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Thread: is all photography documentary?

  1. #1
    multiplex
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    is all photography documentary?

    i "record" the world around me, and i consider myself a documentary photographer. even my experimental work i consider to be a document of something ...

    is ALL photography documentary photography?

  2. #2

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    is all photography documentary?

    No photography is a total document, since the photographer's vision informs the image. Your choice of framing, depth of field, lens, format, print, as Mark Citret writes " where to stand and where to put the edges"--all that influences the image.

  3. #3

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    is all photography documentary?

    Well it is a document of something, even if the something is abstracted to reveal another possible meaning or the something is entirely created for the sole purpose of the photograph. But in general I havet o say no, not all photography is documentary in nature. All photography is both documentary and expressive . This is the essential dual nature of the photographic medium of communication. my experience with my own phofography and with viewing the photographic works made by others is that the deeper their involvement in it the more expressive and less purely documentary it becomes and for a few of us we are able to go so far that the documentary aspect comes back into play but in such a way that the metaphoric ("expressive") aspect of the world tht is documented is more apparent. But this metamorphosis and growh in vision only comes about through conscious choice.

    Look at the first sentence of your post: "i "record" the world around me, and i consider myself a documentary photographer." You are not of course, automatically photographically recording the entirity of the world around you but are choosing what you feel moved ("inspired"? "stimulated"? "motivated"?) to make a photograph of, to "document". You frame the image in a non-random way, you choose when and where you want to make an image, and to certain degree you choose where to place the camera in relation to the world when you make thse images. By doing all of this you are expressing your point of view about that person, place or object. It only works ("is a good phootgraph") if others can grab on to the metaphoric content and relate it to their lifes and experiences, Those others maynot be your contemporaries or your immediate peers, but that is a very good placeto start. One hundred years from today someone may look at that image and read new and different meanings into the image given their particular intellectual and other worldly circumstances, but it still needs an immediate resonance to survive that long. After all Shakespeare wrote for his time but we are still going to plays and movies based very firmly in his writings, we now find much to admire in the painting of Rembrandt and van Gogh (who was completely ignored in his time), and are delighted by the photographic portraits Julia Cameron made of her circle of friends.

    Apologies for rambling on likethis, but my point is this; the photographs you make are as much a documentary of your internal world as they are of an external world and you have to honor that truth..

  4. #4

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    is all photography documentary?

    All attempts to document something are by their nature subjective (except perhaps a robotized scanning camera). What is considered "documentary" is more of a stylistic difference. The old newsreels of the 1930's - 1960's or Life magazine seem terribly hokey and stylized today, but they were the state-of-the-art mass market documentary media of their time. I think the most consistently appreciated attribute of a documentary style is that it communicates clearly and consistently to the viewer. But there are so many ways of "documenting" a thing, person or event that no one medium or style will ever cover more than a fraction of the event. There are over 10,000 non-fiction books "documenting" the life and work of William Shakespeare. If you are achieving in your own mind a fraction of the feeling of the thing, persons or events you are photographing in your images than you are succesful or on the road to it. By the way the best way to be non-documentary is to shred documents like Arthur Andersen Accounting did of Enron's audit.

  5. #5
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    is all photography documentary?

    To document is to record veracity. A documentary photograph is created when you click the shutter, always, according the constraints of the physical universe you have placed on the record at the moment. What you do with it after that determines whether the image remains documentary or moves on to something else. In most cases, since we do not elaborate what has happened to the image after it is taken, most photos (paradoxically which are not snapshots) are not documentary, but have moved on to "something else". Quicksand, semantic quicksand. Be forwarned

  6. #6

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    is all photography documentary?

    Are you reallyasking what defines "documentary photography" as opposed to "photojournalism", "fine art", "industrial", "photo-illustration (AKA advertising)" and other such categories that are primarily defined by academics, curators, collectors, and critics?

  7. #7
    multiplex
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    is all photography documentary?

    ellis, i guess that is kind of what i am asking, but not really ... i am having a hard time actually putting my thoughts into words

    i was wondering if people who make nature photographs, and people that take product shots / still lifes for catalogs are all making documentary images. does manipulation of exposure (filtration &c) , context ( natural setting, man made context in a studio ) and printing / cropping and manipulation in a darkroom automaticly make the images non-documentary. thanks!

  8. #8

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    is all photography documentary?

    "The term "documentary photography" has been used to describe an immense array of visual styles, genres, and commitments. Roy Stryker, Chief of the Historical Section of the Depression-era U.S. Farm Security Administration, shaped one of the most well known contributions of documentary photography. He dispatched a staff of photographers, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn, to capture the relationship between rural poverty and improper land use, the decline of the small farming community, and the growth of urban decay. Documentary photography has been characterized as the social conscience presented in visual imagery. Stryker has provided a simple, broad, and powerful definition of documentary photography: "the things to be said in the language of pictures." . This definition cames from photovoice.com.

    There is another intriguing set of definitions at Pat Brady's "One Out of Many, Regionalism in FSA Photography" University of Virginia website which include's Ansel Adams' defition of documentary photography as ""the type of photography which interprets the social scene in the way of commentary" .

    if you do a google.com search with the parameters of defition of documentary photography, no doubt you will find other things to think about. My personal definition of "documentary photography is very close to A. Adams but includes more subject matter than just "the social scene".

    All photography by definition involves choosing where you stand physically and what you choose to point the camera at, what you decide to leave out of the frame 9this is as important as what you choose to leave in), and of course an entire matrix of technical choices ranging from film type and filters to lens length and finally to an entire range of darkroom manipulation possibilities starting with: do I bother developing this image?

    In general I would say that for a photograph to be considered in the documentary range there has to be a social or historical context the image can be related to.

    But what really do I know? I am just a photographer and these labels are only of concern to me if they give me a framework to work within.

  9. #9
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    is all photography documentary?

    Quicksand. I would argue that the definition at the Brady site is wrong. Documentation cannot interpret, by definition. Here we are again I think where a popular usage is attempting to redefine a concept. In the realm of commercial journalism, a "documentary" has come to mean (and be) an extended form of photojournalism, which serves to extend a particular viewpoint through "interpretation" Honest documentaries are extremely difficult to produce, partly because we cannot be entirely free from our own biases, however benign.

  10. #10

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    is all photography documentary?

    while I agree that the isuue is "quicksand". I also think you are wrong in your assertion that "Documentation cannot interpret, by definition." A compilation of images, or documents, can be structured to make a specific point. This goes back at least to Jacob Riis photographs of poverty and child labor in new York City, the work of the FSA, and continuing on through the work of W. Eugene Smith, Bruce Davidson, Eugene Richards, Susan Meiselas, Robert Adams, William Klett, and so on all the way up to Joel Meyerwitz's ongoing photography of the site of the former World Trade Center in New York City. My point is that to make sense out of chaos there needs to be an organizing principle and that inherent in that principle is an interpretation, and inside that principle is an idea.

    If you agree with this approach the question then becomes what differentiates the documentary approach from mere propaganda?

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