PI-KDTCDGRAPHY

Trllii

DUCK

Essays on Photographic History Institutions, and Practices

ABIGAIL SOLOMON - GODEAU

Foreword by Linda Nochlin

sity of M

M neapolis

Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about

Documentary Photography

ii

hat is a documentary photograph? With equal justice one might respond by saying just about everything or alternatively just about nothing. In support ofthe former reply one could argue that insofar as any photographic nnage expresses an indexical relation to whatever appeared before the lens at the moment exposure, that image is a document of o{mmi>thi'n,g. From this expansive tograph is more or less documentary position, no phothan any other. Conversely one conception of photography could argue that the as a faithful ariel uiimeriiateri transcription of physical appearr ances (residual traces ofthe ancient faith notwithstanding) has long since been abandoned. We therefore now take for granted that the camera produces representations-iconic signs-translating the actual into the pictorial. While photographs of pictorial evidence routinely remain the only form admitted in the courtroom, the once universal belief in the cameras truth has been behcd by everything from outright trumperies to the poreless (aces of Vogue rrieriels But irrespective efita logical iricerraieterieiea, amerplimiaiieea efriearritieri, temelegieal yagrierieae, tlae eategery and epis ~rieerrmeratary" remains iii service though untheorizcd, rubric. However, as a workable, albetween the apparently unmediated laiglily mediated) nriages (but still ofthe electronic euryeillarice camera etlae degree zero of camera as visual regiatry~ariel, fer example, the emphatically personal ami "expressive" pirategraphs of poslrevolutionary lrari taleeri by Gilles Peress, lies a very large ariel area. We need to map this area very gray more precisely in order to examine the assumptions, both implicit and explicit, that underlie this practice both historically and in the present. To speak of documentary photography either as a rliacrcte form of photographic practice or, alternatively as an identinable corpus of work is to run headlong into a morass of contradiction, confusion, and ambiguity. Documentary is itselfa recent entry into the photographic lexicon; it is not employed with any regularity before the late l92Us, nearly a century after its invention. Because thc majority of photographic uses previous to the term 's introduction were what we would now automatically designate as documen~ tary it becomes clear that the documentary concept is historical, not ontological. More over, the words permutations are testimonial to the way photographic uses, and the
169

WHO

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SPEAKING THUS?

to conform flux, repositioned and ,reoriented ascribed to them, are constantly in meanings them. to the larger discourses which engender parlance implies that documentary into photographic late arrival of the category The and inescapably performwas understood as innately until its formulation, photography aside, to ninedefined art photography documentary function, Self-consciously ing a would have seemed notion of documentary photography teenth-ccntury minds the very nineteenth art photography throughout the Indeed, the historic agenda of as a tautological. the popular view of photography twentieth centuries was to counter and much of the mediations. lt is for its subjective and expressive transcriptive medium with claims brute was adapted to photographic the notion of documentary thus not surprising that when (in the stylistic only after symbolism and aesthcticism as a specific genre, it was practices discourse for more than thirty years. had dominated photographic form of pictorialism) documentary, we need to exis and has been meant by To make some sense of what within the construction it must bc situated from three perspectives. As a historical amine it is the notion of docdiscourses, practices, and uses. How held of framework of its contemporary differentiated from the plural photography to be retrospectively umentary defined as an investigative Is documentary to be narrowly nineteenth-century production? informational to include all nonaesthetic and enterprise or broadly defined or didactic possessing evidenphotography the police mug shot uses? ls the avatar of documentary social concem? or photography animated by status,2 the horse races photo Hnish, tiary be approached framework altogether-that photography Such questions suggest another a conduit and of visual communication, as both As part of a larger system phosemiotically. and visual "truths," documentary purveyor of empirical evidence agent of ideology, of visual and system possessed of its own accretion tography can be analyzed as a sign A range of factors can be codes determining reception and instrumentality.; signifying described as Vrjpt du contribute to what Roland Barthes considered including those that signify the docthat have come to effectively as those types of subject matter phcy rel as well want to examine the position of documentary umentary enterprise. Last, we would within the more recently, spaces ofthe mass media (and, tography within the discursive grasp the role it plays, the and museum) in order to better discursive spaces of the gallery fosters, the belief systems it confirms. assumptions and attitudes it a certain extent devolveall finally converge-and to These three lines of inquiry ostensiblc purchase it is pre-eminently photography`s the problem of realism; for around its persuasive capacities. both its instrumentality and on the real that materially determines for literature: it is a major is an issue not only Breeht`s observation that "realism as such" Bertolt be handled and explained and practical issuc and must political, philosophical will require its own field, There, to be sure, it to be factored into the photographic needs of mechanical is, after all, a medium forms of analysis and critique-photography to realist constructions in other media. obvious homologies authentic, reproduction-but there are to rccuperate some notion of an of this kind are intended not Reflections
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WHO ls SPEAKING THUS?

pure, or uncompromised documentary practice, hut, rather, to sketch out the terms in which such photography has functioned hoth in the past and in the present, For the paradox that underlies those documentary practices that have defined themselves as critical of the status quo, or at very least reformist in intention, is that they normally operate within larger systems that function to limit, contain, and ultimately neutralize them. The issue here is not co-option as such, but the structural limitations of conventional documentary imagery to disrupt the textual, epistemological, and ideological systems that inscribc and contain it. Consequently, as Martha Roslcr observed, "Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics, For those who call for a new militant documentary practice cognizant of both the representation of politics and the politics of representationf a thorough awareness of what traditional documentary modes put in place is a prerequisite to any practice that attempts to go beyond it, The status of photography at its birth hinged on what was thought to be its capacity

for objective transcription. Photographic literature from the following two decades compulsively, almost ritualistically, repeats a litany of photographic truth. The world and its objects offered itself to the cameras lens, promising an encyclopedic visual registry-an inventory to be put at the service of science, commerce, physiognomy, empire, and art." Photographs from those early years include pictures of everyday objects, the contents of studios and libraries, corners of cottage gardens, farm implements, unremarkable architecture, the flotsam andjctsam of daily life, excluding only that which moved too rapidly for the long duration of exposure. ln direct contrast to those images that clearly point to the desire to commemorate thc singular and the unusual (freaks and wonders, thc famous and powerful, the exotic, the Other) these pictures imply a fascination and delight in thc act of photographic representation itself That such images have been recently recupcrated as art-for art-says a great deal about contemporary photographic discourse. but sheds little light on the meaning of these photographs as historical objects. By the 1860s, photographic practice ofthe kind we now routinely label as documentary was thoroughly established: Dsir Chamays pictures ofMayan ruins and Madagascan natives, Samuel Bourne`s photographs of India and Nepal, Felice Beato`s war photographs from the Crimea and the Opium Wars, Matthew Brady`s staffs reportage on the Civil War, Francis Frith`s plates of Egypt and the Holy Land, all are animated by the desire to fix and register a perceived reality into the two-dimensional space of representation. But what, we must ask, is the real of representation? And, even more important, to what uses were these representations put? Discussing the social uses of photography, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu commented: In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but contirm itselfin the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective."7 Accordingly, photography fimctions to ratify and affirm the complex ideological web that at any moment in historical time is perceived as reality lou! mufl. Thus,

171

WHO

IS

\l>hAKIN<; lllUS>

the plrdrrrgrrplrs ddprfrlrrg rlrr "empty" spaces dflfrlesrrrrc and Egypt lrerrrrrrp rlrerrrrrlvps an important (visual) tributary nfthc prngress of umpire, the photographs dupicting the cxntic native Other bccomc fuel for the muslim rlililislz/rife. Similarly. thc photographs of incarcerated hystcrics conlmissloncd by Dr. Charcot at th: hospital nf Salptrirc prove and demonstrate at one and the same timc thc specular morphology nfhystr\a." Alrlrpdglr rlrrse ard srrrrrawlnl lrradrd drrrrrrplps tpnrplmrrrrrg the particularly oppressive lnsrrutnuntallues nfthc medium) they are in no way exceptional. The succuss ufphorpgrrplry as rrr lrrragramlrrrrg rplrrr0lrgy~-ers arrnzrrrply rrprrl rrrparrsrprr rrrd assrrrrrlr rlrrrr rd all dlsdrrrrsrt df knowlcdgc rrrrd powcrfwas pransrly a rrrrrcrlrrrr of

cnntirmatory aspects. This in turn suggests why wc cannot legitimately speak of rl niiwmeentlx-cuntury documentary pmcticr that In any way Glnctioucd against the grain of ddrrrarrarrl rdrrrldgrps It would npr have rrrrrrrrdd rd, say, Frredrrrlr Errgds, to havc rupplrrrrrrrrcd 'rlrr rmdfllrlr rr/rlrr lllrrlllrp cllrrr in nrrplrrrrll Wlrlr plrprdgraplrs dfrlrc squalid housing conditions ol' Manchester.

Irs

DESIRE CHARNAY, I>A1.ArE

of

THE Nvlvs AT UXMAL. FAC/IDE oI= THE NORTH

WING, ALBUMEN PRINT, FROM cI-IARNAY, CITES ET IIUINES A.'uERIcAlNI5s,

PARIS,

Im.

CABINET mas ESTAMPES, IImLI0'rI-IEQUE NATIONALE.

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WHO

I5

5PFAKlNG THUSP

This did, however, occur rojacob Rus in 1887 as pan <ifhi> activizy nfpolice reportcr and "cr\1sadu\g"j0um;\l\St, .md ir is prinmnly For rhn rcmson :har :hc rczmspecrivc cunstruction ofthe dncumenmry mode m\dirii>n.\IIy begins with him." In :his model for ducuinenrary, thc game is dctinud wimhin che fmnicwork of ri-furrnisr or nviicliomivc iiimi:_ cncumpassing issues such .is public addrc<_ reception, disscmmntion, rhe notion of projcct or narrative rather than >mg1 imigv, uf, Thus dgnncd, Riis (1849-1914) ippw, is thc logical candidate fm pmgenawf Wifi, is his work was pfodmd in provide thc scnsariunal visual supplemcn: no his 1890 rcRm11istlr:ict Huw /hc Orher lla(/`Liiw_ Having worked as 2 piilaff rcpumf, ind rhcn as i fm-1;ii1j0ufi\ilm fm fm Nm York Cai; amy .ii me end Draw Frm, Riis wwk (and Qiniiiimaonfdy phLmgmp\i= for Om, J (ew

iw,

FEucE BEA'ro\ rmNA, THE

A1rAr:K, nm <sE<:oNo

TAKU

Forrs

AFTER 'rms ANGLQ-FRENCH

opium v/Am.

PAPER PRINT FROM

co|_L0m<iN nN

m_Ass NEGATIVE. cAmNE'r DES Es'r\MPEs, mBL1u'r|~1EQU15 NA'rmNALE.

|73

WHOIS SPFAKINC TI [US

ww

ALLAN HUGHAN, MUSICAL EVENING GIVEN BY FRENCH

orrlrmzs IN

THE ILE

was mxs, NEW CALEDONIA.

as CM, 1 J2 CM. FROM HUGHAN,

CA. nm-71, ALBUNLEN

PR|Nr Fkom GLASS NE;A11vL

LA

soL'vENms AL' Vos/AGES IJE

.wIssIoND'ExI=1.oIzArIox

ENVUYEE EN Nou VELLE CALEDONIE P/an LA COMPAGNIE DE LA A'ow1sI.1.E

<:ALEnoNIE, cAB\NEr DES ESTANLPES, Bmuo'rIfEQuE NATIUNALE

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WHOIS SPEAKING THUS

JACOB Rus, MIDNIGHT IN

Ll/m.ow STREEL
><

lass-90. GE|.AT|N-sn.vER mama' MADE

mom ORIGINAL NEGATIVE, 9 i/2

7 5/ns.

MUSEUM OF THE

crrv oF NEW Yom;

issue. These photographs (frequently taken with the recently invented magnesium Hash that permitted the photographer to work in dark interiors) were reprinted as halt'-tone illustratinns for the book or projected as lantern slides. In her important article "Making Connections with the camera Photography and Social Mnnility in the Career nfjaeeb Sally Stein produced a detailed and wholly persuasive account of the latent, rather than manifest, meanings of Riis`s photographs, This analysis was interwoven with a scrua tiny ot' Riiss writing to the extent that both activities could be seen to converge within was dense matrix of bourgeois social anxieties and thc need to assuage them, This matrix constituted by the threat posed by large numbers of poor, unassimilated recent imnii
grants, the specter ut" social unrest, the use

of photography as a parr ofthe larger enterprise

of surveillance, containment, and social control, and the imperatives of "A|nericanizaann." Within this framewenr, Stein examined me mle played by RiiS's personal ambition and nas assumption nfene mantle of Crusader as an agency of social ascent. By ngemnsly
175

WHO

IS

SPEAKING THUS?

body ofwork functioned, Stein made a major surveying the contextual field in which this forms, one of whose chief contribution to the ongoing critique of traditional documentary relations that such photography normaemphases is an interrogation ofthe subject/object tively puts in place. for imaging his subjects in ways that For example, in describing Riis's predilection following act as a transactional one, Stein makes the deny any notion of the photographic in which so consistency of Riiss photography observation: V/e can indeed marvel at the composed to return the glance of the few of the exposures presented a subject sufficiently in which the subject did happen to photographer, That he rejected those rare photographs was The averted gaze, the appearlook back suggests how premeditated this effect were only a few ofthe recurring features which ance of unconsciousncss or stupefaction, ideological coherence in relation to the gave Riiss pictorial documents stylistic unity and of pieties surrounding representations te><t. By refusing to reiterate the conventional light hidden agendas inscribed in such phothe poor and the marginal, and by bringing to that radically questions a too-easy tography, Stein reveals a secondary level of signification and reform. But the issues exconflation of victim photography" with progrcssivism of photographs have a far more general plored by Stein in relation to this specinc corpus documentary subject as it is constructed application. We must ask whether the plate of the in some sense, given in advance. We must for the more powerful spectator is not always, act does not involve a double act of subask, in other words, whether the documentary its victims; and second, in the regime jugation: first, in the social world that has produced that engcnders the conditions it ofthe image produced within and for the same system then re-presents. " at its origin lays a certain stress The discourse ofdocumentary that placesjacob Riis not inall other forms of photography were on the notion of instrumentality (as though is one whose photography evitably instrumentalizcd). This conception of documentary had its ideological parameters prestige and influence has variously expanded and shrunk, and retooled. In the 19305, a period in which altered, and its constitutive terms modified film, photography, and letters were most priv(al least in America) documentary forms in ofthe form as adequate to explicitly denneti ileged, bath litimls and radicals conceived critique of photographic transparency political ends. Notwithstanding the contemporary ljreeht and Walter Benjamin (fueled, when not speand autonomy launched by Bertolt of the Soviet avant-gatde), the prevalent conception citically modeled, on the theories of represenon subject matter. The perceptual and a politicized documentary focused largely as cuhism, dada, surrealism, contational critique generated by art movements as various be said to have had much influence on structivism, and, of course, photoniontage, cannot either the theory or the practice of documentary. Administrations documentary Accordingly, projects such as the Farm Security machine initially conceived to fosenterprise," a large-scale, federally funded propaganda took for granted that a photography of advoter support for New Deal relief programs,

..,.

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WHO

IS

SPEAKING THUS?

ARTHUR ROTHSTIJN, sHA|z|sc|zoPPn's WIFE, ARKANSAS, was

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

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WHO IS SPEAKING THUS?

Wo|u<En's FAMILY. wx. DoRo11|EA LANGE, MIGIANT AGRICULTURAL

Llmmlw

or concness.

was, ii i all concentrate on subject matter. The subject cacy or reform should effectively stipulated thc specifics

director of thc project, nor only senses, thc given; Roy Stryker, the what assignments, he often further indicated of region, milieu, or activity when making now term thc rhetoric hc was after-what wc would type of mood, expression, "feeling" had their own nesrhene ngenphotographers, like walker Evans, who

nfihe hinge. Those

das did not fare well at thc F.S.A. represented his subfact that ihe ways in whxch Riis While in nh way disputing thc ihe F_s,l\,
~

employed by Lewis Hine, ind, mer, jects were markedly different fnnn those with seine unchanging nnpee. One such here H inphefe we are nonetheless contfrontcd a picP of :he subjccrfand the subjecfs circumstances-as [ro P e consists of the depiction Another con class for a di ffcren t auclicnce and a different torial spectacle usually targeted visual "fact" of individual yie produced by presenting the ccrns the immohilizing effeet
_
~

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WHO IS SPEAKING THUS?

that produced it. timization or subjugation as a mctonym for the (invisible) conditions personal or institutional Such an effect may be produced irrespective of good intentions, able to politics, or ameliorative intent. Moreover, to the extent that photography is less as the F.S.A. project demondcal with collectivity than with individuality, work such inevitable slippage from the political to the anecdotal or the emblematic.
strates
a

probably

lndeed, the very working methods of some of the ES.A. photographers the camera, they erence for the poignant over the militant. When subjects smiled into who wore their best clothes were stage-managed into more somber poses; sharccroppcrs
a

attest to

pref-

persuaded not to to be photographed were told to change into their ragged everyday wear, wash begrimed hands and faces for the camera. '3
As William Stott points out, there was
a

distinctly doctrinal aspect to the F.S.A. govemmental project, lnsofar as the mandate of the program was to bolster popular and as opposed to the support for New Deal rclief policies, it was images of the "worthy" "unworthy" poor that were promoted. Commenting on the work of Dorothea Lange, the unerring eye. You film-maker Parc Lorentz noted the following: She has selected with an the tramps, the unfortudo not find in her portrait gallery the bindle-stiffs_ the driftcrs, made to the viewer was nate, the aimless dregs of a country."" ln other words, the appeal were to be judged as the depremised on the assertion that the victims of the Depression rather than serving poor, and thus the claim for redress hinged on individual misfortune married to the on systematic failure in the political, economic, and social spheres. Lange, on books such as An Amereconomist Paul Schuster Taylor (with whom she collaborated were the conimn Exodus), knew as well as anyone that the conditions she photographed misfortune. Nonethesequences of capitalist crisis and neither acts of God nor arbitrary present her a photographer her instinct was to individualize and personalize-to
less, as

subjects as objects of compassion and concern. The photographers desire to build pathos or sympathy into the image. to invest the labor or subject with either an emblematic or an archetypal importance, to visually dignify obscure the political poverty, is a problem to the extent that such strategies eclipse or in themselves visual. sphere whose determinations, actions, and instrumentalities are not ofthe graphic legacy of Moreover, photographs retain their specificity only briefly; much cmbalmcd in a collective nostalgia about the 19305, or enshrined as
the

ESA, is currently humanist monument to the timeless struggle against adversity, or revered as a record of a individual photographic achievement. Child laborer, tenant farmer, disenfranchised to the injustice and abuses bred black, the (once) living subject whose existence testified eye within a political and social system, now becomes testimony to the photographers and the photographers art. But the fact that a photographs context is a powerful determinant of its perceived the meaning is only one aspect of the problem. Furthermore, it should be stressed that context extend beyond the influences on photographic meaning produced by the framing space, the surobvious polarities of gallery wall or magazine page. For within that latter
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WH()

IS

SPEAKING THUS?

of caption and text, the sequencing of images, rounding editorial environment, the nature page) (e.g., the ads that might appear on the same and the competing mass of other images be read and inremrered. variously influence the way in which rhe images will Martha Rosler points out that ln her now-classic essay on documentary photography, in all phases of cultural life,"' Indeed, one "imperialism breeds an imperialist sensibility concems the way in which dominant social of the principal emphases of her argument those who do and reinforced in the act ofimaging rclat-ions are inevitably both reproduced Further, in the absence of a not have access to the means of representation themselves. such as that which fostered the progressive or reformist political and social environment photography becomes differently inwork of Lewis Hme or the F.S.A., documentary has and outrage fueled by the dedifariun rn reform flected. The earpuse, the compassion psychologism and tourism, voyeurism, shaded over into combinations of exot-icism, metaphysics, trophy hunting-and cateerism."'7 their images to yield certain meanBut while photographers compose and organize the neutral or unmarked to begin with. Added tu ings, rarely is a phurngraphs subject to the sigthe level of denotation and connotation, and significance of subject matter on mechafactors, are those elements supplied through nificance produced by contextual serve to structure meaning. These mechanisms nisms intcrnal to the apparatus which also perhaps the most important one in photogin and of themselves produce certain effects, this derives from the fad that photography, raphy being Barthes`s "reality effect." In pan, (and film and video, effaccs the marks of its making like all camera-made images such as appcars to be self-generated-as though it maker) at thc click of a shutter. A photograph this had to have been on the scene-indeed, had created itself. We know the photographer truthbut the photographer is manifestly abserves as a further guarantee of the images photograwe are there. we are seeing what the sent from the ficld of the image. Instead, congnience ofpoint of view (the eye pher saw at the moment ofexposure. This structural and the spectator`s eye) confers on the phoof the photographer, the eye of the camera, A photograph, as Victor Burgin Once tograph a quality of pure, but delusory, presentness. unlike hand-made images in remarked, is an offer that cannot be refused. Moreover, paper or eanyas, me image in a phd which the depicted image lies on the surface ofthe conceptually, you cannot lift the tograph appears to bc in it, inseparable from its ground; the photograph registers as pure imimage from its material base. 9 Phenomenologically, mythic we commonly ascribe to photography the age, and it is by virtue ofthis effect that value of transparency. perspective system of representation built A further structuring instance lies in the Mudeled on the classical system of singlcr into camera optics in photography`s infancy. to the Renaissance, camera optics were designed point monocular perspective invented in have no vanWhile natural vision and perception yield an analogous pictorial stmcturc. motion, and marked by loss of clarity ishing point, are binocular, unbounded, in constant uniform the Renaissance painting, offers a static, in the periphery, the camera image, like
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V/HO IS l'E=AKlNG THUS=

AARON sxsKxND, MAN IN REn, ww. GEL/\'r|N-s||.vER PmN1,

s 3/in

><

iz iN.

coL|.Ec'noN, THE Museum or MODERN

Ms, snPH|E BLACK.

ART, NEW YORK.

of picihiihi which hii1ihgiiii.ih cmivefgc hr ii iihgic vaunhing piiiiih Such h iieiciii appcar iilmgcrhcr natural, orgiinwhririn, by now <0 imbued in Wchrcrn consciousness .i< rn is the posinun of visual mxstcry ciinfcrred him curtain r;\miGcmini\>_ Chief among rhusc h eiiiiiiiihhdihg lricnh ofthe pic' iipiiii che Speahmi wiim idchi, all-seeing cyc hechhies ihii picriifihi hihsfhiy hiii hm :heir hii_i| mid. This spccriuirial posiiioh iirpcfipccriihi hii iipeh mul is being hh iiiiiciciiily iiiehiiigiiiiu chii<riiiiihh_ ~Th world is he hihgcf ihe proper cinrhiice, rhc iihii iiiihoiihdcii hc>r\z\m.'Lirn1tcd by nic framing, lined hp. phi hi objccr, implied wnrhl offers itself up as an object cnrlnwcd with meaning, an intentional Such hiihlym iifchc rippiby hiiii implying thc .iihhii iiffhh siihjcfc which sighmh ii_"1" cumcrn han hismrmnn bring us a good dccil closer to undcrsundmg why thc usc ofrhc and hggicnihh; io iciny ehgchdefeii 3 i~i,c..hh1hi,~ iifiiimi-fi, p<i<Si0h_ ippfiipfihiihii, in fcmli. slwnr ;i picrnre, rn mkc .i picrure, so ann rhe czimera, and in :lic apparaf If wc accept :hc Rirmularion that chcrc are ideological cffccrs inhercnr scopic connnand, and ms. and :har clicsc cffccm rypically dcvolvc on relations ofninstcry,
Held iii
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WHO

IS

SPEAKING THUS?

the connrmation of subject positions, the notion of a political documentary practice premised on subject matter alone is rendered even further problematic. For such a theorlzation of photography insists on the complicity of representational structures in a variety of ideological formations that will always impose a point of view independent of the persons] politics of a photographer and the particular intention of the work, Furthermore, lf we consider the act of looking at photographs with respect to gender or the operations of the psyche-the complex acts of projection, voyeurism, investiture, fantasy, and desire that inform our looking-we are obliged to abandon the earlier, innocent belief that the documentary camera presents us with visual facts that were simply out there" and which we now, simply and disinterestedly, observe and register. By invoking the question who is speaking thus?" in relation to the docnnientary enterprise, my intention has been threefold. First, to establish the contingency and historical relativity ofthe category alccinncntaty which can then be sccn as spoken within a particular historical ftanie Second, albeit in highly sinntnary fashicn, to indicate that individual documentary projects, themselves products of distinct historical circumstances and rnilieus, speak of agendas both open and covert, personal and institutional, that inform their contents and, to a greater or lesser extent, mediate our reading ofrhein, It is properly the work of historians and entics to attempt to excavate these coded and buried meanings, to bring to light those rhetorical and formal strategies that determined the work`s pnaalncncn, tncaning, reception, and rise. Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon an intelligent viewer to reject a specious universalist reading that functions to innocent photography of its ideological labor, its (normative) dissemination ofthe doxa. Last, thc dacuntentaty photograph, like any other, is "spoken" within language and culture; its meanings are both produced and secured within those systems of representation that a priori mark its subject-and our relations to the subject-in preordained ways. The fact that a photograph appears to speak itseltf as do realist forms in general, shntilci alert tis (as Roland Barthes tirelessly pointed ant) to the Working ofideology which always functions to naturalize the cultural, The recent critiques of traditional documentary forms, from which many ofthe ideas in this essay have hccn drawn (notably the work ofVictor Biirgin, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, anti Sally Stein), atc, signihcantly, cntiqncs from the Left. Perhaps even ninfc iinportant, the three latter critics are committed to a renewal, rather than revival, of documentary practice predlcated on a Full awareness of the role played by context, subject/ object relations, and the various structuring mechanisms that detern-line photographic meaning. lt should be noted too that Rosler, Sekula, and Stein have all produced their own documentary projects, although apologists for traditional forms of documentary might be loathe to recognize their work as such. While certain ofthe ideas underpinning the call far a tnilltant, nppcsiticnal tlactnncntaty can be traced backward th Brecht's and Benjamins insistence that reproductions of reality were powerless to say anything about that reality and that an authentically political photographic practice ninst bc set up and

l82

WHO

IS

SPEAKING THUS?

constructed (as, for example, in the photomontages of john Heartfield), this is only paid one, by no means inclusive theme. Of even greater importance has been the attention and address by proponents ofa radicalized documentary tn issues of audience, reception, form must work accompanied by a concomitant conviction that a politically instrumental images. against passive contemplation or voyeuristie consumption ot' the who are It seems increasingly justified to speak of a new generation of photographers way. Although it is not committed to rethinking documentary in a rigorous and serious employed possible to characterize generally approaches to the forrn as disparate as those Connie Hatch, Lisa Lewenr, Fred by Deborah Bright, carol Conde and Karl rseyenelge, a few), there are Lomdier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Elizabeth Sisco (to name only include an insisnonetheless a few common denominators. Among others, these would or distritence on maintaining control over the work in terms of exhibition, publication, was well aware ofthe multiple dehation. While a photographer such as Dorothea Lange notion terminations of photographic meaning (indeed, it was Lange who formulated the ofa tripod ofmeaningfimage, caption, text), she had, in fact, very little control over this new form the use ofher images except in the hooks she eollahorateri on. In addition, within disof documentary takes account ofpl10tographys textuality; its embeddedness in advance. cursive or institutional systems that the photographer must try to comprehend role in work as It is no doubt for this reason that textual strategies play such an important Game or Martha Roslers distinct in form and content as Fred Lonidiers Health and Sapry The Bowery in Two Inadequate Desrrfpflve sytlema There is some irony in the fact that at the same time as inuch recent criticism and and theory (and certain art production) is increasingly concerned with the instrumental of documentary practice find ideological functioning of photography, these new forms thernselyee progressively marginalized within the precincts of lieth the photography anal art world. In addition to the inevitable problems of venue and exposure, such enterprises and pracare beset by questions anal prolilenis ofselfaieanition, intent, form of address, tical functioning. That these concerns emerge so insistently is a function ot' the seriousness and ambition ofthe work, not of its weakness, Pushing the boundaries of documentary imagery, form as conventionally understood, and asserting the textuality of photographic it deals with such work attempts to function critically in a double sense; externally, in that social and political realities, and internally, in that its critical operation is tumed equally,
inwardly, upon itsel
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