemporary art photography made largely in the observation-documentary mode. It's much of the work seen on independent sites, including this one. It's the work Carl Gunhouse describes as being spawned from a cross of work by Alec Soth and Roe Ethridge.

Photographers in this dominant vein are commonly writing about elements in the work that just aren't there. They are overreaching with the texts on their own work, trying to make their photography do more than it can, staking claims it can't sustain. They are using text to string together a bunch of images and using text to take responsibility for their themes instead of being exacting from their work. The result is a diminishing of the photography as the observer discovers it cannot do what the text wishes it did.

This is the "Fiction of Content," the textual invention of what is in the photography.

One can guess at the reasons for this trend: the dominance of "the project," the demand by photography distributors for thematic coherence in the project, the expectation that the project be accompanied by a strong statement that avoids generalities and the rise of intellectualism in photography generally in the last four decades.

The expectation of the accompanying statement creates an inherent risk for this type of work - we are asked to be specific with words about photography that in many cases aims to evoke rather than describe. For many photographers, the temptation is too strong - the statement becomes a quicksand of false claims. Statements can illuminate. Many photographers do their photography proud with their writing. Read the accompanying texts at galleries, read the press releases from major presses, read the essays at the back of the photobook, however, and look at the work afterwards and tell me how much of what is claimed by the text is actually in the images. Often, it's very little. While specific examples are called for, I'm going to chicken out. No need to pick fights.

I disagree with my friend from Philly. Text accompanying photography, even when it's not working on a specific, observational narrative, has a place, but the goal of good writing about one's photography or about the photography of others for a website, photobook or gallery is to leave the observer with questions and excitement about the work that they can then dig into the work to satisfy. It's goal is to resonate with and accompany the images, to work in parallel. It is not the goal of writing accompanying texts to explain the work so that we are left feeling we know the work before we've seen it or, worse and more common these days, to say more than the photography itself does.

Shifting Lines: The Increasing Consideration of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism as Fine Art Photography, Part I

© Alec Soth, from Dog Days Bogotá

In the latest in a recent series of articles on Thomas Hoepker’s September 11th image, Joerg Colberg of Conscientious published a well-written piece entitled “How we give photographs meaning.” In the post he opens up several threads of potential conversation: the importance of including context when reading an image, all photographs as fictions with no inherent meaning, the ethics of photojournalism, meanings as constructs, etc.

Given I agree with Colberg’s main points (and to dwell on the few second-tier points I have questions about seems nitpicky), I’m going to build on the conversation his piece continues by pulling out one particular thread of his post. This will also be a way to slow the conversation down and explore in depth one of those potential conversations his essay opens.

Colberg writes (my italics):

               “The meaning of a photograph is a construct that involves a group of people operating
               against a specific background (news, art, …), subject to the group’s personal, cultural and
               political biases. I think what we should be talking about is not how truthful photographs
               are, but how truthful we expect them to be, given the background they’re operating in.”

This quote raises a slippery question: how do we know what background we are operating against? Just where are those lines between fine art photography, photojournalism, and documentary photography?

It’s not immediately clear how we should approach establishing those lines in a photographic world in which someone like Alec Soth, to choose an example, can call himself a documentary photographer while simultaneously being a member of the premier photojournalism agency in the world and having a retrospective at a major contemporary art museum. Is it a question of where we see the photograph? If the same image is in both a gallery and a newspaper, should we say we’re operating against an art background in one situation and against a photojournalistic one in the other? Or is it a question of subject matter so that a picture made to describe a war, for example, is inherently photojournalism? But then what to make of Richard Mosse’s Infra? Is a photograph what the photographer says it is? Joel-Peter Witkin surely couldn’t claim his work is documentary. Then is it the observer that decides? What if you and I differ in opinion - who’s right?

© Richard Mosse, from Infra

To make things more complicated, the question is also a temporal one – the lines between genres are alive, constantly moving and shifting to reflect cultural changes, historical events, prevailing intellectual winds, and the photographic marketplace.

To look at these questions, I’m going to dust off and cannibalize a paper for this post that I wrote a few years ago that explores the history of the relationship between these three genres. More historical than polemical, it examines how the 1970s in particular played an important role in forming the contemporary photographic landscape of more elastic definitions that we live in today.

I’ll boil the paper down as much as possible to get rid of what’s not to the point and polish it up a bit, but I don’t think I can get rid of the fundamental academic feel of having written it in a university setting. I solemnly swear to you, however, that I won’t use the words “hegemony,” “epistemological,” or “syllogism.”

This post will be divided into at least two due to length. Today will give the background for what happens in the '70s which will be the subject of the second (and any subsequent) posts.

______________________________________ 

A number of factors combined during the 1970s to accelerate the movement between the photographic genres of documentary work, photojournalism, and fine art photography that have opened into today’s era of more fluid relationships. During this decade the rise of television and the concurrent decline in the magazine industry, the rise of galleries dedicated to showing fine art photography, the museum’s firm establishment of the photographic print as a unique and collectable object and the resulting development of the market for photographic prints, the development of artist's books, the evolution of an economic infrastructure that helped sustain photographers as artists, and the questioning of the ability of photography to document or record events factually all contributed to the rise of the new era.

The boundaries between documentary photography, photojournalism, and fine art photography have never been absolute and have increasingly overlapped during the course of photographic history. The '70s built on existing trends in photography. Photographic historian Mary Warner Marien writes about the '70s milieu in a book called Photography: A Cultural History:

               The presence of documentary and photojournalistic photographs in museums and
               galleries was not new…Nevertheless, in the past, image-makers, audiences, curators, and
               scholars had considered art photography, documentary photography, and photojournalism
               as having their own separate lines of development and different social agendas. (Marien 410)

© Eugène Atget

To pull out just a few examples, Eugène Atget consciously cropped the developing modern Paris around the historical construct he intended to photograph in his Vieux Paris images and he photographed in correlation to the interests of his various clients, revealing a strong subjectivity to work he labeled “documents.”

Dorothea Lange and other documentary photographers of the Farm Security Administration made their way into art exhibitions and Walker Evans exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. Evans defined his work as art despite often being considered a prototypical documentarian by asserting that his work does not have a utilitarian use such as a police crime scene photograph. He also noted the artifice involved in “documentary work.” FSA photographers used stylistic elements such as sharp focus, even lighting, and a frontal composition to code their images as factual and to indicate that they should be read as unbiased. “Documentary?” famously questioned Evans. “That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. . .The term should be documentary style.” (Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, 210) Evans, in short, was aware of the common urge to view documentary images as mimetic, but was cognizant of the bias of the photographer’s perspective.

The Magnum photography agency in 1947 challenged the notion of what constituted photojournalism. Founded as a photographic cooperative, members of Magnum retain the rights to their photographs as well as the authority to conceive and execute their own projects. Although their work still needs to find a market, by removing the responsibility to answer to assignments designed by newspaper and magazine editors, the freelance photojournalists of Magnum defined the term "photojournalism" for themselves, broadening the scope of the genre to include longer projects done in essay form, which becomes close to indistinguishable from the type of work done by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. In turn, Riis and particularly Hine can be listed as either documentarians or photojournalists depending on the article or book.

Original front cover, uncredited image

Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) marked a new era in documentary work in which individual and psychological issues replaced the historical, ideological, and political issues of earlier photographs (such as those of the FSA) and formed a style of intimacy instead of an attempted detachment. Working under a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and not under the guidelines of a newspaper editor or a government program, Frank documented 1950s American society of all strata during his cross-country road trips, photographing flags, politicians, cars, and racial dynamics. At the same time, however, he concerned himself with how the exterior world reflected his interior world. “I’m always doing the same images,” he has stated, “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside.” (Stimson 105) The angry, bemused looks that manifest the photographer’s intrusion in The Americans might be said, according to Stimson, to be the singular moment of the document becoming art, though the document could be considered art since Atget. (Stimson 211)

From the 1950s to the 1970s, work that allowed more space for the personal and contingent in photojournalism became accepted and known as "new journalism." (Mary Panzer, Things as They Are, 27) Although more commonly associated with print journalism, the term “new journalism” became connected to photographers who injected a personal, first-person perspective into their reporting. The Vietnam War, for example, became the center of a perceived link between photojournalism and personal politics as photographers such as Phillip Jones Griffiths abandoned their supposed objectivity and took a stance in opposition of the war.

Lastly, new social documentary photographers emerged from the mix of anti-Vietnam War activism and conceptual art ideas of the era to add another dynamic to the idea of the photograph as a document. The interests of this informal group, which included Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Fred Lonidier among others, included techniques not traditionally associated with documentary work, such as collage, to comment on social oppression without making "victim photographs" that evoked too much overt sympathy or voyeurism. Rosler says, "We wanted to be documentarians in a way that documentarians hadn't been…We wanted to use obviously theatrical or dramatized sequences or performance elements together with more traditional documentary strategies, to use text, irony, absurdity, mixed forms of all types." (Marien 429)

© Martha Rosler, Balloons

We can see that the terms “photojournalism” and “documentary photography” showed significant flexibility before the 1970s. “Photojournalism” went from encompassing the construction of events by the photographer - such as Alexander Gardner's openly rearranged Civil War battle scenes - to considering itself as objective reportage, including politics as part of its stance, and accepting first-person perspective in the form of "new journalism." “Documentary photography” went from being considered the recording of actual documents to being a passionate crusading appeal intended to provoke its audience to action with the work of Riis and Hine, a passive and objective lens with the FSA, an attempt to present psychological reality, sociological assessment, the recording of other art forms for documentation such as earthworks, and even the physical collage of images.

As Lili Corbus Bezner writes in her book Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War, “documentary photography frequently intrudes into contradictory categorization; it exists uneasily, therefore, within the supposedly distinct domains of journalistic, artistic, landscape, fashion, and advertising photography.” (Bezner 1) Similarly, Beaumont Newhall, the first director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote in a later edition of The History of Photography, “Since World War II the [documentary] movement has lost impetus in the organizational sense. Its tenets have been absorbed and have become essential to the fabric of photojournalism.” (Bezner 12)

To be continued Friday