"I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated."
Aims:
- introduce documentary photography and conflict photography
- introduce the work of Mass Observation, Magnum and the FSA Photographers
- explore questions of objectivity and subjectivity inherent in documentary practice
- interrogate the authority of the photographic image
Documentary photography has dominated the 20th Century.
Joseph Nicephore Niepce - View from a window at La Gras (1826)
Genre is difficult to define.
- wide variety of styles and topics.
Idea/term document signifies evidence of something not to be questioned.
Use of camera not only to record but to document and radicalise situations
- camera with a conscience.
- not just there to record but also there to expose situations
- contact between audience and photography
The role is not to be just an invisible eye,
- involve themselves
- taking a stance
- aligning themselves.
Old photography became popular of showing the other how others live.
William Edward Kilburn - The Great Chartist meeting at the common (1848)
- photographer not involved
- higher
- not seen
- removed
- authenticity, historical fact?
How can a photographer not influence events in any way?
- factual records of events
- only records of history
People want to capture the world and war becomes key focus.
The Decisive Movement
Henri Cartier-Bresson,
- depiction of everyday
- also composed
- have photos in head before took it
"photography achieves its highest distinction - reflecting the universality of the human condition in a never-to-be-retrieved fraction of a second"
- more artistic
- composed
How much of documentary photography concerns itself with aesthetics?
Jacob Riis
- middle class social campaigner
- squoller and poverty
- book - how the other half live
Sensationalising recording.
- morbid fascination for others
- allowing the rich to spy on the poor.
Jacob Riis - Bandits Roost (1888)
- not invisible eye
- not neutral
- posing for it
- not depiction of real life but how they want it to appear
- Riis fantasy?
Jacob Riis - A growler gang in session (robbing a lush) (1887)
- posing
- all in same clothes
- acting
- artificial representation
Lewis Hine - Russian Steel Workers (1908)
- subtle
- more empathy
- more humanity
- more neutrality - awkward
- not stereotyped people
F.S.A Photographers (1935-44)
- 2 ways of appoaching communication
- director Roy Stryker
- Depression- 11million unemployed
- mass migration of farm labourers 'oakies'
- the photograph as both emotive photojournalism and emotive lobbying tool
F.S.A = Farm Security Administration
- photographers given shooting scripts
- what to take
- how to take it
- has a total agenda
Margaret Bourke-White - Sharecroppers Home (1937)
- documents with agenda
- not neutral
Russell Lee - Interior of a black farmers house (1939)
- same as the previous example but a different way of representing
Dorothea Lange - Migrant Mother (1936)
- became poster for the great depression
- try draw parallels
- arranging the people like actors until they get what they like
Robert Frank
- exposing America
John Lamprey - Front and profile views of a malayan male (1868)
- comparing other to self
- used to prove judging people to characteristics
- justify scientifically black inferior to the white
Photography is power.
Mass Observation 1937-60
- science project
- Tom Harrison
- Charles Madge
- Humphrey Jennings
- Humphrey Spender
Neutral democratic response to the woking class.
- more accurate document of the world.
War/Conflict Photography.
Robert Capa - Normandy, France (1945)
- becomes it's own
- provide horrifying examples of living
- he was there when everything was happening so unfair to ask if they are 'real' - but they have
Magnum Group
- international group of documentary photography
- founded 1947 by Capa and Cartier-Bresson
- ethos of documenting the world and its social problems
Robert Haeberle - People about to be shot (1969)
- intercepted the moment where people about to be shot
- last moment of peoples lives
- inhumanity
- should he have intervened and tried to stop it happening?
Documentary Photography
- desire to show horror of the world to try and make a difference.
Key Features
- offer humanitarian perspective
- potray social and political situations
- porport to be objective to facts of situations
- people tend to form the subject matter
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