What is Documentary?: The case of Mohamed Bourouissa's Périphérique

Bourouissa - Périphérique  (2005-2009)

Reading through the course notes I came across this:

 ...new platforms are pushing the boundaries of documentary and challenging stagnant and outdated conceptions of the genre. Take, for example, the long-held notion that documentary is necessarily the result of a recording process and not a product of the imagination, as Jean-François Chévrier argued in Documentary Now! (2005, p.47). If this were true then Mohamed Bourouissa, a French Algerian photographer based in Paris, would not be, strictly speaking, a documentary photographer.

So I googled Mr Bourouissa and clicked around on the front page of his website, which looks like this:

I found much of the work displayed of little interest until I got to Périphérique, images of kids in the streets.  After a bit more googling, I discovered the name of the project is the name of Paris' outer ring highway separating the white bourgeois inner city from less well-to-do immigrant neighborhoods on the city's periphery.  Mr Bourouissa, it seems, comes from one such neighborhood and this is his document of it.

But is it documentary?

Before I even read about the project, I could see the images had been staged.  This was evident in the number of exceptionally sharp and well-lit images capturing dramatic looks or gestures.  A "real" documentary photographer would have difficulty producing so many in such a short period.  There would be some grainy or out-of-focus shots in such a set if they had been taken on the fly or in the moment.

The course notes writer (Mr Navarro, I believe) suggests Mr Bourouissa and/or his work is documentary.  I disagree.  For now.

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