Artists As Documentarians / Documentarians As Artists

I found the beginning of the Wells reading for this week to be particularly interesting in its analysis of the artist as a documentarian and the documentarian as an artist. Although this relationship is ever-changing and we do not necessarily need to make distinctions between these two types of image-makers, I believe it is an important dialogue in the context of this class simply because it is an issue which is relevant across the various forms of photography that we are studying. This reading, as well as previous readings, such as the recent case studies on fashion photography, lead me to wonder whether the role of the photographer is always documentarian on the most basic level with different contexts for viewing imagery (such as in the context of an advertisement or in a gallery) adding subsequent levels of discourse.

I am specifically drawn to this discussion by Wells’ passage about Paul Seaworth, an Irish war photographer whose work captured the aftermath and artifacts of war rather than the war itself. I felt Seaworth’s images created an interesting dialogue with the abstract works of Paul Strand (the abstracted chair, etc.) that we looked at in class (and Weston’s pepper images in some ways). These images ask whether and image that captures the essence of the subject is perhaps a more effective image than the subject itself? I find myself answering this question positively because of a cultural desensitization to images. As a culture, we have seen so many images of, for example, war or chairs that they become difficult to internalize and understand in a larger critical context. Thus, by creating “artistic” or perhaps more poetic responses to war or chairs we are able to overcome this desensitization.

So then is the artist a more effective documentarian than the documentary photographers themselves? Or is imagery created through the eye of an artist inherently skewed and therefore unfit to be considered documentary?