Nathalie Rothschild
posted 20 December 2005

'Despite the crimes committed in the name of photographic truth, are photographs themselves innocent?'

The line between documentary and artistry is often fine - consider for instance the images in the annual worldwide photojournalism contest, World Press Photo. Yet the credibility of a photograph often seems to rely on the clarity of such a distinction. If a scene is constructed to appear real or spontaneous or to invoke a specific reaction from the viewer, the truth and honesty of the image will be disputed. And at the same time, capturing a scene 'as it is' is impossible, as the photographer ultimately determines what the image will look like. When it comes to photography, agency, truth and representation are often discussed in moralistic terms, as dilemmas, and artistic freedom is not readily granted.

In the panel discussion, Alison Green pointed out that Roland Barthes, in 'Camera Lucida' took it as self-evident that photography is always 'analogical', and in her presentation she spoke about the 'truth-telling mechanisms' of photographs, contrasting the view of 'photographs as made', that is, attempts to tell stories or represent reality, with the view of photographs as direct 'windows on reality'. The latter is not exactly a fashionable position; the photographer may be accused of arrogance if he purports that he, through his camera, tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, though photographs have of course, as Green points out, been used as legalistic evidence in courts.

One of the most well known examples of the use of footage in courtrooms is the case of the beating of Rodney King, which was captured on film by amateur photographer George Holliday. Though it was video footage and not still photography that was shown in the courtroom, and, sure, it may be argued that moving images carry with them different kinds of 'truth-telling mechanisms', the questions of photographic proof and innocence, or of the objectivity of the image, can be applied to this case as well. Holliday's footage was broadcast around the world, but the Los Angeles Jury that freed the LAPD officers involved in the beating was apparently not convinced that video evidence was proof enough; they acquitted the four charged officers and set off the massive 1992 Los Angeles riots. Nonetheless, in the end a picture may indeed say more than a thousand words - those who had long tried to expose police brutality and racism saw that their case could be argued more convincingly by the amateur video recording of a bystander than by years of campaigning.

The second speaker of the evening, Julian Stallabrass, asked rhetorically whether there would be a difference in taking a photograph of a crime scene and in painting a representation of it in watercolours. Of course different media have different effects and some may be said to lend themselves better to documentary. We are more inclined to think a photograph is an accurate representation than a painting or a sculpture, the former of course having the advantage of immediacy and spontaneity so the 'artist's touch' can be more easily hidden.

Discussions about art as documentary and photography as art must also consider the artist's / photographer's intentions and truth-claims. If a photographer is trying to prove a point, communicate an idea or even show the truth of a situation, then why should we place more emphasis on the artistic and technical means he chooses to enable him to do so than on the actual point he is trying to make? The question of technological determinism was central to Julian Stallabrass' presentation. According to Stallabrass, the question 'the camera never lies?' is misguided as truth and falsehood do not apply to machines. Instead, he argued, we need to ask questions like: Is the photograph over or under exposed? Has it been shot with a grainy film? Which type of lens has been used? These are neither truths nor lies, Stallabrass contends, just mechanisms; mechanisms that affect or distort or determine the photograph. Stallabrass wonders why the art world insists on asking questions regarding the photographic lie when photographs have also been found to be true and have been used to show truths, for instance to identify victims in the Vietnam war, to determine chronologies of events and in trials.

In light of the question posed in the programme - 'Despite the crimes committed in the name of photographic truth, are photographs themselves innocent?' - it is understandable that Stallabrass chose to focus on the photograph as an object, but in discussing only the mechanical production processes of photographs, he left out the question of the photographer's role. Surely someone has loaded the film, mounted the lens, set the shutter and aperture, selected a subject matter, pointed the camera, framed the shot and pushed the trigger button?

Axel Lapp was the panellist who came closest to addressing and taking a stand on the question posed in the programme. One of the examples he brought up and which was picked up by the other panellists and by audience members was a recent Leni Riefenstahl retrospective in Germany, where the prints displayed were on sale. Notorious for being Hitler's favourite filmmaker, Riefenstahl is well remembered for her two documentaries 'Triumph Of The Will', on the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, and the two-part 'Olympia' ('Festival Of Nations' and 'Festival Of Beauty'), which was commissioned by the international Olympic committee for the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, but funded by the Nazis to foster the image abroad of a modern, powerful Germany. In the 1960s, Riefenstahl turned to still photography, producing two books about the Nuba tribe of southern Sudan. Having been de-Nazified years earlier, these books nevertheless show that her fascination for athletic bodies and physical virility remained intact. She later reinvented herself once more as an underwater photographer, focusing on the more neutral subject of coral reefs.

In his Art Monthly article Germany Calling, Lapp writes:

History is the understanding of the past as present. It is a construct that does not exist other than in the mediation of objects and documents that survived from the past, of historical accounts written since then, which equally serve as documents of their own time, and of oral history that finally will be lost. The understanding of history is therefore informed and determined by coincidence and subjective perception…Even in our well-documented time, there is no complete historical record.

Lapp finds the lack of contextualisation in the Riefenstahl exhibition offensive, but if there can be no complete historical record, then what would any text next to the displayed photographs or in an exhibition programme actually achieve? Why appeal to an original History when that appeal will only amount to a subjectively constructed account, which will tell us about the time in which it is written, ie the present, as much as about the time which it attempts to describe? It seems strange that while Lapp is on the one hand adamant that 'the understanding of history is…informed and determined by coincidence and subjective perception', he is on the other hand outraged that the truth of Riefenstahl's work is not clarified in the exhibition.

Lapp thinks it unethical to bring Riefenstahl's photographs into the realm of art, but no matter what we feel about the subject matter and how uncomfortable we are with Riefenstahl's personal persuasions and the contexts in which her work was produced - for instance when she brought in Gypsies from German concentration camps to act as extras in her 1940 film 'Tiefland' - these feelings and opinions are not what determine whether Riefenstahl's work was artistic or not. And it's not the qualities of Riefenstahl's work that have changed since the 1940s, but the way they are viewed and judged.

What Lapp seems to be warning against are false impressions, that without contextualisation, Riefenstahl's work may be misjudged as art and as purely artistic and, further, that those who have chosen to visit the exhibition may yet again be seduced by the muscular masculinity and glorious promises of Nazism portrayed in in Riefenstahl's films and images. Lapp doesn't seem to be the only one who fears such seduction and corruption of minds. The chair of the evening told the audience of an experience she had as an art teacher at Central St Martin's. The Imperial War Museum had made available Riefenstahl's photographs for educational purposes, but in order to use them in class, she was required to read out two pages of information about Riefenstahl to her students, in the presence of one other member of staff, before she was allowed to show them the images.

Finally, the last speaker of the evening, Craig Burnett, chose to go down the neither-nor-route, urging the audience to remember that 'postmodernism taught us not to think in dichotomies' and, hence, 'the camera lies and tells the truth simultaneously'. OK. What else does photography do then? Well, Barnett feels there are many versions of photography. It can be documentary, fictional, aesthetic or poetic and we shouldn't impose a hierarchy on these. Sometimes we might emphasise 'the truth-factor', sometimes the emotional effect of a photograph, sometimes its poetry. 'There is ambiguity in photography', Barnett said, which was of course an ambiguous enough statement in itself.

The ambiguity in photography often stems from the difficulty of disentangling its factual or documentary purposes from its aesthetic or artistic ones. When it comes to the question of photographs' innocence, this implies that the original intention of the photographer and context of the photograph can be disregarded. In other words, the image can be viewed as self-contained and may then be subject to interpretation in accordance with any of the qualities that Barnett for example suggests can be applied to it. But interpreting the meaning of an image involves a consideration of its wider context - the context in which it was made and the context in which it is seen.

The found photographs shown in the exhibition 'Who's Looking at the Family?' at the Barbican Art Gallery (see The Epic and the Everyday by Julian Stallabrass ) were not works of art, neither were they documentary or photojournalism. They were family portraits found by an artist and do not have artistic merit in themselves. But seeing them in the context of an art gallery, we consider the ways in which they have been turned into art. To put it in the terms of the discussion at the Camden Arts Centre, though it is a strange formulation, the portraits themselves were 'innocent' but are here used to further an artist's message.

The question of the truth in photography is often posed in terms of the ways in which the image itself is manipulated. In fashion photography, for example, there is digital manipulation such as retouching. Visual distortions can result from the use of certain lenses or high contrast films, and images can be cropped and reframed in post-production. These are all techniques, which also enable photography to become artistic. With photography that is intended or presented as just documentary, the audience has to be trusted to know that not only are there different interpretations of events, but there are photographic techniques which impact the image. From the photographer's point of view, if he strives to capture things as they are, without wanting to comment on the event he witnesses, without wanting to impose his own mark on the portrayal of that event, he may as well give up.