The publisher’s promotional text promises insights into “how we, as humans, are driven to visually document our experiences and the world around us.” Taken together with largely laudatory reviews, my expectations were perhaps higher than could be satisfied by a text that turned out to be a fairly standard presentation of the history of documentary photography. While ideas are presented succinctly and in clear prose, the conclusion is something of a letdown. The author concedes that, in effect, there may be as many documentary impulses as there are documentary photographers and that ultimately the need to document may be a manifestation of an underlying need to understand what it means to be human. For me, the book fairly begins where it ends.
Author Stuart Franklin opens by way of review, looking at a number of historical examples, from ancient cave painting to 19th century death masks, to establish the seemingly inherent human impulse to document. It stems, Franklin says, “from the psychological and epistemological understanding of being human – being a particular human on the planet at a particular time looking around and thinking, Gosh! I want to record that experience to memory.” This impulse encompasses the entire range of human experience, and “documentary value lies in an honest striving to describe the world around us, without overt intent to sell a political ideology (propaganda) or a commodity (advertising).” Photography is just one of the latest methods for producing documentary artifacts.
One of its earliest uses was cataloging the various wonders encountered in the European colonial expedition, which “arose from the curiosity of white people’s ethnographic interests and erotic fantasizing about people and places they hadn’t yet seen.” Much of this photography was overtly racist and sexist. There were, for example, no parallel projects cataloging German farmers or English laborers. The underlying psychological desire at the heart of theses images was “a yearning for a supposedly vanishing past,” what Franklin refers to as an Edenic archetype, the adjective here referring to the Abrahamic Garden of Eden. Tribespeople across several continents were imagined – and often depicted – as inhabiting lives unsoiled by the anxieties of modern Europeans and North Americans. Ironically, and contrary to the photographer’s own experience, the landscape was depicted as a pristine idyl, even though it was often empty because the people who once lived there had been chased off, hunted down, or deported. This yearning for idyl did not die with the colonial project but is with us today in the work, for example, of Ansel Adams and Sebastião Salgado, whose aesthetically pleasing images depict an essentialist ideal, a world fixed in time, a “fantasy constructed from desires in the present.” The best documentary work, Franklin argues, “places changes at heart of narrative,” recognizing that “there is no ideal Form within the human condition.” Franklin here compares Salgado’s images of Amazonian bodies in recline against palm fronds, with those of photographers documenting slave labor in the Belgian congo, South African apartheid, or American segregation, and finds the latter engaged with and contributing to the process of human evolution.
Beginning in the late 19th century, documentary photography became associated with progressive causes hoping to reform society. The camera was conceived as an instrument for collecting evidence and was directed at instances of child labor, the living conditions of the urban poor, and drug and alcohol addiction. Franklin notes that reformist image making predates the camera, citing a mid-18th century print by Hogarth on the horrors of English home-brewed gin. By the late 20th century the problems explored by documentary image makers were manifold, and the investigative process came to include methods first deployed in ethnography, that of living with or in close physical proximity to a subject, documenting from the inside and presenting more subjective points of view. Photographers were often motivated by outrage at society’s failure to deal with the problems they explored, while others were less concerned with changing anything than simply documenting culture. At this point Franklin turns to a discussion of humanism, citing Soper’s definition of a world (or experience of reality) in which there is no separation between humanity and nature, but an interpenetration. Franklin thereafter asks whether images that don’t picture humans can be humanistic. Looking specifically at the hundreds of images made over many years by Czech photographer Josef Sudek of an apple tree out his back window, Franklin concludes this is possible, that these images speak of the human condition and the desire to unveil and liberate. The link to reforming society is tenuous and it appears Franklin (and his editor) have gotten lost.
The next chapter takes in war and famine and Franklin begins by observing that where film is didactic, photographic images float. Film is constructed to make a point; a photograph has no point to make unless contextualized with text. Photographs are excellent at depicting suffering, but poor at explaining the reasoning for suffering. In covering atrocity, Franklin argues that photographers are motivated by two parallel emotions: disgust (and I suppose a sense of injustice) on the one hand, and on the other guilt at profiting from the misfortunes of others. The first may shape what images are taken and how they are presented; the second every photographer has to address in order to justify his work. Some photographers see themselves as providing a voice for those without, some imagine their work as helping change conditions and alleviate suffering, and others take a long view and see themselves as producers of historical evidence. On the issue of compassion fatigue, Franklin argues there is no such thing, that despite widespread and repeated exposure to atrocity, compassion continues to assert itself, as evidenced by the continuing ability of images to inspire us to great acts of charity.
Meanwhile, governments in the modern period have become adept at shaping events for photographers, or even manufacturing images themselves, throwing into meaning the very idea of documentary. An early example is Riefenstahl’s work on behalf of Germany’s Nazi government, and includes as well the iconic image of the raising of the US flag at Iwo Jima or more recently the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad. Franklin himself covered the 1989 Tiananmen protests (producing the iconic Tank Man image) and notes how two of its most well-known icons were Western interpretations of the event. Where the Goddess of Democracy made the demonstrations appears to be ideologically motivated, rather than the result of specific grievances related to more tangible issues such as fair access to education, the Tank Man obscured the slaughter of innocent protesters moments earlier only blocks away. Both images fed the Western news narrative of Good-versus-Evil, and the Individual-versus-The-State, but did not, as it were, do much to tell the truth.
Where the argument until now has been that photographs “float” and are not in themselves didactic, in chapter six Franklin explores the rhetorical tools photographers use to create images that implicitly, even explicitly, comment on their subjects. Orange and yellow, the warm colors, are friendlier than blue and green. Bright, harsh light can make subjects unappealing. Images shot from below can elevate their subjects, while those from above can belittle. Certain types of images are almost Pavlovian in their ability to elicit predictable response, such as children (rather than adults) in distress, animals with childlike qualities, and mother-and-child images. Franklin then proceeds to a brief discussion of the portrayal of the city as either dystopian or utopian, before segueing to the almost heroic portrayal of industry prior to the 1980s, which morphed thereafter into an exploration of its harmfulness to the environment, most especially in the depiction of nuclear power production.
Franklin’s treatment of street photography is one of the more unusual I’ve come across. He sees it as part of surrealist stream of the 1920s (which fits nicely with Cartier-Bresson’s early years dabbling in surrealist painting). He defines surrealism as a process of seeing, of the observation of the incongruities missed in day-to-day living that “don’t belong to the practical side of life.” Seeing surrealism involves seeing forms, a kind of visual poetry. For many photographers, the process and poetry, rather the subject, became the impulse to document. Some critics have seen this impulse as an apolitical retreat from engagement with the world, an existential approach often afforded only to the financially independent. Franklin argues that an aesthetic mode need not be an overarching, that how one engages with others need not mimic one’s visual aesthetic.
The author’s survey of documentary photography concludes with a consideration of manipulation and staging. The latter is the ability to change an image in the darkroom or on the computer, the former the deliberate arrangement of items in the production of an image. Both have been regular techniques since the early days of photography, but what sets contemporary practice apart is the modern audience’s awareness of the potential for deception and the association of manipulation with propaganda. Recent technology trends that have put the power of image making and worldwide distribution within the hands of the average person have increased opportunities for deception. Franklin claims the situation may also be exacerbated by confusion among the general public about the differences between photojournalism, which is largely news reporting, and documentary photography, which may be more conceptually or aesthetically oriented. He notes the interesting and perhaps worrisome phenomenon of staged images coming to be regarded as actual historical documents when over many years the images become separated from their captions or descriptions. Also new in staging is the turn inward to represent self, in which the actuality depicted is the felt experience, rather than a particular event, in which the documentary process becomes a kind of therapy. Franklin feels that as so much news is these days staged, of greater relevance than whether or not the event is staged is who controls the agenda, or who sets the stage?
The conclusion ends with speculation on what this all means. While there is more than one type of impulse to document, underlying them Franklin finds a need to untie something in the psyche, to unravel a personal paradox. In the end, there may be as many impulses as there are photographers.
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