:: If you liked documentary work, you are going to love digital images ::

by Pedro Meyer

We somehow were brought up with the notion that documentary pictures were the equivalent of a testimony that was credible because it was a photograph.

In other words, the very nature of being photographic was a good enough reason for all of us to consider the photograph as a reliable witness of events in our daily life. Because something was depicted in an image we had the firm conviction that things were as we saw them.

After all we could compare that which we saw with that which we photographed and knew that they were identical. Or at least we thought that they were.

So the question is, aren’t they? and as so many other things in life, the answer is ambivalent. Yes and No.

Yes, because there are certain unequivocal equivalents, that make us feel that the comparison holds up, between that which we see and what has been photographed. However, upon closer inspection and scrutiny, we start to find all sorts of loopholes that bring up a high degree of doubt to this otherwise empirical comparison between the photograph and reality.

So what would some of those loopholes, just mentioned, be? For instance, white other than a few cases of visually impaired eyes, and that such black and white photographs are at best, an abstraction of what reality looks like.

Or if you prefer colors, then the same theory applies; what colors are we actually talking about? as all film based images have their specific color bias, and it all depends on who does the printing of a picture what the color actually ends up being.

Another of such loopholes has to do with idea that a photographic image can be self explanatory by just looking at it. We now know that the personal interpretation of the viewer brings to the reading of the image, his or her own prejudices borne out of ideological, educational, psychological or cultural reasons. In other words the photographic image is malleable in what the viewer wishes to read into the image. If you liked documentary work, you are going to love digital images.

Another interesting topic has to do with what we call the manipulation of the image. The traditionalists have it that they go about their work without any sort of manipulation, of course overlooking that the very act of photographing is by it’s very nature already a process of editing and thus an intervention.

The idea that traditionalists defend so vehemently about photographing life as it is found, flies in the face of the very reality they so staunchly defend. Take the instance of photojournalists, who by their very presence with a camera, already alter the behavior of those that they are photographing. People tend to pose, they tend to present themselves as they imagine they look best, either for narcissistic reasons or for political ones. And if you photographed a place devoid of people, no one can deny that the angle from which the image was shot, the sort of lens used, or the time of day, will alter significantly that which we get to see as THE reality.

Even surveillance cameras have a point of view and if you will, a certain aesthetic as well. Although not determined by a photographer because it operates in fully automatic mode, it was nevertheless defined at the time the camera was set it in place for the first time.

In 1996, I gave a key note speech during the opening ceremony of the Fifth Latin American Colloquium of photography in Mexico City, in that presentation I mentioned that surveillance cameras would in fact become the most ubiquitous documentary photographers in the world given the very nature of their work.

Lo and behold a few days later on the front page of one of the main newspapers was precisely such a documentary image, done by a surveillance camera depicting a bank assault.