Jorge Ribalta on Documentary and Democracy

02 Jul 2009

'Photography’s triumph as art means its complete defeat as document.'

Jorge Ribalta, curator of one of the most ambitious surveys of documentary work ever undertaken, talks to Guy Lane

about photography's radical potential, its democratic credentials, and the need to outflank the art market system.

Jorge Ribalta is an artist, critic and curator. He has held solo shows in the Zabriskie gallery, New York since 1994;

and has also curated exhibitions of Joan Colom, Jo Spence, Manolo Laguillo and others. Most recently he has

organised a hugely succesful history of documentary practices - Universal Archive - described by The Guardian as 'a

groundbreaking photographic epic.'

GL: In your writings you have addressed what some critics have called digital photography's 'crisis of realism' Could

you expand on the nature of the crisis, and what its effects are?

JR: It is important to observe at least two different but related meanings in my use of the term 'realism'. Obviously,

one is that of the index - that is, a certain direct cause-effect relation between the object and its photographic

representation.
 © Lewis Hine - Men at Work, 1932 (New York: The Macmillan Company)

The other is the tradition of an art of public issues - a tradition that one can trace as far back as Gustave Courbet,

which I believe provides the founding ground for all the modern, materialist notions of an art which is produced

politically in order to problematise, or attack, the bourgeois-autonomous public art sphere. It is a tradition with a

reformist (Lewis Hine, for example) or a revolutionary (the worker-photography movement, for instance) horizon. I

think the foundation of the 20th century filmic and photographic idea of documentary (even if this idea only appears as

such circa 1930) belongs to this realist ethos, as do all attempts to link art production to social and revolutionary

movements since 1848.

Now, the current debate tends to naturalise an anti-realist discourse concerning photography. 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 the erase the

documentary power of photography, which is precisely the political potential to link art to transformative radical

politics.
 Dorothea Lange - Destitute Peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children

February, 1936 (© Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

What I defend is not a kind of nostalgic positivist realism, but a negotiated one grounded on a social contract which

changes historically. For example, in the 1930s the emergence of the documentary genres was related to the need to

visualize the new mass subjects of democratic politics. The documentary poetics based on images of the working

class, everyday life, and the common man are the visual translation of the foundation of the welfare state in the West,

and the struggles for revolutionary politics. Since then, documentary genres and democracy are historically

connected. In the seventies, historian William Stott said that documentary is a “radically democratic genre” -
 highlighting that there is a structural correspondence between documentary and representative democracy.

Humphrey Spender - Tram Scene: Overhead Conversation, ca1937-38

(© Bolton Museum and Archive Service Collection)

So, even if we know after Photoshop that realism is a construction, I think we cannot simply abandon the claims of

photographic realism. It continues to exist and to be necessary in the so-called digital era. If we want democracy to

continue, we need some form or idea of documentary.

You have written that amateur photography has ‘turned digital without any kind of trauma’. Might the same be argued

with respect to forms of professional – say, photojournalistic - photography too? Do you think it is true that fears about

the ‘realistic’ status of digital imagery are more often expressed by academics and curators than by working

photographers or consumers?

It is clear that, in what you call professional photography, digital processes involve a qualitative improvement in

printed production; and that’s it. The rest remains the same. In the photojournalistic world, there is no meaningful

discussion of what has been termed 'post-photography.' But the demands for critical practices in the media are

radically different from those in museums...and, of course, the work of writers such as Barthes, Krauss, Batchen,

Mitchell and Azoulay operates in the academy,

But I also think that photojournalism is not a very exciting field in terms of the critical discourse it generates. And I say

this with great admiration and respect for photojournalists. I guess not many photojournalists read Azoulay, for

example. Generally - in terms of providing alternative or interrogative models of both theory and practice - I find the

media as non-productive as the art-market system. There are of course some exceptions, like Susan Meiselas, even if

she can also be very problematic.

Overall though, I see too much plurality in both areas to be able to generalise. I always feel uncomfortable when

borders between discursive and social fields are too rigidly established since we know that social dynamics

systematically overcome those boundaries.

You have suggested that a kind of ‘molecular’ realism might offer a way of addressing the artificiality of digital

imagery, without returning to exhausted notions of realism or universalism. Could you explain your use of ‘molecular’'

in this context?

I mean attempts to establish a kind of photographic practice which is immersed in other social and political practices

and quite outside of the pre-legitimised institutional framework of the art market system. These are practices that

focus on the reinvention of what we can call the “documentary contract” - in this respect what is relevant is that the

conditions of that contract be relatively transparent and subject to contestation. I take the term (from Deleuze and

Guattari) to mean, for me, a fragile, temporary, dialogic, non-essentialist agreement on the conditions of the

document. I find examples of this in Jo Spence’s collaborative practices from the 70s and 80s, or in the work of Marc

Pataut more recently.

 © Marc Pataut - Seat Factory, 2007

I’m aware that what I advocate risks being seen as almost non-existent. The kind of critical, collective, fragile practices

I defend have almost no space either in the mainstream media, or in the art institutions. And my examples (Spence,

Pataut, Meiselas…) may be seen as marginal ones. But I have worked for years in a contemporary art museum and I

still think there is a tremendous potential for what I propose – potential that not many people explore. And It is that

potential which I am defending. My experience is that when this field is deepened and brought into the established

institutional framework, very interesting and productive situations emerge.

You have referred to art’s ‘cultural confinement’ and its ‘reified condition,’ yet you work within an art institution

yourself...

I am critical of bourgeois artistic autonomy, even if simultaneously I defend art institutions like the museum. More

precisely what I defend is the unresolved tension between artistic autonomy, social knowledge and politics; and to me

the documentary aspect of photography embodies that tension in a singularly intense way which needs to be

preserved and radicalized. But I’m not against good art. I’m interested in good art made under strong tensions.

One of your recent talks was entitled ‘Why Photography Matters as Document as Never Before’ – a reference to

Michael Fried’s 'Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before'. How do you understand the relationship between
 your curatorial projects and Fried’s work? Do you think his approach has shortcomings?

I have two main problems with Fried. The first is what he represents, namely the continuation of a strong Anglo-

American postwar formalism. That Fried is about to become the major theoretician of photography’s current

hegemony in the art market is clearly a symptom of regression. Remember Walter Benjamin’s dictum that

photography would transform artistic autonomy. Fried means the inversion of that promise, a return to order:

photography’s triumph as art means its complete defeat as document. Let’s not forget that the document is the

unresolved tension between art and social knowledge, it is not totally art.

The second is his non-problematic acceptance of the art system as it is. What is missing in Fried is the historic link

between the documentary unconscious of photography and the critique of liberal artistic autonomy. I mean the cultural

space of the document is a (radically?) different one from that of abstract painting; and if that difference disappears it

means two possible things: that the revolution has triumphed or that it has been totally defeated and even forgotten.

My impression is that Fried goes for the second option.

Your most recent major work as a curator has been the Universal Archive exhibition. What did you hope to address

and achieve in that project?

The dream of a universal archive is the belief that a photographic translation of the unruly contingency of the world

can result in a rational-organised-industrialised system (equivalent to money currency) which may function as a

perfect means of exchange and commodification within capitalist social relations. Thus it facilitates processes of

rationalisation, industrialisation and exploitation; as well as fostering the legitimation of the modern romantic-colonial

nation-state system.
 Charles Marville - Breaking through L'avenue de l'Opera: roadworks on la Butte des Moulins,

from passage Moliere, ca.1877 (© Charles Marville, Musee Carnavalet, Roger-Viollet)

The first photographic survey in history - the French Mission Heliographique, from 1851 - is one example. Another is

the idea of creating photographic archives of monuments (the ancient and medieval buildings in France, the natural

sublime landscapes in the United States) which ground the myths of national identities. And the dream of a universal

archive continues today with the Internet, but I think it is important to understand that it is precisely in the first public

proliferation of reproducible photographic images (when the first negative-positive technologies emerge around 1850)

where we can find the earliest attempt to make of this dream a technologically viable reality.
 Construction of Columbus Monument

In my opinion the inscription of photography in modern culture is determined forever by this “universal archive”

unconscious, which is also related to the notion of universal citizenship inscribed in the liberal public sphere. The idea

of the document and documentary is grounded in this unconscious; as are the 20th century discourses of photography

as universal language; and the idea of a “Family of Man” - that is, the notion that photography creates a trans-
 national, trans-cultural global public sphere. The prevalence of this idea reached a peak between the 1920s and the

1950s, when photography was dominant in the visual mass media, before television, and it continues today in

different forms.

So the Universal Archive exhibition sought to contribute to an understanding of the complexity of the notion of a

document in the history of photography on the basis of the study and staging of a number of specific debates about

the genre at different historical moments of the twentieth century. The difficulty of understanding what the document

means is rooted in its historical mobility (it means different things at different times); its presence in different discursive

fields (art, communication, social science, law, etc); and in the fact that the document is a precarious construction

based on the temporary intersection of at least three different spaces: the museum, the archive and the media. I

believe the document is the unresolved tension between these three fields.

Within the exhibition you included a section, Public Photographic Spaces, in which you focused on a history of

propagandistic exhibitions – why do you think that these works should be revisited? What, perhaps, do you think is

their relevance to current conditions?

I think it is important is that these projects are well-known and understood because they constitute the basic grammar

of our current forms and methods of visual communication. It is probably hard for us to understand today the

tremendous importance of the innovations of El Lissitzky, Herbert Bayer or Edward Steichen between the wars, for

example, because what they invented has become our visual environment: publicity is our common culture and has

become totally naturalized for us.

 Soviet pavilion designed by El Lissitzky, Pressa, Cologne, 1928

We live in a propagandistic culture - it is a mistake to identify propaganda only with totalitarian regimes. More

precisely, analysing propaganda is a way to understand the totalitarian forms and technologies that rule us here and

now, even in liberal representative democracies. And it is also important to understand that the document is not an

objective translation but a form of public persuasion, it is propaganda. A critique of naturalism in photographic realism

has to deal with the propagandistic dimension implicit in any form of public visual communication

Erza Stoller - View of The Family of Man exhibition, MOMA, New York, 1955

(© Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York / Scala, Florence, 2008)

And through the Museu d'Art Contemporani (MACBA) you have been commissioning your own survey projects in

Barcelona?

In 2006 we initiated a project adopting the method of a photographic survey of Barcelona. It was an attempt to re-

appropriate the classic survey structure and method as an strategy to promote a critical analysis of the situation of the

city, which has produced such a successful urban model, rooted in 1980s social-democratic urbanism.
© Allan Sekula - Terrenys de l'antiga fabrica de gas
 © Xavier Basiana, Jaume Orpinell - Catalana de Gas

The photographic survey has been, since 1851, a tool for public opinion on a mass scale. And in the twentieth

century, the Farm Security Administration survey in the 1930s and the DATAR Mission in the 1980s represented

different forms of visualizing government ideologies and methods - both related to the implementation or

recomposition of welfare state systems. The issue for us was how to use - critically and polemically - that structure

today.

What hopes do you have for the future of documentary photography?

Unfortunately I have no idea what the future will be, which also means that I can be totally wrong. But I can also be

right. The issue is what we want. Central to my concerns is how to radicalise the demands for institutional critique and

how to reinvent artistic autonomy, in other words - how to contribute to the creation of the cultural and institutional

conditions necessary for new transformative practices to emerge.

The obsolescence of the art market system is somewhat equivalent to the obsolescence of (neo)liberal democracy. I

said before there is a link between the document and democracy. My impression is that experimentation and

innovation on the document side cannot be dissociated from experimentation in the radicalisation of democracy.

Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda, from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928-55

Publ. MACBA $80.

© Guy Lane & Jorge Ribalta, 2009.

Universal Archive. The Condition of the Document and the Modern
Photographic Utopia
23/10/2008 - 06/01/2009 MACBA

09/03/2009 - 03/05/2009 Museu Berardo de Lisboa

This exhibition analyses the idea of a document in the history of photography on the basis of the study and staging of a
number of debates about the genre during the 20th century. With the aim of assessing various hypotheses about the
meanings and mechanisms of the documentary, it traces a historical itinerary that gets under way with the beginning
of the hegemony of photography in the illustrated press in the first third of the 20th century, before arriving at the
purported crisis of photographic realism in the digital era at the end of the century. For all that, the exhibition is not a
history of the genre, nor does it exhaust its possible definitions, but instead attempts to study how the photographic
document has been constituted — in a consistently ambivalent and polemical way — in certain historical contexts.

Ever since John Grierson, founder of the British documentary movement at the end of the 1920s, defined the
documentary genre as “the creative treatment of actuality,” this has become the crux of discourses about realism in
photography and film. All the same, the concepts of document and documentary have acquired variable meanings
during the course of the 20th century. The complexity of their definition derives from the fact that these concepts are
inscribed within the philosophy of positivism, which subtends Western scientific knowledge, and are imbricated in such
different discursive, as well as artistic, fields as the social and natural sciences, law and historiography.

The exhibition is organised in two major parts, which are respectively subdivided into various sections. The first part
presents some of the main debates about the condition of the photographic document in the modern period, from
approximately 1850 to 1980. The second part situates this debate within the historical trajectory of Barcelona,
understood as a specific case study.

The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia

The beginning of the exhibition, Politics of the Victim, explains the appearance of the documentary genre in
photography and film, linked to the representation of the working classes. Lewis Hine’s work for the National Child
Labor Committee, set up in 1907, may be considered the precursor of a type of artistico-political documentary,
reformist in kind, which emerges as a genre of indictment. In that sense, the genre is historically constituted in order
to represent the underprivileged, thus instauring a “tradition of the victim.” It will have its greatest exposure in the
illustrated magazines that proliferate during the 1930s and which constitute the public photographic discursive space
par excellence until the 1950s. Hine’s images establish the bases of the reformist documentary promoted by the State,
which culminates in 1935 with the huge Farm Security Administration project about the effects of the economic
depression in the farming world of the southeastern United States. This project, in which photographers like Walker
Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein and Russell Lee participated, turned into the great visual
construction of the politics of the New Deal.

In contrast to reformist documentary, in the second half of the 1920s a documentary photographic movement
proliferates that is linked to the international workers’ movement arising out of the Third Communist International. It
originates in the photographic paradigms and debates about realism, reportage and factography on the Soviet scene,
in which photographers and critics like Aleksander Rodchenko, Sergei Tretyakov and Boris Kushner take part. Founded
upon revolutionary premises, this movement promotes a use of the image and the self-representation of the workers
as a form of emancipation and an appropriation of the means of (re)production. In it, documentation of the daily life of
the workers and life in the factories is encouraged. One of its paradigmatic examples is the classic reportage by Arkady
Shaikhet and Max Alpert, A Day in the Life of a Working-Class Family in Moscow (1931).

A second area, Public Photographic Spaces, traces the trajectory of the exhibitions designed according to an
“expanded” conception of space based on the use of photography. The photo exhibitions designed by El Lissitsky
between 1928 and 1930 established a new model growing out of the epistemological breaks and the ideas of a “new
vision” of the era of the Soviet revolution. This paradigm was to extend to Western Europe through the designers and
architects of the Bauhaus and be absorbed by the totalitarian aesthetics of the new fascist regimes of Italy and
Germany in the 1930s. Its arrival in the United States via Herbert Bayer in the propagandistic context of the Second
World War and the Cold War will be reflected in various MoMA exhibitions, culminating in The Family of Man in 1955.
The trajectory is thereby described of a utopian architectonic-photographic space involving a new kind of spectator,
from revolutionary Russia to Cold War America.

In the third instance, the exhibition explores the notion of photography as an instrument for the social sciences and for
the creation of image archives in historical projects. From the Mission Héliographique of 1851 to the DATAR Mission of
the 1980s, these campaigns or photographic missions involve the formalization of what we may consider as the project
or the utopia of photography in modern culture: the converting of the infinite variety of the world into a rational order
via the archive. With it, a collection of classified and universally accessible images is constituted.
To do so, this section explores various specific cases. The first of these deals with the inseparable relationship between
anthropology and documentary, which is reflected in the pioneering books of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the
British Mass-Observation project, the rural images of the Misiones Pedagógicas and the character-types of Ortiz-
Echagüe in Spain.

The second case links the photographic missions with the heritage inventory, the landscape and the contribution to
discourses on the nation-state, above all in France and the United States. Included here, among other bodies of work,
are some of the classic photographic campaigns of the 19th century, such as the Mission Héliographique, those of the
Fortieth Parallel in the American West, and the trips to the Middle East of Frith, Du Camp and Salzmann.
A third case study focuses on the origin and development of the idea of urban heritage and its historical memory based
on the works of Marville and Atget about the Paris of the second half of the 19th century, and also the representation
of the city in the 1930s, as in Berenice Abbot’s Changing New York. In the 1970s the critique of photography as a
universal language marks a turning point, represented in the exhibition New Topographics. Photographs of a Man-
Altered Landscape of 1975. The end of this utopia is defined by debates about the document in early postmodernism,
which show — in works by Martha Rosler or Allan Sekula — how the testimonial value of the documentary image is no
longer spontaneously given and has to be redefined by means of text.

The Photographic Construction of Barcelona

The second part of the exhibition begins with photographic representations of Barcelona from the period of the
Universal Exposition of 1888 to the Universal Forum of Cultures 2004. The relationship between urbanistic models and
their correspondence to the image of the city puts forward an hypothesis about photographic representation as a space
of conflict inseparable from struggles for the city. In that respect, it examines the tension between the construction of
official images and of counter-images.