What is a document and what is a style?
Thursday, July 21st, 2011
An image by Cooper, the Photographer Cat
SOME CONFUSION
I’ve sat through so many lectures and panel discussions and slogged through too many essays and articles of late in which there is abundant confusion and conflation around both the ideas and terms surrounding documentary and art photography that the time feels ripe to at least initiate a conversation about this contentious subject.
It was Cooper the “photographer cat” that pushed me over the edge. ArtInfo published their story on Cooper on May 17, 2011.
“Cooper’s owners stress that they have not digitally altered any of Cooper’s photographs.”
Well, that’s reassuring. We wouldn’t want to think that somehow humans were manipulating the carefully chosen compositions of a housecat. They sound like certain cranky photojournalists emphasizing the “absolute objectiveness” of their work. This whole thing smells of lazy thinking around documents vs work made in the documentary style.
The photographic images “made by” Cooper are documents in the most basic sense. They are no different than stills from a surveillance cam. Cooper’s camera goes off every 10 minutes (on a timer set by his intelligent and crafty human owners). He not only has no choice in the matter, he’s not even consciously aware of the processes of photography. On a sensory level, yes, he’s aware of a collar with an object around his neck. These are not, however, intelligent or inspired photographic works. (Of course, there is a little wiggle room to state that the group of images that have been edited and selected by his owners are intelligently curated.)
Walker Evans
Ansel Adams, Half-dome, Yosemite
DOCUMENT VS. “DOCUMENTARY STYLE”
“What you’ve got are not photographers. They’re a bunch of sociologists with cameras.”—Ansel Adams, in reference to the FSA photography project, which included Walker Evans.
“The term should be documentary style,” [Evans] told Katz. … “You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style.”—Interview with Walker Evans by Leslie Katz
Documents have a particular use—driver’s license photos, security camera imagery, topographical maps, etc.—and art does not share in that kind of utilitarian usefulness. The all-important point that Evans then makes is that art (ie, artists) can adopt the “style” of documentary work, and do something within that style or language. The implication is that the artist produces engaging work even while co-opting the style of rote documents that don’t comment or critique on anything, but simply provide a descriptive image.
Evans’ worked in a “documentary style” while on assignment to make pictures that addressed the socio-economic conditions of the American South. He did far more than produce rote, machine-generated documents with no thought behind them. (In this connection, think Eggleston adopting the “style” of the vernacular family album color snapshot.)
I regularly hear photographers talk about individual photographs as “documents” of a person, place or thing. That is a lazy use of the word. Did Yosemite actually exist in front of the camera in the minutes before Ansel Adams pressed the shutter release, thus documenting the sky, granite, and forested slopes for all to see? Yes. Is it a photographic document? No. Was he photographing in the documentary style? No. (Are the legions of Ansel Adams imitators who photograph the same views in the same style as Adams making documents? Actually, I think they might be just making copies …)
It’s easy to see how all of this gets confused.
From Evidence, by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel
From A New American Picture, by Douglas Rickard
THE QUESTION OF ARCHIVES OF DOCUMENTS
It is a rare person that can take loads of existing photographic documents and actually turn them into something meaningful. But that’s precisely what Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel did in their book Evidence. They took existing images that had been made as documents, in the literal sense, and re-contextualized them; they re-placed them in a new and different framework, thus changing our understanding of the images (and our understanding of how photographic documents and the mind of the artist work). It was their conscious, sustained activity that qualified them, or the whole project at least, as art. Similarly with Doug Rickard’s brilliant A New American Picture project using Google street views; the same type of sustained activity on the part of Rickard to re-contextualize existing photographs is going on.
There must be ideas behind the work—intentions and contexts and sustained choices by an intelligent being—for it to even be considered art. You can’t perform laboratory work sloppily and say that “it’s all subjective”. No. There are standards and sloppy is sloppy. (Please don’t mis-read this as my saying that all art must be idea-based or intellectual).
Those elements are not evident in a huge swath of the photography we see in the world (ie Facebook, cell-phone snapped Revolution-photographs, or those made by Cooper the cat). Today, we might be able to update the nomenclature from “documentary style” to “vernacular Facebook style”. In the end it doesn’t matter what style you adopt or decide to work in; the point is to do something intelligent and inspired within that style and with tools of your choosing. Otherwise it’ll just be uninteresting.
We’ve all seen those photographs by a macaque monkey, right? Here‘s what the photographer David Slater said about them:
“One of them must have accidentally knocked the camera and set it off because the sound caused a bit of a frenzy,” said Slater, 46. “At first there was a lot of grimacing with their teeth showing because it was probably the first time they had ever seen a reflection. They were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button. The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it. At first it scared the rest of them away but they soon came back—it was amazing to watch. He must have taken hundreds of pictures by the time I got my camera back, but not very many were in focus. He obviously hadn’t worked that out yet. I wish I could have stayed longer as he probably would have taken a full family album.”
Slater isn’t confused about what had happened, even if his language at the end involves some basic anthropomorphizing; it was accident not purposeful use. What this shows is that any-thing can push a button and set in motion the process which yields a photographic image—whether that thing be a computer program that activates a timer on a camera, a monkey depressing the shutter repeatedly with its finger, a robot on the Space Shuttle, or the millions of Facebook users that use the iPhotoBooth function on their iMacs to take a very uninteresting profile pic while seated at home or in the office. There is no intelligence and therefore no art in it.
One last word about Cooper, who happens to be the furry puppet of the owners in this scenario. In a way, they’ve put a cutesy cat face on their own (debatable) hard work of editing what comes out of the random generated image maker tied around Cooper’s neck. As with Rickard’s Google Street Views project, or Sultan/Mandel’s Evidence work, thousands of images had to be sifted through in order to arrive at a select group of “pictures” that convey, in this case, the editor’s viewpoint (which is to get publicity from a gimmick involving their cat, and make some money, which they’ve brilliantly done). Art it does not make. (But fodder more morning talk-shows it clearly does.)
But in its opposite we have the answer to our initial question: an artist/editor with a viewpoint using a particular method, making conscious decisions in pursuit of an internal goal (describable or not). That is the stuff that art is made of.
[I'm sure there are many other angles I've neglected to address, but it's been useful to write about this even if just for myself.]
Photography: A Very Short Introduction
Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
Short Track, by Jake Mendel
Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney