Art & Documentary: strange bedfellows (8/06/08)

“The documentary tradition in photography is an expression of the deepest moral and artistic values of liberal democratic societies. Both in celebration and protest, it is photography which has carried the evaluative burden which high art had abandoned, and it has paid the price.”

* Roger Seamon  

Broadway St., Los Angeles

 

A century ago, documentarian Lewis Hine identified the art of photography in its ability to interpret the everyday world. “He did not,” wrote Alan Trachtenberg, “mean ‘beauty’ or ‘personal expression.’ He meant how people live.” That sounds just about right, and it could be the credo of all Capa’s “concerned photographers.” Whether documentary, or photojournalism can or should be considered (Fine) Art is a trivial diversion, meaningless to an understanding of what’s happening on Broadway Street today. Yet in any discussion of street photography and documentary, a distinction needs to be made between what I consider political or social art, and l’art pour l’art, which has historically divorced the intrinsic value of art from any moral or utilitarian function. Postmodern practitioners can reasonably argue that deconstructing the medium is in itself a social or political act. I am more concerned with visual messages that emphasize content over form; not only those that raise social and political awareness about issues and events, but those that are easily understood and appreciated by common people unschooled in art history or theory. Manual Alvarez Bravo referred to this as popular art, or “art of the people . . . with less of the impersonal and intellectual characteristics that are the essence of the art of the schools.”

Street photography does well both as a folk art and an elitist art form. Coleman reminds us that street photographers have gradually “expanded the street as subject, transforming it from a reportorially oriented locus of social concern to the proscenium for a surreal theatrical centered around cultural symbols.” As the 20th Century progressed, “more and more photographers took to the streets with concerns that were not those of the reporter but rather those of the novelist and poet—a search for resonant contrasts, rich metaphors, and found dramatic scenarios.” John Szarkowski, in the introduction to his 1967 New Documents exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art featuring the work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, wrote that this new generation of photographers had more personal aims, and had redirected documentary away from trying to make the world a better place.  As Martha Rosler explains, this emphasis on self-expression played into the coffers of an historically conservative Artworld. “The elite . . . attaches most importance to the author of the image, isolating the images in galleries, museums and the art market. In doing so, it separates the elite’s understanding of the images from the common understanding. As a result debates about photography have shifted to the right and revolve around formal aesthetic considerations ignoring the content and political or ideological dimension of the images.” 

This is not to say that aesthetics are absent from photojournalism and documentary. As the likes of Mary Ellen Mark, W. Eugene Smith, Sebastiao Salgado and James Natcheway have aptly shown, reportage made in the fashion of art often gets the point across more effectively, if only because these images hold our attention. There’s also a long history of human intervention that defies the public’s expectation of photographic truth, dating back to the moving around of dead bodies during the Civil War. Smith, most active during the heyday of the photo story and Life magazine, was particularly unconcerned about blurring the line, angering purists with occasional darkroom manipulations deemed unethical in the world of journalism. Walker Evans, who despite his protestations was thought to move objects around to enhance composition, spoke in his later years of this distinction between documentary and art for art’s sake. “Documentary? That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. The term should be documentary style. An example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never called a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.” 

Henri Cartier-Bresson, co-founder of the quintessentially independent photojournalism agency Magnum, is commonly thought of more as an artist than a reporter, though it has been written that his “attempts to expose social injustice with his camera were consistent with his revolt against the capitalist class, the perceived cause of that injustice.” (Cookman) Perhaps more than any other photographer, Cartier-Bresson epitomizes the potential of artistic reportage, and with his unique ability to find universal moments wherever he traveled, he is held in the highest esteem among street photographers. 

In an essay written on his protégé Helen Levitt, art historian and critic Max Kozloff’s attempts to understand street photography underscored the genre’s unique positioning within this murky netherworld. He was writing about photographs taken on the streets of New York in the 1940s that were not published until the 1960s, yet his musings are still relevant today. ”To walk the streets is to be confronted with a stupid abundance of confused, jostled and small incidents,” Kozloff declared. “The photograph will fix any instance of it with a drastic particularity, wispy, random, and, therefore, perhaps trivial.” But to what end, Kozloff wonders. “How is the stuff of the image transmuted into a message?”

How indeed? More to the point, does the street photographer have responsibilities similar to those we normally assign the documentarian or photojournalist? When considering the lyrical, more spontaneous style of street photography, Kozloff sees the artist’s concern with candid imagery overlapping the imperative of subjectivity we expect in photojournalism: “Underlying street photography is a naturalist argument that goes something like this: The value of the picture resides in its truthful observation. The value is jeopardized to the extent the photographer intervenes in the social circumstances, causing a rupture from what would naturally have happened . . .”

At the same time, what separates street photographers from reporters is a disregard for the traditional narrative. I approach my work on Broadway unfettered by editorial constraints, and can allow myself the freedom of totally subjective interpretation. As Kozloff explains, “If these street photographers certify that nothing more is seen or even meant than what is shown, they offer concrete findings without any journalistic pretext.” This would seem to indicate that the street photographer is as concerned with self-expression as making social statements, running around with the fiercely independent creative lust of, well, an artist. Not so fast, Kozloff cautions. “The mobility of street photographers . . . does not necessarily lead them to the fictions of the art world, nor do the photographers seek legitimization there. They are in flight, rather, from the stereotypes of photography for hire. The freedom at issue is not so much to allow the photographer to be personal for the ego’s sake, but to use the ego to describe intimate and fortuitous realities not otherwise available.” 

“ . . . the history of photography is fraught with disagreements about its status—tensions between photography as art and as record, between posed versus candid images, over public versus private ownership—precisely because the photograph represents a commodified and reproducible form.”

* Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented 

 

(All photographs in this blog are copyrighted to David Blumenkrantz)