Re[2]: [Leica] Salgado - Simply The Best?? Talk amongst yourselves

[Bob Walkden <bob@web-options.com>]

Hi,

> Well, I see where this could deteriorate pretty quickly...but...

it seems to have started already...

> I wasn't suggesting comparing documentary and "art" photographers. What
> I was suggesting is that documentary photography can definitely have
> artistic, as well as social, value, and I for one think that Salgado's
> work is an example of that.

I have a small bee in my bonnet about the relationship between photography,
particularly reportage, and art. It's quite a long argument, which I
haven't really got time to go into in detail at the moment unfortunately,
but I'll try and sketch some of the salient points.

My first point is that photographers (or at least, people on photography
discussion lists and in photography magazines) seem to feel a sense of
inferiority towards Art-with-a-capital-A and hanker after art status. This
is curious because the history of art (I mean specifically painting) since
the birth of photography has been a headlong flight away from photography.
Photography turned painting upside by usurping its representational role.
By and large the philosophy of art until then had been about
representationalism; photography caused a crisis and ever since then art
has been in search of a coherent philosophy, which it hasn't yet found.

For photography to engage with the art world it must engage with the avant
garde, but in my opinion the avant garde and reportage photography are
mutually exclusive by virtue of what they are trying to do, so reportage
photography considered as art could only be bad art. There are, of course,
artists using photographs as a medium, such as Wolfgang Tillmans, but this
doesn't mean that all photography can or should be considered in art terms
any more than Chris Ophili's (sp?) use of elephant dung as a medium means
that all of Dumbo's droppings can or should be treated as Art.

Without wishing to get involved in a long discussion about the philosophy
of art, it seems likely that the only coherent definition of Art is that it
is a long conversation with its own history. So an object has art status if
and only if it is a connected part of that conversation. We can determine
whether or not it is good or bad art by the quality of its contribution to
the conversation. I don't believe that reportage photography as practiced
by Nachtwey, Salgado et al. is (or even should be) part of that
conversation, and if it is then it is almost certainly bad Art.

My own opinion is that reportage photography has no need of Art status. It
seems to me that reportage is what photography does supremely well, that it
does this better than it does anything else, and that nothing else does
reportage as well as photography - although reportage writing comes close.
This is because it exploits the unique quality of photography, which is
believability. However sophisticated we are, and however much we know that
the camera does lie, we still believe in the representational power of
photography. Anybody who thinks this is false should try replacing their
passport photo with a miniature oil painting and see how many countries
they can get into. Most art photography goes against the properties of the
medium and as a result becomes both bad art and bad photography, just as a
watercolour which tried to be an oil would be highly unlikely to succeed.

So to claim that reportage photography has artistic value, but then not to
talk about in the same terms that apply to the rest of the art world, is
contradictory. If Salgado's work has artistic value then we should talk
about that aspect of his work in the same terms as we talk about Tillman's
work, which, at least in my opinion, would be a category error.

Another option, which is the one I choose to take, is to consider reportage
as not part of the art world, and in no need of art status. I think it
stands on its own 3 legs.

> As I'm sure you know, there are in fact
> those who think that he work is "too beautiful" and because of that
> loses its documentary value.

Indeed. I don't have any patience with that point of view.

One of the major causes of confusion in people's minds when it comes to
considering photography and art, is that they share a vocabulary, namely
the vocabulary of visual literacy - they both use colour, form, tone,
texture, perspective and so on - but they use them to different purposes.

> I, too, seriously doubt that their purpose is to have an impact on
> photography. That doesn't mean that they don't have one, and it doesn't
> mean that that impact isn't meaningful and important.

Possibly, but as a general rule documentary photographers are very
conservative in the way they show their subjects. Robert Frank of course
was a glaring exception to this, but I think that Salgado isn't. His
compositional techniques and his general style are very conservative indeed
(albeit impressive) and strongly influenced by the tradition of Western
religious art. The word that people come up with time and time again to
describe his work is 'biblical' - to such an extent that it's a tired old
cliche itself. What they mean by this is that a great deal of his work
recalls paintings of Madonnas, depositions from the cross, pietas and so
forth. They work very well and communicate very effectively on an emotional
level because of these references, but they are deeply conservative and
only a documentary photographer could get away with it. If an art
photographer, or indeed any other artist, tried to make use of the same
devices they would have to do it in an ironic, post-modern way to avoid
accusations of (unintentional) kitsch.

And these are not the only expressive devices he uses, of course. Many of
his pictures, particularly those of workers, use the same techniques as
Socialist Realism to depict the heroic nature of manual work and are very
successful because of this in provoking our responses. This is not a
criticism of what he does - I admire his work as much as anybody else - but
I don't think he's stretching the envelope or moving photography forward,
whatever that means, in the way that people like Frank or Hank did.

> BTW - As you were talking about the impossibility of defining
> documentary photography...I would suggest that HCB isn't really a
> documentary photographer. He has done some documentary photography, but
> somehow I don't see him in that camp.

Well, I agree with you about that, but as the Devil's Advocate it would
probably be a straightforward matter to come up with a definition of
documentary photography that includes him, or confuses the subject to such
an extent that further discussion is rendered impossible. It's largely a
matter of labels, and doesn't really affect what the photographer actually
does. Capa understood this when he advised Hank to call himself a
photojournalist rather than an artist.

Incidentally, I prefer the term reportage to describe what Salgado,
Nachtwey and so on do. I think this term includes documentary photography
as a specialised category, and also includes what HCB does. But this
definition of terms is a rather dull discussion about which shoe-boxes to
put things in, and doesn't affect the things themselves in any way.
Unfortunately people often end up arguing about the shoe-boxes and losing
sight of the photographs.

Cheers,

Bob