So what is a good documentary photograph? Take a look at this one. It’s good.
The evaluation of a photograph as good, or something less than good, must take its context into account. The photograph above is not so good if I’m trying to produce art photography. If it’s news about what is happening in this space, I’d say a better adjective is functional. But as a documentary photograph it is good.
Why? Because it is a record of a moment in the re-development of a residential and commercial space in a particular neighborhood in a particular city at a particular time: The intersection of Rua Manuel Firmino and Rua Concelheiro Luís de Magalhães at 13:10 on 14 December 2024 in the Vera Cruz neighborhood of Aveiro, Portugal.
Someday someone will want to see what this space looked like after the old building was torn down and before the new building was built.
I’ve made many little “mini docs” in black & white that you can find on my YouTube channel. Much of this is about my desire to begin doing my larger documentary projects in black & white. Eventually, I want to produce/direct a feature in widescreen black & white.
Os Marnotos is first up. I am now in pre-production. I have published a black & white test video. I didn’t have to publish it 🙂 But it’s a good idea to keep up a “steady” stream of new videos for YouTube. Self-promotion and all, you know.
My Fujifilm X-E1 rangefinder is beat to shit. I’ve dropped it numerous time. I even broke a fall with it during a hike while using the monopod it was on as a walking stick. Back in my photojournalism days I was a known abuser of cameras. During the digital era, I’ve tried to go a little easier on them (especially my cinema cameras). My X-E1 is apparently a bridge between those two eras.
Something interesting happened. My X-E1 became not as crisp and perfect as it once was. Go figure. And I love it.
I mentioned earlier that I bought a new camera for street photography. But I have since decided that was a mistake. I’m putting my SONY A6400 to work for other jobs. My X-E1 remains my primary street camera precisely because of its trauma-induced imperfections.
4. Seek maximum resolution and fine grain: Yeah, maybe. Where I differ on some of these is in the necessity, in my opinion, to produce some ratty video as a rhetorical response to a particular situation. It’s an authenticity move. Trauma and mayhem in nonfiction shouldn’t look too polished. For example, here’s a still from the Oscar-winning White Helmets. The full movie is available on YouTube. Also see number 13 below.
and…
13. Shoot with steady handheld or Steadicam “in the eye of the hurricane”: Depends. Watch the first several minutes of White Helmets and tell me how those scenes would change the film if shot with a Steadicam. That’s an exercise, by the way, that I gave to my documentary film students to teach them that, sometimes, ratty chaotic video is the best. Then again, the eyes of hurricanes are calm. Hmmmmm…
Judging images by technical perfection is, in my opinion, judging images on the wrong thing. Relax and makes picture. But do hold onto your camera 😉
In the previous installment of this series I asked what happens when you run the well-worn narrative framework of sequence filming through the decisive moment and the dogma of Terrence Malick?
I still don’t have an answer, but I work on it every time I pick up a camera.
One way to answer is: How does Malick look? As in how does he see and how does his way of seeing show up on the screen. It turns out you can find a lot of YouTubers interested in the look of Malick.
I particularly like this one:
This is the way I want my documentaries to look (with obvious differences re: my personal style and the circumstances real life presents to me). What I’m seeing here is exactly the melding of the decisive moment (because I want to see it?) and the Malick dogma (because, well…).
The author of this video is noticing Malick’s “obsessions” from three particular, recent films while also suggesting we can see the same choices at work throughout the Malick canon:
He abandons the writer-centrism that pervades the vast majority of filmmaking, and in doing so, brings the choices of the actors, cinematographer, and editor to the forefront. I think for Malick the process of creation almost supersedes the final product. The lens is searching because he is searching, the characters search because the actors search. These films aren’t planned, they are formed by reaction. The actors react to the world and each other, the cinematographer reacts to the actors and to the world, and the editor reacts to the rhythms constructed by the actors, the world, and the cinematographer.
So make two mental adjustments. Substitute “source” for “actor” and add the role of director to cinematographer. The other side of that equation is a guy like me: a documentary filmmaker working alone or with a small crew. All of a sudden that sounds a lot like how a documentary filmmaker, such as myself, works.
The scenes I film are necessarily more chaotic than Malick’s. He is filming fiction, and he is in control no matter how much he allows his scenes to develop in a free-form way. But I am enamored of following my subjects closely and filming with wide lenses to achieve a visual style similar to what you see in the video. Because I am not in control of the reality unfolding before me, I cannot follow the dogma to the letter (nor would I want to in any case). So I must translate some of this look and feel for longer lenses.
Coming up… I’ll discuss my use of wide and long lenses and how I try to use these each for specific effect while trying to maintain my own visual dogma. Hmmm… I guess I’m going to have to write my own dogma. Perhaps that will be the concluding entry in this series.
Is news photography also documentary photography? Yes. News photography documents the immediate news situation. Shortly thereafter it is history. That’s a rather simplistic timeline, but for the most part it holds. Today’s news photo from the city council meeting is tomorrow’s document of that occurrence. But it is also a document of how people and places looked, although in news that is usually not an intention.
In a sense (that is debatable and discussable), all news photography is documentary photography, but not all documentary photography is news photography.
This is a photograph I made in the summer of 1982 while working in Washington, D.C. as a photojournalist. I was covering the 10th anniversary of the Watergate break-in with a reporter from the Boston Globe. The event was certainly news. This photo of George McGovern giving remarks at one of the parties in unremarkable. It’s the kind of thing you get covering this kind of event in Washington D.C. Published and quickly forgotten. But it remains a document of the event and who was there and what they looked like. This is an example of a humdrum news photo becoming, I think, a more interesting record of the event and a famous politician who spoke that night.
One of the big things to do during Christmas in the Aveiro region of Portugal is to visit the town of Águeda where they put on a big show of lights and entertainment. The city attracts thousands of people daily throughout December. For me, this was a great opportunity to do a little street photography (a form of documentary as well as art). And here is a document of a moment during December of 2023. The happy moment of the young couple making a selfie caught my eye because it seemed a fitting illustration of what Águeda offers its Christmas visitors. This image is not particularly newsworthy.
Capturing the news requires an understanding of the immediate journalistic purpose of covering a news event (or just about anything else that catches the journalistic gaze). But documentary photography is about understanding the long-term value of capturing an image. What is interesting to the documentary gaze may seem dull to the journalistic gaze.
Frame by Frame is my blog about nonfiction visual storytelling from critique to practice. I am an Emeritus Professor of Media & Journalism, Missouri State University. Co-founder of Carbon Trace Productions 501(c)(3) documentary film studio. I continue to work on nonfiction projects of all kinds. See my documentary site Eyewitness. I’m available for hire as a director, cinematographer, editor, and news photographer. Based in Aveiro, Portugal. Note: The Terms of Use published at rhetorica.net also covers this weblog.
