Discussing documentary

Exercise 11 – Mirror of visual culture by Maartje van den Heuvel

The crux of the matter – “whether documentary can still perform its time honoured communicative role of militant eye-witness in the museum room and whether documentary images themselves can anyway still refer to a degree of reality or whether the boundary with fiction has been definitively been abolished”

We are awash with images – papers, magazines, TV, Internet et al; describing different scenarios and explaining in minute detail different (alternative to our own) realities. In other words we no longer need to have been somewhere to see/do something to experience that place/activity; we are now capable of vicariously living it via somebody else’s images.

As a result of the continuous stream of digital data in existence, the ‘visual language’ developed to communicate through this data has by necessity become more and more sophisticated and complex. This in turn, has required that both the photographer and the viewer of these images be trained and become visually literate to identify and understand the visual symbols and the many styles of rhetoric employed.

The concern being, once people are able to understand this visual communication, they themselves will start to communicate using the same codes and mechanism. Thus newer images no longer actually portray reality, but portray a version of reality as defined by the latest visual language.

Historically, only individuals involved in the ‘art industry’ (photographers, film-makers) reflected on images in this way and then copied, reviewed and further reflected until they had distilled it into their own style. Today all types of images, art and documentary images are accessible to be reviewed by any individual in this way. As a result the codes and mechanisms that were solely used for documentary are now also used for high art and the genre boundaries are becoming blurred. As Heuvel states “in this sense, reflection upon documentary images is part of a wider development, namely one in which art is beginning to function more and more as a mirror of visual culture.”

Heuvel starts that there are two starting points that determined “documentary as the militant eye-witness”, one from the West, the Anglo-Saxon ‘human interest’ photography; the other from the East, the Communist/Socialist photography and film making between the two world wars.

He then goes on to explain how photography was utilised by the two sides to better the local ‘situation’. In the West, the works of Riis and Hine documenting the immigrant workers and the farmers; then Evens and Lange documenting poverty across the US. The East actively adopted photography and film as “a new, pure form of imagery” unlike “painting, which was a stuffy, bourgeois medium contaminated with decoration and mannerism.” The workers movements utilised the camera in support of the revolutionary struggle of the working class by documenting the poverty and their harrowing living conditions.

Over the years documentary reporting had developed a specific style - coarse grained, high-contrast, B&W images accompanied by a text that provided an overview for each image clearly directing how the images were to be interpreted. Reportage had been born.

“At this time the documentary photographer was diametrically opposed to the advertising photographer. Whereas the latter was associated with colour, technical perfection, artificiality, idealisation and staging; the rougher, B&W style of the documentary photographer was associated with authenticity, realism and everyday rawness – ‘images seized from life’”.

Heuvel highlights that the documentary image can only function as such if the viewer believes in its “transparency and objectivity”. However, since the advent of television and with the on-going technological advancements of the digital platform, especially image manipulation, documentary as a transparent and objective method of communication has continuously been undermined. If an image does not reproduce reality, it cannot be documentary and can therefore only be art.

Rather than this revelation resulting in the death of documentary, it enabled the genre to reinvent itself. Instead of having to reproduce reality, documentary started to incorporate the codes and mechanism (the visual language) of art and present options and scenarios that could reflect any number of possible realities. Thus documentary entered the art scene.

A couple of questions:
Heuvel states the “more and more mass media dominates our perception of reality”, however, have we not reach the point where mass media defines (to a greater extent) each of our individual realities?

If we continue with the stance that photographic images are not objective but heavily influenced by the photographer and that today the majority of our experiences are second hand via digital mass media (via somebody else’s particular view of the world); then how can we ever arrive at personally informed view of any situation?

Why is the on-going blurring of these boundaries detrimental? As long as clear definitions are agreed and documented for the new genre created, then rather than be problematic, it should enable further development of numerous digital and artistic mediums.