Documentary/Storytelling Photography - Week Two [Reading Notes]

Documentary and Story-telling, in Photography: the Key Concepts, by David Bate

Intro

- Documentary emerged as a popular practice across a variety of media after WWI and developed throughout the twentieth century. 

- The birth of documentary as a popular form is linked historically to the rise of a large-scale mass press, particularly during WWII. Commercial magazine markets flourished around the world with a constant flow of new stories and pictures, documentary 'stories' on everyday life.

- Documentary aimed to show, in an informal way, the everyday lives of ordinary people to other ordinary people.

- Photographers for these magazines became a key role in the industry's competitive production process. These photographers would act as a reporter of everyday life who supplied the photographs (sometimes the stories) for this growing market.

- The aim of social documentary work was not only to record and document, but also to enlighten and creatively educate

Picture Story: 
A sequence of images that could tell a story with only basic, minimal contextual writing to accompany it. These stories would show the world in motion and full of life, represented by people 'in action': shown smiling, laughing, or looking angry while 'doing' something like work, play or travelling.

Editorial Control

- Pictures could be organized to indicate significance and meaning; for example several images gathered around a larger central portrait could be used to show different aspects of a character (happy, lonely, excited, etc.) or different aspects of their life (work, home, etc.)

- Pictures were organized spatially to construct narrative effect, reinforced by basic written caption, an introductory text and title. As is now well known, cropping of photographs is an essential part of this process, to emphasise specific meanings.

- The sequencing of pictures on a page can radically affect the story told. Editorial control is a key issue and the conflict between photographer and editor over photographic meaning remains highly relevant for documentary photographer today.

- The issue of control and constructed meaning, coupled with ambition, led to photographers publishing their own work as photography books.

Auteur Photographers

- Auteur Photographers: Authors with control over their own work, publishing their own photographic work as photo-books. In these documentary photo-books the photographers were given more prominence than the writing that accompanied them.

Democratic Vision

- The early years of the twentieth century saw the birth of a whole range of documentary movements around the world, groups of people who organzied and made representations of themselves or others for a wider public in film, photography, writing and sound recordings. The ambitions of most of these documentary movements can be seen as driven by the demand for a new reality and a recognition that that ordinary people did in their lives, mattered.

- Social truth was embodied in the modern technological process of 'documenting'. Thus, documentary photography become a tool in a broader movement of social change and liberal attitude. 

- It became a source of visual knowledge, especially in the 1930s since mass literacy skills were not yet achieved globally. It became an international tool of communication and the emergence of humanist photographer which photographs would depict a shared 'common condition'.

- They would become a key part of the legal/judicial systems as photographs would be considered evidential documents of truth. But how close is documentary photography to social documentary photography? If documentary practices are as different as the visual means used to archive them, then how to define documentary photography as a social practice?

How the Other Half Lives

- Nineteenth-century documentary mode photographers like Matthew Brady, Jacob A. Riis and Lewis Hine of the USA or John Thomson and Henry Mayhew in Britain all aimed to inform, educate and disseminate the truth about an issue using photography, alongside writing. They wanted to demonstrate that documentary seeing was a way of knowing and further, that knowing would improve humanity.

- Issues they all documented - war, slums, immigrants and child labour, and street workers.

- The emphasis of 'seeing' was to show something as true, associated with giving the reader empirical evident with a strong educational or judicial tone. 

- By the 1930s, it was possible to see two general modes of documentary photography. Objective and Subjective which were binary opposites. These two tendencies privileged either a neutral camera view, the so-called 'objective approach' or the subjective idea of instantaneity, the capturing of a fleeting instant as the expression of everyday life.

- Techninally, in semiotic language it might be said that the formed 'tripod-photography' emphasises the informational codes, the qualities of the lens and film (e.g. depth-of-field, high-fidelity information) while the other 'shutter' photography privileges the stylistic and iconographic codes (e.g. blur, cut-off edges, human movement indicating speed and time) of the camera.

Reportage

- Reportage became an accepted genre of socially-critical literature and visual presentation in the 1920s, largely under the influence of the Russian revolutionary avant-garde who extolled fact against the pop entertainment which the European Left had always condemned as the people's opium. Eric Hobsbawm

- News photographs are percieved as signifying events. Art and most documentary photographs signify states. Some documentary photographs are seen as signifying processes. From what we know about minimal narratives, we might say that an ideal minimal story form might consist of a documentary photograph, then an art photograph (process, event, state).  Peter Wollen

- Documentary pictures can show social processes, the actors within it (events) and the conditions in which it takes place (state). The neutral type photography shows the state of something, its 'condition', while reportage uses both event and process to show them as life story 'experiences'. This helps to explain why documentary is itself such a slippery category too since it can embrace different modes of practice, using techniques from art, new and journalism. 

- Documentary photography hovers between art and journalism, between creative treatment and actuality, the very terms that the found of documentary film, John Grierson had combined to define social documentary: the creative treatment of actuality.

- Reportage is similarly an ambiguous concept, ranging from the reporting of an event as news to the description of the social processes and their impact on people, whether as individuals or as a whole social group.

Peripateia in the Documentary Mode

Staging Reality

- Composition and postioning are what help stage a scene, using raw materials which together create photographic codes, a rhetoric form to create a reality effect.

- For Grierson, a good documentary is a good 'interpretation' of real live, one that lights up the fact. 

- Reportage (and snapshots) signify human involvement and expression of life in events. Whilst objective/descriptive photography offers a more disengaged position to the scene. Despite the differences, both subjective and objective are variant modes of the 'straight photograph' and depend on the idea of witnessing 'life', which is so crucial to the documentary form.

Eyewitness

- Another aim of documentary is to make the spectator into an 'eyewitness'. A spectator can participate by seeing with their own eyes hat the photographer has seen; an argument built on trust that what we see is what the photographer had seen.

- The photographer becomes an agent of the truth, producing documents whose responsibility to truth is ultimate and ethical. We see truth visually. It can be thought of as the point of view of a witness who is telling the story about a social event or process.

- Story-telling in photograph implies a potential for fiction and subjectivity. When you or I witness an event, our stories may be quite different; because of where people stand it can seem different, even though it was the same event. In this sense, documentary photography always has an opinion, no matter how subjective or innocent the picture appears to be. A documentary photograph always has a point-of-view.

Reality and Representation

- Documentary relies on the construction of an image of reality in representation. This construction, on which the whole project of documentary was based, can also be described as manifesting a desire for reality. However, the desire for recognition of reality is not only on the part of the photograph; it involves the spectator. Documentary pictures tend to suggest that there is a reality and it is in this sense that we must argue that: documentary photograph construct representations of reality, according to someone's view, their desire to see.