Joel SternfeldAttorney with laundry, corner Bank and West 41 street, NYC 1988
Museum Folkwang, Essen © Joel Sternfeld courtesy Pace/Mac Gill Gallery, New YorkC-Print138 x 111 cm
“Photography is truth.” once said the French director Jean-Luch Godard , but who owns this truth? The photographer? The subject? The image itself? Why have we come to expect truth from photography in the first place? Staging Authenticity. Photographic Stories from the Street and the Studio, the course led by artist and lecturer Joy Gregory aims to explore these questions.
The emergence of photography revolutionized our way of seeing the world. Actual events could be represented with a device that allowed for a recording of the refraction of light, we could literally write with light. The fact that the image was framed and exposed in a certain way by the photographer did little to deter the people who attributed the unquestionable veracity of the image to the optical device. Doesn't that amount to saying that the brush did the painting rather than the painter? Although that awry reasoning has long since been deconstructed and invalidated, it still has a recalcitrant hold on the people's imagination.
Documentary photography is the genre that might be the most problematic with regards to questions of truth. Street & Studio. An Urban History of Photography, the current exhibition at Tate Modern (22 May until 31 August 2008) testifies to the overlap between a documentary function, requiring some notion of truth, and an aesthetic one, privileging form. The juxtaposition of images originally meant to record facts and events with slickly composed portraits also raises the following questions: what is the difference between art and document? Do these genres have a different visual language? Should they be displayed and used differently? Needless to say that Staging Authenticity will address these interrogations over the next few weeks.
In order to anchor our thoughts about truth and photography with examples, we moved from the seminar room to the gallery in order to take a good look at the images of the pioneers of documentary photography: Lewis Hine who documented child labour; Arnold Genthe who took a particular interest in San Francisco's Chinatown before the earthquake of 1908; Paul Strand who developed his practice around the candid image. Encouraged to comment on the images, one person noted that the titles of the works in Genthe's Chinatown series had a racist connotation. Although, admittedly, the portrait of a reclining oriental man bearing the title Dead to the World. Opium Fiend was not exactly an example of subtlety, this comment appeared to generate a flurry of discomfort. The “truth” that Genthe chose to represent was very much of its time, not burdened by political correctness, and resonated quite differently in the current context.
So truth in photography requires a certain exercise in constructivism (or reconstructivism if such a thing existed) in that not only do you have to consider the point of view of the photographer, but that of the subject, the context in which it was taken and the time in which you are encountering the image are just as important. In other words, forget the 1000 words that a photograph can apparently summon. If truth is what you are looking for, you might have to think in terms of a 1000 points of view. And even then you might be surprised: we encountered a portrait of Arnold Genthe holding his camera... and the photograph was attributed to him. Perhaps next week we will talk about ubiquity.
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