Post-Documentary? (1999) ìThe penalty of realism is that it is about reality and has to bother for ever not about being ëbeautifulí but about being right.î So wrote John Grierson, the man considered the ìfather of documentary film,î the person who named the genre and helped establish documentary film in the English-speaking world.1 Grierson is pointing here to the dichotomies of accuracy and aesthetics, the criteria by which we have come to judge the worth of documentary imagery. But documentaryóa practice that began and flourished with the twentieth century and may indeed die with itóis undergoing profound challenges from multiple sources, on social, political, and ethical grounds. These challenges, which radically undermine photographyís fundamental claim to a unique capacity to offer a direct insight into the real, have produced something of a crisis among artists and intellectuals and troubled some in journalism and the legal professions, if not others in the wider audience. My aim here is to explore some of the attributes and functions of social documentary photography in the postmodern world. Recently an artist friend and I had a conversation about the effects of exhibiting lush photos of transvestites and transsexual prostitutes of color. My friend quickly made what amounted to a common argument underlying documentaryónamely, that it humanizes the so-called Other and promotes identification between the viewer and people so regarded. My concern about this particular line of argument was that the barriers to identification, particularly in this era of scapegoating, are too high to be vaulted over, and easily certainly not with spectacular color images of people having such highly marked appearances and ascribed identities. But, my friend asked, what if the photographer saw herself as part of the subjectsí milieu? This is an argument that had been made about, say, Diane Arbusís work in the 1960s. I responded that a photographerís intentions are unrecoverable from most images. Well, then, would including quotations from the people pictured lessen the distance between them and other viewers? Similar projects in the populist 1970s, such as Bill Owensís Suburbia, didnít appear to decrease that symbolic distance very much. In that instance, the recorded (or approximated) remarks may increase the psychological distance from those who on the surface might seem to be ìjust like me.î The inclusion of purported quotes, clearly, changes the nature of the transaction between image and viewer; the subject speaks, whereas in a caption what is pictured is spoken about. But the subjectís enunciation alone will not overcome the power of framing elements, which include the pre-existing attitudes of viewers rooted in dominant discourses. The muteness of a photograph of someone different from the viewer may paradoxically be more effective in inviting projection, empathy, or pity than even the same photo representing a speaking subject, because the icon is universalized and depoliticized. Still, there is always a text somewhereóeven when it starts with and departs from physical appearance as an index of character. In the particular project my friend and I were discussing, the subjects were pleased by their photos and their public reception. This appears to be a powerful argument, but whether even well-received photographic projects do much to lessen social stigma needs to be confirmed rather than assumed. Ultimately, my friend reaffirmed her belief in the power of identification. She argued that the aesthetic power of the photographs significantly increased the likelihood of the social acceptance of the people portrayed. On my part, I wondered what role images can really play in promoting acceptance of Others by familiarizing viewers with physical appearances (and identities) with which they have had little real-life experience. The fixity and iconicity of still images, particularly portraits, continue to worry me; I suspect that moving imagesófilm and televisionóas opposed to still photos of entertainers are potentially far more powerful in reducing social stereotyping, although even they also may ultimately be ineffectual. We have gotten well used to images of Others without necessarily seeing them as ìUs.î But perhaps identitarian times breed identitarian projects. ìEthnographicî images of people ìperforming identitiesî may confirm difference as distance. But there are questions of representation that go beyond the social reevaluation of foreigners or local subcultures. Documentary, journalistic, and news photography, rather than seeking to promote understanding, may aim to provoke, to horrify, or to mobilize sentiment against a generalized danger or a specific enemy or condition. In any case, our discussion brought to mind all the questions surrounding the social power and epistemological understandings (as opposed to the aesthetic qualities alone) of certain forms of photography. It is true, of course, that all forms of representation call forth questions of responsibility and perhaps of descriptive accuracy, but those evoked by photographic representation are unique. The apparent truth value of photography and film has made them powerfully effective vehicles for reportage and commentary. Of all photographic practices, social documentaryóthe self-professed truth-teller, implicated in modernity and part of its ìlife worldîóis the one in which the underlying issues of social power are accessible to contestation. Until recently there has been little reason to question photographic accuracy (and then only in specific instances, not globally in respect to the practice itself), and many reasonsónotably the immense commercial and bureaucratic usefulness of photography to the mass media, advertising, police, and the familyóto accept it. But over the past few decades, photography and photographic practices have been subjected to attacks on all fronts. Striking to the heart of the matter, even the Sunday New York Times Magazine, addressing the great suburban middle class, in March 1997 proclaimed right on the cover, ìDocumentary film makers have to manipulate reality in order to make their art, even if that means exploiting their subjects.î This implies that filmmakers are also manipulatingóand exploitingótheir audience; ìrealityî is sold out in favor of ìart.î What is said here about documentary filmmaking can be said as well of documentary still photography, despite the imperative toward narrativity of the time-based medium. But documentary, whether still or moving, precisely as an ìart-fulî practice, can hardly escape the inclination toward some form of dramatization. In the advanced industrial world, the questioning of who is speaking, and from where, has occurred in the context of a wider cultural suspicionóor delegitimationóof political authority as well as of the truth and objectivity of journalism. Narrative theory and discourse analysis, analyzing the structure and situatedness of communication, have further enlivened the distinction between truth and accuracy in representation. And the status of the photographic image as a faithful representation of sheer ìvisualityî is radically impeached by the wide availablity of computer programs that easily manipulate and alter the image. Thus, poststructural and postcolonial discourses, along with digital technologies, have undermined the subject position of the photographer (and the cultural milieu into which the images are inserted) and the epistemological status of the imageóits relationship to a phenomenologically present visual realityódenigrating its (metonymic) adequacy in relation to the situation it depicts and problematizing the ability of any image of a visual field to convey lived experience, custom, tradition, or history. Through much of its working history, the burden of truth borne by documentary has shouldered aside aesthetic matters in favor of a variety of other issues, leaving aesthetics to surface seemingly as an afterthought, as Griersonís remarks, quoted above, suggest. Nevertheless, documentarians have explicitly called upon the aesthetic dimension of their work as a kind of necessary surplus that protects them from charges of propaganda-making, so that the language of aesthetic appreciation is always available to ìrescueî documentary from itselfóthat is, from its own truth claims. This trope, far from being born of postmodern doubt, was already typical of modernism, an insertion of unstated commentary between ìthe sheer sensationî of the image and its reception by the viewer or, in contrast, a heightening of meaning in the face of flat reality. The poetics of form can lead to a reception of images as poetic, a form of personalized address that escapes either responsibility or reportorial accuracy, though it may of course increase the burden of truth, but as subjectivized witness rather than objective reportage. Documentary is currently experiencing another sort of crisis in that it is losing access to a mass public via print journalism as well as losing a fair chunk of that publicís interest, which is more and more attuned to television and to accounts of the real refracted through the distorting prisms of sensationalism, voyeurism, and what might be called a neo-gothic sensibility. Perhaps, then, documentary really is a dying practice; but there is much to consider before consigning it to the ash can of history. Photography (now over 150 years old) and film (about 100) have never been stable practices and are continually changing.2 Both the production and interpretation of photographic imagery are made according to prevailing social and historical trends. Photographers who work outside the studio are sometimes accused of having a ghoulish addiction to misery and, worse, of profiting financially from the desperation of others. The accusation, often leveled at war photographers, is also increasingly directed at documentarians. A number of years ago, the well-known and widely respected (white) American documentarian Eugene Richards was at the center of an editorial controversy over his book on the social effects of crack cocaine in an urban ghetto. The charge was racismóthat his work was part of the mediaís unflagging stream of images of drug-taking blacks, which leads to a greatly exaggerated idea of the percentage of African Americans engaged in crime. The photographer was infuriated and hurt by such a response. In a letter to a newspaper he ascribed it to the handy bugaboo of ìpolitical correctness.î The argument here revolves not around sympathy or understanding for the poor but over the interpretation of the motivation for socially destructive behavior and whether those pictured are worthy of blame for their own depicted actions. Richardsís long-established interest in representing the life of Americaís poor people, especially the urban poor, may make his motives and methods in obtaining his images unassailable, but the wider African American community has no obligation to ignore the context of reception of his, and related, workówhich includes not only the nightly television news and the tabloid press but also a political climate of racial demonization, downñsizing, and disentitlement. Similar difficulties have arisen with respect to images from abroad. The end of European empires, the social movements of the 1960s and beyond, and the political needs of the West, have amplified the demands of the worldís unrepresented and oppressed for both political autonomy andómore prominently than ever beforeócultural self-representation. The mission of documentary photographers, often self-assumed, of speaking for the oppressed or disregarded is no longer casually ceded to those from privileged countries or groups. The wherewithal to produce some forms of self-representation, or to intervene in representation produced by and for the (former) First World, or by and for a social majority at home, is much closer to hand than ever before. Entertainment and information media are undergoing consolidation and globalization, and cultural hegemony is exercised around the world by Western (not to say U.S.) media. But one result is that reports from elsewhere meant for Western consumption are likely to be viewed as well by those who inhabit what used to be the barely imagined peripheries of empire, residents of the self-same ìelsewhere.î Clearly, some disruption to documentary and photojournalistic practices has been caused by the blurring boundary between citizenship and spectatorship. A case in point: An English ìalternativeî political magazine, the New Internationalist, decides to produce an issue on coffee, tracing it back to the growers from the dining rooms of the developed world. A reporter and a photographer visit a coffee-growing area in the southern Peruvian Andes. A local official of the coffee cooperative serves as guide and translator. The group drops in on the manís elderly parents at their farm; the photographer obtains a posed portrait. Later, the son, in London to help complete the issue, worries that showing his parents in their work clothes is disrespectful. He is persuaded, however, that the image is accurate and therefore important. His misgivings are published in the magazine along with the photo (a print of which goes home to the parents). If the son werenít working with the magazine, the ethical question might not have been articulated, but how often have subjects had second thoughts about appearing in published photos taken in circumstances more uncontrolled than these? Folkloric portraits and photos of peasants at work are routine for such a story, the stock in trade of National Geographic; yet this magazine was attempting to demystify the relation between Third World producers and First World consumers. In other, more pointed situations, reactions to ìoutsideî photographers can be explosive. In time-honored fashion, the images of people engaged in the production of consumer goods at the heart of viewersí lives are intended to awaken conscience over the disparity between the two sets of life circumstances. Since advertising photography sometimes supplies images of colorful natives for this purpose (Juan ValdÈz, the figure concocted to represent the Colombian coffee-growersí associationís advertising campaign, comes to mind), photographers wish to supply counterimages. (Even Lewis Hine, in his ìMaking Human Junk,î consciously produced counter-advertising to the popular ìmaking healthy childrenî advertising of the early-twentieth-century food industry.) Although socially disempowered people may object to being photographed or filmed, in some cases they seek news coverage; the (right) camera is now even more pointedly recognizable as an instrument of power, and the desire for a large megaphone may conflict with a palpable desire to thwart the bearer of bad news. Some see in all this the end to the legitimate role of the documentarian from ìoutside.î Unfortunately, such a position, while understandable and to some degree even necessary, is problematic, presupposing that the identitiesóor roles or experiencesóin question are straightforwardly recognizable (Indian peasants, transvestites, or African Americans, say) and uncomplicatedly singular (Peruvian, American, poor) or that they assume a hierarchy within the individual (being a peasant, being black, or being poor is more determining than being a woman or being an Indian, and so forth).3 The doctrine of no exogenous narration may, in addition, rely on an essentialist interpretation of identity and have a positivist and empiricist bias that tends to privilege appearance over interpretation. For those with a psychoanalyticóor indeed another analyticóproclivity, it can be less than satisfying. On an entirely different plane, it rejects the notion of alliances, assuming that social movements are necessarily constituted and led from within. But social documentary has tended to assume a humanist and generally universal ethical basis in the society to which it has been directed, or to see itself as directly allied, often militantly, with the interests of the photographic subjects.4 I say more about the assumptions behind documentary further on, after a brief telling of elements of its history. Arthur Rothstein wrote about his widely reproduced photograph The Dust Storm (1936), of a farmer and his sons trudging through a dust-beclouded landscape: In the beginning it was a record, after which it became a news picture, then it became a feature photograph, eventually an historical photograph, and now itís considered a work of art in most museums. It has a life of its own.5 A defining element of a documentary image is its particularity, that it represents a specific spatiotemporal ìwhat-is.î But the ability to evoke identification, when there is no clear-cut context of group membership, means a loss of specificity in favor of a more universal appeal, or perhaps a certain mythic element. (The precise identity, as opposed to group identity, of the individual before the lens is not generally of interestóthese are not, after all, celebrities.) With the passage of time, specificity fades and projection more easily does its work. Furthermore, the criteria employed by aesthetic judgment evolve, partly under pressure of photographic practices. There is no use in trying to pin down photographic, or cultural, meaning outside a context of reception. Some American documentary practices Alongside context is history, including the foundational history of the photographic practices in question. Photography played a notable role in campaigns for social betterment in turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States.6 The Danish-born New York newspaperman Jacob Riis enlisted photography for a brief time in his housing crusade. Riis had little concern for the aesthetic element of his photos, for he saw them as evidentiary; the images were initially taken by someone else hired to accompany him on midnight police raids, and convenience alone led him to begin taking them himself. Riis hardly considered the transaction between himself and his photographic subjects; he saw them as representative of the ill-housed urban poor, many of them newly arrived immigrants, and his interest did not extend far beyond that role. Riis was countering the idea of poverty as synonymous with moral decay and was portraying his poverty-stricken subjects as victims of an impossible situation unprotected by law. His appeal was to law, routed through the consciences and judgments of the new modernizing elites, on the assumption (not unjustified) that poor immigrants, and native-born blacks, could not themselves effectively mount such appeals. A more sophisticated photographic practice was developed soon after by Lewis Hine, often in the pursuit of legislative changes relating to workósuch as regulating or ending child labor. Hine, a young teacher who came to documentary already concerned with photographic aesthetics, was hired by crusading social-work organizations and magazines. For Riis, ethics (moralism, actually) drove his use of photography, but matters relating to individual subjects lay outside his ethical compass; for Hine, aesthetics were married to ethical concerns. The persuasive power of the photograph, he believed, greatly depended on its formal elements, yet he never treated his subjects merely as representative ciphers. Even under difficult circumstances (he frequently lied his way into factory situations, from which he was otherwise excluded by the owners and managers), he took the time to learn their names and to ascertain their occupations, their ages, and other pertinent information, information that often figured in the essays and articles employing his photos. Unlike Riis, Hine also attempted to engage in a transaction with the subjects that resulted in a dignified yet responsive pose. Hineís concern for his subjectsí dignity, evidenced in his images of labor as well as in his portraits of tenement families, led to a strategy opposite to Riisís raw naturalism. Hineís entire concept of the political sphere and the participation of poor people, especially in their role as workers, differed from that of Riis. Both attempted to link the moral order to the political order. Despite Hineís constancy, he no more than Riis could promise the direct utility of his project to the person before the lens; that is not the nature of the documentary transaction, which is an argument about the experience of a class or category of people, as I have suggested above. The starkness of Riisís photos is a powerful signal of their ìtruth value,î whereas Hineís formal control suggests a photographerís advocacy. The people in Riisís photos were ìcaughtî in the act of being victims of their terrible surroundings and existential conditions, whereas Hineís were shown posed between moments of activity, often at work in poor and exploitative circumstances but within the stream of life and time so different from the airless stasis of Riisís subjects, almost outside the possibility of any dynamic movement forward. And despite the vastly different approaches of the twoóthe naturalistic artlessness of Riis, the careful realism of Hineóand their disparate relationship to photography and its uses, time and the workings of the art world have transmuted both these outsiders into notable figures. Their work is accepted into the roster of important historical photographic practices because of its foundational role, bringing their formal properties into the register of the aesthetic. One of Hineís young students, the New Yorker Paul Strand, was inspired by a visit to Alfred Stieglitzís art galleries to become ìan artist in photographyîóbut without the European-influenced pictorialism promoted by Stieglitz. Strand built on English debates about photographic aesthetics, which hinged on how best to arrive at aesthetic value without excessive artifice or concern with surface detail. Strandís work was revolutionary in its embrace of modernist ideas, all but abandoning romantic pastoralism in favor of an eager look at the life of nowóyet a significant portion of his work was concerned with natural form and with rural and peasant life. In the teens, Strand produced a series of candid portraits of New Yorkersópoor, elderly men and women (generally taken with a trick camera whose lens appeared to point elsewhere). Unlike Hine, Strand appears to have been concerned with them as exemplars, but his moral concerns were also very different from those of Riis. His appeal seems not to have been to the polity as a body of laws (or to the aesthetic faculties via the document) but to the moral order as an implicit ideal in the life of a modern urban democratic nation; unlike Riis and Hine, Strand (at that moment, at least) was not involved in specific reform campaigns. Strandís interest appeared to be not only in reforming photographic aesthetics but in establishing an iconography of the marginal that afforded them respect through full incorporation into the physiognomy of the human. What Strand was after depended on the shock of confronting the viewing public with those considered unworthy of attention. Some assumptions As this early history suggests, documentary engages with structural injustices, often to provoke active responses. Much of its appeal stems from what might be called the physiognomic fallacy: the identification of the image of a face with character, a body-centered essentialism. An alternative to American psychologism is suggested by the approach developed in the 1920s through the 1940s by the German photographer August Sander, who was loosely associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. Sanderís taxonomy of German society through a large number of portraits of people occupying every possible social location was far more concerned with a representation of a person as an ensemble of self, setting, and social role than in challenging the viewer to concoct a psychology of the individuals or a reading of their character. The concepts of ìcitizenshipî that I have suggested here in germ suggest powerful motives for documentary production. The logic of capital, with its division of society into expropriators and expropriated, has functioned as a powerful underlying assumption for documentary through much of this century, providing images of ìsocietyís losersîóits victimsóand occasionally of its winners, who are less often directly identified as its victimizers. But this division of the world may not have the force it did just yesterday. Political scientist Robert Meister argues, for example, that poststructuralismóon the basis of readings of Nietzsche, as well as of Hegel by Alexandre KojËve and his students, among them Michel Foucaultóradically questions the rhetoric of victims and victimizers. Poststructuralism, in Meisterís view, rejects the ìdemonizationî of any member of an oppressive system; thus, calling people victimizers, whether for their behavior or their class characteristics, is considered an unacceptable error, both analytically and ethically. Even the class of capitalismís beneficiaries cannot be named as oppressors, since, as in Foucaultís analysis, power resides everywhere in society. In Nietzschean terms, the ìwill to powerî means that those who are oppressed also oppress and would do so in greater measure if given the opportunity to turn the tables.7 In postmodern timesóin which it cannot be assumed that for the good of the collective whole, groups or individuals will willingly take less in order for others to have moreóexplanations of oppressive social practices, of classes of beneficiaries, and appropriate structural reforms are all contested, along with the hypostatization of the notion of ìvictimhoodî as an abstract category of explanations of differential social power. If there are no victimsóor, if, what amounts to the same thing, we are all equally victimsóthen there are no oppressors. Social inequality appears to be produced by a system without active human agents or collective remedies. At the end point of such logics, calling ìthe systemîócapitalism, sayóthe oppressor leads to no change, since there are no steps that can be taken that do not tread on someoneís toes. Patently, no practice of social documentary that sees itself as providing evidence of structural injustice can flourish where there is no model of social progress, of implied routes to get to a better place. I have already suggested alternative explanations of documentary imagery that might present themselves: psychologistic stasis, dehistoricized universal ìtruth,î a depoliticized visual typology of social ìlosersîóthe homeless, single mothers, battered women, inner-city residents, crack users, happy-go-lucky bumsóor even of îwinners,î all without any presumed idea of wrongs or remedies, all iconographies of myth. But before any of these explanations take hold, there is a more basic axiom, that of credibility, the fundamental issue in the reception of documentary imagery. Documentary Practices and Credibility At one time, reconstructions and restaging were acceptable as documentary, but now photographic believability requires a discreet distancing from (inescapable) formal visual and dramatic tropes. More important, it requires a balance of trust in the photographer and the medium of distribution of the resultant imagery. Despite the radical questioning of the truth value of documentary, every day, countless times a day, images that document events, in the form of news photos and documentation, are produced and received in a great variety of forms and at a growing host of sites of reception. Although a judicial body may, because of the possibility of digital manipulation, now be prodded to disbelieve photographic evidence, the public, by and large, still trusts images it sees in the daily newspaper and on the evening news. Aside from the privileging of the apparatus itself, it is on the specific codes of production of news imagery that the acceptance of this infinitude of images rests.8 The durability of the reputation of objectivity of the apparatus, buttressed by the (apparent) reliability of the medium, overwhelms all but the most inescapable doubts about the image. But the audience certainly recognizes the stylistic markers of ìactualityî photography and, more pertinently, moving footage, which have been imported into advertising and music television and purposefully distorted in the burgeoning genre of docudrama and real-crime shows. The artless quality of ìsnapshotsî that art photographers once sought so energetically to avoid has become a reigning style in photography and advertising, having first been routed through the hand-held camera style of ìcinema veritÈ.î Over the past couple of decades, color has expanded into news photography from personal and commercial photography and produced powerful dislocations, since serious news had been so long identified with black-and-white photography. Yet color is now sufficiently normalized that black-and-white imagery may seem mannered and artificial (as it has been presented in music television and advertising). Color-saturated film enhances the aestheticization of the image, producing eye-catchingly beautiful images of crime scenes, battlefields, slums, and mean streetsórendering them the visual equal of green acres and luxury residences. The use of color in documentary is still uncommon, and its aestheticism problematic, for it is hard to hang onto the literalness of the image without the direct headline-related news value. Photographic credibility is strongly conditioned by codes of professionalization. Photojournalism was well-established in the decades after the First World War, aided by the new European mass-circulation picture magazines.9 Later decades produced a highly professionalized corps of photojournalists, and a concomitant loss of identification with the interests of the people they photographed. The codified ethics of news reportage soon entailed maintaining a wall of separation between photographer and subject. Documentary and photojournalistic practices overlap greatly but are still to some degree distinguishable from one another. Photojournalists are primarily employed to work on specific journalistic ìstories,î supplying images while others provide copy, and their feelings and sympathies about what they are photographing remain unsolicited. In contrast, documentarians choose their subjects and treat them as they will. In reality, however, many photographers engage in both practices, and the same images may function as both as well. 10 Journalistic ethics prescribe honesty, objectivity, and responsibility to the subject, but they privilege the document, which supersedes all but the most urgent interests of the individuals involved.11 Responsibility is to societyóthat is, to readers and viewers.12 In another sense, however, for journalists, whether photographers or reporters, the most crucial thing is to protect the professional status of the practitioners and the practice itself through the establishment of ìobjectivity.î Especially for those being photographed, the photographer is sometimes seen as an interloper, ìselling papersî through sensationalism or furthering the editorís or publisherís ideological and political agenda. But we all pay a price for summarily dismissing journalistic claims of objectivityónamely, the end to the demands for representational responsibility to the subject, whether in terms of a true and faithful account of appearances and behaviors or in terms of satisfying the subjectís desires. There is a long-standing documentary subgenre, namely, ìstreet photography,î filling this niche of ìnonresponsibilityî to the subject. (I note in passing that, historically, ìproto-documentaryî practices were anthropologically descriptive and took for granted that the photographer-audience group and those depicted were essentially different and inhabited different social locations, but street photography has evolved away from this model.) Whether it represents a view of photography as a form of self-portraiture through projectionóan important argument, applied in varying degrees to photographers as diverse as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus, to name just a fewóor whether some less definable release from social goals, the loss of specificity or scrupulousness, as it empties information from the image, aids the aestheticization and universalization favored in the art world. Despite its often acute revelations of social power differentials in what it observes, street photography does not incline toward a calculus of rectification. The photographer, rather than the subjects, becomes a kind of psychological or characterological type, and it is with the photographer that one identifies, reforging links between this form of photography and old-fashioned travelogues (ìOur correspondent in the land ofÖî). The photographer is weeping, despairing, astonished, amused, disgusted, spiritually transformed, and so on, mediating through her/his sensibilities and (to use Robert Frankís word) ìvisionî the raw social facts at hand. Methodologies of Production In the face of the challenges to social documentaryónot the least of which is the possibility that projects will find no sponsors and no distributionóproduction methods have come under scrutiny by interested observers. Many documentarians were trained in sociology or anthropology, and many of documentaryís frames of reference are drawn from these disciplines. Documentary photographers often think, for example, that they must become ìparticipant observersîópart of the group or subculture whose members they are photographingóor maintain intense relationships with group members. This is in contrast to the street photographer or that stereotypical figure of irresponsibility to the subjects, the ìparachuting photojournalist.î Some supporters of documentaryósuch as anthropologist Jay Ruby, founder of the magazine Visual Anthropologyóbelieve that only self-representations can solve the problem of unequal power in the photographic transaction. A form of equalization theory underlies the work of photographers following the trail blazed by anthropologist Sol Worth, who gave movie cameras to Native Americans.13 As Brazilian educator Paolo Freire has shown, providing narrative toolsómost basically, ìalphabetization,î or literacyóto the socially and politically excluded is in itself empowering. This approach has most often been adopted by naturalist and realist documentary filmmakers, who have tried to recreate the experience of presentness with a minimum of intervention and interpretation and little hint of political agency. Those who use this method with still photography must add verbal texts of witness, testimony, and confession. Photographers following this method include Wendy Ewald, working with poor North and South American children, and Deborah Barndt, working primarily with immigrant women in Toronto, as well as a number of photographers working with homeless children. Their projects are wonderful. My great sympathy for such projects, however, is tempered by some concerns about their possible limitations. Freireís methodology was educational, meant for use within a learning group, where his technique has repeatedly been shown to be powerfully effective. With work that circulates publicly, however, relying on giving the camera to the subjects underestimates the shaping effect of institutions and the context of reception, which are likely to reimpose the unequal power relationship banished from the photographic transaction. The project gains credibility for external observers from the subjectsí sharp investedness, possibly from photographic naivetÈ (many such projects employ children), from imagery that is aesthetically appealing, perhaps unexpectedly. As the sole form of representation it seems too easily recuperable by those with no desire to change political realities. In the words of a municipal bureaucrat, it represents a tool for "managing diversity"; thus, it has come to be seen as therapeutic or cathartic. Depoliticized and dehistoricized, the hack version of this work offers a preferred picture of the social victim, who might not earn sympathy if portrayed as analytic or militantóactivists among the poor say that journalists focus on the abjection of individuals and ignore group activism, which implies a demand against the privileges of the viewers. The best of these projects project a powerful idea of the subjects' desired self-image, but in routine applications the skills of the facilitating photographer are not put to use. But this approach, if it displaces other documentary methodology, smacks of positivismóone obtains testimony but only limited analysis.14 If documentary appears to be under pressureófrom distributors, sponsors, and subjects, as well as from leery practitioners and postmodern critics of traditional social, particularly class, analysisóand if the radical contraction of the public sphere means that there is no place to insert documentary arguments, why continue to talk about documentary practices? It is enough, perhaps, to claim that documentary still represents a lively impulse, but there may be even more important reasons to continue to distinguish documentary from street photography, which appears to be in no danger of withering away. In the world of just-yesterday, documentary could convey a sense of a ìsocial sceneîóand an observer of that sceneóto you. But in the present map of the world, the self-same photo might simply be readable as an image of the random Brownian motion of individuals present in the same unit of space-time, and adding up only to numbers, not to ìsociety.î Without a sense of the social, only the personal remains, and a look at the merely personal is an invitation to voyeurism. Voyeurism as a naked motive for photography is increasingly expressed and rewarded, in both art and mass culture. The art world is not immune from the rhetoric of demonization of immigrants and the poor, and galleries and museums are revoking their former discreet avoidance of sensationalistic and tendentious images of poor people. Finding favor as well are colorful images reminiscent of club-world journalism, which displaces the kind of color work that was first allowed through art-world gatesónamely, melancholy images of urban and small-town landscapes, often of the American South or postindustrial New England, blank empty places of special cachet. What has also captured attentionóparticularly in Europeóis a deskilled ìslackerî aesthetic of blurry, informal photos, often of conglomerations of people doing nothing much. This flashy casualness, patently influenced by and feeding back into fashion, suggests the way in which photography is seen to describe the postmodern social. I will use as my example the work of the English artist Richard Billingham, discovered as a student of painting in an art school not many years ago. In exhibiting, textless, in commercial galleries and museums, his greatly enlarged instant-camera color photos of his drunken father and brother and his rot-toothed mother, in their sorry council-house flat, Billinghamówho won instant fame and the patronage of Charles Saatchi and a hungering pack of international collectorsómay be taken as illustrating the collapse of the tattered but still widely upheld art-world stance of generalized humanism and noblesse oblige. Promoters praise his freak show as a form of poetryóthus, nothing but self-expression, following the argument, referred to earlier, meant to rescue street photography from seeming simply predatory. Billinghamís book of these photosówhose only text is a short descriptive blurb on the dust jacketóis called, appropriately enough, Rayís a Laugh.15 Ray is Dad, and, yes, Oedipal rage is on view. If the identities sketched out here are those of working-class people in postindustrial Britain, they are not being described by admirers; drunks always appear as self-produced permanent losers, not as victims of someone or something. Mr. Billingham is just a convenientóif rather egregiousóexample, anointed as part of art-world's absorption of certain photographic practices. Despite this further step along the road of artists' pantomimes of social disengagement, it is important to reiterate that documentary is not primarily an art-world practiceóalthough, as I have noted, art-world practices have the ability to capture center stage, displacing an interest in documentary among potential future documentarians as well as viewers and critics. But plenty of people are still producing documentary images, despite the loss of stable avenues of dissemination, and it is up to us in the audience to prevent them from being submerged by those on the other side of an ethical and political divide. The terrible element here is the need to reel off a list of names, leaving out scores of others. I briefly offer the names of a small number of practitioners out of very many, including some highly traditional work along with the less traditional: Fred Lonidier, Allan Sekula, Dona Ann McAdams, Susan Meiselas, Deborah Bright, Phil Steinmetz, Nancy Buchanan, Reagan Louie, Judith Crawley, Mel Rosenthal, Steve Cagan, Ken Light, Milton Rogovin, Sophie Rivera, Earl Dotter, Marilyn Nance, Miriam Romais, Dan Higgins, JEB, Cathy Cade, Catherine Opie, Lisa Lewenz, Julio Nazario, Jeff Gates, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, and with an even less traditional form of image making, Carol CondÈ and Karl Beveridge, Kaucyila Brooke, Anita Sperber, Hulleah T. Tsinhnahjinnie, Greg Sholette, Juan S·nchez, and Patrick Nagatani. I close by recapitulating some of the arguments of the present essay. First, documentary, a polarizing practice that must inevitably provoke opposition, is perpetually teetering on the brink of its demise. Those hostile to the demands of ìcrusadingî documentary may find it easiest to call for its end, ironically enough, in the name of ethics and ìresponsibility.î Second, as postmodernists claim, demands for ìstraight informationî without interpretation are unrealistic, for there is no voice from outside particular human communities. Strict objectivity, a goal derived from journalistic ethics, may prove an inappropriate ideal for documentaryóas documentarians already knowóbut so is the alibi of personalization, sentiment, or disengagement. Third, the partial melding of the photographic audience and its subjects has put great pressure on the institutionalized methodologies of documentary, for interpretation has become contested. Finally, the art-world embrace of photography can squeeze documentary to deathóor maybe Iíve got cause and effect reversed, for it could be that all of photography is already a nostalgic craft, given the explosion of computer-based manipulations. So why continue to defend documentary? The short answer is, because we need it, and because it likely will continue, with or without art-world theorizing. As the division widens between rich and poor (and as art practices are institutionalized and academicized), there is less and less serious analysis of the lives of those on the wrong side of that great divide. My embrace of postmodernism does not extend to the idea of a world with no coherent explanation of differential social power or advocacy of ways to right the imbalance. Explanation and advocacy are still as reasonable in photography as in word-based journalism. Documentary's best course, it seems to me, is not to "speak for" another but to provide a balance between observing the situation of others and expressing one's own point of view16ówhich ought to include some form of analytic framework identifying social causes and proposing remedies. In pursuit of this, documentary must, as always, negotiate between sensationalism on the one hand and instrumentalism on the other. As I began with a quotation from Grierson, it seems appropriate to end with one: A mirror held up to nature is not so important in a dynamic and fast-changing society as the hammer which shapes itóit is as a hammer, not a mirror, that I have sought to use the medium that came to my somewhat restive hand. 17 This essay was originally published in Samuel P. Harn Eminent Scholars Lecture Series in the Visual Arts, 1996-1997, Gainesville: College of Fine Arts and Harn Museum, University of Florida, 1998 (1999). With other essays by Michael Brenson, Elizabeth Brou, and Douglas Crimp. It was republished in Photo.doc: Dokumentteja dokumentarmista/Documents of Documentary Photography, Helsinki: Musta Taide, 2000. Notes John Grierson, in Documentary News Letter, quoted in James Beveridge, John Grierson, Film Master (New York & London: Macmillan and Collier, 1978), p. 178, and in Forsyth Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 249. Grierson was no revolutionary but a proponent of democratic participation who believed that imagination was needed to help citizens make sense of events and of the news. I cite him here because his influence has been so pervasive. 2. Most histories of photography (and some histories of documentary film and video) tend to take a position of technological determinism in which the development of new and ever lighter, more portable, more automatic apparatuses of reproduction determine what kinds of things can be photographed or filmed and thus what will be photographed or filmed. Technological change does not, in my estimation drive social events; rather, technological developments are accomplished within a framework of social imperatives, although in practice this is a complex relationship in which technology also organizes experience and functions as a means of social control. 3. By no means do all such conflicts hinge on what we have come to call identity; shared experience, such as being involved in a strike, having a certain kind of job, or living in a certain neighborhood, are also the sorts of things documentary might address but which are not, in the present understanding, primary identities. Furthermore, postcolonial discourse has highlighted the very instability of identitiesóand not only ethnic or national onesópointing out that they are constructed by the universes of discourse that we inhabit, and we assuredly inhabit more than one. 4. As an aside, I note that it is an oversimplification to treat the appeal of documentary as always from one group or class to another. Nevertheless, most documentary practices presuppose a mass-market model, in which elites with the power to produce and disseminate messages will, through a gate-keeping process, direct them to nonelites. 5. Arthur Rothstein, Words and Pictures (New York: Amphoto, 1979). 6. A small motion toward its use in this manner, in the case of the London charity for street children run by Dr. Barnardo, came to a litigious end, which I do not have the space to discuss here. See my ìIn, Around and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography,î in Martha Rosler: 3 Works (Nova Scotia, College of Art and Design Press, 1981), reprinted in this volume. 7. There is a further problem, according to Meisterís analysis, in identifying the perpetrators of social oppression with its beneficiaries. Using the recent conflict in Rwanda as an example, it can be argued that the perpetrators of the genocide were not its beneficiaries. In South Africa, where the beneficiaries (most whites) were not the perpetrators (those who operated the police state), meaningful structural reform may be thwarted when the beneficiaries of oppression are asked to shoulder the collective guilt implied by redistribution of wealth and poweróa viewpoint echoed in the United States in arguments attacking affirmative-action policies. 8. What I mean by "the privileging of the apparatusî is simply this: in the absence of hints of unreliability, people believe what the image shows. In the so-called amateur videotapes picked up by news media for use in high-profile court cases, such as the Rodney King case, the apparatus is seen as the primary actor and witness, and its operator is forgotten. 9. A fuller account would detail the origins of ìstreet photographyî as an outgrowth of documentary and allied with war photography. Further, there were professional photojournalists before the turn of the century, including the American Frances Benjamin Johnston, most of whose work was imbued with the Progressive ideals of the era. Friendly with ruling Republican elites, she produced sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans, Southern blacks, and women workers intended to promote their incorporation into the mainstream of the American working class; that this practice occludes difference and supports the now-discredited practice of radical separation of native peoples and ìminoritiesî from traditional languages and practices hardly needs to be said. 10. As suggested earlier, as time passes the news value of images loses currency, and news images, documentary photos, and photographs taken on story assignments are all judged by similar aesthetic criteria. Further, very few people can make a living from self-chosen projects. Finally, photojournalists and documentarians are constantly seeking greater control over dissemination of their work. And many documentary photographers make their living from commercial work and are likely to employ their signature styles, muddying the waters. 11. See, for example, Robert Aibel, ìEthics and Professionalism in Documentary Film-Making,î in Larry Gross et al., Image Ethics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), on a film of a rural U.S. auction, in which the subject was unrelated to politicized issues of class, race, gender, wealth, or social or political power. 12. In the United States, though not elsewhere, the ìrules of engagementî are such that most photographers in public situations donít stop to obtain permission from those they photograph, and a personís failure to object immediately is taken as acquiescence. Those making news photographs are not legally obligated to seek permission. 13. In Through Indian Eyes. The 1970s Australian film Two Laws, made with aboriginal collaboration, was produced on this model, with clear political intent. 14. This is not to suggest that people are unequipped to describe or understand their own situations, but only a reminder that there is a dimension of oneís own situation and behavior that is not available to consciousness, not to mention the comparative knowledge that others may bring to a situation. 15. Milan: Scalo, 1996. 16. This trope is increasingly evident in documentary film and video, in modern reflexive documentaries and diaristic films and in web-based works which appear more and more like glossily produced magazine articles with live interviews and spoken commentary. 17. Quoted in James Beveridge, ed., John Grierson, Film Master (New York and London: Macmillan and Collier, 1978), n.p.