Post Documentary Photography, Art and Ethics

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When looking at documentary photographs we can be made to feel many different ways.  Sometimes
we are unaffected, and others can be life changing, if not for us then for others around us.

Documentary has its own history and over the years there has been a blurring of the boundaries and a mixing of disciplines. Its hard to tell if something is a document, piece of information, or just an art form.

There are a number of difficulties in post documentary that inspire critical action. Image makers are managing to stretch the boundaries of perception. Where aesthetics and ethics meet each other is not just with post documentary, it happens with all disciplines.
Aesthetics stood for the capacity to remove yourself from your own framework so you could learn to see the unprecedented from that view point. It grew from an 'ethics of perception' into a concept that appeared to be more autonomous, only accountable to itself.  Previously, beauty and good meant the same, but ended in a stalemate.

Aesthetics seduces you to open and broaden.  I makes you notice what you had not previously seen.
We are no longer capable of anything but perceive and recognise according to endless repeated principles.  Aesthetics threatens to colonise our gaze.

Post documentary photographers are asking themselves whether their engagement can be defined on the basis of an ethical instead of purely aesthetic perspective.  Oscar Van Alphen, a documentary photographer, was inspired to give a form to his engagement and turn away from aesthetics and images that functioned as illustrations of other peoples interpretations.

Photography opens up our world and enlarges our awareness, it creates knowledge and makes everyone share experiences.

Anton Corbijn seduces us into another way of seeing his photograph of musicians.  Firstly you see musicians its only on the second look that you see they are handicapped in some way.  Instead of sensationalising the fact they are handicapped, it creates space for the viewer and those who are represented in the picture.
Photography can also bring the opposite, turning people into objects reducing their vitality to a picture, losing their individuality

Sontag concludes that photography has contributed at least as much to the numbering of our conscience as to it development.   Documentary made a false start presenting itself as a mirror of reality, it has too been subservient to that reality.   Photographic pictures of the world around us are experienced as more real than real.   Although nobody believes anymore in the reality effects of documentary photography everyone is still expected to behave as though they do.  In this way image perception, language and consciousness continually reproduce and confirm each other.

Documentary photography has endured much post colonial criticism at the moment that ‘documentary practice’ seems to have had its day. 

After photographys invention it was used also in scientific areas.  The camera became not only suitable for building up an archive but also used for research. 

In the medical area electric shocks were carried out before the camera and a record was made of the outcome.  Also the convulsions of a person having a fit .

These weren’t shown to the person as they were just kept for medical reasons.  These pictures were not only intended to record reality but to explain it.

These images were a violation to the person involved.

This medical view of people perverted to a monstrous degree during the Nazi regime.  Pictures of children were taken like a normal album and then after that there were pictures taken of their skulls once they were killed.

Martha Rosler not herself a documentary photographer but makes use of it in her work.  Her work – The Bowery – is about the homeless and alcoholism in her neighbourhood.  By emphasising the inadequacy she give the people space to regain  control.  These people get back their individuality rather than an identity judged by their condition and hence their life. 

Roslers works are conceived on the basis of an ethical awareness and are never just about people, they combined projects and people, giving the people a voice.

A similar approach is the work of Allan Sekula who is a documentary photographer.   He opts for a more consciously for a recognisable aesthetic approach, with the goal of involving the viewer in an ambiguous world with all its pitfalls.  His project focus on social, political and cultural in todays society.

The photographic work never stands by itself, text is added to tell the story.

His work has a sense of humour which engages the viewer.

Another example of harrowing photographic documents were during Pol Pots reign of terror – there were portraits taken of the prisoners just before their execution.  Two photographers, Douglas Niven and Christopher Riley developed a project to save this threatened archive.  They were presented to a worldwide audience and finally had their book printed in 1995 – The Killing Fields.

In 1997 the MoMA in New York exhibited a selection of these portraits oblivious to their problematic role in the politics of misrepresentation.  The public however regarded them as art. 

The presentation of this archive also came in for criticism because of the ‘muteness’ of those portrayed.  The medium of photography was seen as preventing the deceased subject from speaking.  Powerless to give the subject a voice when living.

In 1950, Hannah Arendt – the choice is to no longer accept the world as it is or as it appears, but to see the world that we experience and participate in as a complex of problems and challenges that we have to face. 

Alan Badiou’s essay Understanding of Evil,  says the artist is someone who feels the necessity to pursue a personal truth and to remain faithful to it in spite of considerable opposition.  According to this argument, being an artist an ethics are inextricable bound up with each other.

Badiou is looking for an intiating, active and processual form of ethics.

According to Badiou abstract ethics is a farce if only because there is no such thing as an abstract subject.

Martha Rosler argues todays  documentary photography is no longer seduced by grand narratives.  Photographers have moved to the small and personal.  Their goal no longer seems to want to change the world but to know it.

The danger of this is that it becomes swallowed up in what you would call general visual culture and is them made harmless by the system.

It is up to the viewer as co author to give weight to pictures.

A process that gives the viewer a ‘ moment of insight’ which is able to help resist the prison of quotation perception.  A process that enables not only the first maker but also the one who consummates to become someone. 

It is here that ethics and aesthetics merge.  Images that initiate something that is expressive of more than what the material thing ‘a sich’ reveals, have the potential to appeal to the viewer in a aesthetical / ethical sense.

A broad minded perception is the beginning and it is precisely there that ethics and aesthetics can achieve a great deal in partnership.