Documentary Photography as a Medium![]() In response to the question "do photographs tell the truth?" American sociologist Howard Becker illustrates the impossibility to answer simply "yes:" In so far as the artistic intention interferes with the photographer's evidentiary use, it does so by affecting the selection and presentation of details, so that some things are not shown, some details are emphasized at the expense of others and thus suggest relationships and conclusions without actually giving good cause for believing them, and by presenting details in such a way (through manipulation of lighting or the style of printing, for instance) as to suggest one mood rather than anotherFeatherstone 43). As head of the project and final reviewer of each negative, Stryker found no ethical problem in posing subjects or changing the surroundings in order to point out "a known social or economic problem" (Davis 17). And Dorothea Lange, his most famous FSA photographer, once went so far as to admit that she tried to capture not just an image but a mood. The other FSA photographers displayed a wide range of attitudes towards what their role was in the making of an image. Ben Shahn often shot poor farmers from above, refusing them much dignity and stressing the almost hopelessness of their plight. In shooting her famous migrant mother, Lange purposely removed the woman's husband and five of her seven children in what Allen F. Davis calls the projects constant desire "to conform to the dominant cultural values of the urban middle class" (vii-ix). Walker Evans was the most renown for his refusal to manipulate an image in any way and his repeated assertions that he subverted his art for the simple depiction of a moment. Still Evans brought his own prejudices and techniques to his work and because of this Davis argues Evans' was most dangerous because he helped "to perpetuate popular misconceptions that cameras do not lie and photographs are true" (23). |
||||||||
![]() Floyd Burroughs, Walker Evans, Hale County, Alabama. | ||||||||
It is extremely difficult to come terms with how manipulatable a medium
documentary photography is simply by addressing common prejudices; to
really understood how malleable an image and a photography can be it is
necessary to study particular photos. Evans' famous image of Floyd
Burroughs (actually George Gudger) headlines this page and has come to
represent an iconic image of the inextinguishable endurance--even in
the face of disaster--of the southern pioneer. It is important to
know, however, that this image, one that Stryker chose to circulate all
throughout the country, is only one of dozens of Gudger and his family.
A second one, presented to the right, shows Gudger displacing a much
less comforting expression. It is not the same tattered and unshaven
man millions of Americans have come to know through his hard, plaintive
yet anxious stare but instead a more complex figure. His neat
appearance and the wry look on his face make him appear cynical--almost
laughing--a much more difficult stance to reconcile with a struggling
farmer, especially a struggling farmer in need of government money.
His face turned slightly downward almost hints at condescension. This
photo, not surprisingly, was not chosen for the collection. Another
photo of Evans captures Burroughs with his family, his arms around them
in a classic pose of unity and happiness. "This George Gudger," Stott
states, "needs no one's pity" (qtd. in Brannan & Fleischhauer 21). The
same could be said of the George Gudger at the right. This image and
the one of Gudger and his family, Lawrence W. Levine argues, comprise
"an important part of the reality of the thirties that we can ignore
only at great cost to our understanding of the self-images and the
aspirations of people like the" Gudgers (Brannan & Fleischhauer 22).
|
||||||||
![]() Three photos of a Mississippi plantation owner, Walker Evans. |
These pictures represent three images of a Clarksdale, Mississippi
plantation owner taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936. The one on the far
right was the most famous of the FSA shots; the center marked a far
less publicized member of the FSA file, and the right-most one was a
cropped image of the left one used in Archibald MacLeish's famous
photo-documentary and poem Land of the Free. The left image is a
very powerful one, the plantation owner struck in a very dominating
pose with his black workers looking on very much in the background. By
its arrangement the photo insists that the supposedly 70-year-old dead
system of slavery is in many ways very much alive--the image's
existence marks a sad commentary on the life of poor southern blacks
and on America. The cropped image on the right, however, completely
removes this focus. Without the blacks in the background, the
plantation owner becomes, like Floyd Burroughs, an image of the proud,
indomitable American spirit. In what John Rogers Puckett calls "a
blatant distortion of the image," MacLeish further violates the image
when his poem on the facing page talks about Americans hard earned
freedom (Puckett 51). "MacLeish finds a photograph symbolic of black
oppression and changes it into a sympathetic portrait of rural America
ruminating about freedom" (Puckett 53). The center image in the above
collage at first boasts a remarkable similarity to the famous one on
the left. The differences in the photos are miniscule, almost entirely
composed of a slightly different photo angle and a minor downward turn
of the plantation owner's head. The emotional response to the two
pictures, however, is drastically different. With his head turned
down, the owner looks sad, downtrodden, even defeated. The blacks in
the background suddenly do not look as small and take on a greater role
in the photograph. Not surprisingly, MacLeish did not use this photo
to talk about the glory of American victories of freedom, nor did
Stryker assign it a prominent place in the FSA collection. Critic A.D. Coleman once remarked how unique it was that "there is a branch of photography concerned with justifying the medium's credibility" (qtd. Davis vii), and Stryker and his photographers strove throughout their careers to insist that the photos did represent some real truth. Still even Stryker had to admit that the photographer's prejudices often entered in to the creation of an image, making the photos part enduring cultural record and part propaganda. And in depicting the uniqueness of America's regions, photography once again saw the interplay of truth and propaganda.
Suggested Reading
![]() Maintained by Pat Brady Last Modified: May 10, 1999 |