For this exercise I have to read an article written by Elizabeth McCausland titled Documentary Photography, which was published in 1939, and bullet point the main points of the article. In addition I have to summarise why the article is still relevant to the course.
The key points I took from the article are:
- ‘… documentary photography is not a fad or a vogue…’
- ‘We have all had a surfeit of “pretty” pictures, of romantic views of hilltop, seaside, rolling fields, skyscrapers seen askew, picturesque bits of life torn out of their sordid context. It is life that is exciting and important, and life whole and unretouched.’
- ‘The camera eye cannot lie, is lightly said. On the contrary, the camera eye usually does nothing but lie,…’
- ‘The fact is a thousand times more important than the photographer; his personality can be intruded only by the worst taste of exhibitionism; this at last is reality. Yet, also, by the imagination and intelligence he possesses and uses, the photographer controls the new esthetic, finds the significant truth and gives it significant form.’
- ‘The opportunities for publishing honest photographs of present-day life in magazines or newspapers are not many…’
- ‘”Is photograph ART?” Today progressive photographers are not especially interested in the point; it seems an empty issue.’
- ‘It is not a romantic, impressionistic medium, dependent on subjective factors and ignoring the objective. It is bound to realism in as complex a way as buildings are bound to the earth by the pull of gravitation,…’
- ‘We want the truth, not rationalization, not idealizations, not romanticizations. That truth we get from reading a financial page, a foreign cable, an unemployment survey report. That truth we receive, visually, from photographs recording the undeniable facts of life today,…’
- ‘A work of art, on this basis, must have meaning, it must have content, it must communicate, it must speak to an audience.’
- ‘Actually there is no limit to the world of external reality the photographer may record. Every subject is significant, considered in its context and viewed in the light of historical forces.’
I think the article is still relevant as it touches on many of the issues that are still applicable to documentary photography. I think the last quote high-lighting that there is no limit to what can be photographed and the significance of context is a good start point for any documentary photographer. The article also deals with the tension inherent in documentary photography, namely that whilst recording the world documentary photography is not totally objective, the photographer makes subjective decisions about what to what to photograph, what to include in the image and what to omit. Lastly McCausland touches on the challenges of getting documentary photographs seen, a point that seems as relevant today as it was over eighty years ago.
Documentary, Fact & Fiction 