Contemporary Documentary

Contemporary documentary photographers

The below projects demonstrate the persistent authority that photographers have always relied on – that a camera allows you to step into communities and situations and take a look and also to step back, reflect and comment. Contemporary documentary photography is not a unified form but neither is it a defunct or endangered area of photographic practice. It is simply that its contexts, visual styles and the motivations of the photographers are various. The dissemination of contemporary documentary photography now relies on a number of contexts and is spread between magazines (its traditional environment), books and art galleries.

Projects created for all of these contexts where represented in an exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The motivations of the photographers whose work is shown below suggest the range of emotional forces – political, humanist and aesthetic – which drive documentary photography.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

They use a large format camera, which requires a tripod, and makes the taking of photographs a slow and conspicuous act. The sense of activity being slowed for the camera makes references to nineteenth century photography both in terms of process and style. It also serves to detach their photographs from the conventions of photojournalism. There is a sense that Broomberg and Chanarin arrive 'either too early or too late' and not within the usual media-driven time scale at a site of social crisis. These photographers talk about the constraints and contradictions of working in this way in the interview excerpts below.

Please refer to the website:http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/c/contemporary-documentary-photographers/

Pollsmoor prison in Cape Town and a mental asylum in Cuba.

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
Dion (41), Pollsmoor Prison, 2000

Broomberg and Chanarin both explain that their working principles in regards to their ethical beliefs and values to their subject(s) is to produce media in which the people from the community they are photographing are completely satisfied with, and that the photographed are aware of the purpose of the image(s) so that they aren't being exploited in any way.

A more recent acknowledgement of their newest and first curatorial photographic work is being exhibited now Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin present Dora Fobert, PARADISE ROW, 74 Newman Street, London, W1T 1PH, until November 12, 2011

Dazed Digital: What kind of woman is Dora Fobert?
Oliver Chanarin: The first thing to know about Dora Fobert is that she never existed. She was invented by a Polish writer Karolina Sulej, for the Krakow Photomonth in May 2011. Adam and I inhabited her biography for a short while and produced the photographs that we think she might have produced. Perhaps you can get a sense of her personality through this series of images. Dora was concerned, consciously or unconsciously, with the way Jewish women were regarded by the Nazis. During this period, around 1942, there was an idea, a classicist ideal, of the Aryan women as naturally beautiful.

She did not need make-up or perfume or well cut clothes for her beauty to be apparent. The Jewish women were set in opposition to this ideal. The adorned Jewess, as she was known, was bohemian, decadent, and exotic. Under The Third Reich she was de-humanized, reduced to the status of an object, a 'piece'. Nevertheless there is evidence that the Adorned Jewess was at the same time seen as a sexualised object and Dora, according to the narrative, rejected this objectification with her series of playful and intimate nudes.

Oliver Chanarin - "Dora Fobert may not have existed, but she easily could have. It's paradoxical but that's what makes this fiction authentic."

A little different to their earlier work, the South African duo have produced a paradoxical fictional array of images to suggest how they believed a fictional woman if concious or unconscious would have perceived herself within the 1940's as a Jewish woman. The images on display can only be viewed within a red box due to the negative not being fixed as keeping to the theme of the character photographing herself within that time period, there was a shortage of photographic materials not allowing her to fix the image.

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/11811/1/adam-broomberg-oliver-chanarin-dora-fobert

Roger Ballen

In 1982, Roger Ballen began photographing the homes and people of small town South Africa. Ballen’s first photographs were strongly led by his desire to define an aspect of South African culture. This reflected his position as a newcomer, stepping into a marginalised community, foregrounding the socio-economic position that his subjects held.

Dorps Small Towns of South Africa

Old Man, Ottoshoop, 1983

Early morning, Napier, 1985 Chairs, Asian Bazaar, 1984 Front door, Hopetown, 1983

All works in this series are selenium toned, silver gelatin prints shot with black and white film using a Rolleiflex camera.

http://www.artnet.com

But in recent photographs, taken in towns on the outskirts of Johannesburg and Pretoria, Ballen has moved further and further from attempting to document a culture. His photographs are powerful and complex because of their extreme aesthetic contemplation of a subject that we assume to be worthy of visualisation purely for its social meaning. Ballen’s recent photographs suggest a passion for texture and composition. The starting point for the construction of an image could as easily be a dot on the wall, a dog’s tail, or the teeth of the subject.

Ballen continues to photograph the world using black and white film and has done so for over 50 years. He believes that he is part of the last generation to solely use this medium after the rise of digital photography in the late 90's early 00's.

'Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike colour photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way a human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality" Roger Ballen

http://www.rogerballen.com/