Is the purpose of documentary photography to persuade or record?

Dan Foy

BA Hons Photography

Module: PHOT10058 Seminar tutor: Malcolm Brice Word Count: 1099

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Is the purpose of documentary photography to persuade or record?

The term ʻdocumentary photographyʼ infers that photographs created in this

style exist to document record of real-world events. It would appear that the

subgenres of this broad classification can be split into one of two credos:

either its purpose is to objectively record, else it is just another form of

expression, and thereby a vehicle to persuade a viewer into interpreting an

event or idea as expressed by the photographer. I suggest that neither

approach is attainable in a practical fashion.

To illustrate my point I will refer to two photographs: ʻChildren Fleeing an

American Napalm Strikeʼ by Nick Ut, and ʻValley of the Shadow of Deathʼ by

Roger Fenton.

Utʼs photograph, taken during the Vietnam War in 1972, depicts a number of

Vietnamese children, all of whom appear to fleeing the plume of arid smoke

behind them, and who are clearly in distress. Two of them are screaming,

and one of them – a pre-adolescent girl – is naked. A number of soldiers walk

behind the children, and look notably calmer. The photograph is a press

photograph and intended to be accompanied by a story, which will inform that

the childrenʼs village has been napalm-bombed by friendly forces; the girl, Kim

Phuc, has suffered terrible burns that will leave her hospitalized for over a

year. Utʼs photograph is indisputably evocative, and whilst it could be argued

that the photograph was taken with intent to indiscriminately record, the image

became a symbol of large-scale public opposition to the unpopular Vietnam

War. This makes Utʼs intentions as a photographer somewhat irrelevant in a

real-world context.

The second photograph, taken in 1855 during the Crimean War, is comprised

of what would by a comparatively featureless landscape, if it were not for the

cannonballs littering the valley road that snakes through the photograph.

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Despite initially appearing much more of an objective record than Utʼs

photograph, it is arguably more constructed to be persuasive. The

photograph is one of a pair, with the other photograph showing the road clear

of cannonballs. Although it is a matter of some dispute, it would appear that

Fenton artificially altered the scene for dramatic effect, in an attempt to

persuade viewers that the situations that he photographed were more

dangerous than they were in reality, perhaps due to 1850s technology

prohibiting photographs of actual wartime action. This sort of direct

manipulation became scandalous with instances such as Rothsteinʼs famous

FSA image of a skull on cracked earth creating political uproar, suggesting

that the general public expect ʻofficialʼ documentary photographs to be as

neutral a record as possible.

However, it is also significant to consider what the photographers in question

did not choose to photograph. It is unusual to discover photographs

documenting the poor living conditions of soldiers at war dating from

photographyʼs infancy. Fenton is recognised for his documentation of soldiers

and the wartime landscape, but in balance, the lack of photos of

documentation of the killed or maimed in action, or those wasted to incidental

causes such as the cholera outbreak, is almost as significant and revealing of

his intentions. In the words of George Baldwin, a curator more familiar with

Fentonʼs work:

“The soldiers, in that first winter, before Fenton arrived, had inadequate

food, inadequate shelter, inadequate clothing. The images that are

propagandistic are the ones that show that the soldiers are adequately

housed, adequately clothed.” (Baldwin, 2007)

Created more than a century later, Utʼs photograph appears to be a world

apart from Fentonʼs photograph, depicting the clear stress of an innocent child

as she becomes the victim of an attack by friendly forces that is likely to leave

her alive, yet deformed for life. If the failures of Fentonʼs work as

documentary photography lay within his apparent reluctance to make

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photographs depicting the appalling realities of war, the inference is that Utʼs

frank and unashamed photograph is a more accurate record of the realities of

organized conflict. However, the more complex reality is that no photograph

can be truly objective, and thus no photograph can claim to be an objective

and unbiased record.

People expect to see photographs compatible with their beliefs. When a

layman purchases a ticket for a photo-safari in Africa, he is likely to expect to

return with photographs of wild lions, elephants, and traditional African

villagers, rather than black people in jeans and vast featureless landscapes.

Similarly, the majority of 1970s American public would have been uninterested

in photographs glorifying war, just as the 1850s British would have been

uninterested in viewing the hundreds of their military wiped out

unceremoniously by disease behind the lines.

Being a subtractive medium, a photographer must actively decide what to

include and omit in each exposure, and this is influenced – even if only in the

subconscious – by the context in which the photograph is made. In many

cases, a photographerʼs aim is to persuade a party to adopt his or her

depiction of a scene as accurate. However, the full story is not as simple, and

for the press documentary photographer there is an additional party to

persuade: the picture editor. Utʼs photograph is dramatic and evocative and is

an award-winning piece of documentary and rightly so, but this would not be

the case if the photograph depicted a more mundane aspect of life in wartime

Vietnam. The reality of press photography - the field in which Nick Ut and

other Associated Press photographers operate in – is that if a photograph isnʼt

interesting, then it isnʼt going to be published, and this naturally influences the

types of photographs that are taken.

The persuasive forces behind Fentonʼs photograph are more subtle. Fenton

founded what was to become the Royal Photographic Society, under the

patronage of Prince Albert, and according to Susan Sontagʼs book ʻRegarding

the pain of othersʼ, it was under Albertʼs insistence that Fenton travelled to the

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Crimean Peninsula to become the first European war documentary

photographer. Considering that Fentonʼs personal security and access to the

war was due to royal appointment, it seems unlikely that the lack of

photographs depicting poor conditions at camp or the demoralizing sight of

dead allied soldiers is a coincidence.

Photographs that are created purely to persuade tend to fail because viewers

tend to be attracted to photographs illustrating values and ideas that to a

degree they already emphasise with, or are at least aware of, whilst photos

taken purely to record fail because they can never be objective – both

photographer and viewer interpret the scene based on past experiences. The

true purpose of documentary photography lies not at these extremes, but in a

skilful fusion meeting somewhere in the middle.

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Bibliography ANON., 2010. Roger Fenton. Wikipedia [online]. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fenton [accessed 8/3/10].

FAAS, Horst, 2000. The Survivor - The Story of Kim Phuc and photographer Nick Ut. Digital Journalist, 0008, pp.8

JEFFREY, Ian, ed., 1997. The Photo Book. London: Phaidon Press.

MORRIS, Errol, and BALDWIN, Gordon, 2007. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? New York Times Opinionator [online blog]. 25 September. Available at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/ [Accessed 9 March 2010]

ROBERTS, Simon, 2010. Talk with Simon Roberts (re. Motherland, Homeland exhibition). [Lecture to students and public, Photography, Nottingham Trent]. 4 March 2010.

ZEHR, Howard, 2010. Photographic truth and documentary photography. Visual Peacemakers [online blog], 30 January. Available at http://visualpeacemakers.org/2010/01/30/photographic-truth-and-documentary-photography/ [accessed 8 March 2010].