Documentary Photography as a Medium
As movie theaters continued to expand, the first picture magazines such
as Life, Look, and Fortune sprung up, and even
ballets and presidential addresses took on a documentary slant, the
1930s marked an age where documentary and the photograph grabbed a
unique hold on the cultural consciousness of America. But what were
the people to make of these photos? Were they, as Stryker, argued
"truth," a frozen moment in time? (qtd. in Stott 14) Or were they,
too, more manipulatable and manipulative, subject to many of the same
biases as literature and painting? A look at the definition of
documentary photography as a whole and its particular development in
the thirties will begin to answer these questions. In his
Documentary Expression in Thirties America, William Stott argues
there are two types of documents. The first, which documents official
information, has little cultural significance beyond an historical and
intellectual level. The second more humanistic form of documentary,
however, appeals to the emotions and hence garners an even greater
power. "A document, when human," Stott states, "is the opposite of the
official kind; it is not objective but thoroughly personal" (7). The
photographs of the FSA fall securely in the second group and hence
possess all the opportunities for interpretation and manipulation that
any appeal to the emotions must feature.
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 another
Featherstone
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).
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Floyd Burroughs, Walker Evans, Hale County, Alabama. |
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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).
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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.
Works Cited and
Suggested Reading
Maintained by Pat Brady
Last Modified: May 10, 1999 |
