Truth be Told …

NOTE: Thanks to hypertext and the ability to transform documents from the stasis of print, “Truth be Told” is a living essay that will change and grow as I continue to examine new media theory and culture. Please revisit to read updated information and new links to writings, creative and critical, and to photographs and photographic art.

The truth of a photograph is more complex than the movement of a prop or the posing of a model. It transcends the technology and technique an artist employs to make an image.

For the truth is that there are multiple truths involved in a single image: the photographer’s truth, society’s truth, the truth of the model, and the truth of the individual viewer and these truths are dependent on one’s society and the culture in which one was raised.

So, this digital photography debate -- this argument about film photography in comparison with digital photography -- among the creators, theorists and scholars is not really about technique/technology as demon and technique/technology as deus ex machina. Rather it is about society, our culture and change in conjunction with artistic vision.

“ If the history of photography teaches us anything, it is that the tools we use to make photographs are constantly changing and becoming obsolete,” writes Editor Brooks Jensen in the August-September 2003 issue of Lenswork. “… the progress of art – unlike technology – is not built up like an ever higher-reaching ladder. A calculator is better than an abacus, which is better than counting on your fingers – there is a linear progression of technology that improves with each new advance. This is not true in art. Albumen prints are not better than silver prints, which are not better than inkjet prints, nor the other way around. They are all just different. A given image might look better as a silver print or as a platinum print, but platinum as a medium is not inherently better than silver as a medium nor are these better as a medium than the newer technologies. In all cases it is the sensitivity of the artist that is of paramount importance.” (11)

History indeed! The debate over the properties -- such as truth -- and purposes – documentation versus art -- of photography began long before pixels became the bane of traditionalists. Consider the work of Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information government photographers.

Like the work of Lewis Hine, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography project remains an important exemplar of documentary photography and its power to effect opinion and social change; however, even it is not without controversy about photo manipulation. Created under the Information Division of the Resettlement Administration (RA), which President Franklin Roosevelt established in 1935, its function was to procure visual evidence to educate the public about agrarian issues, particularly the human suffering of the rural population, during the Great Depression. Rexford Tugwell was its initial administrator. Tugwell gave Roy Stryker, whom he had known previously in academia and in the book publishing/photography world, command of the photographic unit.

“ By defining FSA photographs as objective documents, taken solely ‘for the record,’ Stryker and his associates believed that they were serving the cause of historic preservation,” says author James Curtis in his book Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth FSA Photography Reconsidered. (10)

Of course, while Stryker may have been sincere about his work (and I think he was – at least initially), critics charged that the FSA photography project was nothing more than a governmental propaganda machine to compel public approval of federal administrative programs collectively called "The New Deal." Long after the FSA-OWI closed and the prints were placed on file at the Library of Congress, the renowned FSA photographer Walker Evans, reported by many sources to have bucked Stryker’s orders for writing lengthy captions and following a script to pursue his own artistic agenda, conceded the bureaucracy of the program. Dorothy Lange, famous for her Migrant Mother photographs, likewise, used her own “vision” to document humanity.

“ Evans was passionately committed to photographic artistry. On assignment, he often refused to ‘do some bureaucratic, stupid thing,’ so that he could indulge his penchant for painterly composition,” Curtis reveals (11).

Yet, as the author points out, it is fact that Evans shied away from discussing his photographs as “art” and labored to make his work as different as possible from images made by the photograph God of that era -- Alfred Stieglitz.

Wait a moment. Evans thought in terms of painterly composition? Is that permitted in “documentary” photography? The way some purists are carrying on, one might assume that film photographers never do anything besides snap a photograph of a scene that just happens to look great, develop the negatives and make exact prints.

While the world was talking about the “naked realism” – the truth – of Evans’ work, Curtis says Evans was busy producing “precisely the effects he intended. In so doing, he helped perpetuate popular misconceptions that cameras do not lie and that photographs are true because they are mechanical reproductions of reality. Documentary photography derived its power and authority from artful manipulations of these fictions.” (23)

Curtis discusses Evans’ making of the photographs of the Fields family, in 1936 in Hale County, Alabama. There are six people in the photograph that was displayed at the 1938 Grand Central Exhibit. This photograph created tumult because a young boy in the image is not wearing pants.

“The image does appear in the first edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, [a collaborative effort between Evans and journalist James Agee] but opposite another photograph of the same interior showing only three figures: father, mother, and sleeping infant," Curtis writes. “This placement makes it clear that the Fields family posed for Evans and arranged themselves in response to his direction. Evans usually went to great lengths to disguise such arrangement, fearful that it might be perceived as a violation of the canons of documentary photography.” (13)

The storm Arthur Rothstein created with his steer skull photographs made in Pennington County, South Dakota in 1936, according to FSA records, is another example of the age-old arguments over documentary truth and art in photography. Rothstein, according to Curtis, moved the skull “a few feet to achieve more dramatic contrast and deeper shadow detail” (72).

It was more than this that attracted the ire of people in Fargo and caused federal Republicans to launch an investigation, most likely in a political effort to damage the credibility of the beloved Franklin Delano Roosevelt. According to Curtis, the Fargo Evening Forum editorialized that the Resettlement Administration fictionalized drought conditions and was guilty of “photographic fakery.” (75)

Photographers being human, one has to consider historical context, that is what was going on in our culture when FSA photographers, such as Rothstein, were at work, and what was “happening” was cinema - documentary drama. The “narrative power” of documentary film, specifically the work of Pare Loretz in The Plow That Broke the Plains, significantly influenced Rothstein, Curtis avers. The steer skull photos and Rothstein’s Fleeing a Dust Storm are examples of Rothstein’s artistic internalization of cinematic production. (76-77)

Thinking about the evolution of photographic art – for this is the term I choose to use to describe my work – and my experience in both film and digital photography, I have to believe that photography is a social process – a storytelling event -- not a static, artless procedure. What’s more, I believe this is what too many photographers, scholars and theorists are forgetting in this argument pitting classicists against digital photographers. Comparing photographs made during the early FSA years with those made in the early 1940s, this becomes clear. Comparing all of these photographs with contemporary images is even more convincing that photographers adapt as culture changes and that photographers, human beings after all, bring new “visions” to their work, thereby serving to alter society and culture.

Consider what Andrea Fisher states in Let Us Now Praise Famous Women about the later FSA-OWI years, when the focus of the program shifted from rural poverty to the urban home front during wartime. Women were doing so-called “men’s work,” which brought forth questions and concerns about gender and power.

“In the final period of documentary work done by the FSA and the Office of War Information, Stryker took on a whole number of women photographers … It was at this point that women photographers gained most free access to the profession, but by this point the demands of the agency had changed substantially. They were hired to produce propaganda as versus documentation, recording war work and the efforts of the war on civilian life. With attention turned to the war, little was spoken of the women photographers and their work was rarely by-lined. Yet women are insistently present in their photographs as the locus of emergent desires … As documentary became potentially a woman’s work, it also became a very different work.” (131)

Their photographs – stories one and all -- reveal the social tension, the questions, that existed in the face of changing social dynamics. In talking about the work of Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins and Ann Rosener, Fisher observes: “The ‘truth’ of these images seemed to me to be of a different order: not of the integrity of each human being, but of our complexity. They spoke not only of a womanhood beyond them, but of the role of images and the process of looking in producing femininity. The images of the 1930s had used particular photographic conventions to construct the appearance of an untainted window of the world. But these images seem to take a pleasure in the artifice which is photography. And they use their articulacy with that artifice to set several notions of the feminine in counterpoint.” (124). In my mind, they were simultaneously stating and capturing desires made manifest in culture.

Have a look at Collins' photo “Lititz, Pennsylvania. Self-portrait at a public sale.” Viewing this photo story and others by her colleagues reminds me of the early women science fiction writers, particularly of C.L. Moore. Her No Woman Born, published in the early 1940s, tackles issues of embodiment. Like the women FSA-OWI photographers, authors such as Moore were artists with personal and social visions that they projected through their stories, spoken in their chosen mediums.

We would do justice to the truth in photography debate and, therefore, to the work of photographers and to society by obliterating the red herring: “Does digital photography remove truth from photography” to address relevant questions such as: “Whose truth is told through film and digital photography?” “What makes a photograph documentary or ‘real’?” and even “Does photographic “truth” hold the same meaning today that it did in the 1930s?”

This is my current view, which I base on reading, thinking and years of an art practice using both film and digital cameras. Photography, as we know it since 1839, is still at the heart of making a photograph because there is an individual behind the camera and people and conditions on the other side of the lens.

“… what really matters in all image creation, once the craft has been developed to a certain point, is vision and energy,” opines Paul Saturley in Fusing Binary Bits into the Photography: Computer Images Smudge the Line Between Camera Work and Traditional Art. "Technique can be mastered over time, history can be committed to memory, and tools are commonly available to anyone with the money and desire to acquire them. The image visionaries of the current century will draw on all art mediums to merge them into something that reflects the culture that created the desktop computer and the Internet. Sometimes, a photographic reality may be called for; sometimes photography may give way to painted pixels.” (60)

If the new kids on the block fail to convince you of what matters in photography, perhaps the words from a sage of another era, Jacob Deschin, may serve as a reminder. In his 1960 book Say It With Your Camera, Deschin asks: “What role have you assigned to technique in your photography? Is technique your master or your servant? Are you using technique or being used by it?” He proceeds: “It makes a difference … The fault in much of today’s photography is that emphasis is shifted to technique, and the excellence with which a print is turned out assumes greater importance than the subject matter itself instead of the other way about … We should expect of the ‘better’ photographer superiority of judgment as to what is important and what is trivial, keener responsiveness, a more confident use of techniques. When the subject calls for it, he should have the intelligence and the courage to alter or even to go counter to the established rules in order to make a photographic statement of maximum significance.” (87-88)

Digital photographs and their offspring, painted pixels, I contend, are still “real”; they are based on vision, on artistic interpretation. Pixel painting is not unlike the darkroom hand-dancing (dodging, burning) that film photographers perform to tell the story they want viewers to read, to see, to feel.

Forget the machines and their materials. Focus on what really counts – the stories that need to be told and how best to make the photos that tell them.