Clarke, The Photograph, Chapter 8: Documentary Photography, 1997

Arthur Rothstein 1936 Oklahoma Fleeing a Dust Storm

Where Clarke finds portraiture ambiguous, and the nude contentious, documentary is misleading.  Linguistically it is based on a medieval word for a piece of paper providing evidence.   The ability of the camera to reproduce reality led to the idea that the camera never lies, that a photograph is a kind of evidence of past events.  Clarke uses the American FSA project to argue otherwise.  This was a government funded scheme intended to document conditions of the working poor and which fed into Roosevelt's political designs by creating public support for public works projects.  While much of the work is beautiful and produced some of Americas iconic images, it is clear the photographers, and the agency, were not out to document what they found, but to find what they hoped to document.

The idea that the camera could not lie not persisted, Clarke sees it, right up until the publication of Frank's The Americans, a collection of photos that redefined American documentary photography by using traditional symbols in a new, "bleak and gloomy" way.   This sense of lost innocence is reflected as well in war photography.  Images of horror and pain have led to "a sense of moral exhaustion" in which "war photography has increasingly reflected a sense of underlying meaninglessness."  This cynicism has been fed by public knowledge of the ability of photographers to create images,  leading to a condition in which "documentary" as a term for any kind of photography has become suspect.

Another fine example of Clarke's verbal opacity, this time on Frank's "Parade:"  The American flag...eclipses the wall (and the figures), and has a poetic immutability so that the surface imagery conspires to suggest the period's inner condition in the way we meet it in Diane Arbus." 

In discussing photographer George Rodger, Clarke mentions "one of his best known images" - which is not included in the text!

#