THE POSTMODERN VIEW
The New Social Documentary
The New Social Documentary
- Postmodern ideas fostered new thinking about social documentary photography.
- In the United States, a new social documentary also followed from specific political and social circumstances.
- A mix of anti-Vietnam War activism and Conceptual art ideas helped shape a new philosophy and practice that differed from the work done by Eugene Richards and Mary Ellen Mark.
- The ideas and interest of an informal study group that formed during the mid-1970's in California proved important to a generation looking for direction about photographic practice in general, and documentary projects in particular.
- Members of this group, including Martha Rosler (b.1943), Allan Sekula (b.1951), and Fred Lonidier (b.1942), emerged as intellectual and visual leaders of a new social documentary.
- Among the most widely influential writings read by the group, and by others seeking a fresh direction in photography , was a 1936 essay penned by German historian and critic Walter Benjamin, called " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
- "Aura" of the original work of art- that is, out sense of an art work's uniqueness based on its having been made at a particular time and occupying a singular physical space.
- What attracted most of his readers was not Benjamin's historical foresight, nor his vision of a profoundly different socialist future, but his notion that the original could vanish in a welter of facsimiles.
- Benjamin's essay confirmed the existence of an image-world that molded people's perception of themselves, forged their desires, and fashioned their political beliefs.
- Importantly, the essay implied that political action consisted not only of protests, like those during the Vietnam War, but also of an ongoing, vigorous questioning of conventions and stereotypes promulgated by the mass media.
- Beginning in the late 1970's, critical essays on the history and theory of photography by Rosler and Sekula - along with Douglas Crimp, Christopher Phillips, Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Sally Stein - hit the field of photographic studies like a sharp wind.
- Where American theorists tended to be overwhelmed by what they perceived as the mighty tide of mass-media images crushing all efforts at societal change, social documentarians and activists such as Hackney Flashers held that political and personal transitions were possible, and could be achieved through photographs that exposed injustice.
THINKING PHOTOGRAPHY
- Attempts to conceive a new social documentary were based on a thoughtful documentary traditions, as well as the incorporation of ideas from outside the area of photographic practice.
- One of the most influential thinkers in the period was French philosopher Roland Barthes, who coined two terms that were much discussed in photographic criticism.
- The first, stadium, designated photographic content that interests the intellect; the second, punctum, taken from the Latin word for "to puncture," referred to the sudden arresting effect that a photographic image can have on the viewer.
- Beginning in the late 1970s, American critics such as Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Hal Foster, and Douglas Crimp focused on the demise of the original as a vastly important sign that Modernism, with its enthronement of artistic expression and originality, was also dying.
- By the late 1970's , photography was rapidly emerging as the vogue art, not simply because of it's growing acceptance in the art world, but because of the way it dovetailed in practical terms with contemporary concerns about representation and originality.
NATURE AND THE BODY POLITIC
- Photographs from space followed the tradition of the sublime landscape, accentuating the distance of other galaxies and the breadth of celestial bodies.
- In the late twentieth century, images of nature did not receive as much critical scrutiny as did the concepts of gender and ethnic identity.
- A few critics pointed out that photographs and films of animals were not objective, but modeled on an idealized view of Western family life.
- As Andres Serrano's work showed , beauty and repugnance can be effectively mingled in the same work.
- A similar effect sometimes occurs in photographs of nature as a wounded victim.
- Pictures of strip mines, clear-cut forests, and oil spills flaunt intense coloration and spectral glamour.
- Within Postmodern theories of representation, the body was repeatedly theorized as the point at which society's values shape human personality.