Response to Rosler

In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography) by Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler’s piece on documentary photography was very critical of the documentarian albeit accepting of the inevitability of documentarians photographing everything in sight. Overall, I enjoyed the text, but I thought she was a little bit too critical on the practice.

One of Rosler’s contentions is that documentary photography is to some degree unnecessary or wrong; she states, speaking of the New York Times story featuring documentary-style images from Walker Evans, that the reader learns 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.” (page 4)

However, Rosler includes the other side of this argument, which is Szarkowski’s quote that the documentary photographer’s “aim has not been to reform life, but to know it.” (page 5) Rosler comes back again criticizing Szarkowski’s allowance of moral separation from the subject (namely in the case of Vietnam War photographers)

Rosler’s other thought is that “[t]he credibility of the image as the explicit trace of the comprehensible in the living world has been whittled away,” as exemplified by the story of the staged picture by Erwitt. (page 4) Though she compliments his apparently evident photographic ability, she jabs at the fact that "[t]he man pedaled back and forth nearly 30 times till Erwitt achieved the ideal composition.

mikey smith