Lewis Bush

MB: What’s your definition of documentary photography?

LB: This is a question I struggle with endlessly. For me, it’s a practice that I position somewhere between what you traditionally recognize as photojournalism and what you might see as art photography, photography that’s interested in the real world, and focusing on contemporary or timely issues or issues which aren’t being particularly espoused in mainstream journalism. Maybe it’s an approach that is more visually and conceptually open than photojournalism, which is very prescribed in terms of visuals and concept. So at risk of giving a kind of vague answer that would be my definition of documentary photography.

MB: Are we more expansive towards what we accept as documentary today as opposed to twenty years ago? Should we be? Must we be?

LB: Not everyone is, and some people would completely disagree with me and disregard my definition. But for me form is not important. I consider myself a documentary photographer despite the fact that I often don’t take the photographs I work with, but I still consider them documentary because they are, as I say, documents of something in the world that I think is timely and important.

MB: I always think of documentary as a spectrum that ranges from traditional reportage to the edge of fine art documentary. But then there is that moment when work crosses the line and ceases to be documentary. That’s a fungible line for sure. I think Edmund Clark can be termed a documentary photographer, but I don’t know if he would think of himself as one.

LB:. I think Ed is like a few of us who occupy that terrain. We may change what we define ourselves as depending on the conversation. I think I heard him refer to himself as a photojournalist at least once, possibly in jest. But I think you’re right that it’s a spectrum, or maybe another interesting way of thinking about it is as a Venn diagram. You have photojournalism and art on two ends, and then you have documentary in the middle and they intersect to some degree, but documentary also occupies some territory of its own, and it doesn’t really have that much to do with either of the other two practices. And I think where they intersect are maybe some of the most interesting or challenging at least for people to accept both in terms of the art world and the journalism world. I certainly have heard artists say: “Why is documentary getting so arty? Stop encroaching on our territory.” And obviously the conflicts between documentary, art and photojournalism are well charted. We’re treading on a lot of toes I guess in this kind of field.

MB: So many things are changing as we unhinge ourselves from the analogue artifact on the wall and propel ourselves into this odd binary world where photographs are digital and unmoored from time and space. I think we should release documentary from those very narrow rigid structures and aesthetics that have been imposed in the past.

LB: I’d say for photojournalism and art photography – and this is a massive generalization – but I think to some extent in both of those fields this unhinging of photography from its physical media is really frightening. For photojournalism of course, the fear is because it’s a practice rooted in this notion that photography is physically connected to the real world and therefore it is truthful. As soon as you bring in digital technology for photojournalism that poses a huge challenge to its axiomatic idea of truth. For art, I think because photography is this kind of luscious physical medium like painting, which can be sold at extravagant prices and with limited editions, digital arguably poses a huge challenge to its business model. Some documentary photographers are challenged for both of these reasons, but for others I think it doesn’t challenge them at all. It actually kind of empowers them and becomes very exciting. I think there are a lot of documentary photographers and many people who wouldn’t necessarily define themselves as documentary photographers, but who I would see as documentary, who have embraced this dematerialization and done interesting things with it.

MB: Who would come to mind?

LB: Mishka Henner is an interesting example of someone who’s done work, which is kind of indisputably documentary.

MB: He calls himself an artist?

LB: He does, yes. He certainly sells his work in galleries, but I think he’s not personally threatened by this idea that what he’s doing, working with mainly publicly available information, might be considered documentary.

MB: I would call him documentary, or maybe a new category -- archivist documentary.

LB: His origins I think I recall him saying were originally much more towards traditional documentary, but he’s very much rejected that and moved towards this way of working, and I would say in some ways he is more of an art photographer, if you call him a photographer at all, in the sense that his work has that kind of self-reflection.

MB: He’s producing images in the end right? If he’s taking them off of Google Earth or whatever, they’re still photographs.

LB: Yes, I think he’s occupying this interesting hybrid where it’s very difficult to pin him down and say this person is definitely this or that.

MB: I was looking at your work and you do a lot of stuff with memory and the idea of both real memory and a kind of false memory, memories created by what we see and what we don’t see. Could you talk about your work and the idea of photograph as memory?

LB: In terms of my work I’d say memory is often an underlying theme or subtopic. My background long before photography was history, so that immediately explains why I interested in the juncture between history and technologies. History is a technology of memory in the same way photography is. It’s something that’s been developed to record the past and understand it. History is very loaded and very complicated and not objective in a similar way to photography.

So, I’m interested in the way photography slots into how memory is produced and disseminated. Certainly photography plays a very significant role in the dissemination of ideas of history, national identity and individual identity. It’s one of those things that if you study something like history you never get away from it. Once you learn to look at the world like a historian you can’t stop doing it and my projects to some extent ever since have had that kind of undertone.

One of the projects I did was about the idea of Europe’s history and memory and the extent to which the European Union adapted the idea of a pact of forgetting, a term originating in Spain after the Franco era. Both sides decided to basically forget the fact that they had been killing each other for the past forty years. Everyone would just live with each other. And some ways on a much less extreme level I think the European Union did something similar, which was the countries that had a lot of bad unresolved history said let’s get into this economic union together, and even though we’ve not really addressed the past, we’ll be prosperous so it will be okay. But of course, whether in Spain, or in Europe more widely, it isn’t ok. I’m now working on another project which is about much the same issue but in microcosm, looking specifically at the way German technical specialists with dubious pasts were forgiven at the end of the Second World War in return for their expertise.

MB: I did see something on your site that looked like a radio frequency and an image. What do you call that?

LB: It’s called Shadows of The State. It’s about radio systems used by intelligence agencies during the Cold War primarily, but even to this day to send messages to undercover agents. It’s interesting to me in light of the (Edward) Snowden revelation. We have a lot of images about surveillance and intelligence gathering, which are often very high tech and abstract but at the same time there are these very low tech processes like shortwave radio communication still being used. Actually what’s also interesting about these things is they’re all around us, even in this room we’re being surrounded by these secret signals. If you know how to reach out and grab them you can, and if you don’t they might as well not be there. That’s an interesting example because those spectrograms are basically produced by radio software. I often show them to people and say this is a photograph, mainly to because I like getting into arguments with photographers.

MB: Well, it is a document.

LB: It’s a document but arguably it’s a photograph if you think a photograph is writing with parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. These radio waves are of the same electromagnetic spectrum as visible light. In some ways you can say it’s no different than a photograph. It’s just being rendered by different technology. It’s something that we could do if our eyes evolved differently so we could see radio waves. So it’s interesting for me because it highlights how comfortably we use the word ‘photography’ without really often thinking about its implications.

MB: You pair the spectrograms them with a satellite image?

LB: Sometimes. Some of them are paired with a satellite image of the transmitter site. The idea of the project is to trace these broadcast as closely as possible back to where they originate. The idea is if you can find out where they’re coming from you can confirm or disconfirm the belief that they’re operated by intelligence agencies. If they come from a fairly big public broadcasting site maybe not. If they come from a kind of secret transmitter site attached to an intelligence base maybe they are connected with intelligence gathering. But as with many of my other projects this is sort of just a gateway into a wider issue, in this case the question of how democracy can be safeguarded by something like secrecy which is anathema to it.

MB: Let’s talk about transparency in photojournalism in lieu of the Steve McCurry controversy. Should we care about all of that?

LB: Should we care about Steve McCurry specifically?

MB: Not necessarily him, but the controversy about whether photojournalism ever be manipulated.

LB: It depends so much on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Again if you speak about this Venn diagram and these different practices intersecting, I think very few people expect artists to be transparent about what they do, which I think actually is sometimes a problem. I think artists making work that is arguably in the same vein as documentary or photojournalism, that is, about something in the world should be more transparent about what they are doing or who is funding it. You do get this situation where people who are definitely artists try to trade on the cultural currency and credibility of photojournalism.

The expectations of photojournalists is they are transparent and they are expected to adhere to certain rules. That’s why people do care when something like the McCurry case emerges. There is a sense of betrayal that people wouldn’t feel if McCurry had positioned himself unambiguously as an artist. I know he said I’m not a photojournalist, but unfortunately at the time, if you Googled his website the first thing that popped up was “Steve McCurry, photojournalist.” So whether manipulation is allowed, I think, is very much dependent on how you frame yourself and your work, and what you want your work to do and who you want it to speak to. For me though, transparency at all levels – whether it’s the levels of photojournalist or artist – is very important.

MB: Is that more driven by what I might call the corporate world of photojournalism?

LB: That’s an interesting question. It’s weird because in a way obviously it’s in an organizations interest to adhere to this idea that journalists don’t stage scenes or manipulate their images, but at the same time it’s not really in their interest to be transparent to the extent of showing how they work as an organization. For example, wasn’t it the Associated Press who were getting flak during the Syrian Civil War for using stringers in Syria who were in some cases seemingly aligned to rebel groups? There’s often no transparency about the interactions within these huge and powerful organizations, but there is this kind of supposed expectation of transparency about how the journalist at the very bottom of the pile operates, which I find quite strange.

For example, there’s the Narciso Contrares case which I think is a really interesting case study of how photojournalism sometimes works. He was an AP photographer working in Syria. He took a photograph of a Syrian rebel jumping into a ditch holding an AK-47. It was a generic, perhaps rather meaningless war photograph, except in one corner there was another journalist’s camera in the shot. To me that image with the camera was the most brilliant war image, because it’s just a reminder that these events are often complete media circuses. It reminds you that what goes on behind the camera, out of the camera’s field of view, more often is way more important than what actually goes on inside the field of view. Contrares digitally removed the camera from the image, and he was fired for doing that. The irony is if he submitted the unedited image obviously it would never have been used by a press agency because in a way it is exactly what they don’t want to do, which is to draw the viewer’s attention to the press themselves. The often repeated press mantra that they should ‘never become part of the story’ ironically sometimes because a way of avoiding scrutiny.

MB: So the concern today is not so much about manipulation as it is the fact that we know about how easily things are manipulated.

LB: Manipulation in other words runs to the heart of photography, and always has. I’ve argued before that the photo essay is a prime example of manipulation. Unless you reproduce the photographs in the sequence you shot them you are manipulating your audience by arranging your images in a particular manner/

MB: Yes, because you are reconstructing time.

LB: Exactly, that’s even before you talk about the contents of the images, the context they appear in, etc. I think it’s very interesting that certain forms of manipulations are acceptable and certain forms that are completely unacceptable. I think the distinction between the two and why one thing falls into one or another category is again rather revealing.

MB: Errol Morris in his Seeing is Believing book talks about a photograph taken by Ben Curtis, that shows a Mickey Mouse doll in the foreground amidst the rubble of bombed out buildings in Tyre, suggesting that the Israelis targeted civilians. He was accused by bloggers of deliberately placing the toy there. He denied it. I am not sure I believe him because it just looks too perfect a picture.

LB: It’s funny how often that phrase comes up, “too perfect a picture.” I’ve heard that often said about a photograph where maybe there isn’t a provable smoking gun that this has been staged or Photoshopped but for some reason the photograph just feels too good to be true.

MB: Well to me the toy was too clean, undamaged. There had been bombings. The buildings were destroyed and debris is everywhere on the ground, and this toy is white and kind of clean, a little beat up, maybe, but not as much as might be expected had it been in a building that was bombed. But this image raises another type of manipulation. Even if the toy had been there, even if that were true, the photographer chose to frame the image so it was predominantly in the foreground.

LB: Do you know the Don McCullin photograph that was taken during the Vietnam War of a Vietcong soldier’s wallet with his possessions scattered out? Don McCullin totally acknowledges he basically got the wallet out, emptied the stuff on the ground and took a photograph of it. His argument was he wanted to show something about this person, not just take a picture of a corpse on the floor which will tell you nothing. I never heard anyone criticize him for that. I would say rightly, because he was transparent about what he did and why he did it. I think the photograph is actually far more telling than as I said a photograph of an anonymous solider.

MB: He never denied it. He made a statement. But no one was talking about manipulation in 1968. Little manipulations happened all the time. You made your pictures better by moving things.

LB: Like the theory around (Robert) Capa’s falling soldier, that possibly it was an editor misinterpreting the image and thinking it was someone shot, describing it as such, and that just stuck. Perhaps it wasn’t Capa claiming it was a moment of action captured as the guy was shot. Perhaps he just went along with it after it happened. I’m not saying I believe that but I think it’s an interesting alternative narrative of that image.

MB: There is also the story of the Arthur Rothstein skull and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Absolutely he placed it there. He never said he didn’t. It was a caption writer for the FSA who said the skull was from a dead cow who had died there because of the drought because the FSA was trying to drum up support for the New Deal. But even though Rothstein did not write the caption, he’s been continuously criticized for lying.

LB: Which shows another thing that isn’t new for photographers. There is a chain of control for the image and how it gets reused, reapplied, redescribed, and changed as well. I’m sure you can find contemporary examples where an image is being captioned or contextualized in a way that’s similarly misleading. It’s interesting to contrast to the chain of custody idea in handling criminal evidence, where it always has to be clear who has handled an item and what they have done with it. When you think that press photographs are often regarded as a form of very public evidence, but there is never such transparency about the chain they pass along.

MB: What responsibility does the photojournalist have to try to ensure accuracy? One of the criticisms of photojournalism is the degree to which it decontextualizes the actual event. In some ways a photograph is so ephemeral you have to have text to actually root it. What’s the role of the photojournalist in determining whether that caption actually follows that photograph around? Can we do that in the time of the internet?

LB: How can you do that? Short of embedding the caption across the image in such a way that the two have to be taken together, and even then of course that’s no guarantee. That is the almost impossible problem now, if you have an image where the context is so key

MB: But isn’t context always key?

LB: It is always key in photojournalism, but you could say in a particular moment the stakes are higher and the consequences more serious for miscontextualization. A picture of someone at a cake fair or in London at a countryside, arguably the issue of that being recontextualized is less important than that of a refugee somewhere in Europe. There’s an interesting example with the UK Referendum when the far right parties here used this poster which featured an image of refugees in Europe coming down. This image and text closely echoed a Nazi propaganda film of the 1930s. The photographer who took the image was interviewed saying in his view this is the image being taken out of context. These were people who were I believe in Macedonia somewhere, or in Eastern Europe. The reason they’re walking like that is because they’re on a train line. The surrounding land is kind of rough and difficult to cross. But in the poster context it’s kind of made to look like this queue of people waiting to arrive in the UK.

MB: You talk about the relationship between power and image. Using the refugee photograph to try to sway the vote is one of the nefarious ways photography can be misused.

LB: I think it’s utterly important but impossible to ensure an image is used in context.

MB: So what do you tell your students?

LB: This is a difficult question to answer. I tell them to do everything they can to keep their images in the context they think they need to be seen in. The strategies for doing that vary from medium to medium and context to context. I’ve had some students before with particular images and I’ve said to them “I think you should be really careful about putting this online. It can be misconstrued very easily, particularly on the Internet where it’s so easy to reposition it.” That can be very difficult, because as soon as you have an image that’s incredibly powerful for the right reasons you want to use it, but if it can be reversed very easily and become incredibly powerful for the wrong reasons perhaps sometimes the potential harm is balances that out.

MB: So you ask them to think about that?

LB: Yes, basically to be very aware of the different media they’re using and the risks that come with them; to be pragmatic about what’s being used where and when and why and in what form. Photographers are all aware that you don’t put high resolution photographs on your site because they’re far easier to grab and reuse. I think you extend that conversation to actually think also about the ethical consequences of the images circulating out there out of context, not just the economic consequences.

MB: Let’s talk a bit about the photograph as history when we reconsider how we look at photographs from the past. A postmodern criticism is that it’s a very white, European, mostly male view, which it was, because photography was the purview of rich, affluent people in the late 1800s. It still does remain that to some extent. How is the role of the iPhone and social media changing that? Might we hope that were going to see a more 360 degree look at things? Now anybody with an iPhone can take photographs, as opposed to that just that European view.

LB: Well what’s the sort of the dream of photography isn’t it, arguably from its earliest moments, that it would be a democratic technology. That fact that the French Government gave the gift of the daguerreotype to the world, with the exception of the UK, I believe we had to pay for it – a brilliant example of Anglo-French relations. I think photography’s aspiration has always been as a democratic medium, but that’s obviously been hampered by all kinds of things: its origins, which as you say was a world of gentlemen scholars and enthusiast-scientists doing this, partly the technical complexity of it for a long time. Obviously with the introduction of the Kodak cameras, again the aspiration was there to be something anyone could use and they were of course marketed on that basis. Some of that democratizing certainly happened but only in the West. Perhaps it’s a progressive thing. Each new technological innovation broadens the accessibility.

But I think it’s a mistake to think of photography’s democratic potential just in terms of image making technology. It’s far more complicated than that, certainly if you want to think about citizen journalism and empowering anyone to go out there taking pictures of something important. There’s this question of visual literacy, which in a weird kind of way the internet has slightly started to solve. Certainly with the younger generation I’m amazed how without taking any steps to be visually literate, how visually literate my students still are. I think that’s partly due to things like Instagram. Images are very much a part of the social media world and they use them to construct and personas, which often are as misleading and manipulated, I would say, as the Robert Capa picture. They’re staged. They’re creations. But that means they’re very visually sophisticated. The counterpoint here though is they often don’t actually understand their own literacy, which sounds like a contradictory thing to say.

Then there is the issue of dissemination, when you do take an image that’s important, when you have the technology and the visual literacy to capture an important image, how do you then do something with that? I think there are still huge obstacles there although again they’re improving. The problem is not necessarily the reticence of mainstream media to use citizen images, because it seems like a free or cheap alternative to hiring professional photographers, but more about the enduring mistrust about whether these images are what they claim to be. There are interesting companies which offer a kind of verification service like News Zulu, I don’t know if we talked about them, but they often verify citizen produced media. If that becomes more of a mainstream thing I think that is lowering another roadblock to this idea that not only are we all photographers, but we are all citizen journalists. Globally smartphones are available to more and more people in more and more countries. I think potentially Africa is a really interesting frontier for that. There are such ambitious plans to bring Wi-Fi and 3G connections to large parts of Africa and mobile usage in some areas is already far more nuanced and sophisticated than in other parts of the world because of the numerous functions that phones fulfill. If you combine that with availability with smartphones in more and more hands potentially there is something very interesting brewing.

MB: Well it’s interesting because documentary photographers photograph “the other” – often the most disempowered people. As democratic as technology is going to be, that’s still not going to change for a very long time. We are still going to be photographing “the other”, “we” being whoever we is.

LB: I think to some extent you see that in the images coming from Syria. It’s always risky to take one model and apply it everywhere else but when you look at that way, particular during the early stages of the uprising, the way the media was being used was interesting, breaking the image of the photojournalist photographing the other which has been the case for most of the practices history. But perhaps Syria isn’t a model by which you can apply that to ever other country.

MB: There’s a wonderful agency known as Metrography, which is an Iraqi photojournalism agency. In collaboration with DARST, they produced an interactive website called Map of Displacement. It was founded by an American, Sebastian Meyer and an Italian, Stefano Carini. Basically they were both living in Iraq. They started training Iraqi photojournalists to get them hired as opposed to sending Westerners in. His challenge was explaining Western media ethics to Iraqi photojournalists and getting editors to believe the Iraqis were going to not manipulate them. The photographs are different than most coming out of Iraq. Should documentary photography still be criticized that it continues the colonial model of the savior or was it ever a fair criticism, or was it just a matter of who had the money to go and take pictures?

LB: Well you could say one of the problems with documentary photography is it’s rooted in part in that practice of colonial photography. You could see people like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine as those early proto documentary photographers.

MB: Why do you call them proto documentary photographers?

LB: I suppose because they largely predate John Grierson’s coining of the idea of ‘documentary’ as a practice, and so it feels strange to call them documentary photographers. Their methods of dissemination, the long form nature of their projects, also lead me away from calling them photojournalists. I was going to say some aspects of their methods remind me of the methods of early colonial administrators who used photography to document their dominions and then share this knowledge with others, although there are also huge differences.

MB: Where would you position Alice Seeley Harris’s work on the Congo? The images did raise money, yet they were white missionaries trying to proselytize Christianity.

LB: In some ways I think you can use her as a sort of bridge between the people who were explicitly going to the Congo to take photographs to do the ethnographic, imperial stuff and then the people like (Jacob) Riis and (Lewis) Hine who were doing similar things but doing it at home. Again, often with a very judgmental point of view, particularly I would say with Riis.

MB: But he was photographing immigrants like himself.

LB: Yes, but when you look at the way he sensationalizes his subjects and the places he is photographing it becomes judgmental. Let’s just say his work is more complicated than people often acknowledge. People often say this is the father of documentary photography. Hine is more difficult to argue that with, but probably not impossible.

MB: Well, Hine was doing portraits. He took meticulous notes. He was working for what today we would call a nonprofit.

LB: He definitely had a very clear social agenda and didn’t sensationalize it. You can maybe see an interesting progression through the three of them. Not that that’s necessary because they were working to some extent in the same time frame as each other or at least overlapping. But if you chose to you could maybe draw an interesting thread of evolution through the different kinds of work.

MB: So could we position Seeley Harris as a kind of proto documentary photographer?

LB: I would. Again I’d be interested to know what she saw herself as. She probably didn’t really consider herself a photographer, I get the sense it was a means to an end to her work as a missionary?

MB: She wasn’t given as much credit as she deserved because she was a woman. A lot of her photographs were credited to her husband.

LB: I didn’t know that. I think her work is amazing and in retrospect is indisputably documentary. I know this isn’t true for a lot of photographers but for me an important part of documentary is a social or political agenda. I think maybe that separates it from photojournalism in some ways. I think in photojournalism there is always an agenda but it’s not something readily acknowledged, or it’s almost something that should be downplayed. I think documentary photographers are more willing to admit they have an agenda behind their work.

MB: Particularly activist photographers.

LB: I think you could say all of them were activists. All of them were keen on promoting change. I think that’s another interesting thread, another subcategory within this crazy Venn diagram we’re drawing in our heads of photography. Within documentary there is this interesting sub circle of photographers. What they’re doing is intent on making change.

MB: And they unabashedly say that.

LB: I think for some people it’s no question. The irony is a lot of photojournalists I know certainly talk about this idea of their work influencing people and changing the world, but at the same time they’re not particularly keen to acknowledge that comes from an agenda of their own.

MB: Because photojournalism’s agenda is supposed to be objectivity. Of course we’re not objective as human beings.

LB: There’s a dissonance there between the idea that you influence people and the idea that your work is objective. What are you influencing people about? Are you influencing people that there is this objective notion of the world that is completely uncolored in any respect? That seems self-contradictory to me, but interesting.

MB: Anything else we should talk about?

LB: One thing we talked about before was ethics. I don’t prescribe an ethical code as such when I teach. I don’t say you must follow this ethical code and if you haven’t been I’ll fail you or anything like that. I teach them what ethical expectations are, particularly in photojournalism. If you want to get on in that industry you don’t do some things, you do do other things. I think one thing that’s really important for me is students leave college able to make their own ethical decisions about the world. Whatever code I give them it’s not going to cover every situation they find themselves in. There are always going to be situations where they’re out there in the world working and they’re presented with difficult ethical journalistic questions that I haven’t talked about in class or perhaps ever even anticipated. A large part of my class is discussing these broader ethical and moral questions and trying to get students to make their own decisions about them. If a student decides that from their perspective staging images is absolutely fine that’s their decision to make, not mine, just as they have to take responsibility for it, not me.

MB: I think your insistence on transparency being the issue is a more interesting conversation for photographers to have than whether a person should change a pixel. What you have in a lot of these instances is this aesthetic situation where a photographer goes “Oh my god that sky I took like a second later is a better sky, I want to change the clouds.” But that so fundamentally goes against World Press Photo rules even if the change doesn’t fundamentally change the photograph.

LB: At the same time, I completely respect a student who leaves my class and says I am totally going to stick to those rules and never stage or manipulate an image. If they reach that conclusion about how they want to work, I completely respect and support that. I equally respect and support a student who rationalizes doing the opposite. As long as they can explain why they’re doing what they do, and it makes sense.

MB: What Ron Haviv finds interesting is young photographers he meets will think nothing of quasi setting up an event to photograph, say finding kids and a field and telling the kids to play in the field. Then they photograph the kids playing in the field and they don’t think they are manipulating the image because they aren’t directing the scene while it is happening. Compare this to the debate among purists about if it’s even okay to ask someone to switch the day they do something. That’s the micro level this debate gets into. That’s what you’re giving your students. Here are the issues. You all figure out what your moral true north is.

LB: Exactly and it gets even more microscopic than that. Obviously the issue we all know but don’t discuss is that simply by being there as photographers, we manipulate the situation. It almost becomes one of these philosophical questions like the sound of one hand clapping?

MB: Or, if something happens and no one is there to photograph it, did it really occur?

LB: I think when you get down to that level where you say actually me just being here is a manipulation, that’s already an admission of sorts. I think it’s fine from there to admit to other things if it happened. Again, clearly it depends on the context it’s used in, who’s publishing and disseminating it, the photographer’s own moral code. Basically I don’t believe in dictating ethical decisions to other people, we each need to find our own way.

https://www.stevemccurry.com. Now the site states (in the bio section): “Steve McCurry has been one of the most iconic voices in contemporary photography for more than thirty years, with scores of magazine and book covers, over a dozen books, and countless exhibitions around the world to his name.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/07/the-controversial-death-of-a-teenage-stringer/. https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/publications/PP9_Issa_Syrianmedia_web_0.pdf.

https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/questions-about-news-photographers-in-syria-arise-after-freelancers-death/. Questions arose about freelance news photographers employed by agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters after the death of teenage photographer Molhem Barakat, employed by Reuters.

Paul Seawright

MB: How would you define documentary photography today?

PS: It’s impossible to define documentary photography today. I’ve always had a problem with the word itself. Actually before I went to work in Newport (Newport campus, University of South Wales)I n 1994 I hadn’t seen myself as a documentary photographer. I think I remember once in a Creative Camera article someone wrote “documentary photographer Paul Seawright” and I said “Really?” I thought I was a landscape photographer or artist. But because I went to Newport to set up their Masters and they have a long history of documentary, suddenly that term became massive for me and for everyone. Part of my work there was to try and expand that idea because Newport was very, very conservative documentary, as you can imagine, having been established in the 1970s by David Hurn from Magnum. It was ironic that I was brought in to change their conservative view of documentary because I hadn’t seen myself as a documentary photographer.

MB: Should there be restrictions on what is considered documentary?

PS: You can make an argument that documentary can be anything, really. If it’s made outside of the studio or it’s not constructed, you can argue any piece of the work made in the world could be called documentary. But that’s not helpful. So what is helpful in terms of thinking about documentary? I think what the photographer intends about the work is important. Paul Graham is very defensive about being called a documentary photographer even though in his early days he wrote a book about documentary photography and subjective documentary. But today he doesn’t like to be called that. Documentary photographers often want to reposition themselves in the market because there was a time when museums wouldn’t touch anything documentary with a barge pole. Actually, even I was an examiner at The Royal College of Art for a couple of years, any student who put a piece of work in front of me that might have been conceived as documentary, the first thing the student said would be “This is not documentary.” They’re saying “I know it looks documentary because it’s issue base and it’s observed, but it’s not documentary.” That’s not so much about the work or indeed their intent, it comes from a nervousness about not being taken seriously in the museum sector.

MB: How do you position yourself?

PS: I have always had one foot in the world of photography and the world of art, and there were clearly two camps, certainly in Europe. That was much less defined in America because of MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, NYC) and (John) Szarkowski and all that. But certainly in Europe and Britain there was the world of photography and the world of art. The Tate at that time only had photographic work by three people, but they were very art based. Those things have changed because the museum attitude to photography has changed in general. Therefore, their attitude to documentary has changed, which has allowed people to think about what documentary might be in a more expansive way than what they might be able to do before. Absolutely lots of artists have used documentary motifs and documentary methodology. Gillian Wearing is a classic example. She would never see herself as anything to do with documentary but she uses documentary techniques both in terms of her research and her working methods.

MB: I think now people actually want to be documentary photographers.

PS: I wouldn’t go that far.

MB: Or maybe they just want to claim the documentary “style”, whatever that means.

PS: I work with a guy called Ian Walker at Newport, He is a fantastic historian and theorist. He wrote an article years ago where he talked about documentary within art practice as the genre that dare not speak its name and that sums it up quite well. Luc Delahaye is probably the best example of someone who is a Magnum photographer who thought “How do I reinvent myself as an artist?” It was a very deliberate conscious decision. His answer was you only produce three photographs a year instead of 300 and you make them huge and even though they look exactly the same, but they become art.

MB: That raises interesting questions, because when we talked about intent and documentary you used the words “issue based” and “observed” as certain taglines.

PS: Yes, for me subjectivity is key. That’s where it came from for me. When I went to art school, I was a landscape photographer. But it was about the landscape of home. Actually it was Paul Graham, who was one of my tutors. In a second year class he showed us Svarkowski’s Mirrors and Windows book, which of course tries to position photography in two prisms: photography is a window of the world, a classic documentary idea, and photography as a kind of mirror on the self, a poetic kind of Minor White-esque work. There’s always been this dialectic, but Paul Graham said “Is there not something in the middle where you use a subjective personal reflection of the self in a documentary context?” Lovely idea.

MB: Do you work in that manner?

PS: When I was a 15-year-old in Belfast, I kept a diary during the Hunger Strike year. I went back and revisited those places, and made photographs. That opened up for me the last thirty years of my practice, which is making work that is a reflection on things that have concerned me, a very subjective, highly authored element of documentary. Of course this is slightly counter to objectivity, which most people would say is the inherent thing in documentary. I kind of balk at that idea that objectivity is the key identifier in documentary. For me it’s the key foil in documentary, it’s what you work against, that presumed objectivity. For me what’s key is casting your shadow onto the picture instead of trying to remove it.

MB: It’s interesting because I think the idea of presumed objectivity was imposed on documentary. Documentary photographers never said their work was objective.

PS: But it was embraced by photojournalists.

MB: True, but I think photojournalism is different. In photojournalism, particularly newspaper photography, you have to be as objective as is humanly possible, knowing full well you can’t ever be fully objective, but you try, you really put aside your biases. That’s the role of the journalist. But that’s not necessarily the role of the documentary photographer.

PS: What is the difference then? The difference you would say, is that one is vocational, primarily single image based, assignment based, so you’re working on other people’s briefs. And the other is long-term, multiple images, longer narratives. Newspapers changed and began to have magazines. And then documentary also became vocational, also shot by the same photojournalists who believe in objectivity, which then caused problems I think in presenting documentary work as objective. I was on a panel in 2001 with Don McCullin and he said “I am and have been an objective witness of world history.” That’s what he believes. He said to me,

“Paul, if you had been there you’d have made the same pictures.” I said “That’s absolute nonsense.” The example I give is: Ed Kashi and I met one summer photographing in Belfast. We met over and over that summer. I told him I would be fascinated to see what he produced versus what I produced. I was making work for an exhibition. He was making his work for The Observer magazine and The Independent magazine. In fact, a terrible thing happened to him as he had made a story on Tiger’s Bay where I lived in Belfast. He had gotten in deep with a family as you do, that’s his approach, and he photographed them for a whole summer, and then when the Independent magazine used it, not only did they use it, but it was on all billboards on newspaper offices around Belfast, and they called it Day in The Life of Brian a Violent Youth in Ulster. They really reduced it to something very simplistic. Ed told me they sent the journalist who wrote the piece to the estate for a day while Ed had been there for 12 weeks. He went back to the community the following year and they beat him up. It was a horrible experience for him. But in the end we had a two-person exhibition, Ed and I, at the Arts Council Gallery in Belfast of the same parades the same summer and honestly it couldn’t have been more different. His is narrative based and mine is bit more abstract. It was just lovely as a two person show. But what it says is that any documentary photography is always going to be highly subjective.

We could not have made the same work. That’s what’s beautiful about photography. You can be in the same room and make a different piece of work than the next person.

MB: So what about intent? If Luc Delahaye says I’m going to take the same photo of the Afghan soldier and I’m going to do it with a view camera and print it huge intended for the wall of the gallery, does that make it less documentary?

PS: It does for him. It doesn’t for us. When I say intent that is just to acknowledge that a photographer can say I want nothing to do with the idea of documentary. I think it’s a little bit around documentary as persuasion. A critic once wrote about Willie Doherty and I, it was a real critique of our work, much more so of Willie, because he’s much more prominent than I am, but the critic was saying how useless the work was in his eye because our work doesn’t take a position or doesn’t try to educate anyone. I guess as a piece of documentary work in the purest sense the kind of work I make or that Willie makes doesn’t try to educate or to push a polemic – it’s not trying to take a position or persuade you necessarily.

MB: But does documentary have to do that?

PS: I don’t think that it does, but a lot of people do believe that, and if it doesn’t, it has no value beyond the gallery.

MB: Could you say all photography persuades if you look closely enough at it and understand the image?

PS: Like what you said about Ansel Adams being an activist.

MB: Well, he was he was an environmentalist.

PS: People will say how could that photography be seen as activism, but of course, it depends on how it’s contextualized.

MB: He did show his work to key congressmen to try to convince them to create the Kings Canyon National Park Congress. He was absolutely an environmental activist.  

PS: So the form of the photograph in that context you can say he was documenting a changing landscape that was under threat and it was documentary?

MB: Now it’s art, but he took his images as evidence to Congress to prove why the land needed to be protected.

PS: So that goes back to saying anything can be documentary, in a sense.

MB: Or maybe we start by asking what’s not documentary?

PS: One of the things I often talk about to students is what happened in the 1980s. Post structuralism was absolutely at its height, particularly in photography, the Burden of Representation had just been published and photography was being critiqued as colonialism.– all of that. There were so many theorists teaching that people theorized themselves out of the practice. So documentary became absolute anathema, particularly at the Polytechnic of Central London (PCL) where Victor Burgin and John Tagg were teaching. You could not make documentary work and it was a huge debate when we were at art school at that time. Conversely that was the time we were in the middle of the coalminer strikes, Thatcherism was full blown and the country was in chaos, with Ireland at its worst. The context of British politics was quite acute and a lot needed to be said with as many different perspectives as possible, in my view so we needed photography. The work I make, call it whatever the hell you want, but it’s dealing with the same subject matter that conventional documentarians might do, that even photojournalists might do, but it’s trying to do it within a different discourse and for a different audience and disseminated in a different way.

People talk about compassion fatigue in relation to Northern Ireland, and that people just didn’t want to see more reports from that place so how do you keep people interested? How do you keep drawing people’s attention to what’s going on there? For years I talked about my own work as a direct response to photojournalism in Northern Ireland. Actually in the last five years I acknowledge it was much more complex than that. I don’t know if you’ve seen that book by Colin Graham, Thirty Years of Photography in Northern Ireland.. Colin wrote that he thought the work he was making was as much a response and perhaps more a response to what was going on photographically in the world, as it was to what was going on in Northern Ireland. I think he’s absolutely right. It’s 50/50. So I’m in an English art school, very frustrated with the reductive nature of photography coming out of Northern Ireland and the fact that nearly all the photography of the troubles and violence was being made by journalists outside of Northern Ireland.

When you leave a place you suddenly become much more interested in it and I was gathering together all of this stuff in my thesis about censorship in Northern Ireland, all of that, and deeply dissatisfied with what was out there. So my work partly became a response to that, but if you look at the work, it was also about what was going on with photography. My work was color, medium format, landscape and much more complex than the idea of just responding to the situation. We were all pushing at the boundaries of what we might call documentary at the same time, so it was a brilliant moment to be making new work. At the same time, the issues facing Britain – the threat of nuclear war, sectarianism, unemployment – were essentially invisible or un-visual and didn’t lend themselves well to documentary practices.

MB: That depends on the documentary approach.

PS: That was the challenge that fed my work. Nearly everything I do is about the invisible and un-visual in a sense. So that for me was the trigger. I thought “Oh, it’s a perfect moment to find a new language to use in documentary.” So it’s also documentary, but kind of borrowing lots of other languages and methodologies and meshing those together. I think the label is almost something you apply afterwards. If you’re curating a show or doing a book about documentary, can it fit in? I think that’s the question.

MB: The question for me is when does documentary photography cross the line and become only fine art? I think that’s where it gets tricky.

PS: You could work with no intent and still have something that resonates. When people are critical of the work I’ve done they usually criticize it because they don’t see how it is meaningful in terms of what it is telling them about a situation. They’re right. I might argue yes, (in Hidden) very little is obvious in that  landscape of Afghanistan, but I hope it might implore you to look further in what’s going on in Afghanistan. That’s enough for me.

MB: Your work does tell us something. Here’s a question. Can documentary work be constructed ? Or does that go too far?

PS: If you’re saying that documentary is any photograph that is engaging with societal issues, the things we face, that’s not a bad definition for me. Is it grasping with or pointing us to or playing with issues that we’re also wresting with through other forms of media? If someone does a theater piece about someone being arrested and tortured in Iraq, we don’t call it “documentary theater,” we just call it theater. But in the same context it would be documentary, wouldn’t it?

MB: Well it’s totally fictional though, that’s the difference.

PS: But it is based on fact.

MB: But still fictionalized, like constructed photography.

PS: Yes, so maybe that’s the boundary. If the construct is entirely fictionalized, is that the boundary? So where does that take us? Right back to bloody truth and objectivity. The theater analogy brings me back to what I often thought is a better way to describe what I did -- as issue-based. That might be documentary and even though you don’t want to put any labels on yourself, labels are also helpful. What I’ve often said when people have asked, is that labels are helpful in an educational context because students are learning about photography, the different ways of making work and the different working methods. In the professional context when it gets to the museum or gallery labels are not actually useful.

MB: The only reason documentary became the genre that dare not name itself is because the art world didn’t accept it, and to be a documentary photographer meant you couldn’t sell work in art galleries. Now you can.

PS: But now you can because you’re acknowledging you don’t believe your work is objective or documentary.

MB: Indeed.

PS: There are still people who I would argue are pure documentarian. But even with these rules, we still have all the stuff that’s going on in the World Press for the last two years.

MB: I can’t understand how Giovanni Troilo’s image won. It was obviously set up.

PS: You knew it was constructed because it was lit. It was lit.

MB: And you don’t go to have sex in your car and leave the lights on.

PS: That document that World Press has produced is a seminar class in itself.

MB: At the time, there was no specific rule against constructing a scene, I think, because no one thought such a rule was needed so they couldn’t disqualify it for that reason. But World Press did have a rule about accuracy in captions and the caption inaccurately identified the location. But this controversy did spark the new rules about what constitutes manipulation.

PS: Donovan Wiley got caught up in this kind of thing. Time magazine had published his Afghanistan watchtower images on Lightbox. Because of another project he also did for them where he made a composite, they went back and looked at the watchtower images and asked him if some of them had been digitally manipulated. He said of course they had been because they had been commissioned for a museum in Canada. Time wanted a statement from him so he worked with me and a lawyer in Magnum to write a bloody statement explaining exactly what has been changed in those images. The statement starts by saying that Time was misled. No one misled anybody. Are you saying you can’t slightly desaturate an image?

MB: That’s absurd.

PS: It is absurd because these are art photographs made for a museum and never intended to be press pictures. He never misrepresented them. They just made assumptions because he is a Magnum photographer. And the statement is still online. That bit is incredible.

MB: In our digital era, it all has gotten silly. Photographers are not allowed to do what newspaper photographers always did in the darkroom. And the very fact that photographers frame this and not that, is already manipulation. We’ve become so right wing about all of this.

PS: I think this has slightly poisoned the well for documentary too. That kind of extremist approach is just not helpful.

MB: A couple of well-known documentary photographers I know got into an argument about whether it was okay to ask someone to change the day they did something to fit the photographer’s schedule. One thought it was, one didn’t think it was.

PS: Oh you’re kidding me.

MB: That argument gets so granular even amongst photographers.

PS: The term we used in the eighties and what Martin (Parr) and Paul (Graham) would have called themselves is independent photographer. Not artist, not photographer, not documentarian, independent photographer. The idea was that you were working with no one’s agenda but your own. Actually, that if anything is what we’ve all held onto. That’s what we argued the work with the gallery context gave you, is you sacrificed the audience size for the integrity of working your own way with your own rules to produce an art work. That independence is something you lose as soon as you end up in any of these professional vocational worlds. I also think that was the resistance of the art world that documentary is perceived by them as partly vocational and subject to all these rules about truth, while art is not interested in any of that. If anything it’s interested in a critique of those things.

(Robert) Frank’s Americans is for me the quintessential documentary project. Long term work that uses nobody else’s parameters, quite esoteric but also sometimes documentary in a quite transparent way, a complex narrative with lots of metaphoric and realist motifs working together. It’s still the perfect example of a non-vocational, independent, artist developed documentary project. It works as easily in printed form as it does on the gallery wall.

MB: Documentary photographers today put work in galleries to make money. They don’t have pensions. We shouldn’t begrudge them selling prints. I think that’s a valid response too.

PS: I think that’s fine.

MB: There’s something weird about being in a white wall gallery with conflict images, but even so.

PS: There is a problem with some of it. It is an interesting debate. I went to an opening two years ago of the Magnum show at Paris Photo. Three Magnum photographers in a massive corporate gallery with champagne. It all felt very wrong given the nature of the images on the wall, which were all about extreme forms of African poverty.

MB: Yes, that show seemed too corporate for the images.

PS: Yes, you felt out of place if you weren’t wearing black Prada.

MB: To slightly change the subject. What do you tell your students about what they are “allowed” to do in terms of setting things up or altering a moment?

PS: At our school, we have professors working in a mix of approaches from the purist documentary to more conceptual approaches. We might approach it more as documentary ethics with a small e. I kind of play up our differences in a way to tell students to decide about where they are in relation to what we all do. If I show a photograph about a child in a field in the Irish Museum of Modern Art no one cares if I put them in that field, if that child is my son or daughter, they don’t care. It’s just about the image itself. They’re interested in the image and what it means. Really my approach has always been, as an individual and an artist, is I’m constructing meaning in the photographs that I make, acknowledging that we are constructing the meaning in the photograph. I think if you acknowledge that then all of those other things don’t matter. This is not me dispassionately observing something that goes on in the world. It’s me constructing meaning by choosing what’s going to be in the frame.

MB: I think that’s what always had been done. You look at Eugene Smith’s Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath. It was a collaboration between Smith and Tomoko’s mother So while we revered it as a great photograph, it was constructed.

PS: There is a book, (Nobuyoshi) Araki’s The Banquet. That book is about the death of his wife. It’s metaphoric but it’s also about food -- color and black and white detailed photographs of food. But that was about her and he began to photograph food. I think, “Were these all her actual meals?” Does that matter for me? It doesn’t matter because of the metaphor. If he started photographing her meals and this became the body of work at the end of the day, even after she died, he was still photographing food to put this together in that book. He constructed an artwork that is powerful. It is a powerful metaphor for his wife’s deterioration and if they’re not actually her meals does it matter?

MB: It would only matter to me if he said they were all her meals. If the text was inaccurate, I would feel slightly cheated.

PS: Photographers who work in a museum context tend not to use any text at all. My last work about the sex offenders was shown in a commercial gallery. They had this huge battle with me with what we were going to say or not say to the press or on the gallery wall. Of course a commercial gallery does not have to say anything on the gallery wall, but a museum will always want an interpretive wall piece. Then of course that tends to be not the artist’s words but someone else’s words. I’ll go into a show and someone else has written a wall panel and I will think, “My god are you serious?”

MB: Don’t you read a wall text sometimes and think it actually says nothing?

PS: Absolutely. Or it says something, just slightly bizarre. When my work on U.S. television news studios was shown they had written a wall text about the work being fetishistic. What? It’s incredible. Some curator just analyzed it that way but people think I wrote it.

MB: I do think a postmodern criticism of documentary is the need for text. When you take a serious, horrible situation that’s inherently exploitive because documentary photography is to some degree exploitive, and you disaggregate it from the text it devalues the people photographed. I think there is some responsibility and I think most of the photographers I talk to who work in that genre do believe that is important. The text needs to be respectful and accurate, but how do you keep that attached to the picture?

PS: I agree with that. But that’s also why photographers would distance themselves from saying it’s documentary. They don’t want to provide that text because it surrenders the meaning of the work too quickly.

MB: But you’re not going into Congo to photograph the Lord’s Resistance Army people like Marcus Bleasdale does without providing context.

PS: Compare him then to Richard Mosse. Is Richard Mosse documentary?

MB: I would say that his work is documentary, but he might not. Let’s take the work from Congo. The only thing he did is realize the infrared film would render all the foliage red and the skin tones normal and that was the most extraordinary metaphor in my mind for all the death and bloodshed in the Congo. I don’t know if that was his intent or if he said that afterwards I have no idea. I know a lot of photographers who criticize his work because the infrared film abstracts the image. But so does black and white film.

PS: But Mosse doesn't include text.

MB: I don’t think he needs text and I would still say he’s documentary. He probably wouldn’t agree.

PS: He would say he is an artist, bit I do think that work has some documentary qualities.

MB: And maybe documentary intent.

PS: I think so too. The very fact that you’re going to the Congo and you’re dealing with conflict? I don’t think you can say you’re not documentary. But some people were horrified because there was no text to explain which group is which group in the pictures, all of that stuff to explain the complexity of the Congo. For my work, I often talk about when I was asked to go to Afghanistan. Before I went to Afghanistan, I was very critical of the photographers who came to Northern Ireland to make work without knowing anything about the situation. Call them documentarians or what you will, but these people often were not well informed about what they were coming into. Belfast during the 70s and 80s was perfect because you could get on a domestic flight anywhere and be there in an hour. You could stay in a nice hotel in the center of the town and go and photograph riots and bombings all day long then go back to the hotel and meet some other people like yourself. So it was filled with people like that making their careers.

I showed at a festival in China last year and a guy came up to me from Sweden and said “I photographed Northern Ireland in the 70s. Would you like to see the pictures?” I almost said to him “I’m sure I’ve already seen them because they look like all the other pictures.” I was very critical of that. Paul Graham told me not to be so angry and so critical because I was critical of his early Northern Ireland work too. I thought he was just going around in his convertible Volkswagen Golf GTI and making these pictures. But actually in hindsight it changed everything for me, that work, so I still acknowledge it as completely transformative for not just me, but for representing that conflict. That idea of other people from outside and making work from within, he encouraged me to do that. That was fantastic.

So then how could someone like me go to Afghanistan and make work? That was a thorny question for me when I was shortlisted (for a commission from the UK’s Imperial War Museum) and invited to come to them with a proposal. The very first thing I said to the commission was I would be deeply uneasy about going to make work in Afghanistan because everything I believe and said due to the conflict I grew up living through all these years – so how could I go and do that? The way I rationalized that in the end was I could go make work if it was about war and the landscape of war, generically. It wasn’t work that was about Afghanistan, specifically. In fact the title of the work, Hidden, is this idea of everything in a contemporary conflict being hidden, including the communities of people. Everything is obscured in this kind of mist. The Taliban is supposedly hidden; the mines are literally hidden beneath the ground. When we did the show at the Imperial War Museum they realized at the very last moment when they were sending all of the invites out, that none of the invites mentioned Afghanistan. They had to print a little flyer to put in the envelope saying this is our Afghanistan War commission. So for me it could be about any Middle Eastern war, and of course Iraq came after and it all changed. The work was about what happens to landscape in war. That’s how I settled it with myself. Who am I to talk about Afghanistan, about the specificity of any conflict other than my own? So it talks very generically about war and the international mine treaty which has been signed by every country in the world except two, North Korea and America.

MB: I was going to say one of those countries had to be the U.S.

PS: An interesting aside to this work is that the BBC asked me if I would be interested making an audio diary when I was there, and I thought maybe this is the perfect way to do something, because of course there’s a terrible slight frustration but also guilt for being in that situation and making the kind of work that I make that’s so stripped down and so stripped of its kind of narrative. I kind of thought the radio documentary was maybe a way to counter that and make a piece that was very directly about the issue. In the end that’s what I did. It’s a half hour radio documentary for Radio 4. I quite liked that. I’m currently making a piece of work, video in fact, and I’m using entirely documentary techniques to assemble the whole piece. That’s the way I work. I work like a journalist or documentarian in terms of how I approach the project, but of course that’s not what you see when you see the final piece of work. That becomes invisible. This current project is about American soldiers that come back from Afghanistan and Iraq and have then been living in a period of homelessness. I’ve been working in West Virginia and Memphis.

MB: Are you shooting this or using archives?

PS: I spent a month in March doing audio interviews with soldiers. I interviewed more than twenty ex-homeless vets. It changed as I did the interviews because when you start interviewing other things become important, so it’s about how they go out as heroes and come back as pariahs. It’s kind of strange to come back as a burden. You can actually produce a conventional documentary film from the material, but what will be produced in the end will be a more abstract video piece, which will use one or two of those interviews.

MB: The problem is we're saving soldiers but sending them home with severe brain trauma that requires a lot of care. We have so defunded our Veterans Administration hospitals that it can take months to get an appointment even if you have PTSD and you’re going crazy. The fact that there are homeless vets in this country is appalling. We're the richest country in the world so what are we doing? Those stories need to be told.

PS: They do. The stories I’ve heard are just shocking. In fact, I was doing a TV interview just the week before I went away. It was a BBC program about commemorating 1916 where they want to talk about war and photography. The guy who interviewed me is a radio producer and asked me if I was interested in doing an Afghanistan radio thing. I’m actually thinking I might do something radio with this veterans piece of work as a kind of counterpart to the video piece. He said why don’t we work on that together? So I probably will do another radio documentary, which is a nice way to bounce out those two things.

MB: Do you think it’s impossible for someone to learn enough about Afghanistan or Belfast to make them more than an outsider, before they go to actually be able to photograph? Documentary photographers are almost always the other. It’s always been a rather affluent profession. You had to be rich in the 19th and early 20th centuries to be a photographer and frankly you have to be fairly well off today. It becomes a class based issue just by the nature of the expense. So often you’re the other, going in some place whether its Belfast or West Virginia. What’s the counterargument to your very valid point?

PS: The counter argument is one that I accept completely. I would rather have those photographs exist than not. Simple as that. I think the more versions or the broader representation we have of any of those issues, the better, from as many voices as possible. If all of the voices are Rupert Murdoch’s sponsor voices, then were all in trouble. That’s actually why you need artists. You need people going to these places who aren’t conventionally trained or aren’t necessarily trying to produce a balanced view. You need people who are mavericks as well. You need all of them. Because in the end as we look back on it 40 to 50 years, it will all be of value in some way.

MB: So what is the role of cellphones and citizens and sort of the democracy of photography today? How is that going to change what we see?

PS: It’s frightening. I think the biggest challenge with that is the sheer volume of material. How do you wade through that to find the meaningful stuff? How is it all archived and kept?

Of course none of that takes any account of the issues we talked about around ethics or what’s constructed or not constructed. Yet it finds its way out into the world.

MB: If we get our sense of history from photographs, which we have since like the 1800s, what happens when we don’t know what we’re seeing or how accurate it is? How will that impact public memory?

PS: There’s a certain veracity about the person on the street who takes out their phone and starts filming. The public believes that more than watching the polished news program the next day.

MB: That’s true as long as it’s from the place it claims to be from.

PS: There’s a lot of assumptions to be made. But people feel that type of footage feels more real.

MB: As a journalist I always see the news clip they’re playing, but I wondered what happened the minute before and the minute after. What are we not seeing that can change the context of the little snippet that we are being shown? So how do we combat that? Is it the role of more professional documentary photographers or artists to combat that?

PS: I think the role of the artist becomes much more valuable in that scenario. As we move towards every solider wearing a body cam, in ten years are we going to see everyone with those cameras that record everything all of the time?

MB: Unfettered and unedited, everything.

PS: All the time. We are probably going to end up somewhere like that, in which case the role of the artist becomes something that is much more interpretive, much slower, much more complex and layered. For me that’s always been the exciting space.

MB: It becomes the commentary.

PS: To construct your own narrative and meaning about that issue and to do it visually, that’s the difference between a document and documentary. The GoPro on a soldier’s helmet is a document of what he was working on that day. But it’s not documentary. Documentary begins to construct a narrative around events which will probably have a number of viewpoints and so on. I guess the artist then is someone who takes all the available material and produces something that is a complex and interesting critique.

MB: Maybe that also becomes what the documentary photographer does or maybe we get rid of those definitions altogether.

PS: Yeah I think maybe that’s what will happen. It’s happening anyway. In the past you could have said that photojournalism and media based vocational documentary was fairly singular in its kind of approach. You can’t say that anymore because newspapers and magazines are publishing all kinds of stuff. I used to point to 9/11 as this moment of crisis where nothing could compete with the image of the plane heading towards the tower. Nothing could compete with that image. It was filmed in real time, live, streamed to the world, it was cinematic. Nothing was ever going to compete with that moment so what are you going to do as a photographer? I show this work by a French photographer called Frédérick Sautereau, which is a lovely little black and white book of people standing in the streets looking up. It just has the coordinates of twin towers as the title. No other text, just group after group of people standing together looking at the sky. I think as a piece of pure documentary work that’s beginning to push the boundaries, that’s it for me. That for me is the kind of moment where people had to think differently. How do you represent something without showing the thing itself? My point is you don’t need to see the tower. You don’t need to explain it. It’s in all of our heads. You just show the look of horror on these peoples’ faces. Magazines and newspapers are now publishing all kinds of work that back then we would have seen as art based projects.

MB: They have to do that. They’re trying to compete. Maybe it’s been a good thing.

PS: That’s where documentary had to change. I also think all of the self-publishing has allowed photographers to do books when before they would only have published their photos in newspapers or supplements.

MB: I think it’s an exciting time for photographers. I go to Perpignan every year and I always come away inspired. The work is Jean-François’s point of view, I get that, but the sheer energy and volume of work that people are producing is extraordinary. I think it’s a fabulous time for documentary photography and for students the expansiveness of documentary should be exciting. How do your students come at work? Are they more naturally experimental because they’re growing up in a more visually literate world or are they traditional?

PS: I think they’re more visually literate than art students were in the past due to the sheer access of material. They’re exposed to images in a way that students before had to be much more proactive to come across that material. When I was a student I had to go to London for a photographic workshop. There was no way of getting mail order books even. The sheer access of material has changed visual literacy. For us the biggest problem with young students, and I don’t want to characterize them too much here – the generality would be I think they’re less interested in the world than what we were. They’re much more visually literate and much less actually literate.

MB: So their documentary work is more internal and less external?

PS: Yes. They all photograph their friends. They all think documentary stardom is Nan Goldin.

MB: So how does narrative change with this visual literacy of students? Is narrative way less linear?

PS: It’s way less linear. Of course. You can counter that by saying traditional narrative is having a kind of renaissance in the photobook. That’s the counterargument to the digital deconstruction of narrative that’s going on. People are falling in love again of having printed matter in their hands, particularly young people. I think they love the accessibility of it. They can print 12 copies of this thing. I think that’s probably something we're focusing a lot on. But we also know that explosion of photo books is a horror story in terms of the terrible stuff that is out there.

MB: Most of them aren’t very good. My question to students is always “Why should your project be a book?”

PS: Yes, but it is great in terms of teaching narrative. Look at Frank’s Americans and the sequencing of it was absolutely genius. It wasn’t arrived at accidently. I think students making student newspapers and books need to think about narrative and text. Not in a documentary context, but in all kinds of contexts. Dealing with narrative is something we continue to emphasize in our program for sure.

MB: Should photography include the moving image?

PS: It’s going to have to. Let me tell you a little anecdote. Donovan (Wiley) and I were at a bar in a hotel in Dublin and Donovan looks at his phone. He was seeing all these Magnum emails coming in from Ukraine from some Magnum photographers who were there. But it was all video. This guy is lying in the bloody rubble, filming in black and white on his camera with a body being pulled out. Magnum photographers are all sending these messages “Stay safe!” I said Donovan you should just send the message “Get the fuck out of there! What are you thinking?!” But 4K is amazing. You can shoot in 4K and pull still frames off your video, and print them and they’re fabulous.

MB: So then it’s not the decisive moment, but the decisive edit.

PS: So the next stage from that will be a 4K camera on the soldier’s helmet. That’s what will happen. Then everything won’t be the dodgy police camera, it will be the perfect 4K image of that stuff. And then what? What’s the rule? The rule then is all about interpretation.

MB: We’re curators. As much as I hate that word it’s true.

PS: So you’ve moved from the documentary photographer to being an observer. If that’s all he is we don’t need him. We’ve got a better helmet cam. Observer is no longer enough. For me it’s never been enough. For me it’s always been what do you put of yourself into that experience into that moment and into that image? The subjective part of that is always the thing that is unique. Your own intervention into the situation and photograph is crucial. If it’s just a cold objective witness let’s just fill the streets with 4K cameras.

MB: I don’t think it ever has been just objective. That’s a label that was applied, I think, because the first photographs were so amazing to viewers that they thought they were showing reality. So we said that photographs were truthful. I don’t think photographers posited that. Viewers and critics were subjecting photography to that standard, even though photographers moved items and reconstructed scenes. I think one of the interesting things to reconsider in documentary, is the degree to which it never has been objective. Limitations placed on photographers today were never placed on photographers in the past.

PS: For me that’s always been the biggest frustration with photography. I guess I always wanted to be a painter. A painter can do whatever he wants, but a documentary photographer can’t.

Lori Grinker

MB: How would you define documentary photography?

LG: I am interested in how we define documentary photography versus fine art versus journalism. Originally, documentary was a document, a record, a record for artists to paint from, or a record to prove something happened. Now we have so many different titles like documentary, photo journalism, or documentary expanded, which is something I started teaching. Maybe a clear definition is that documentary is the investigation and investment in subject matter that you want to look at visually through photography. It’s visual storytelling and today it can go beyond straight forward photography. If you’re going to manipulate something then you have to state that, but I think there is some interesting documentary work being done that is manipulated.

MB: So where do we draw the line between documentary and fine art?

LG: Well, first we have to answer the question “What is fine art?”

MB: I don’t think we can answer that question, but let’s say I set something up or stage a photograph – constructed reality – can that be documentary?

LG: I would not call a narrative construction documentary. I would more call documentary where you're exploring a subject through your photography, but it doesn’t have to be literal; the photographs can refer to the issue. It is speaking to that narrative

MB: So you would draw the line at manipulating or constructing the scene?

LG: Yes.

MB: And as long as the intent is to identify an issue or some story of some kind of social significance or social value?

LG: Yes, to help people take notice of what they pass by everyday but don't really see. To help people engage more deeply with issues. I think that visuals help people connect in ways that words don’t always do.

MB: So the bottom line is that the intent of the photographer helps define what is documentary?

LG: Yes. My definition of photo journalism compared to documentary is that photo journalism is really going out and covering an issue that is in the news. If you want to take it further then it becomes more of a long form documentary project.

MB: Let’s just hone in a little bit more on the difference between photojournalism and documentary. Photo journalism must be based on a news event of some sort and is less in-depth than documentary?

LG: Photojournalists and documentary photographers often cover the same news events or issues, but documentary goes deeper.

MB: I think of photojournalism as a subset of documentary.

LG: Well that’s one way to look at it, yes.

MB: And I think we have problems when they get conflated, because when we talk about what is acceptable in terms of manipulating or directing a scene, what might be acceptable in documentary is not acceptable in photo journalism, which still rightly has a fairly strict set of ethics.

LG: I have a problem with television news stories and some documentary films where they have someone redo an event that happened. That also happens now in editorial because in the past they would give you two weeks to cover something, but now they give you two days, but they want you to make it look like it’s two weeks, so they want you to have the person change clothes and re do things, and somehow that’s acceptable.

MB: Is editorial so different? The reason I am asking the question is because well-known photographers will argue about when it is ever okay to change anything, even, say, asking someone to switch the day they do something to fit the photographer’s schedule. Some say you can’t even do that.

LG: There are purists.

MB: Is there purism in long form documentary?

LG: It’s complicated. Someone was doing a story about me in China, and they were like, “Ok, we want to get you getting up in the morning.” I say, “Fine, just come at dawn when I get up to go out and shoot.” They wanted to come later and have me get into the bed and do the whole thing over. I said no.

MB: Restaging is a documentary filmmaker’s strategy.

LG: A lot of news organizations do that too.

MB: I think that it should be different for photojournalists. I mean you're there, and if you miss it, you miss it. You don't get to go back and say, “Can you go pull that person out of the burning building again?”

LG: I was doing an incredible story about a woman with two autistic children. One was in an assisted living place and he would come home on weekends, and one was at home completely inaudible and had a tutor come in, but my story had to be done in the course of 24 hours, so we just picked the day where all that would be happening. Now did they arrange for the son to come home on that day? I don't even know and it doesn’t change the story. I think that it’s okay to switch days as long as it doesn’t change what they do, only the day they do it. The question is how transparent do you need to be?

MB: It can be a slippery slope, like it doesn’t really matter, but then it becomes easy to ask for other changes. The purest approach is easier because it is void of any moral dilemma.

LG: When I first started working, I was in Vietnam shooting for my Afterwar book, and I was with a National Geographic photographer. We were both photographing the same story but for me it was about after the war and for him it was a story about Vietnam in 1989. We were in the hospital with these vets who were returning there to help the people in Vietnam. We were walking backwards to get a shot of the vets walking through the hospital holding a patient or something, and he’s like “Just lift your head a little” just so he could see him better. I was horrified because I never would have done that. Then I was working on stories later on about the Vietnamese troops leaving Cambodia and there were lots of journalists from all over the world and there was a Japanese journalist who was directing the guy, who was packing up his stuff on the ground. The Japanese photographer took his stuff and moved it a spot with better light and told the guy what to do. That kind of directing is not acceptable. We are already interrupting the situation by being there and asking someone to lift their head a little might be okay, but repositioning somebody and telling them what to do is not.

MB: I agree that it is very different, but these days we know that we manipulate when we frame a scene, or when we crop an image.

LG: Well I even have problems with cropping because I was taught to get it in camera.
Sure, if you’re shooting for a newspaper or magazine and they have a column that the picture has to fit, or if you don’t have access to a particular spot and you don’t have your 1000 mm lens, and you’re covering an issue, you have to crop. It’s okay as long as you’re not taking out someone’s foot from behind somebody. That’s what it comes down to these days.

MB: Right, it’s more of an issue now because it’s so easy to manipulate photographs digitally, but theoretically does it really matter if I just move over to get a better frame? In the old days we might not alter a scene, but we thought nothing of going in the darkroom and manipulating the print. The things we did would get someone disqualified from news photograph contests these days.

LG: W. Eugene Smith was a master of print manipulation through dodging, burning and bleaching. We can’t do that these days, which I think is okay. We need parameters because digital technology makes everything so easy today. If you can take something out why can’t you add something in? Who decides? So I think it’s good to have regulations, particularly for photojournalism. I feel the same way about documentary images that are supposed to be real.

MB: So do you think the World Press Photo contest rules go too?

LG: I do. When I judge and see something that’s so obviously manipulated, it kills it for me anyway, but I also think that minimal amounts of processing to bring some highlights or shadows. I think that should be allowed of course. I think that work that is more illustrative should have its own category because story telling is changing. A good example is the work done by Daniella Zalcman. Is it documentary is it portraiture? Now portraiture has its own rules, because in a portrait you can set up whatever you want to tell that person’s story, so I think her expression of these people’s situations can fit in with documentary.

MB: I think that portraiture can be documentary, and has a place in a documentary project, but it wouldn't be photo journalism, because you set it up.

LG: You know portraits have always been a part of newspaper photography.

MB: Jean-François Leroy doesn’t think portraits belong in photojournalism. He’s dogmatic. I think that portraiture fits with documentary because a portrait is obviously a portrait. We know it’s set up. But where else do we draw the line? Is ‘fine art documentary’ an oxymoron? Let’s take Luc Delahaye’s Afghan soldier. He didn’t set it up but he did photograph it with a large format camera to make a huge print to sell in an art gallery. His intent was not to make a documentary photograph even though that is what he made. What would we call this?

LG: I don’t think it would be fine art documentary. I think it’s a documentary photograph blown up big and shown in an art gallery. Susan Sontag said Jeff Wall’s picture of the Afghani soldiers was the best war photograph and yet it was completely staged. Or take the Larry Burrows picture from Vietnam of the wounded soldier reaching out towards a fellow fallen soldier, I remember seeing it once on a Life Magazine website where you could buy prints and they had like a virtual room where you could see how the image looked over a sofa.

MB: That’s so weird!

LG: It was kind of fascinating. On one hand, that photograph is just gorgeous, you know the way the color works and the hand reaching out. We know it’s news documentary, but does it become fine art if you blow it up and hang it in an art gallery or on your wall?

MB: Alright, so maybe the distinction here depends on the context in which it appears. Some activist photographers I know allow their images to be in galleries because they figure they don’t have a pension, and they have kids who need to go to college, so why should anyone begrudge them making some real money?

LG: There are people who would disagree with conflict images being in a gallery.  

MB: Yes, for sure, but what about say Richard Mosse’s infrared work from Congo? Is that documentary or is it fine art?

LG: That’s interesting. I guess that could be called documentary fine art. I love that work; it’s gorgeous and I've seen other people try to do it and it doesn't work the same way.

MB: Isn’t “fine art documentary” sort of an oxymoron? Should we maybe call it documentary style fine art”?

LG: Or maybe the Mosse work is just fine art.

MB: His approach was sort of documentary. He only changed the scene by choosing infrared film. It transforms all the green to red but leaves the skin tones almost normal so the images are bathed in red, suggestive of the blood spilled in that war. But that’s no more abstract than photographing in black and white.

LG: I agree, it is amazing work. But I do think it’s different than photographing in black and white. With black and white you are working with form and content. With color you work with form, content and color; each having significant impact on the viewer’s understanding of the subject. By using infrared film, he is changing the facts. If we change green to red in a digital image we can no longer call it documentary or photojournalism. But, that is something art can do: it can wake people up to these things in a different way than journalism can. One of the reasons I went back to school to get my MFA was because I wanted to break out of the traditional type of documentary storytelling I had been doing. It helped me think about books in a new way, books as installation, think about what installation is. My project, Six Days from Forty, is about my brother who died of HIV/AIDS. It is an installation that includes video, his writing, my writing, 35 mm photography, 4 by 5 photography. I wrote down everything he said as he was dying, during the last week of his life, and it became this whole project and even though some of the images are documentary, I don’t know if the project is.

MB: Installation work can be documentary. I had a wonderful conversation with Shahidul Alam who posited that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to the old language of documentary, that visual language can evolve. Your project can be documentary even if it is not a linear narrative. We can and should think about different modes of storytelling. We can choose the storytelling method that fits the story.

LG: Yes. That is what I am doing. I am exploring another idea in my new work, Consider Me, a portrait project which deals with implicit bias. I have photographed and interviewed a number of people in Newburgh, New York. The work is shown in an outdoor installation without any explanation other than text on implicit bias, references to the poem, “Consider Me”, by Langston Hughes, and I also refer to the isiZulu greeting, Sawubona. There are texts from my interviews that you can read while viewing the life-size portraits, but no one is identified. I’m now in the process of producing a set of cards, individual portraits and texts, but again, no one is identified. It’s almost a game. It encourages people of all ages to think about how we judge, unconsciously or consciously, particular qualities of people, of communities, without really knowing anything about them. I think it’s a very important issue in this country right now but I approached it from a different point of view; it’s at once straight forward but abstract in the experience. You are left to confront with your own inherent bias.

MB: So how would you describe yourself now?

LG: Well that’s the thing now, do you call yourself an artist, a film maker, a storyteller, a documentary photographer, a photographer? I’m not just doing photography anymore.

MB: What do you think your most important body of work is?

LG: Well I think that Afterwar is my most important finished piece. I think people really get a sense of the world and our warring into the 21st century.

MB: Did that start as an assignment?

LG: No, it started as an idea I had when I went to Israel and the West Bank in Gaza in 1986. I went to stay there for three months to do something on Arab/Jewish cooperation and that was an idea I had: the ideas of war and how war defined people so that got me to think about what war does to the people on the front lines.

MB: Where do you get your story ideas generally?

LG: One idea leads to the next in the most obscure ways. The Afterwar project led to this project about my family history. I wanted to get away from war and relatives of my father’s generation were collecting genealogy from the 60’s on, so people started sending me information. I had the opportunity to go to Lithuania, where we are from, and I started documenting that place thinking that I just wanted to do landscapes, but then I started thinking about “what ifs,” like what if my grandparents went to South Africa or Palestine, instead of America? It became this bigger thing about migration and cultural identity.

MG: What was the most difficult story to do, besides the one on your brother, in terms of difficult cause it was dangerous or difficult for whatever reason?

LG: There were some difficult things where it was uncomfortable in the place I was in, whether it was doing landmines in Cambodia or living in these awful concrete block places with no toilets or trying to keep the scorpions off you at night, things like that were not always pleasant. It was also fascinating, I wouldn't call it difficult. I’d say the most difficult stories is where when I used to shoot a lot of health related stories for People Mag, so I felt like I was the disease photographer and going into people’s lives and documenting their suffering takes an emotional toll.

MB: Do you think that it made it easier to do because you are a woman, do you think people opened up to you more?

LG: Well it works both ways, because when I started doing the wounded veterans in Israel I do think that they felt more comfortable with me as a female. Here I was looking at them with their missing limbs and I was treating them like any human being even though it was difficult for me. I think that they didn't feel as threatened with their manhood by me. There were other situations where women weren’t allowed and I had to fight to just be let in. But I think that so much of the kind of the photography you do depends on your personality, male or female. I mean empathy is a big plus in this kind of work.

MB: I think that that’s an interesting point, that we pick what we pick to photograph in part because of who we are, and more aggressive personalities, male or female, will choose different kinds of situations to photograph.

LG: Just on the superficial level, there are definitely times where being a female will make you seem less threatening.

MB: How has the business changed?

LG: It is certainly harder because there are fewer assignments, but there are also more opportunities to work in different media. It is less compartmentalized. If you can shoot and edit video, and write or report, you have opportunities. But we all need to keep learning new skills. It’s changing, but I don’t think it’s dying. You have to think of yourself as a small business, and know what your overhead is, so you know how much money you need to make. If you can do commercial work, you will make unbelievable money so students should learn as much as they can about lighting and studio work. If you want to work in newspapers, you have to be willing to move to where the jobs are.

MB: If you were going to give advice to a young documentary photographer, what would you tell them?

LG: Gain as many skills as you can in terms of how you want to do your storytelling. Learn how to shoot video. Learn how to write. Learn some coding. Learn some animation. Take a business class because if you’re going to be a freelancer, you are a small business. Know how to set up a 401K. Understand the idea of income versus output. Why stay in New York where it is very expensive when you could move to Detroit where it’s much cheaper to live? Go off and see where you can be, or were you can find the stories.

MB: How would you tell a student to approach a story? Like how do you get access, how do you work through the time when you feel the story is not working? How do you know when you quit?

LG: Perseverance is really the thing that has got me through. Depending on the subject, if it’s an easy one, out of every ten people who say no, one says yes. If it’s a hard one – say something about prison – out of every thousand one says yes and once you get one you start to get more. It is important to really do your research. Know your subject, know what your angle is. Be empathetic and not aggressive. There is a lot of waiting in this business, waiting for someone to call you back or waiting for something to happen. You go through so much insecurity and loneliness and defeat, but if you stick with it, if you persevere, you will come out on the other side.