Doing Documentary Work
Doing Documentary Work should be required reading.For anyone who wants to describe reality, that is.
The past few days there have been a massive convergence of themes in my head. I spent the first half of my life working as a photographer, and now I’m trying to make sense of things as a writer. I suppose I’ve been drawing connections, and creating a new philosophy as I go, and for the first time I’ve found the majority of these ideas brought together in a single book.
I wish books like Doing Documentary Work were around when I first adopted the life. I felt intuitively from the beginning that photography was a “means of understanding” and that it was at its best when it was used as “a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's originality.” I quoted the full passage from HCB just a few days ago, and the words “documentary photography” were not even available when Bresson and Kertéz began photographing. But people like these were my models, my heroes, before I knew what the words were supposed to mean. Robert Coles develops the idea into a much broader and more useful context.
Coles began as a psychiatrist doing field research and questioning the limits of impartiality. Currently, he teaches Documentary studies at Harvard and is the editor of Doubletake Magazine.
This book draws writing, literature, photography, and the impulse to learn something about the world we live in together into a thought provoking overview of the documentary process. It isn’t just about writing. It isn’t just about photography. It isn’t just about sociology. It’s about poetry. It’s about life and how we deal with it.
Though it began as a series of lectures, the book is hardly academic. Those are really the only flaws I could name; there is no bibliography, and it might be difficult for someone not familiar with the players in the SNCC or the FSA to make sense of the constant name-checking because there are no footnotes. But it trades these utiltiarian features for a flowing, easy to read style which conveys the passion and the poetry of the people who have shaped the idea of documentation as we know it.
I was familiar with some of his touchstones, but Coles mentioned a lot of things that I want to look into more closely: William Carlos Williams five book poem, Patterson, George Orwell’s early documentary books, and he renewed my interest in An American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor. There is an epilogue which suggests materials for a course in Documentary studies which includes popular music, poetry, fiction, as well as the usual photographic books.
I can’t recommend it highly enough. In a section regarding the way that the hand of the artist or writer shapes documentary “truth” Coles displays the uncropped versions of a number of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange photographs which I had never seen before. Though the book is cheap newsprint, the impact is still there as a teaching tool regarding how much what you don’t say or show skews the whole enterprise. Great stuff, and a whole lot of education for less than $15.
One of my favorite moments was a list of potential projects, written on the back of a blank check by Walker Evans in 1934-5:
Projects:the art audience at galleries, people at bars, set of movie ticket takers, set of newstand dealers, set of shop windows, the props of the upper-class set, public schools faces and life.
- New York Society in the 1930s
- national groups
- types of time (b. and wh.)
- children in streets
- chalk drawings
- air views of the city
- subway
- ship reporter (this project get police cards)
Documentary means everything. It’s amazing to me how much of this list Walker Evans actually photographed, in depth and detail. But Coles book isn’t just about photography. It’s about life, the universe and everything.
