Elizabeth McCausland: A Faulty Argument

The most contradictive reading for me that we have done so far is the Elizabeth McCausland article that she wrote during the 1930s. This is mainly for one reason. In her argument, she favors documentary photography over avant-garde photography because it is "direct and realistic, dedicated to the profound and sober chronicling of the external world." My problem with her argument is that she cannot seem to make the division between "scientific, uncompromising honesty" and the creative control that documentary photographers have over what they photograph, therefore shaping a reality that they want us to see, or in the case of the FSA, what the government wants or allows us to see. If they do this, then it renders this kind of photography to not be purely objective, which McCausland thinks is. Everyone has an agenda. Even McCausland had an agenda when she was writing this: that documentary photography be a vehicle for social change. How many people have used this kind of photography to only show part of the truth, or used it after the fact for social change yet out of context? Or manipulated reality or titles to get a completely different response from viewers? External reality is only one kind of reality, it cannot gve us "the whole picture." As Wells writes about the FSA photographs, "[s]ome of the central contradictions of the social project of documentary photography are revealed here, for these photographs are treated as historical, but timeless; densely coded, but transparent; highly specific, but universal" (Wells, 99). Overall, I agree with Wells, which to me renders McCausland's agument quite faulty.