Exercise: Postdocumentary Photography, Art and Ethics.

Exercise: Postdocumentary Photography, Art and Ethics.

A Summary of the salient points.

• An examination of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in documentary photography.  
• Aesthetics has moved from its original understanding of viewing from a new stand point to one where it is now beholden only to itself.  
• The media now see ethics and aesthetics as opposites.  Aesthetics can enlighten and broaden but all too often strangles and limits our view.
• Post documentary photographers question themselves as to whether they are working to an ethical or aesthetics end.
• Modern photographers are turning away from aesthetics and the judgement go others and being true to themselves.
• Artist:- One who puts their individuality and creativity voice or shows an image in the public domain.  There is an attempt by some modern thinkers to restore the old ethics/aesthetics connection.
• Photography allows for the subject and viewer to share space.  
• Photographs can equally objectify their subject and murder their individuality.
• Sontag says that photography has contributed at least as much to the numbing of our conscience as to its development.  An overpowering and detached aesthetics takes its toll.
• The representation of documentary photography as a mirror of reality has led to its perversion into propaganda and indoctrination.
• Photograph can be experienced as being reality, image showing truth without intervention by man.
• Photography has in past decades been used to reinforce the dominant political view.  
• Postcolonial attitudes have led to the position where there very truth of photography is in doubt.  Does it record or make truth.  Is its representing or inventing what is in the photograph.  
• Early photography was employed to record facts: medical, architectural , and scientific.  They not only represented reality, they were reality.
• The recording of images of the ill and suffering are now seen as an violation of the subjects dignity.  It made objects of them.  This objectification reached its height in the death camps of WW2.
• A discussion about the work of Martha Rosler where her combination of word and pictures give her subjects, the residence of The Bowery, individuality and dignity.
• The work of Allen Sekula is also discussed. His work is seines more aesthetic than Roslers and he both engages his subjects and controls the context and the relationship of pictures and words.
• Representation - interpretation - counter-presentation.  Using the S-21 Cambodian terror pictures attentions drawn to how pictures of the most evil subjects can be reduced to works of art and in doing  so loose their reality.  A criticism was made  that the pictures subjects had no voice.
• By reference to the Ab Graib  images it is pointed out that the subjects had been objectified long before the pictures were taken.
• The images of the New York Twin Towers attack on 11th September rapidly turned from news footage to television spectacular.  Repeated over and over for the ratings and emotional response.  
• Guy Debora said that we no longer live life, but actin a film, which we call life.  It is this world that keeps us prisoner, at the same time that it alienates us from reality.

• Kieth Tester in his book The Inhuman Condition that we are over stimulated by instant reality and have no time to dwell on or contemplate what is happening in the world.  He argues that we must be able to alienate ourselves in the world and create a fracture within an indolent culture that seems to accept the greatest crimes against humanity as belonging to the order of the day.
• The South African Kendell Geers appears to be try for this in his art where he portrays evil for its own sake.
• Alain Badiou is close to Tester’s suggestion own the world,except that Badiou has doubts about whether it cane a “conscious” choice.  Badiou typifies “the artist” as someone who, as a result of a deeply encroaching, often traumatic event, feels the necessity to pursue a personal truth and to remain faithful to it in spite of considerable opposition.  According to this argument, being an artist and ethics are inextricably bound up with each other.
• Badiou appears to dismiss the form of ethics that is found bound up in legislation and instead believes in a looking for an initiating, active and processional form instead; a concrete form and not an abstract form.
• Badiou argues that truth cannot be communicated, It is not just a matter of opinions.  Truth is encountered it is something that happens to you.  
• The notion of evil is introduced.  He boundary between good and evil, he claims, is wafer thin.  He give three examples: the following a pseudo truth, not being able to  be faithful to a truth process, the following of a single truth that has total power.
• Martha Rosler argues that unlike past documentary photographer, todays photographers are happy to record the world as it is rather than trying to change it.  These neutral images are too easily absorbed into the system and made harmless.  By using the Badiou approach of highlighting “the other” it is possible to influence the world.  Is this the point of photography?
• We, as photographers, should not be just recording the world but in our images adding something to it.  Teach viewers to see differently; to have a moment of insight.

This is where ethics and aesthetics merge.  An image that shows more than just the thing itself has the potential to have both an ethic and aesthetic appeal.  Both the maker and the viewer have their part to play in this.  By approaching this with an open mind will allow ethics and aesthetics, in partnership, to achieve a great deal.