Ribalta, you had me at “social contract”

Over at Foto8 there’s a great interview you should read called Jorge Ribalta on Documentary and Democracy. I think what he says is incredibly important and timely, and it would do all of us documentary folks some good to consider the place of this type of work in the context of our own era. Reading it spurned a number of thoughts for me on these subjects.

Although I am greatly inspired by fairly traditional post-war documentary and street photography, I think it’s pretty clear that this time period is long gone and the work that those of us create today needs to have some serious thought behind it, based on what it can and should accomplish in our various social and political situations. I also think the idea of photographic “realism” needs a major overhaul. Someone reminded me recently that many don’t believe documentary has a place in fine art, and I couldn’t believe more differently. While I still feel like an outsider to the art world and am just beginning to really understand it, I feel strongly that the idea of “straight” documentary photography actually being realism is a bit naive both today and 60 years ago, although definitely more today.

With every form of or attempt at either art or documentation, there are choices to be made. When there are choices to be made, there is always creativity. Whenever I document a subject, I am aware that my work is very much about my own experience with the subject. I can’t help it. I have 100s of choices to make in creating and editing that work, which are always guided by my own opinions, creativity, comfort, goals, etc, whether I think about it at the time or not, and whether I deny it later or not.

I don’t think the growing accessibility and standardization of digital photography has changed the realist integrity of documentary photography as much as people attribute to it. Then again, I did just say that realism is just an ideal that can’t be accurately applied, anyway. But digital is, basically, just another tool. My best darkroom learning experience ended with the realization that I can change the entire composition of my image by the way I print it. I can dodge and burn away the focal point and create an entirely new one. I can hide insignificant details in shadows that I create. There are a myriad of possibilities here.

What the world of digital has done is made some of these choices easier and more accessible, of course on a much grander scale and in a very short period of time. I think that in a way and for this reason, it’s become a scapegoat. Possibly because we yearn for some kind of document that seems wholly “legitimate”, non-manipulated, apolitical, and void of any kind of cultural or social impressions. Maybe because we want ourselves to be documented in such a way. Maybe because we think our own integrity as image-makers relies on these ideals, because of the value that has been placed on them.  Maybe because we create societal institutions that we infuse with some of the same ideals (courts, police, schools, etc), that prove over and over again that it just doesn’t work this way. But does that mean we shouldn’t still attempt to document, and that documentary photography can’t possibly have similar affects on the world as it did year ago? No, I don’t think so. I think we just need to be real about expectations and changing social conditions. I don’t necessarily have the answers, but I think about these things often.

Ribalta says “The idea that, ‘after Photoshop, photography is dead in the realist-indexical sense’ is a belief that I find both theoretically unproductive and, on a political level, potentially reactionary or anti-democratic in some way. Its effect is to erase the documentary power of photography, which is precisely the political potential to link art to transformative radical politics.” I agree with him. And certainly there are many ways for art and document to work together and be productive and useful to all camps and various needs in the ways of art and storytelling as well as indexing and creating proof.

Randy’s toys, © Steph Plourde-Simard