What makes a document?
Rob says that ‘any photograph is inherently a document’ and I agree with him on this. If we break it down and we remove the romance and pretence out of what the art of image making is, everyone who has a camera makes documents of events in the past. Currently we alter those moments by adding Instagram filters or Snapchat text over the top of them to make them seem better than they are. We add #discriptivehashtags to explain what our photos are supposed to mean but most likely the only reason we go to these lengths are to get more recognition from our friends/peers/fans. I think that Jose sums it up perfectly in his post where he says "So no matter how hard we try there is no guarantee that what we want to say with our pictures will be ‘heard’ by the viewer. We have no control over the cultural context our images will be shown or the cultural baggage of the viewer." To cut out all the cultural context and baggage modern day photographers tell the viewer what the image is about, they tell the viewer what the context is and they tell the viewer what they think the viewer should think of it. All hidden in a hashtag like this
#man_with_his_old_dog___who_survived_the_earthquake___we_should_all_feel_blessed_that_we_are_not_in_their_shoes___now_share_my_photo_with_your_friends_to_raise_awareness.
I feel that Anned explains this perfectly in their response. "I think the story supplied by Jose is what makes this photograph a document – whether a family photograph documenting family history or a photograph which allows us to see an aspect of Spanish history. Without the date, the place, the personal knowledge it would be very much less reliable as a document."
If we look at what we have created, is a file, it's labeled a .JPG file (most of the time) but with the amount of descriptions that we are adding to it, is it that much different to a word document? Are we now making mini powerpoint/keynote presentations every time we post an image? No longer is an image enough, we have to add text, cropping and and usually a generous helping of filters. Is that in itself not a description of a document? Lets think about it like this, if I said to a viewer that I spent 30 minutes on an slide of a presentation, I added an image which I spent some time removing unwanted elements like blemishes, I added some text and I added a description to the slide and lastly added a look to the slide by applying a cross process filter to the overall slide. I then saved the slide and posted it to instagram, is it a photo or a document? I lean towards a document.
Update: Here are some extended comments and thoughts.
I feel that Jim D N Smith has a good point when he asks "Is it the content of the image that makes it a document?" and then answers his question with the following. "The personal significance dimension of photographic interpretation means that some photographs will be documents for some people, but perhaps not for others." Without knowledge of what is in the photo, or without an emotional attachment to a photo others may just brush past an image that for me, as an individual has some emotional meaning but for them is just another image. I often look back at my catalogue of images, especially those when I just started taking photos, and to some extent I have as much emotional attachment to a photo of a line of trees as I have to an image of the family dog. Each image (especially if it was difficult to take) I can remember, I can attach a memory to it. Does this mean its not a document? No it does not, but it is more of a document to me than, say my friend who has never been to that place, adding cultural meaning to the image as well. So it comes back to context again, with the context of where what when, in an instant I have a connection with the image that others will need much more explaining to understand.
references a great quote, "A document is “…any concrete or symbolic indexical sign, preserved or recorded toward the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon.” So says Suzanne Briet in ”What is documentation” – one of the founding texts of information science
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~roday/briet.htm."
I think the quote again gives an alternative view but the idea that a document is any indexical sign (or image in this case) makes sense. It still comes back to someone having the intention of making it and adding context (or a story) to the image.
Having read the thread, it seems that most students think that photos of an event is a document. Photos with the aim of documenting is also seen as a document.
A couple of students mention an article by Kratochvil & Michael Persson, regarding the difference between documentary and photojournalism. I will read it to form my own opinion and update this page once I have done so.
As a response to how many images are being posted online per day this is what I thought.
I think people are starting to treat images as disposable due to the sheer overload. Is scrolling through Instagram/Facebook timelines any different to flicking through a tabloid magazine at the hairdressers? The difference is that people spend a lot more time on social media than they do in hair dressers, meaning that they consume/see so many more images than in the past.
Take Snapchat for example, most images or even stories exist only for a few seconds or 24 hours at most. Can you imagine explaining that to someone like Henri Cartier-Bresson? But just because an image is printed in a book, does it make it more of a document than something that has a expiry stamp on it? How long after taking images do they become irrelevant? We all have those images in our family album of an aunt or uncle that we never met. Ed Lerpiniere says it very well in his writeup, "My belief is that a document changes from contemporary to historical when the last person who could have witnessed the time, event, person, whatever – has died and their remembered description goes with them, even if that remembered description has been recorded along with the document."
So now that we are seeing so many more images, for shorter times do we form an opinion on them (like when we see them in a gallery) or do we just swipe past them to the next one?