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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

re-reading Martha Rosler on docmentary photography « Previous | |Next »
April 26, 2012

I'm at a bit of a loss to know how to continue with my Rethinking documentary photography after returning from Tasmania. So I thought that I'd do a bit of reading of old texts on documentary photography that I remembered reading, such as Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

Included in it was Martha Rosler's her late 1970's essay 'In, Around, and Afterthoughts on Documentary Photography)' in Decoys, Disruptions: Selected Writings 1974-2001. She begins by asking 'How can we deal with documentary photography itself as a photographic practice? What remains of it?' It's a good question.

She answers thus:

We must begin with it as a historical phenomenon, a practice with a past. Documentary photography has come to represent the social conscience of liberal sensibility presented in visual imagery (though its roots are somewhat more diverse and include the “artless” control motives of police record keeping and surveillance). Photo documentary as a public genre had its moment in the ideological climate of developing State liberalism and the attendant reform movements of the early-twentieth- century Progressive Era in the United States and withered along with the New Deal consensus some time after the Second World War. Documentary, with its original muckraking associations, preceded the myth of journalistic objectivity and was partly strangled by it.

It's a very American perspective, understandable given her concern with the Bowery in New York as a historical site of victim photography in which the victims, insofar as they are now victims of the camera—that is, of the photographer—are often docile, whether through mental confusion or because they are just lying there, unconscious.

Yet documentary, still exists and it, carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful. She adds:

the documentary that has so far been granted cultural legitimacy has no such argument to make. Its arguments have been twisted into generalizations about the condition of “man,” which is by definition not susceptible to change through struggle. And the higher the price that photography can command as a commodity in dealerships, the higher the status accorded to it in museums and galleries, the greater will be the gap between that kind of documentary and another kind, a documentary incorporated into an explicit analysis of society and at least the beginning of a program for changing it.

The liberal documentary, in which members of the ascendant classes are implored to have pity on and to rescue members of the oppressed, now belongs to the past. This is a contrasted to a radical documentary of the present; a financially unloved but growing body of documentary works committed to the exposure of specific abuses caused by people’s jobs, by the financier’s growing hegemony over the cities, by racism, sexism, and class oppression; works about militancy or about self-organization, or works meant to support them.

Rosler's work was an act of criticism which demonstrated how both language and images are insufficient to for a full description and analysis of this poor area of New York where homeless people gather to drink alcohol. Whilst doing so punctured the assumptions of liberal or humanist documentary photography.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:11 PM |