Howard Becker on Photography
I stumbled on this in my photographic web jaunts. It's an exploration of where I am in my photographic pursuits at the moment, where my interests lie. Even though I may be trying to solve photographic problems with "word magic," I'm becoming more and more involved with documentary photography, and of course my focus of interest right now is food, slow food, and corporate responsibility/irresponsibility.
"Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It's (Almost) All a Matter of Context" by Howard S. Becker
Documentary photography was tied, historically, to both exploration and social reform. Some early documentarians worked, literally, "documenting" features of the natural landscape, as did Timothy O'Sullivan, who accompanied the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel in 1867-69 and the surveys of the southwestern United States led by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, during which he made his now famous images of the Canyon de Chelle (Horan 1966, 151-214 and 237-312). Others documented unfamiliar ways of life, as in John Thompson's photographs of street life in London (Newhall 1964, 139), Eugène Atget's massive survey of Parisian people and places (Atget 1992), or August Sander's monumental study (finally published in English in 1986) of German social types. The latter two projects were, in fact, massive and monumental and in some deep sense impractical, that is, not tied to any immediate practical use.
Others worked, like Lewis Hine (Gutman 1967), for the great social surveys of the early part of the century or, like Jacob Riis 1971 [1901], for muckraking newspapers. Their work was used to expose evil and promote change. Their images were, perhaps, something like those journalists made but, less tied to illustrating a newspaper story, they had more space to breathe in. A classic example is Hine's image of "Leo, 48 inches high, 8 years old, picks up bobbins at fifteen cents a day," in which a young boy stands next to the machines which have, we almost surely conclude, stunted his growth.
What is documentary "supposed to do"? In the reformist version, it's supposed to dig deep, get at what Robert E. Park (a sociologist who had worked as a journalist for daily papers in Minneapolis, Denver, Detroit, Chicago and New York) called the Big News, be "concerned" about society, play an active role in social change, be socially responsible, worry about its effects on the society in which its work is distributed. Photographers like Hine saw their work, and it has often been seen since, as having an immediate effect on citizens and legislators. A photographically chauvinistic view of history often explains the passage of laws banning child labor as the direct result of Hines' work.
In its alternative version, documentary was not supposed to be anything in particular, since the work was not made for anyone in particular who could have enforced such requirements. Sander, who hoped to sell his work by subscription, described it variously as depicting the "existing social order" and "a physiognomical time exposure of German man" (Sander 1986, 23-4). Atget, rather more like an archetypal naive artist, did not describe his work at all, simply made it and sold the prints to whoever would buy them. Today, we see this work as having an exploratory, investigative character, something more like social science. Contemporary documentary photographers, whose work converges more consciously with social science, have become aware, as anthropologists have, that they have to worry about, and justify, their relations to the people they photograph.
"Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It's (Almost) All a Matter of Context" by Howard S. Becker
Documentary photography was tied, historically, to both exploration and social reform. Some early documentarians worked, literally, "documenting" features of the natural landscape, as did Timothy O'Sullivan, who accompanied the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel in 1867-69 and the surveys of the southwestern United States led by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, during which he made his now famous images of the Canyon de Chelle (Horan 1966, 151-214 and 237-312). Others documented unfamiliar ways of life, as in John Thompson's photographs of street life in London (Newhall 1964, 139), Eugène Atget's massive survey of Parisian people and places (Atget 1992), or August Sander's monumental study (finally published in English in 1986) of German social types. The latter two projects were, in fact, massive and monumental and in some deep sense impractical, that is, not tied to any immediate practical use.
Others worked, like Lewis Hine (Gutman 1967), for the great social surveys of the early part of the century or, like Jacob Riis 1971 [1901], for muckraking newspapers. Their work was used to expose evil and promote change. Their images were, perhaps, something like those journalists made but, less tied to illustrating a newspaper story, they had more space to breathe in. A classic example is Hine's image of "Leo, 48 inches high, 8 years old, picks up bobbins at fifteen cents a day," in which a young boy stands next to the machines which have, we almost surely conclude, stunted his growth.
What is documentary "supposed to do"? In the reformist version, it's supposed to dig deep, get at what Robert E. Park (a sociologist who had worked as a journalist for daily papers in Minneapolis, Denver, Detroit, Chicago and New York) called the Big News, be "concerned" about society, play an active role in social change, be socially responsible, worry about its effects on the society in which its work is distributed. Photographers like Hine saw their work, and it has often been seen since, as having an immediate effect on citizens and legislators. A photographically chauvinistic view of history often explains the passage of laws banning child labor as the direct result of Hines' work.
In its alternative version, documentary was not supposed to be anything in particular, since the work was not made for anyone in particular who could have enforced such requirements. Sander, who hoped to sell his work by subscription, described it variously as depicting the "existing social order" and "a physiognomical time exposure of German man" (Sander 1986, 23-4). Atget, rather more like an archetypal naive artist, did not describe his work at all, simply made it and sold the prints to whoever would buy them. Today, we see this work as having an exploratory, investigative character, something more like social science. Contemporary documentary photographers, whose work converges more consciously with social science, have become aware, as anthropologists have, that they have to worry about, and justify, their relations to the people they photograph.
posted by Solomon | 8:26 PM
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