Documentary Now

In some senses, documentary's humanist tradition might be said to be over. John Szarkowski was saying this in the 1960s. But then, he had specific agendas in mind, not least the establishment of photography as an art alongside - but always distinct from - painting and sculpture. For him, Diane Arbus' photographs offered a more powerful register of the trauma of Vietnam than the best of the photojournalism that was coming out of the war. Susan Sontag's scathing attack on Diane Arbus in On Photography concerned the way she betrayed her subjects in what was seen as an essentially undignified mode of representation, an abuse of the documentary contract, believed to be predicated on respect for its subject. But Sontag was no real advocate of photography. Hierarchies and distinctions between literature and photography underly her book. While it was okay to abandon ethical responsibility in literature, photography was different because of its documentary premise, the photographer was dealing with the real not fiction. The essays that collectively make up On Photography of course can only speak of photography as a pre-digital medium. By the time of her later book on photography, Regarding The Pain of Others, 2003, digital technologies had radically shifted our relation to the medium. The importance given to Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk at the close seems significant, a staged and digitally constructed fiction that is seen to intelligently and critically reflect on the representation of war. The staged photograph assimiliates or appropriates documentary. With Wall the choreographed social disturbances and breakdowns are aesthetically refined- in Milk, 1984, for example, the painterly beautiful abstract form of the milk exploding from a carton and frozen by the camera, counters the realism attached to the performance of anger and rage by the solitary male on the street. This formal aesthetic uplift of documentary has certain parallels in the work of Paul Graham and Martin Parr from the 1980s. Their use of colour signalled a clear shift away from the ideals of a humanist documentary- colour brought in associations with advertising and consumer culture, the very antithesis of traditional documentary's values. Graham and Parr's skill was to ironically undercut such links by using colour to draw out respectively the grubby décor of the dole offices in Britain or the litter-choked environs of a decaying Northern seaside resort.

Colour both augmented the realism of documentary subject matter, but also brought in more distractions, shifted attention away from the centrality of its human subjects. The same distraction that was set up and orchestrated in Wall's tableau, Milk. Richard Billingham's 1996 Ray's a Laugh illustrates this condition very well. Here his mother's kitsch ornaments and decoration set up a jarring background to his raw and unrelenting depictions of the otherwise familiar documentary subject matter of poverty and family conflicts. But here much as it served to upset documentary tradition, colour in its associations with 'bad' décor was also intrinsically caught up with class-marked judgements of taste. The art market has now appropriated documentary. Photojournalism can and does function outside this, but it has been affected fundamentally by this shift in values. At the same time with the emergence of the citizen as photojournalist with their mobile phone cameras, photojournalists cannot simply speak of their role as a witness or evidence gatherer. The aesthetic and art can thus become important in distinguishing photojournalism from the mass of amateur images that now also circulate within the print and broadcast media as news images.

The British photographer, Simon Norfolk, a former Newport student, puts himself in the same dangerous situations as photojournalists, but avoids the emotionalism, drama and closeness of photojournalism. Instead, he is moved and affected by the war zone as landscape. Working with a large format camera, he foregoes the expressive, gestural immediacy that can characterise handheld photography, for something more reflective and contemplative. Recalling the paintings of Empire with all their fantasies over the ruined splendour of the Orient, Norfolk's recent beautiful still photographs of Iraq see contemporary destruction in colonial terms.

In his book Baghdad Calling, 2008, the Dutch photojournalist, Geert van Kesteren edited and displayed some of the mobile phone images and digital photos that Iraqi refugees had received over the Internet from family and friends who had stayed behind. Testimonies of the refugees accompanied the appropriated images. Geert van Kesteren acknowledges not only the power of such amateur photos, but the dangers the current violent situation in Iraq presents to the photojournalist. The cell phone photos were being used as both family albums and newspapers. Tapping into these affective and charged private pictures might well be seen to expose something of the paucity and limits of contemporary photojournalism, but on the other hand they can also serve as a model for the kind of closeness and intimacy the photojournalist so often seeks. And in this respect, Geert van Kesteren might be seen to be continuing the humanist documentary tradition, despite the distance from this tradition so much documentary since the 1960s seems to have been characterised by.

Mark Durden