The following post is a summary of the Martha Rosler essay In, Around and Afterthoughts (on documentary) (1981). I will add my own thoughts on how appropriate it is to 2017.
Below are direct extracts from Rosler’s essay. These are what I consider to be the key points and offer, I hope, a fair reflection of her arguments.
How can we deal with documentary photography itself as a photographic practice?
…[documentary photography] meant to awaken the self-interest of the privileged.
Charity is an argument for the preservation of wealth- an argument within a class about the need to give a little in order to mollify the dangerous classes below.
Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.
…the images might be more decisively unsettling than the arguments enveloping them.
The War on Poverty has been called off.
…[public opinion moving towards] the poor may be poor through lack of merit
There is as yet no organized national Left, only a Right.
…documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting—and careerism.
…mainstream documentary has achieved legitimacy and has a decidedly ritualistic character. It begins in glossy magazines and books, occasionally in newspapers, and becomes more expensive as it moves into art galleries and museums.
One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.)
…eighties’ pugnacious self-interest
Documentary testifies, finally, to the bravery or (dare we name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble.
What happened to the man (actually men) in the photo? The question is inappropriate when the subject is photographs. And photographers. The subject of the article is the photographer. In 1978 there was a small news story on a historical curiosity:the real-live person who was photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1936 in what became the world’s most reproduced photograph.
Florence Thompson, seventy-five in 1978, a Cherokee living in a trailer in Modesto, California, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “That’s my picture hanging all over the world, and I can’t get a penny out of it.”She said that she is proud to be its subject but asked, “What good’s it doing me?
Are photographic images, then, like civilization, made on the backs of the exploited?
…a documentary image has two moments:(1) the “immediate,”instrumental one, and (2) the conventional “aesthetic-historical”moment.
…topicality drops away as epochs fade, and the aesthetic aspect is, if anything, enhanced by the loss of specific reference
I understand, from the inside, photographers’ involvement with the work itself, …But I also become impatient with this perhaps-enforced protectiveness, which draws even the best intentioned of us nearer and nearer to exploitiveness.
[Arbus’ twins image being reworked in Sunday New York Times] This new work manages to institute a new genre of victimhood—the victimization by someone else’s camera of helpless persons, who then hold still long enough for the indignation of the new writer to capture them, in words and images both, in their current state of decrepitude.
As readers of the Sunday Times, what do we discover? That the poor are ashamed of having been exposed as poor, that the photos have been the source of festering shame. That the poor remain poorer than we are, for although they see their own rise in fortunes, their escape from desperate poverty, we Times readers understand that our relative distance has not been abridged; we are still doing much better than they.
Szarkowski – ‘Most of those who were called documentary photographers a generation ago . . . made their pictures in the service of a social cause. . . . to show what was wrong with the world, and to persuade their fellows to take action and make it right. . . . [A] new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has not been to reform life, but to know it.’
[Rosler’s opinion of Szarkowski’s statement] He makes a poor argument for the value of disengagement from a “social cause” and in favour of a connoisseurship of the tawdry.
[Rosler’s summation] Perhaps a radical documentary can be brought into existence. But the common acceptance of the idea that documentary precedes, supplants, transcends, or cures full, substantive social activism is an indicator that we do not yet have a real documentary.
Martyn Rainbird 