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There continues to be a lot of back and forth with regards to the validity of documentary photography and/or truth as well as the tired, yet never-ending, debate over film v. digital. Two recent, yet disparate, articles seem to touch upon both subjects.

With the re-release of Nan Goldin’s, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency a review in Salon asks ‘Is documentary-style photography dead?’ This question is based on Goldin’s new afterword where she fears that viewers will no longer believe her work is real but rather a product of computer manipulation; her concern that the work will be seen as having been ‘set up’ and therefore not real. She worries that digital manipulation has made any notion of ‘truth’ in photography obsolete. For Goldin, the idea of a photographic truth is crucial to her work since it has always been presented as a true representation of her life at a very specific place and time. As she writes, ‘This work was always about reality, the hard truth, and there was never any artifice.’

I’m not sure new viewers to Ballad will think the work is set up but there is definitely more Art Photography being made where constructed imagery or staged scenarios take place. Many photographers are now uninterested in traditional kinds of documentation, but rather in creating, re-creating or constructing photographic scenarios of what appears to be ‘real-life’. So instead of going out into the world and photographing what takes place in front of the camera (the photographer as witness), it’s now commonplace to simply stage photos. Rather than looking at life and photographing it, they’re staging photos that appear to be life. It’s photography but it feels more like theatre. And while theoretically it’s addressing the nature and artifice of ‘real’ photography  (photography about photography) and whether any photograph can be ‘true’, it still feels less interesting to me than what’s actually our there in the world. Work by Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson will never as interesting or provocative as Josef Koudelka, David Goldblatt, Bruce Davidson or William Klein.

Unfortunately, Nan Goldin’s work was so successful that it spawned generations (Ballad was first shown in 1979 as a slide show) of imitators; photographers intent on documenting every moment of their lives but lacking the skills or the compassion to do so without falling into parody. This style of self documentation is now commonplace and one needs to look no further than facebook or other types of social media to see it on a daily basis. I have no problem with people documenting their own lives (or even posting them online), I’m just not sure they’re all that interesting, and in the vast majority of cases, they aint art.

Of course there isn’t any singular truth; there never has been and it’s absurd to think there ever could be. But it shouldn’t stop people from experiencing life and trying to make sense of it with their art. And there surely isn’t anything wrong with trying to be truthful when we photograph. Be honest, be compassionate, be ethical, be respectful, be fair and some level of truth will always come through.

Documentary photography isn’t dead, it just needs people to continue to be involved with the world outside themselves and to make images that are as compassionate and honest as possible. And you’ll never convince me that a constructed scenario will ever be as compelling as the real, unconstructed, sloppy, amazing, messy, fantastic, tangible, world. As historian John Stilgoe writes, ‘outside lies magic.’

Photographer Norman Jean Roy laments that the digital photographic process has ruined photography. Now while he may be overstating his case, he does make some good points. Basically he feels that too many fashion photographers (and he could easily be saying the same thing about all other photographers as well) over process their images in an attempt to ‘perfect’ them, but as a result end up destroying them. He says, ‘Part of a perfect image is that it is imperfect. With digital photography, it’s very easy to perfect the image. You kill the image when you perfect it. You basically suck the life out of it. An image, to me, lives when you can look at it and it’s just slightly off.’

What Roy is getting at is something that’s been gnawing at me for a while (and to be clear I shoot both film and digital and like and admire both for the very reason that they are so different) when I look at a lot of digital photos. They. Just. Seem. Too. Much. Too sharp and too bright and too shiny and too clear and too saturated and too colorful and just too too.

It’s not the photographs themselves, but the way they have been processed. Many times they are photoshopped to within an inch of their lives, leaving the final image looking less like a photo and more like an approximation of a photo or even a photo-illustration. I guess the tendency is to take the technology as far as one can, even if it strips the image of the flaws (or Roy’s imperfections) that make it interesting in the first place. Where does one stop when digitally processing an image? Who knows.

For me photography (and any kind of art) has first always been about how I respond to it emotionally. How it effects me on a visceral level has driven my interest in art and artists for as long as I can remember. Even before I actually ‘knew’ what made me respond to these things in the first place I knew what I liked. I could feel it in my gut.

In retrospect, maybe it’s the flaws that I was responding to all along. Art’s innate imperfections. And when people remove these flaws in an attempt to perfect a photo, perhaps they’re removing some of what makes them interesting to begin with.

This isn’t to say that film is better than digital or vice versa; that argument is silly and unnecessary. But rather it’s important to think about what it is that makes a photograph interesting or compelling in the first place.