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March 17, 2010
In his Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning Jonathan Tagg refers to the issue of documentary photography. He argues that there can be no more talk of a continuous documentary tradition grounded on the non-manipulative use of this camera’s supposed natural properties.
...if there is a link between documentation and “documentary,” that link is now seen to come not via the pristine camera but via the institutions, discourses, and systems of power that invest the camera and sully it, and via the regimen that holds the document in place. What links document to “documentary” is not a natural continuity founding a seamless tradition but, rather, the uneven history of photography’s implication in the purposeful institutionalization of boundaries to meaning: boundaries drawn only through a processof conflict and negotiation in which—contrary to the claims of the truth machine—nothing is guaranteed in advance; boundaries that specify photography’s singularity only at the price of multiplying it and dividing it.
The history of documentary is the history of a strategy of meaning forwhich reality is not only a complex discursive effect but also an effect of power that returns its own force to the struggle to control the social Weld.
Realisms, by definition, claim to ground themselves on a finality that ends all dispute. Thus, they have never been able to brook the endless, open play of meaning that marks the contingency of the social and undoes all attempts to give a final fixity to social reality:
In order to be effective, the timeless truths of realism have to be timely, since it is always within particular historical frames of discourse that effects of meaning are produced, mobilized, and enforced. Realisms are thus always specific and conjunctural: activated in specific historical frameworks,determined by specific representational resources, and effective only as specific historical rhetorics.
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