On Documentary Photography

Its allegorical nature in postmodernism

Assignment Essay

Post Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Photography

HKUSPACE, Hong Kong

Peter Lam, 31 August 2020

Are all photographs documentary in nature?

With its lens optics and chemical processes combined, photography intrinsically has the nature of being objective in portraying the real world. There is always an allegory that any image is a truthful depiction of some real-world human, living creature, artefact, architecture or landscape that once stood in front of the camera lens.

Tate defines documentary photography as:

a style of photography that provides a straightforward and accurate representation of people, places, objects and events, and is often used in reportage

Any personal amateurish images may become candidates for documentary photos. Be it one year, decade or century, as time goes on, a photograph automatically acquires some sort of significance in its historicity. Such nature need not be any historic event or famous person captured on the photo, time — and very often the passage of time alone — is the only criterion that turns any old photo into a documentary.

(left) “L’Eclipse, avril 1912” (1912) Eugène Atget. (right) Gazers of Partial Solar Eclipse in Hong Kong (2020) (credits: Alamy)

“L’Eclipse, avril 1912” by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) was an unintentional documentary. Atget is a French photographer of the late 19th century. His signature series was his tranquil and serene street photos of Paris. Partially because Atget shot stock photos as reference for painters, there were hardly any people in the scene. “L’Eclipse” was one of his exceptions, having people on the street as his subject matter. Within the photo, dozens of decently well-dressed men, women, boys and girls were gazing towards the sky in front of the landmark department store at Place de la Bastille , each holding a dark glass, squinting at the solar eclipse. Although the sun was not shown in the photo, the common gesture of the group and the very nature of this celestial event, instantly turned the photo into a documentary. A precise date can even be inferred — April 17, 1912.

What then is documentary photography? There must be elements other than capturing an historic event, more than just story-telling, more than a candid capture of people and their acts. Documentary photography is more than snapshot-style street photography.

(left) “The Migrant Mother” (1936) Dorothea Lange. (right) “A woman waits for a bucket to fill from a standpipe” (1959) Chung Man Lurk

The Farm Security Administration was an agency under the Department of Agriculture of the United States to combat rural poverty, best known for its photography images documenting the suffering of farmers during the harsh 1930s due to the double-hit of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl . Lange and his later-on husband Paul Taylor, a social scientist also in the FSA study, did thorough documentation in both text and images of farmers. The couple travelled to rural farms, spent time interviewing the famers, to have candid photos taken, and words jotted down. These snippets of the farmers’ grievance, concerns and aspiration can be found hand-written on developed photos. Lange and Taylor’s work was well documented and later published in 1939, the famous photo-essay book “An American Exodus”.

Perhaps one of Lange’s most iconic documentary photographs is the “Migrant Mother”. The Library of Congress gives a more detailed account of the misfortunate mother with an official title “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California”. The 4x5” black-and-white image is both compassionate and empathic, even tears-triggering perhaps to many.

Must documentary photography tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Yet, further research tells another story. Contrary to the title, the “Migrant Mother” Florence Thompson was not a “migrant” but a local Californian. Worse, her somber gesture failed to reveal that Thompson was an activist in farm-labour struggle in the 1930s. Worst, the famous photo provided no immediate financial relief to her family. (Library of Congress 2003)

This portrait of Thompson and her children was nothing candid but staged. Lange took no less than five photographs of Thompson and only the one showing her disillusioned gaze, head resting on her hand, got world famous. (Meister 2020)

Should this widely-considered documentary photograph “Migrant Woman” be interpreted as a publicity of FSA’s relief programmes and measures? The dual nature, arguably, may have twisted the truthfulness of what Lange’s photograph is supposed to depict.

Were staging forbidden, Lange’s example would barely pass this threshold, given that all her photos were all taken with believable authenticity — real places, real people and real events. The staging involved is unnoticeable to many, and may arguably be considered as her chosen perspective in documenting facts. This subtlety, however, turned documentary

photos from passively taking an event on scene, to a directed portrayal of the photographer's preferred image.

After World War Two

Unlike Lange’s solemn approach, Agnès Varda (1921-2019) defines a different style of documentary, with emphasis on aesthetics and visual imagery.

Varda is an important filmmaker in the post-war era. Originally trained as a photographer, she earned her fame in the late 1950s in filmmaking, and even more on her influence in the French New Wave film movement. Varda shoots both drama and documentary, and she often applies her still photography skills in the direction and cinematography of her films.

(left) Still shot in “Daguerréotypes” of two butchers. (1976) Agnès Varda. (middle) A daguerreotype print of two butchers. (c. late 19th century) Unknown photographer, (right) Boucherie, Rue Christine. (b 1895-1927) Eugène Atget.

In her 1976 documentary “Daguerréotypes”, Varda introduces her neighbours living on Rue Daguerre . Rather than having an ethnographical portrayal of the 4 shopkeepers on Rue Daguerre as an outsider, Varda is an insider. They are individuals she interacts with everyday. Everybody knows everybody else well. Staying in their own locale, everybody

behaves naturally in front of Varda’s camera.

There are a lot of posed shots, lasting several seconds much like still photographs, fairly stereotypical in nature, styled much like the classic daguerreotype print (only in colour), of ordinary people — butcher, barber, baker — yet none of these shots are sentimental as the film title implies the 19th century typological photographs of les petits métiers5, quite on the contrary, they are “charming”, “pleasant” and “affectionate” depictions of her beloved neighbours. (DeRoo 2017).

Varda challenges the government-led urban renewal that threatens the livelihood of Rue Daguerre. Her reference to Atget’s typological photos of the minor-tradesman poses an ultimate challenge to its so-called “objectivity” — a 19th century outdated misnomer to read one’s inner characters and social position through external traits, clothing and

accessories. (DeRoo 2017).

These ordinary people are not “types” per se living on Rue Daguerre but Varda’s real neighbours. In her own words, she wants them to forget the existence of the camera when making this documentary (Taylor 2010) depicting their everyday lives.

“[0:10] ... Because in front of the camera, people behave differently, that’s what documentary is so exciting to make because even if you think they’ll do that, you know what they do, you know their work, in front of the camera, something comes out of people, and if you can catch that, it’s very exciting...

[1:55] … I was impressed by my neighbours, my real neighbours, shopkeepers, the

people like you can enter, I mean it’s in a shop you can go, you don’t have to ask, you

don’t have to make a special [appointment] before going…

[3:09] … I mean just have [people] exist, get the best you can get. Now, I’m speaking

about making that image in which they may know they are filmed but they forget about it,

so they let themselves forget about the camera. ”

Varda keeps creating documentary and fiction movies in her long career. She is often considered as an avant garde before the postmodernism movement is in full swing.

Postmodernism

Traditional photographic prints have to be developed and fixed, but ironically, contemporary photographic art is never fixated to any norms and keeps developing.

By the 1970s, the postmodernism movement was budding in all realms of art. Postmodernism is characterised by its skepticism towards rationality and objective reality. There was no exception to photographic art.

Yale Professor and art critic Craig Owens (1950-1990) identifies one of the most important aspects of postmodern theory is allegory (1980). The rhetoric of applying metaphors in a continuous series is nothing new in literature, but its suppression in modern aesthetics theory makes it all the more reviving in the postmodernism movement.

Owens further identifies six linkages of allegory with contemporary art, including 1. appropriation 2. site specificity 3. impermanence 4. accumulation 5. discursivity and 6. hybridization. Adopted singly or as combinations, these characteristics are fairly apparent and commonplace in postmodernist artwork, that distinguish themselves from the modernist predecessors.6

Appropriation

Owens (1980) asserts that “allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery”. Whoever allegorises need not invent but confiscates images from others.

All allegories reference something in the past, no matter an idea, event, person or place. In photography, this reference may be juxtaposing old and new work, rephotography7, embedding, or straight copying. Artists do so to comment, critique, or sometimes construct a complete new meaning out of the original. Yet, to appropriate is equivalent to take without consent. It sounds absurd to promote creativity by endorsing such an unethical act.

Is there any ethics in appropriation?

Richard Prince (1949-), an American painter and photographer, is a controversial figure in the contemporary art scene. “A prophet of current dystopian American culture”, “a lawless artist who mixes work without permission”, “synonymous with appropriation” (Spector 2019) — with such notoriety, one would expect Prince constantly hitting roadblocks in his career

path.

Habitually, his photos see work of others, from an artefact within his work to an outright rephotography as a “subliminal and sublime commentaries on pop culture” (GQ 2010). Naked girl is a repeating theme, be she a real sitter or images appropriated from other sources.

His infamous “Spiritual America” in 1983, a rephotograph of Brook Shields’ 8 (1965-) nude photo9, got warned by the Scotland Yard on grounds of bleaching obscenity laws, forcing Tate Modern to remove it from an exhibition just before opening to the public. (Guardian 2009)

His “Canal Zone” series of paintings in 2008, based on Patrick Cariou’s (1963-) photographs of Rastafarians10 in Jamaica, dragged him into a six-year legal battle. (Boucher 2014)

His “New Portraits” 11 in 2014, which are oversized prints of mostly young women from his Instagram feed, drew criticism of the sitters, for not being sought for their consent in public display of their images. Both the gallery and Prince were sued by the original photographers for infringing their copyrighted works. (Guardian 2014, Fashion Law 2014)

(top left) cropped image of “Spiritual America” (1983) Richard Prince (top middle) untitled. A twinning photo of a naked girl holding an appropriated image of another naked girl (c 2014) (top right) installation of “New Portraits” in Gagosian Gallery (2014) Richard Prince (bottom left) photo from the “Canal Zone” series (2008) Richard Prince (bottom middle) Original (2000) and appropriated photo (2008) of a Rastafarian, Patrick Cariou and Richard Prince (bottom right) untitled (aka “sticker shock”) (2012) Richard Prince.

It is intriguing how Prince considers appropriation. In an Interview by Guggenheim Museum, Prince introduced his rephotography as “electronic scissors”. Once the existing images are rephotographed, the resulting image is “seamless, [having] no glue, no scotch tape. The page of magazine would become alive.” His practice was commented to “[unleash] the unconscious[ness] of the photographs” so that “hyperrealism [would be] brought to the forth.” (Spector 2019)

If that is not intriguing enough, see how Prince (1977) manifests his style of rephotography and his understanding of appropriation:

Rephotography is a technique for stealing (pirating) already existing images, simulating rather than copying them, "managing" rather than quoting them, re-producing their effect and look as naturally as they had been produced when they first appeared. A resemblance more than a reproduction, a rephotograph is essentially an appropriation of what's already real about an existing image and an attempt to add on or additionalise this reality onto something more real, a virtuoso real, a reality that 12 has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn't have any chances of being real.

In his pursuit of a “virtuoso reality” or “hyperrealism”, stealing is justified as the necessary evil. Such justification is better known as “fair use” in US copyright laws 13. It often protects the defendants who appropriated copyrighted materials from accusations of infringement14.

Copyright in the United States “is not an inevitable, divine, or natural right that confers on authors the absolute ownership of their creations.” Its purpose is to “stimulate activity and progress in the arts for the intellectual enrichment of the public.” “Fair use is necessary to fulfill [that] very purpose”, and in order to qualify as fair use, “a new work generally must

alter the original with “new expression, meaning, or message.” Its ultimate test is whether the goal of “promoting the progress of science and useful arts … would be better served by allowing the use rather than by preventing it.” (US Court of Appeal 2013).15

It is also interesting how the US Court of Appeal remarked on Prince’s aesthetics, and detailed his practices which constitute “transformative” nature (See Appendix 2). The verdict of the court in the case Cariou vs. Prince was closely watched in the art world on the limits of fair use, as it is no longer a requirement to “comment on the original artist or work,

or popular culture” in any secondary usage. Infringement accusations of sorts are therefore overruled.

The necessary evil of “appropriation” now has to abide by its newfound ethics — there must be a change in physical composition, presentation, scale, colour palette, or media; and there must be a new expression different from the original.

Site Specificity and Impermanence

The spatial and temporal projections of allegory are achieved by the two linkages Site Specificity and Impermanence in Owens’ discourse. Both can be observed in another documentary of Varda in her senior years.

In 2017, the octogenarian co-directed “Faces Places” (French “ Visages Villages ”), depicting her journey in rural France with muralist JR (1983-), taking poster-size portraits of whoever they came across. Some of these posters are monumental murals over 30 metres, affixed onto fences, walls, cisterns, and even containers.

Scenes from “Faces Places” (2017) Agnès Varda. (top left) Varda in front of a collage of portraits on a wall showing local villagers eating a baguette sandwich. (top right) Wifes of container crane operators with their portraits on containers. (bottom) a senior lady at the doorsteps of her house with her portrait on the facade.

The murals in “Faces Places” perhaps should better be attributed to the co-director JR. In 2007, the French photographer undertook the project “Face 2 Face” with Marc(o) Berrebi (1963-), which well exemplifies Owens’ idea of site specificity.

Around the biblical city of Bethlehem, a huge wall separates modern day Israel and Palestine. Civilians living on both sides practising the same trade, like taxi drivers, hairdressers, were invited to have their poking faces taken as huge portraits. These monumental size portraits were then pasted face-to-face against each other on either side of the wall.

(left and right) Murals of “Face 2 Face” project, Bethlehem (2007) JR. On-site photos taken by the author in 2008. Some of the original murals were torn or smeared. (bottom) Murals of “My Portrait Diary: 18 Children” (2019) Anthony Kar-long Fan.

The project questions, despite various similarities between the Israelis and Palestinians, why the two are fighting endlessly against each other. This very question leads to an inseparable link between the artwork and the location. Such site-specific artwork, when exhibited elsewhere , would never achieve the same profound significance 16 as it originally

displayed in situ.

Site-specific art is intrinsically impermanent. Everything is in transient, nothing is in permanence. Most of JR’s paper-based murals are subject to weathering or vandalism.

Artwork traditionally tends to be durable if not a permanent artefact. Paintings, sculptures, classical music, all testify the passage of time. Even documentary photography is supposed to be archived. It is counterintuitive when postmodernist artwork is created to be vanished. By adopting the two allegory practices, it is an acknowledgement and acceptance that time never freezes and therefore we should cherish and respect all once-in-a-lifetime events, every passing-away of perishables.

Sometimes, the impermanence of JR’s murals accentuates the here and now. His “Face 2 Face” centres on the tension of the Israelis and Palestinians at the time, not hundreds of years ago. In another occasion, the very impermanence links to a distant past. He had a mural of Varda’s passed-away friend Guy Boudin17 pasted onto a collapsed Nazi Germany

bunker on a beach in Normandy. The mural gave way to the tides and vanished after a single day. 70 years after WWII compressed into seven hours, prompts the audience to reflect — time washes away memories, bitter or sweet — literally.

“Ephemeral images are my stock in trade,” JR says, “but the sea worked fast.”

“The image had vanished. We will vanish, too! The film won”t be finished,” Varda laments. (Fuller 2018)

“Faces Places” is not merely a travel documentary. It is an allegory which empathises the passing of time, linking all random murals, all people involved, the present and the bygone.

Mural on a collapsed bunker in Normandy. (2017) JR. Varda took the original photo of her friend Guy Bourdin in 1954. The mural was swept away by the sea the next day after completion.

Accumulation

Allegory may progress organically, much like a mathematics progression 18 in Owens’ words, and potentially go on ad infinitum . As such, postmodern artists may practice on the same theme, technique or approach and extend it into a series of derived works. In photography, photomontages, assemblages tend to behave this way, in which heterogeneous visual images keep accumulating into a harmonious presentation under a certain theme.

Apart from his near ubiquitous appropriation in every project, Prince’s work exemplifies the linkage between allegory and contemporary art through accumulation. “Canal Zone” is not a single piece of artwork but a series of photomontages, having fragments of Rastafarians images appropriated from Cariou. “New Portraits” again is a series, “Sticker Shock”, too.

Accumulation, or the placement of one thing after another, extends an allegory to other realms. When there is an element of rephotography within his work, a spatial or temporal projection is formed. When there is a series, one work links to another, and potentially without cease. The meaning of each photo, binds into a progression that transcends to a higher level of significance. If there must be a discourse of Prince’s “hyperrealism”, one should not focus on individual fragments, nor just looking into the symbolic meaning of the visuals, spanning across a series, there exists an allegorical motive that may be subtle to the audience.

His untitled series of DVD barcode labels crisscrossing on vintage nude images (aka “Sticker Shock”) opens up the discussion of self-imposed censorship (Campos 2016, Karren 2020). It bears little meaning to decipher the identity of the naked girls in provocative poses, nor the title of those random DVDs and their contents. What matters is that his hiding of nudity allegorises self-imposed censorship on artistic production.

Discursivity

Prolific writers apply rhetorics in their essay writing to denote and connote their narratives. While this discursive nature of verbal expression and text is apparent, not until the 1970s an imagery equivalent became prominent as semiotics analysis was applied to photographic documents to investigate the sign system encoded in the imagery as text. (Price 2000 cited by Radich 2001)

Owens, as an art critic, elaborates little on discursivity in his discourse on allegory impulses in postmodernism other than highlighting the existence of text-imagery “reciprocity” (See Appendix 3). More pragmatically, Caple and Bednarek (2016), from a journalism standpoint, developed a discursive approach in analysing the “news value” of an image through a list of discursive devices. (See Appendix 4).

Putting aside business concerns, readership preference, censorship (self or authority), the two acknowledge three different approaches to assess the news value of a photo. The first is the cognitive approach based on the journalist's own judgement either by experience or intuition. The second is the material approach which measures the deviance to the norms, and/or social, political, cultural significance of the subject matter. The third, and also of interest to Caple and Bednarek, is the discursive approach by focusing on the content and camera technique applied on the image.

They define the worth of a photo as “the worth of a happening or issue to be reported as news, as established via a set of news values” which include: negativity, timeliness, proximity, superlativeness, eliteness, impact, novelty, personalisation, consonance and aesthetic appeal. By discerning these values, it facilitates decision making whether to cover the news photo on the media.

(left) “Nha Trang” (2004) Andrea Gursky. (right) “Dai Pai Dong” (1960) Yau Leung.

In order to understand the discursive practice and elucidate its news value, Andreas Gursky’s “Nha Trang” (2004) is taken as a case. With his strong ties with Düsseldorf school of photography , German Andreas Gursky (1955-) inherited a “19 flat, dispassionate documentary style” of photography (Blumberg 2020). His work is typically a bird’s eye view keeping a distance away from the subject matter, often appearing en masse, as exemplified in his photo of hundreds of basket weavers at work in a factory hall at Nha Trang, Vietnam.

There is no apparent negativity. The working conditions look decently safe and clean. The busy scene can be taken on any ordinary day of the factory, meaning little significance in timeliness. Nha Trang is thousands of miles away from Germany. The factory may be huge, at least a few hundred workers laboriously are weaving. The photo neither highlights any prominent weaver nor the quality of the basket. Viewers of the original photo may feel the impact of the nearly 10x7 feet wall-size print , but it is questionable for most 20 people viewing its much smaller copies on print or screen. The basketry trade has been centuries old. Gursky is not Vietnamese, nor is he a basket weaver. The workers are so little on the photo that it sees the face of none. Sporting in red uniform also plays down any personalisation, but with the congregation, the repeating pattern bears some form of consonance.

Aesthetically, this 2004 photo employs saturated colours, depicting order out of chaos with a multitude of subject matters. The macroscopic pattern invites the audience to get close to discern the microscopic details. Gursky refers to his bi-level style, influenced by painters Jackson Pollock21 (1912-56) and Willem de Kooning22 (1904-97), as “smallest details versus the mega signs”. (Gursky cited by mumok 2004)

In summary, apart from the aesthetics and consonance, this documentary-like photo displays little news value. Gursky’s Nha Trang is hardly a suitable candidate as the headline photo on the front page. Then, what lies beyond this so-called documentary photograph? In particular when possibilities of documentary photography are no longer bound by the long-established understanding of photojournalism and roles in reportage?

Has the role of documentary photography changed?

Radich (2001), in his thesis on documentary photography contends that power disparity, the mode of making and consuming a photo, and most important of all, stereotyping which stem from social, cultural, religious, political differences, define the discursive practices of the photographer in the postmodern era.

The photo is not made for the locals. Given Gursky’s fame, the audience may likely be art collectors and buyers in the West. With this Nha Trang photo, Gursky is introduced to have the socio-culture issue of “people at work” brought up, as a reflection to “the anonymity of modern existence and the interchangeability of people and places”. (mumok 2004) The

congregation of uniformed weavers denotes the anonymity of factory production. Work can never be attributed to any individuals but collectively, end products, as one. Running on top, The lamp cables divide the entire photo into compartments, illustrating a perspective from near to far, allegorising the perpetuity of repetitive work.

It may not be purposeful, but an alternate discourse from the Oriental viewpoint may find the discursive practices in this photo intrusive. The bird’s eye view is a projection of power. Be it an authoritative mode of surveillance or a stereotypical mode of spectacle (Radich 2001), it is an exotic view to see that many craftsmen sitting or squatting on the floor, all being impersonalised by their uniforms and inferiorised by the sheer distance away from the camera lens at the high vantage point. The factory definitely looks backwards to highly computerised production lines. Nearly two centuries after the Industrial Revolution in the West, how on earth a labour-intensive trade still remains without being replaced by machinery? And how much longer would these uniformed craftsmen survive practicing the trade? Is it a kind of Western hegemonic view over the Orient?

Hybridization

Owens references Duchamp’s (1887-1968) artwork to illustrate “confusion 23 of genres”, “eclectic works which ostentatiously combine previously distinct art mediums” as hybridization24.

If live events cannot be captured on-site real-time, why can't they be reenacted afterwards? Documentary movies see the mixing of historic footage with reenacted scenes by actors. For still photography, Laurie Simmons (1949-) took photos of dolls to reflect on her reality. The line between fiction and reality is blurring.

Simmons has a strong desire to document her life, likely due to her father’s influence, both as a hobby and career. In examining her fictional space, she emphasises that “a fictional portrayal of [her] career is a much more intense way to pin down [her] truth.” (Cardoso, A. and Yolamd K. 2018)

Many of her photos are a photographic account of her installation artwork of dolls, puppets and mannequins. She set up “little tableaus” to tell little stories. She photographed them in an attempt to find a kind of “existing reality”. The disparity in size and scale between the dolls and reality often creates a degree of surrealism. She conceded in becoming a street photographer due to the risk of cameraing in New York as a woman during the 1970s. She then started to set up her own world for her dolls photography.

Her early dollhouse photos depicted the idealised roles of women in the 1950s during her childhood. Later, the “Walking Objects” series in the 1980s had icons of American symbols often shown on television. She then left her small world, having “The Love Dolls” posing in her home and studio. Finally she transitioned to live characters donning doll masks in “The Doll Face”. Inner space of women and their confined roles in society have always been Simmons’ favourite theme.

(top left) “Blonde/Red Dress/Kitchen” from the series Interiors (1978) (top right) “Walking Gun” (1991) (bottom left) The Love Doll/Day 30/Day 2 (Meeting) (2011) (bottom right) “Brunette / Red Dress / Standing Corner” (2014). All photographs by Laurie Simmons.

Despite Simmons being regarded as a conceptual artist stylish in constructing a “reality” subjective to her own, she relies little on computer and digital photographic manipulation. Owens too lived at the dawn of the digital age when personal computers were not yet household items, and phones were fulfilling their original purpose as means of voice communication. Quarter-century later, Cauchot defines hybridization, in the context of art, as “the crossing between heterogeneous technical, semiotic and aesthetic elements.” (2005).

Whose reality is documentary photography capturing?

A virtual reality built in pixels transforms photography by the turn of the 21st century. Digital technology profoundly changes the ecology of photography from creating, seeing, presenting, transmitting to perceiving photographs. Text, image, graphics, video, sound and now physical motions, gesture — these distinctive media in the analogue world behave no differently when computers consider them the same as bits and bytes. The notion that the Internet as a big copy machine supplies an abundance of high-quality digital photos readily for appropriation.

Digital manipulation eliminates the laborious darkroom techniques, simplifying them into few pushes of buttons on a smartphone screen. For the more creative, manipulation software enables them all to be digital photographic artists. Photoshop originally as a brand is now regarded as a common verb synonymous to digital graphics editing and alteration.

Screenshot 2020-08-10 at 12.05.55 AM.png

(left) “Rhine II” (1999) Andrea Gursky. (right) Location where Andrea Gursay took his photo. Screen captured from a documentary.

Take Gursky’s “Rhein II (1999)” as an example . His digitally manipulated 25 image of the Rhein river bank runs counter to many of his previous works. The visual is not busy; paradoxically, the energetic Rhine is portrayed as a tranquil river.

The semiotics26 in Gursky’s manicured photo is way beyond by reading its denotation of how the Rhine appears, but how the river should be . Gursky digitally painted a new landscape of the Rhine not with a paintbrush but a mouse, faithfully in Düsseldorf school of thoughts in “New Objectivity”27 — both painting28 and photography.

Subjectivity suggests addition of something to something else, which in the reverse, can be subtracted as well (Nichols 2008). In Gursky’s way of objectivity, he has digitally removed all man-made structures and signs of life but a paved roadway beside a stretch of Rhine river bank not far from Düsseldorf. There is no more architecture, meaning no more subjective design by others, except the bare minimum of a mundane pavement for identifying the location. Through his subjective digital painting, Gursky projects an objective truth of the Rhine — the truthful nature of the Rhine as a real river — allegorising human’s “desire in controlling nature” (Southbank 2012), or is it?

In a documentary about “Rhine II”, Gursky led the interviewer to the spot where his favourite photo was taken (matiastatengue 2012). He introduced:

[1:18] “The Rhine” is my favourite picture because it says a lot using the most minimal

means. For me it is an allegorical picture about the meaning of life, and the way things

are, and about the fullness and emptiness. (original in German, quote from English

subtitles)

With such understanding, getting back to his Nha Trang photo, another discourse could be inferred: The surveillance-like overseeing of the factory hall should be read as a reminder to consumers in the wake of globalisation. The closely-knit supply chain around the world, much like the weaving, the uniformed team, much like all suppliers. Looking from a distance, it allegorises no matter how far you are, laborious work continues somewhere on the other side of the earth. One should really ponder their consumerism behaviour and the possible coercion sensed by the supplying end. Yet, only Gursky knows his allegorical story behind.

Hybridization is fairly organic and its possibilities are only limited by one’s creativity. The aesthetics of “Rhine II” does not confine in its visuals but crossovers into the audio. The London Sinfonietta commissioned the “17 Tate Riff” and “Response: Andrey Gursky series” to experience his photographic work from a new perspective. Live music inspired by

Untitled XIII (2002), Kamiokande (2007), Review (2015) were performed in Hayward Gallery, South Centre. (South Centre 2018, London Sinfonietta 2020, Lai 2020)

Conclusion

Half a century and counting, the postmodernism movement has torn down the line between seeing and believing. Photographic art never ceases evolving, nor does documentary continue to be entrenched in journalistic reportage. There is often little news value in postmodernist documentaries.

Such photos cannot be guaranteed to distinguish between reality and artificials either. The notion that photography is a faithful mechanical reproduction of the reality portraying objective truth has become history. When truth is relative and objectivity becomes subjective and evolves into “New Objectivity”, the imagery as constructed in the documentary may tell only one of the multiple facets of reality, let alone an objective reality. The traditional idea that documentary photos in revealing any social injustice, is replaced by a fairly personal inquisition; its single somber authoritative tone, by a plethora of tones — assertive, satirical, lofty, lighthearted, etc.

The six allegory impulses are nearly ubiquitously found in all postmodernist documentary-like photographic art. Embedding within which, an allegory exists through various discursive practices. From original to appropriated photos, gallery to site specific exhibition, archival to transient, single piece to a series, exclusiveness to reciprocity of text and imagery, recording live to staging or reenacting with physical props, straight photography to computer manipulation, documentary photography keeps evolving by encompassing new techniques and technology in depicting, or better, constructing a reality on the imagery. It requires the audience to take the initiative to read the allegory behind the photographer’s mind. For those competent ones who succeed, the reality portrayed in the documentary photos will become more real than it appears.

Epilogue

While researching on photos as portrayed in the writing task, some interesting photos taken by Hong Kong photographers were discovered. They are juxtaposed to works of their international counterparts to illustrate their photographic style and significance towards local documentary photography.

The stock photo of masked solar eclipse watchers with their tinted gears is another example that precise dating can be deduced — 21 June 2020. Drafting of this essay commenced in mid June. In the run-up to this event, Eugène Atget’s “L’Eclipse, avril 1912” conjured up in my mind, and thus was chosen as the first photo in the entire discourse.

James Chung Man-lurk’s 鍾文略 (1925-2018) award-winning portrait of a woman beside a public faucet (1959) takes the audience to a glimpse of the hardship during the heydays of water rationing in Hong Kong. Chung, painter turned commercial photographer, is famous for his street photography of grassroots in 1950-60s. Unlike Lange, he had never been commissioned by any government agencies for taking documentaries. The photo has the woman in bokeh, accentuating the slow-running faucet, thus keeping the subject matter on water ration rather than the identity of the woman.

Anthony Fan Kar-long 范家朗 (1996-) took portraits of 18 children who participated in the annual massive demonstration on 1 July 2019. “ My Portrait Diary: 18 Children” (十八港孩) was exhibited as murals in the Hong Kong International Photo Festival 2020 inside a rooftop garden. Without site specificity, these murals do not carry the same impact as JR’s murals pasted on the walls of Bethlehem separating the Israelis and Palestinians.

Aside from his professional life at Shaw Brothers Studio taking stills of movie stars, Yau Leung 邱良 (1941-1997) spent his leisure time taking street photographs. Yau is a highly regarded documentary photographer in Hong Kong. The photo of an outdoor restaurant “Dai Pai Dong” 大牌檔 (1960) was taken at a high vantage point, a rare perspective seen in Yau’s classic noir. Peeking at the diners top-down, decades before the invention of drones aerial photography, is a rather interesting novelty.

Footnotes

1 The Great Depression refers to the economic downturn in the United States during 1930-35.
2 The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon. (wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl )
3 Decades later, the couple were honoured by a prize in their name. Duke University, since 1991, has been awarding documentary writers and photographers who are “engaged in extended, ongoing fieldwork projects that fully exploit the relationship of words and images in the powerful, persuasive representation of a subject.”
4 Rue Daguerre is a lively market street in Paris, France, named in honour of Louis Daguerre (1787-1851), the inventor of the daguerreotype photographic process, and one of the fathers of photography. Agnès Varda lived at No. 86 from 1951 until passing away in 2019 .
5 French. Labours or workers of minor trades. For example, hawkers, janitors.
6 Modernism refers to a global movement in society and culture that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life. (Tate)
7 Rephotography loosely refers to photographic reproduction of any existing photographs. It may also refer to a more demanding arrangement to photograph at the same location, perspective and camera settings as a previous photograph, for time-lapse comparison purposes in scientific or socialresearch.
8 “Spiritual America” is the second most expensive photograph ever auctioned, just after Andreas Gursky’s “Rhein II” (wikipedia)
9 Brook Shields (1965-) was an American teen idol and celebrity. In 1976, a commercial photographer Gary Gross (1937-2010) took her nude photos of the then 10-year-old Shields with her mother’s consent. The unsettling photos were near to child pornography. In 1983, Prince found it in an adult publication “Little Women”, rephotographed it, and presented it in a gallery in New York City. The title “Spiritual America” was taken from Alfred Stieglitz’s 1923 photo of a gelded horse.
10 Rastafari, also known as Rastafarianism, is an Abrahamic religion that developed in Jamaica during the 1930s. It is classified as both a new religious movement and a social movement by scholars of religion. (wikipedia)
11 Prince has Instagram posts of celebrities, artists, bloggers and ordinary people screen captured. He made comments in each post, suggesting some level of intimacy with them.
12 A reality as perceived by master, connoisseur, or any highly artistically skilful person.
13 In the United States, The Copyright Act of 1976 lists four non-exclusive factors that must be considered in determining fair use. (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for the value of the copyrighted work.
14 The fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
15 “Fair dealing” as the approach granting copyright exemption in the Copyright Ordinance of Hong Kong is exhaustive in nature, as compared to the non-exhaustive approach of “fair use” in the US. (HKSAR 2004)
16 “Face 2 Face” was later exhibited in Berlin, Arles, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, and Geneva.
17 Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) was a French artist and fashion photographer known for his provocative images. From 1955, Bourdin worked mostly with Vogue. He shot ad campaigns for Chanel, Charles Jourdan, Pentax and Bloomingdale's. (Wikipedia)
18 In mathematics, a progression is a sequence of numbers with a fixed pattern between two consecutive terms. The individual numbers may look random, but there always exists a formula to determine the next term. For example, in the Fibonacci sequence, each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …
19 German photographer Andreas Gursky (1955-) is a prominent figure in the Düsseldorf school of photography known for their rigorous devotion to the 1920s German tradition of New Objectivity (German Neue Sachlichkeit). He was the only-child born in a photographer family. Both his grandfather and father were commercial photographers. He studied visual communication during 1981-87 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and received critical training from Hilla (1934-2015) and Bernd Becher (1931-2007), who famously studied and documented industrial machinery and architecture topologically, who in turn, the couple were said to be affected by the pre-war German photographer August Sanders’s (1876-1964) series of objective portraits of common people. (Wikipedia)
20 The original is a chromogenic print mounted on Plexiglas in artist's frame, dimensioned 116 x 81 1/2 in. (294.64 x 207.01 cm)
21 Paul Jackson Pollock (1912-56) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his technique of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface. It was also called drip technique’ or 'action painting'. (Wikipedia)
22 Willem de Kooning (1904-97) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. After WW2, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as abstract expressionism or "action painting", and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock. (Wikipedia)
23 Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. His “Fountain” (1917) was a ready-made sculpture using a porcelain urinal. Duchamp signed “R. Mutt” when he submitted his work for an exhibition but was not never placed in the show area. A photograph of the work, taken in Alfred Stieglitz's studio, was later published in “The Blind Man”. The original has been lost.
24 The biological term refers to having offspring of two distinctively different species, in particular through human manipulation.
25 Gursky tops the world record in photography auction, and occupies seven more positions out of the list of top 25. (Wiki 2020) His “Rhein II (1999)” fetched a handsome $4.34 million in Christie’s, New York.
26 Semiotics of photography is the observation of symbolism used within photography or "reading" the picture. Roland Barthes observes there are four meanings in reading a photo - denotation, connotation, coded iconic message, and non-coded iconic message. (Wikipedia)
27 The New Objectivity (in German: Neue Sachlichkeit) was a movement in German art that arose during the 1920s as a reaction against expressionism. (Wikipedia). This movement is a direct response against WW1 pro-war narrative by depicting the truthful issues and impact during and after the war.
28 The work of the Düsseldorf school of painting is characterised by finely detailed yet fanciful landscapes, often with religious or allegorical stories set in the landscapes. (Wikipedia)

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