Thanks to a reader of this Substack (s/o Andrew Glickman) who’s sent me a few nice messages over the years and most recently an email asking if I was going to the lecture called Experimental Documentary Now at the National Gallery of Art with Carolyn Drake and Susan Meiselas. I wasn’t, but I’m glad he mentioned it because I ended up there on Sunday — and got to meet Andrew IRL. Sometimes, the internet is good and works to build communities, and I appreciate that.
It was an interesting talk, tied to the amazing Dorthea Lange exhibit up now at the NGA, and trying to make a connection between Lange’s work and social documentary work being done now by photographers like Drake and Meiselas.
Meiselas mentioned akakurdistan, shared some of her beautiful work on the Prince Street Girls (circa 1975), and a project turned collaboration in a domestic violence shelter outside of Birmingham, England.
She got her start in photo by teaching 4th/5th graders in NY Public Schools and teaching them to document their communities, realizing she’d never done that herself, turned her lens on her neighborhood with the Prince Street Girls project. “It took me a while to find out where to place myself in the world,” she said, but found her raison d’etre with the Carnival Strippers work, and recording audio of the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers, and paying customers. She said she likes making something with people so they understand what it is and to give them a voice, and perhaps that’s why she’s drawn to making books and showing her work that way “because you control the backend and the framing of it.”
Drake said one thing that struck her about Dorthea Lange was how her work shifted over time, from a portrait studio to street photography to the FSA stuff. “I see a lot of the same issues playing out now that Lange photographed,” she said.
She said she got into photography “as a way to interact with the physical world.” And to back that up, shared work from a smart project on Nextdoor (yes, the website), using subject lines for titles of pictures that she’d then go out and make or appropriating photos, blowing them up and making quilts of the pixelated images taken from the Crime and Safety section, of surveillance images of “suspicious people and cars.” It’s fascinating work, from something that promises connection but speaks more to perceived dangers and who belongs. She also showed her Knit Club work, a collaboration with a community of women in Mississippi and playing with different ways to represent people. “As an artist sometimes you don’t want to dwell on ethics because it leads to inhibitions.”
I have a few pages of notes, but some of my favorite quotes came during the more candid and frank conversation afterward, especially when moderator Philip Brookman asked them “Do you see yourselves as documentary photographers?”
“It’s such a corrupted and complicated word. I’d rather claim it than not, but maybe the word photography is enough.” —Susan Meiselas
“I think of the word documentary and the word photography I try to throw them out the window… and blur the lines.” —Carolyn Drake
Then during the audience Q&A, someone asked a softball question: “Is there a gender gap in photography in terms of who gets to tell the stories and what stories get told… and also in compensation?” Both answers got a laugh.
“Yes.” —Carolyn Drake
“You noticed.” —Susan Meislas
It made me think back to that beautifully curated Dorthea Lange exhibit spanning the breadth of her career called “Seeing People.” If you’ll be in DC between now and 3/31, it’s worth a trip to the National Gallery of Art to see.
The talks made me think about how social documentary work means different things to different people and the reasons why we do it may differ wildly. It also made me think a lot about our evolution as photographers, and how the longer we do this the reasons why we do it may change. Sometimes we want to explore things externally, other times internally. And both are ok as long as you are transparent with your intentions and motivations and what you’re trying to do and say.
If you don’t know her background, Dorthea Lange started as an assistant in a celebrity portrait studio in NYC before starting her own in SF in 1919, making portraits of high society folk. But a decade later, while looking out of her studio window one day she saw lines of people in the bread lines and took to the streets “surrounded by evidence of the Depression,” and the mission of her work began to shift. She began exploring the injustices in hopes of creating social change. Then she was hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the forced relocation of Japanese Americans. At the time, some of her work was censored, because the WRA worried the images might influence public opinion.
That’s a great reminder about the power of photography. The WHY.
Lange was the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, she went on to work for the FSA (making some of her most famous photographs), and then for Life Magazine.
I always thought being a photographer for the FSA would be a dream job and something we desperately need in this day and age. And there has always been some part of me that wants to be part of a modern-day equivalent because of how powerful and resonant that work was. Call it what you will: social documentary, documentary photography, or just plain photography. They’re some of the most telling and compelling images and they’ve stood the test of time. It’s what we should all be striving for with our work. Lange’s work epitomized the why.
So I’d love to hear from you, how would you define documentary photography now? And who do you think is doing a great job of it?
Drop me a comment: I’m all ears, and love learning about new photographers.
I caught up to this today and glad I did! Thanks, M. I appreciated what you wrote about the presentation. Wish I could have been there. IMO, Matt Black is doing exceptional work along the lines of the FSA. The longevity and the accuracy of his work speak volumes to this country's story. Yes, there are others, no doubt. But Matt's work will always be at the top of my thought process.
For me, documentary photography is a chronicle of day-to-day life in a warts-and-all manner. Don't shy away from the beauty or the ugly. Put history and time into context.
In that vein, I'm starting to work on a photo book related to the first year of the pandemic, a time in which I walked almost 3,000 miles in and around Alexandria, Va. (with a couple of trips into DC and NYC). I really (emphasis on really) documented that time, especially over the first six months, and am now cutting down the 2,000+ images — 95% of which were shot with an iPhone — into a more manageable number. It's been fascinating to relive that time.