‘Blind woman. Camera work No. 49/50, July 1917’. by PaulStrand. Photo engraving on paper. Reina Sofia Museum, Paul Strand
A mother, a documentary filmmaker, grapples as best she can with her son’s urgent question: “What does it mean to document?” Eventually it occurs to him, “Maybe I should tell him that documenting with a camera is when you add one plus light and then light minus one…”. So an addition and subtraction operation. But it helps us to understand that we didn’t actually have the experience of what it was, and yet through the Document Archives we have a different, entirely new experience that those who were there couldn’t have. And in general, the answers of the protagonist of Desierto sonoro, the novel by the Mexican Valeria Luiselli, appeal to this addition as a layer that accumulates on the remaining layers that are “deposited in a collective understanding of the world”.
Thus, especially in the artistic field, it may be legitimate to believe that the document becomes an intruder, an intruder that slavishly illustrates the nonsense to which contemporary museums have accustomed us, thus stealing us against masses of interpretations of one aesthetic experience , which we accept in their most vivid state as unconditional and without words.
“On the Shores – The Siesta. The small trades of Paris”, photograph from the end of the 19th century and a copy from 1904. Museum Reina Sofía Eugène Atget
However, the Documentary Genealogies exhibition, which completes the cycle of the documentary history of social movements from front to back, invites us to see – pun intended – a much greater complexity. The document rebels. First of all, dealing with art, but not only. In the groups of workers, the bourgeois poses, the landscapes or the “Spanish types” with all their romantic and predatory pictorial quality, the representative pictorial methods are inevitably visible, with which photography wanted to honor itself from its beginnings. Another exhibition on the bill, Stop, Instantly, at the Juan March Foundation, supported by two exceptional collections, the German by Dietmar Siegert and the Spanish by Ordóñez-Falcón, helps us understand them in contrast. Some images agree in both, but these coincidences—Nadar’s hermaphrodites, the Newhaven fishermen photographed by Hill and Adamson in 1845, faces subjected to neurological derangements, proletarian misery in Lewis Hine’s reformism—serve only to tell us that we in both contexts are not see the same thing. While the fabulous exhibition of masterpieces shows us the perfect modern and avant-garde paragon of photography as art, what counts in Documentary Genealogies is its opposite: art as photography.
Photography shows us, mostly unintentionally, the untamed, the irreducible, what bursts in uninvited.
It was Walter Benjamin in a 1931 essay who first put it this way. Benjamin, however, observing the chronological coincidence between the first photos of a revolution and the edition of the Communist Manifesto on which the exhibition builds its history, also observed that the document not only opposes art, but also rebels against the discursive purpose that created it and anyone else who now wishes to interpret it. Photography – and the more documentary and thus more subaltern and in need of help – shows us, mostly unintentionally, the untamed, the irreducible, what breaks in uninvited. What’s more, in this furtive and savage state lies the key to its moving power and true character. A bit like the dizziness that makes us realize that the horses and the trees in the Western depiction don’t know each other.
It is true that there is no document without arguments. But in the case of Benjamin, it would be a bit of a scam to associate the two in passing. His iconoclasm, which fuels his aesthetic distrust, has more to do with his theological appeals to a final crisis in history and the ensuing unrealistic future of salvation. That’s the only way to understand how, when he spoke of Newhaven’s “Fisherman’s Wife,” he focused on “something that isn’t just a testimony of the photographer Hill, something that the silence doesn’t silence, something that’s outrageous the photographer’s name is claimed by one who lived there, still exists and will never be fully captured by art”. And also his interest in Atget, the great photographer of Paris before Haussmann’s destruction, in whom the surrealists believed they had discovered a forerunner of the miraculous and an instrument of chance.
To understand the document as a mere illustration of the argument is limiting, caricatural, but the transformation of the photographic archive into art also implies an interested blindness (which Rosalind Krauss warned of at the time). Here are the few surviving images of that 1848 revolution; the photos of Atget and those of the Atgets in Berlin (Zille) or Vienna (Ritter); the Spanish Crown’s propaganda orders to Clifford; the scientific and economic publicity of the mines registered by O’Sullivan or the anthropological reports (e.g. by Malinowski). Also the devastation of Tragic Week in Barcelona and with it the commercial exploitation of the images as monstrous souvenirs, as the clever editors of the Civil War albums had discovered with their corpses scattered.
All of them are about becoming aware of the extent to which our view is historical. Furthermore, to what extent is it capable of an emotion not intended in the purposes of the image, or in an integration of its untimely presence in an argument reduced to a verbal text? That it’s not even due to the melancholy revival of a bygone era. Among the monumental repertoires, the figures of the Krupp workers or the pathological physiognomies of the Salpêtrière, the faint but irreducible glow of the irretrievable strikes. But it’s strange, that’s how it is when we look back, as Benjamin said, when we discover an entirely new experience, one that points to the present and the future and has nothing to do with who was there.
“Documentary Genealogies. Photo 1848-1917′. Reina Sofia Museum. Madrid. Until February 27th.
“Stop, now. A History of Photography”. Juan March Foundation. Madrid. Until January 15th.
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