TU The Role and Ability of Photographs and Photographers Discussion

Part 1: Describe any images to which you refer, and discuss Sontag’s point about the photographer as an enabler of events, and not always being just a recorder of what is happening. 300 words.

Please answer ONE of the following assignments, using the following quotation as a starting point:

“While the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Taking pictures, like sexual voyeurism, is a way of tacitly—often explicitly—encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a good picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that’s the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.” – Susan Sontag

1. Making reference to the work of Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White in your answer, address the point that Sontag is making here, and discuss the way the presence of a photographer can be positive or negative when it comes to issues of “another person’s pain or misfortune.”

2. Assess the role of the photographer in the following images. Is the taking of pictures “encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening” as Sontag claims?

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Part 2: Roy K. Stryker was the head of the historical section of the Farm Security Administration. His mission was to document the hardships and conditions around the country, particularly across the Midwestern states and into California. In all, Stryker’s team of photographers produced over 175,000 black and white negatives and 1,610 color transparencies, as well as several films.

He stated:

“There are great pictures today and they are not great tomorrow. There are great pictures today and they are going to be great pictures right on down through time, not because they’ve been used a lot, but because they were great pictures probably and it took many, many people keep sensing the same thing.”

Stryker on Walker Evans: “Walker walks around and all of a sudden sees … the tombstone in the cemetery, the street, the houses. It’s an interesting picture, because you know that he planned it. That’s not “composed” in the sense that that word is so badly used at times, but he hunts till he finds the right viewpoint, the right place to stand. But he’s telling you a sort of social situation  … he plans them, he walks around, he looks, and all of a sudden — his is a composed job. He takes time.”

Use the images and information from this week and examine whether or not the FSA photographers could claim that their work was ‘documentary’ or not. Think about the role that they were assigned and the decisions that they made in the work they produced. Did, for example, Evans’s choices about how to photograph a scene mean that it was no longer objective photography? Is it true that our reaction to photographs will change over time, and what is it about these FSA photographs that suggests they could be ‘great’?