camera truth

“Surveyors and the surveyed.”

The text primarily establishes the idea of one’s desire (society’s desire) for a medium mainly engaged with “accurate transcription of reality”. (68) This desire is fulfilled in the mechanical process of the camera, a process characterized by an autonomous action of light upon a sensitive field. However even with such swimmingly detached technology we can not escape the subjectivity inherent in our human condition. The “Surveyors and the surveyed” tries to dissect this condition and at the same time briefly introduce development of documentary photography within our culture. It starts with initial idea of photograph as an objective media, and then moves towards criticism of such simplistic idea, urging the reader to view the process of photography as a construction of reality and not just its capture. With such criticism, and perhaps cautionary advice towards the reader, the text moves through four major fields of documentary photography, trying to define the role of the camera and that of the photographer in this medium. The reader is first greeted with reflection upon the pictures of the “other”, a trend concurrent to the emergence of the photographic technology, where early documentarists collected images of that most alien to them, simply because they could augment their own memories of the bizarre through this innovative process. As we progress through the text, we often stumble over the idea of the other, in both the social justice realm of documentary photography as well as war photography, it is only when we reach the FSA period when we start to see photography trying to depict, us, the usual. Here documentary photography becomes educational, in a cense of showing us, the viewer, of who we really are.
As rational as this account of development of documentary photography is, I often find myself disagreeing with the placement, and notion of “the other” and “self” in its history. It is problematic, in my mind, to separate the photographer and his subject since both influence each other, and there fore even pictures of “the other” become a testament of self. Surveyors and the surveyed briefly address this question in the discussion of Jacob Riis, and his unorthodox approach toward candid photography. However even his work was widely criticized with regard to objectivity. Once again we come to the question regarding the camera’s potential to depict reality, and I would say that even though the image can be, and often is, manipulated by the photographer or the circumstance it is still remains pristine fore we ourselves manipulate reality (refuse to see what is really there) without any aid from various devises.

Artur out

P.S. picture by ~escrimador of www.deviantart.com. Makes me think of what would photographs of a child be like.