http://www.martharosler.net/about/index.html In, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography) - Martha Rosler
Firstly I find Rosler's style of writing hard work, she is one of those writers who sometime uses words that over complicates the sentence for no reason, it also jumps from topic to topic without warning. But with my rant over. This is what I take out of the article.
I feel that Rosler's point of view on documentary photography is quite negative, in each of the examples she gives it is from a negative point of view. So overall I feel that her point of view is that documentary photography is not objective and she does not feel that its got merit as a social cause.
The article starts with referencing the Bowery in New York, which is an archetypal skid row. Photographers have flocked to the Bowery to take photos of the misery within its boundaries. To show those who has more what they should be grateful for. It has also been used to raise funds or awareness of such areas.
Early photography felt like it had more clout when it came to showing despair. Jacob Riis wrote "the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst." "I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression." With minimal retouching and being a new medium it feels like photographers had the opportunity to make a difference to show "polite society" what they had to be grateful but at the same time play to their "sympathy for the poor". "Yet the force of documentary surely derives in part from that the images might be more decisively unsettling than the arguments enveloping them." I feel that this does not apply to modern day documentary photography. Long gone are the days where images of starving children jolts us out of our seats and into action, even if that action is giving £3 a month for fresh water. It is so crowded with these types of images that we almost don't notice them.
"Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat in fantasy, into imagery"
A lot of early liberal documentary photography was based around the notion of "these people can do nothing for themselves" so feel sorry for them rather than, take action like Cesar Chavez, who organised farm workers to fight for themselves.
One of the other points that Rosler raises is that of the bravery of the photographer. As viewers we see these images and we see the "bravery or the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer who entered a situation of physical, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble" This is true for every war image ever seen, I don't want to be there fighting let alone running around with only a camera to defend myself to bring me these images.
But on a good note I thought that the example raised by Rosler of W.Eugene Smith and Aileen Miko Smith who photographed the human devistation in Minamata (a small Japanese fishing village ravaged thanks to Chisso chemical firm dumping mercury-laden wast into the waters) was a good reason to tell the rest of the world, not for profit of the photographers but for the awareness that this chemical company caused this amount of harm to the people around it, and it could have been avoided. Other communities around the world stood up and ensured that their towns did not turn into Minamata. If photography has this effect it has to be positive even though the subject it not.
Edward S Curtis was the opposite of the Smith family, he changed the perception people had of Native North American people by arriving with a modern day props and wardrobe department. Not only did he dress his sitters he also retouched his images for his discerning buyers. He made documentary that would sell for the highest price not documentary about something real. "The higher the price that the photography can command as a commodity in dealerships, the higher the status accorded to it in museums and galleries, the greater will be the gap between that kind of documentary and another kind, a documentary incorporated into an explicit analysis of society and at least the beginning of a program for changing it"
and I agree wholeheartedly with the statement
"The liberal documentary, in which members of the ascendant classes are implored to have pity on and to rescue members of the oppressed, now belongs to the past"
Advertising is known for bending the truth and when it comes to photography it is littered with copies and remakes and lazy creative ideas. Its much easier to take an existing well known image and apply a brand to it than it is to create something original. Advertisers will usually take the easy option, pick something that is already known so we don't have to spend the money to get it known. This is the same for the Visa advert 1979. Elliot Erwitt created an image in the 1950s for the French office of tourism. It was then recreated (almost to the T) by a producer for the 1979 commercial.
Personally I have a problem with taking photos of the down and out, the drunks, the homeless. I find taking images of people who have nothing, degrading to that person. As a photographer what are you gaining or changing in society when you take an image of a homeless person? The simple answer is that its much easier to walk up to someone who lives on the street and take a photo of them than it is to take one of someone who you feel is superior to you, in either class or financial standing. I very often see photographers trade on their portrait ability with black and white images of scruffy men with big beards, over processed images with added sharpness and added grain to show every blemish and every imperfection. These images are meant to show how good a photographer is but in essence it shows everything but what I would want to see from a portrait photographer. As an example Lee Jeffries did a series on the homeless. I like some if the images but for some reason I have no empathy for the people in the images. I just feel that he is building his reputation and further earning potential on someone who will never see a dime of that money. Just like Florence Thompson who never saw a dime after becoming the face of "the worlds most reproduced photograph" Dorothea Lange profited from that image and built a reputation on it whereas Thompson was never rewarded.
In hindsight even though Rosler's article was hard to read I feel very strongly about some of the topics she raised and it has made me think more than I first thought it would.
References
‘In, Around and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)’ by Martha Rosler in Bolton, R. (ed.) (1992) The Contest of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (p.303).