By Martha Rosler.
IN, AROUND AND AFTERTHOUGHTS
This article starts by talking about The Bowery in New York, which I must say I hadn't heard of before, after looking online I note that this area, street, was once opulent and high class, but fell into decline. The area was ( and probably is ) renowned for prostitution and drugs.. and drunks.
Over the years many a photo has been taken of the area and its inhabitants, maybe to help them or expose their dangerous existence. Some of the photos may be used by police as a record of events, but mainly for the documentarians. The photographers I presume would never be without a subject, constant activity and there will always be an interest for these pictures. even if you don't enjoy looking at them they often have the same effect as rubber necking a car crash.
Reformers like Riis and Sanger strongly appealed to the worry that the ravages of crime and immorality would threaten the health and security of a polite society. Charity is an argument for the preservation of wealth and reformist documentary.
Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.
Documentary surely derives in part from the fact that the images might be more decisively unsettling than the arguments enveloping them. With the manifold possibilities for radical demands that photos of poverty and degradation suggests, any coherent argument for reform is ultimately both polite and negotiable.
Going back to the Bowery - the site of victim photography in which the victims are now the victims of the camera, the photographer. The subjects are usually docile but if you approach them before they are drunk you would meet with a more hostility. They do not want stardom or immorality, they have been bothered many a time with photographers.
The compassion and outrage, of documentary fuelled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of tourism, voyeurism, trophy hunting ... and careerism.
Mainstream documentary has achieved legitimacy, it begins in glossy magazines and newspapers and becomes more expensive as it moves into Art Galleries and museums. Documentary is a little like a horror movie, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. Documentary, as we know it, carries 'old' information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful.
Liberal Documentary - poverty and oppression are always equated to misfortunes caused by natural disasters - it implores us to look in the face of deprivation and weep ( and send money )..
Documentary testifies to the bravery or manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of danger, or somewhere we do not want to go, saving us the bother. Like astronauts showing us places we never hope to go.
The article also talks of photographic records of indians and natives, creating a historical record, a visual one.
The Visa Ad from 1979 has an array of photos - some staged and some not - they tell a story but it doesn't really matter if we trust these as documents.
Gamma photographer David Burnett won the overseas Press club Robert Capa Award - for exceptional courage and enterprise ... about Chilean Prisoners, they were going missing and being shot. What happened to the men in the photo ?? The question is inappropriate when the subject is photographs. And photographers. The subject of the article is the photographer.
Talking about Langes photo she never actually made any money from the photograph but the awareness was bought to the camp and they at the camp benefitted directly. Mr Burnetts photo will probably reach such provenance ( the photo barely seen ) and even now we will never discover what happened to the people pictured.
Documentary has two Moments : the immediate and : The conventional 'aesthetic historical' moment. - less difinable in it boundaries.
Immediate - created out of the stream of the present and held up as testimony, as evidence in the most legalistic of senses.
Conventional - 'history minded' in its very awareness of the pastness of time in which the image was made. Ie Lange photo.
It seems to ignore the fact that historical interests govern whether any particular form is seen as adequately revealing its meaning - you cannot second guess history.
Its clear that Lange identify a powerful meaning with a primary sensuousness are pushing against the gigantic idealogical weight of classical beauty. Which presses on us the understanding that in the search for transcendental form, the world is merely a stepping off point into aesthetic eternity.
The present cultural reflex of wrenching all artworks out of their contexts makes it difficult to come to terms with this issue, especially without seeming to devalue such people as Lange, and their work.
Stripping away false names and revealing real names and real life stories, this new work manages to institute a new genre of victimhood - the victimisation by someone else's camera of helpless persons, who hold still long enough for the indignation of the new writer to capture them.
New photos appear alongside old to provide a historical dimension.
Garry Winogrand who aggressively regrets any responsibility for his images - says - all meaning in photography applies only to what resides within the 'four walls' of the framing edges.
Most who were called documentary photographers a generation ago made their pictures in the service of a social cause.. to show what was wrong with the world and to persuade their fellows to take action to make it right. A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has not been to reform life but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy - almost affection - for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world in spite of its terrors. What they hold in common is the belief that the commonplace is really worth looking at, and the courage to look at it with a minimum of theorising.
There is a certain craziness that goes on in the world and we want people to understand that we can chronicle it for them.
The higher the price that photography can command as a commodity in dealerships, the higher the status accorded to it in museums and galleries, the greater will be the gap between that kind of documentary and another kind, a documentary incorporated into explicit analysis of society and at least the beginning of a program for changing it.
The common acceptance of the idea that documentary precedes, supplants, transcends, substantive social activism is an indicator that we do not yet have a real documentary.
