Brief introduction of Abigail Solomon-Godeau's "Who is speaking thus?"

1. Date 09/04/2018
Who is SpeakingThus?
Some Question of Documentary Photography
Chapter 8 From “Photography At The Dock”
Kuan-Yi Wu / ART 282A Presentation.

2. "Documentary" is is not employed with any
regularity before the late 1920s, nearly a
century after its invention.”
Nicéphore Niépce View from the Window at Le Gras Originally published: 1991

3. What is and has been meant by documentary?
✤ Is documentary to be narrowly defined as an investigative
or didactic enterprise or broadly defined to include all non-
aesthetic and informational uses?

4. “ Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of
moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.”
–Martha Rosler

5. "Realism is an issue not only for literature: it is a major political, philosophical and
practical issue and must be handled and explained as such."
– Bertolt Brecht

6. Photography is approached semiotically.

7. ✤ Early Years Photographs
✤ By 1860s
✤ In 1930s
✤ Conclusion
Chapters.

8. I. EarlyYears Photographs
Capacity for objective transcription

9. EarlyYears Photographs
✤ Pictures of everyday objects
✤ The contents of studios and libraries
✤ Corners of cottage gardens
✤ Farm implements
✤ Unremarkable architecture
✤ The flotsam and jetsam of daily life
Capacity for objective transcription

10. II. By 1860s…..
Photography is routinely label as documentary

11. Photography is routinely
label as documentary.
Related works are animated by the desire to
fix and register a perceived reality into the
two-dimensional space of representation.
EX: Désiré Charnay, Samuel Bourne, Felice Beato,
Matthew Brady, Francis Frith….

13. "In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but
confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that
conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.
– Pierre Burdieu

14. A nineteenth-century documentary practice didn’t function
against the grain of dominant ideologies.

15. Jacob Riis (1849-1914)
✤ Former police reporter, journalist
✤ Improve the human condition through
photography
✤ Documentary model

16. Jacob Riis,
Midnight In Ludlow Street
1888-1890
Tenement Life through the Eyes of Jacob Riis

17. Members of the Growler Gang demonstrate how
they steal. Circa 1888-1889.
Poor Children attend class at the Essex Market school. 1887.A boy and several men pause from their work inside a sweatshop. 1889.

18. Sally Stein
“Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and
Social Mobility in the Career of Jacob”
✤ Writes about 20th-century photography and its
relation to broader question of culture, politics
and society.
✤ Produced a detailed and wholly persuasive
account of the latent, rather than manifest,
meanings of Riis 's photographs.
✤ She emphases an interrogation of the subject/
object relations that such photography
normatively puts in place.
Jacob Riis - Girl holding baby

19. "We can indeed marvel at the consistency of Riis's photography …… The averted
gaze, the appearance of unconsciousness or stupefaction, were only a few of the
recurring features which gave Riis's pictorial documents stylistic unity and
ideological coherence in relation to the text. "10
– Sally Stein

20. III. In 1930s…..
Documentary forms in film, photography, and letters
were most privileged.

21. In 1930s
✤ Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin
launched contemporary critique of
photographic transparency and autonomy.
✤ Large scale, federally funded project like
F.S.A’s documentary enterprise.
✤ Critique generated by art movement didn’t
has much influence on either the theory or
the practice of documentary.
Documentary forms in film, photography,
and letters were most privileged.

22. What is Farm Security Administration?
A New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great
Depression in the United States.

23. What is New Deal?
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial
reforms and regulations enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1936 in
response to the Great Depression.(1929-1939)

24. Photography of advocacy or reform should effectively
concentrate on subject matter.

25. Roy Stryker(1893~1975)
✤ An American economist, government
official, and photographer
✤ Projects director of F.S.A Documentary
Enterprise.
✤ Indicated what type of mood, expression,
"feeling" he was after-what we would now
term the rhetoric of the image.
Introducing America to Americans - Roy Stryker and the FSA Photographs

26. ✤ A pictorial spectacle usually targeted for a different audience
and a different class.
✤ Immobilizing effect produced by presenting the visual "fact" of
individual victimization or subjugation as a metonym for the
invisible conditions that produced it.
✤ Photography is less able to deal with collectivity than with
individuality.
But the problems are:

27. Dorothea Lange(1895-1965)
✤ Wife of a economist Paul Schuster Taylor
✤ Individualize and personalize-to present her
subjects as objects of compassion and
concern.
✤ Her photographs humanized the
consequences of the Great Depression.
✤ She was well aware of the multiple
determinations of photographic meaning
(Lange formulated the notion of a "tripod"
of meaning-image, caption, text),

28. Brawley, Imperial Valley, In Farm Security Administration
(FSA) migratory labor camp
Family living in tent while building the house around them.
Near Klamath Falls, Klamath county, Oregon.Children of Oklahoma drought refugee in migratory camp in California.

29. Dorothea Lange,
Migrant Agricultural Worker’s Family,
1936
History Brief: Dorothea Lange

30. “Imperialism breeds an imperialist sensibility in all phases of cultural life. "
–Martha Rosler

31. VI. Conclusion
Who Is Speaking Thus……..

32. ✤ Include an insistence on maintaining control over the work in terms
of exhibition, publication, or distribution.
✤ This new form of documentary takes account of photography's
textuality
✤ Photographer must try to comprehend its embeddedness within
discursive or institutional systems in advance
New generation of photographers

33. She was well aware of the multiple determinations of photographic meaning -
Lange formulated the notion of a "tripod" of meaning - image, caption, text.
– Dorothea Lange

34. Fred Lonidier
“The Health and Safety Game:Fictions Based on Fact”
Martha Rosler
“The Bowery in. Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems.”

35. Conclusion
1. Recent critiques of traditional documentary forms are significantly
critiques from the Left.
2. Recent criticism and theory is increasingly concerned with the
instrumental and ideological functioning of photography, these new forms
of documentary practice find themselves progressively marginalized
within the precincts of both the photography and art world.

36. 3. Pushing the boundaries of documentary form as conventionally understood,
and asserting the textuality of photographic imagery, such work attempts to
function critically in a double sense:
✤ Externally: it deals with social and political realities.
✤ Internally: its critical operation is turned equally, inwardly, upon itself.
Conclusion

37. ✤ To establish the contingency and historical relativity of the category documentary
which can then be seen as "spoken" within a particular historical frame.
✤ To "speak" of agendas both open and covert, personal and institutional, that inform
their contents and, to a greater or lesser extent, mediate our reading of them.
✤ a photograph should alert us to the working of ideology which always functions to
naturalize the cultural.
Intention of Documentary Enterprise

38. Q&A

39. ✤ Is rarely a photograph's subject neutral or unmarked to begin
with?
✤ Why has camera historically engender a vocabulary of mastery,
possession, appropriation, and aggression; to shoot a picture, to
take a picture, to aim the camera, and so forth?
Let’s Think…….

40. ✤ Is the place of the documentary subject constructed for the
more powerful spectator is not always given in advance?
✤ Has it produce its victims in the social world?
Let’s Think…….

41. If we consider the act of looking at photographs with respect to gender or the
operations of the psyche-the complex acts of projection, voyeurism, investiture,
fantasy, and desire that inform our looking-we are obliged to abandon the earlier,
innocent belief that the documentary camera presents us with visual facts that
were simply "out there" and which we now, simply and disinterestedly,
observe and register.