You may or may not have noticed before that every image I post on the blog gets categorized in two ways – firstly as either colour or monochrome (that’s pretty straight forward) and then according to what type of shot it is – architecture, detail, landscape, portrait, sports, wedding or wildlife. This is a little less straight forward sometimes, and I’ve often thought about reworking these categories, or adding new ones. The one that consistently comes to mind to add is “documentary”, but I never have done. To explain why I need to answer the question: “what is documentary photography?”
People’s answers to that question might differ, and I’m sure there are photographers who call themselves documentary photographers who would have strong feelings about what is (or perhaps more significantly, what isn’t) documentary photography. So to try to remain on the fence for now, let’s look at what Wikipedia defines it as:
“Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle significant and historical events. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or student pursuit. The photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually candid photography of a particular subject, most often pictures of people.”
So that’s probably not too controversial a definition, and its one I would largely agree with. I say “largely” because I’m not sure about the emphasis on pictures of people. I think pictures of places and things can be equally important in documenting a time or an event. Also, and I suspect not all would agree with me here, when it comes to pictures of people I think that the most truthful images are likely to be those which are candid – in that the subject, while perhaps aware of the presence of a camera and the possibility of being photographed, is not aware in the instant the photograph is taken that it is being captured. A person who knows the instant in which their photograph is being taken will almost always, in my experience at least, adapt their behaviour, expression, mannerism – even unknowingly, and often in very minor ways – to account for that. It may not amount to them posing as such, but is it fair to suggest that any alteration in the subject due to the taking of the photo means that the photo itself is no longer a wholly honest capture? Perhaps this is taking it all a bit too far, but where a truly candid photograph can be taken, I suspect it’s more likely to be a honest representation, and therefore by definition, closer to a true documentary photograph than, say, just a portrait.
The emphasis on truthfulness and objectiveness in the definition above would suggest to me that such photographs have to be created without artisitic expression on behalf of the photographer, for as soon as the photographer imposes any of his or her artistic flair on the image it ceases to be objective. Again, I’m probably over-stating this and it requires a more subtle interpretation, but it is probably fair to say that most good documentary photography is good not because of anything artistic – for instance the use of depth of field or lighting or shutter speed – but purely because of the subject.
I do feel that documentary photography can take in more than just portraits. A detail shot (like the one above, without people, but showing a scene during the Great Ireland run in the Phoenix Park last year) has value as a documentary shot in my opinion, and so too can a landscape, or a wedding photograph. So why I don’t class images as documetary when categorizing them is that I see that as a super-class which would itself need to be broken down.
By the way, how all of this came to mind is that I was looking at an excellent website called Dublin Documentary which is maintained by, amongst others, some of my fellow Dublin Camera Club members, and is well worth a look to see some really interesting and insightful images of Dublin and its people.
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