Towards a New Documentalism
Jorge Ribalta

Tagg, John.The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture ofMeaning.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. (9780816642885)

Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography.Cambridge, MA.: Zone Books, 2008. (9781890951887)

Since John Tagg published his first book,The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies andHistories(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), he has been one ofthe most recognised figures in photographic theory. He is part of abrilliant generation of Anglo-American authors who emerged from the1968 political movement, appeared in the public arena in the contextof the 1970s New Art History, and whose contribution to a theorisationof photography using the tools of Marxism, poststructuralism,Gramscian cultural studies, feminism, and psychoanalysis remainsunsurpassed. Tagg himself recently formulated the project of thisgroup in these terms: “we half believed that this State could besmashed and that the first brick could be thrown by photographictheory” (John Tagg, “Mindless Photography,” in J. J. Long, AndreaNoble, and Edward Welch, eds.,Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, New York: Routledge, 2009,29). Tagg’s Disciplinary Frame continues the project of acultural history of photography critically inscribed in the discoursesand institutions of modern culture that he initiated with his firstbook. However, Tagg’s strong investment in a Foucauldian framework(noticeable in the book’s title) account’s for certain of theproject’s epistemic (and political) limitations.

The first chapter of Disciplinary Frame traces the role of thephotographic archive and the socially regulatory uses of photographyin the constitution of the modern liberal State. According to Tagg,this State is characterised by two factors: an implicit war logic,which determines the coercive force and the violence inherent to theState logic; and the instrumentalisation of culture as a means ofproducing social inclusion and constructing citizenship, a process hecalls “recruitment and mobilisation” (49).

The central chapters deal with the 1930s, the key period whendocumentary discourse was constituted according totechnocratic-liberal New Deal policies. In claiming that Farm SecurityAdministration (FSA) documentary photography represented the “firstand only true art form produced by social democracy” (61), Taggfollows the work of John Grierson, the recognised founder of thereformist documentary film movement in the late 1920s. The secondchapter studies FSA and Griersonian discourse as constitutingdocumentary photography as a specific cultural form for social“recruitment and mobilisation” within the specific historicalconditions of the 1930s. The ethical contract between the citizen andthe paternalistic State as a form of collective participation wasbased on an ethics of transparency and expressed in documentary tropessuch as “truth,” “dignity of fact,” or the “innate decency of theordinary” (93). The third chapter focuses on Walker Evans as aspecific and problematic case study inside of the hegemonicdocumentary paradigm in 1930s America (emblematised byLife magazine). Tagg argues that Evans’s “melancholiclassitude,” or his characteristic ambiguity and resistance to meaning,determines “an impossible internal distance from the very discursiveframe in which it is produced as subject” (177), and would introduce adegree of self-critique to that “documentary style” of which he hasbeen canonised as “father.” Chapter 4 focuses on the dissolution ofboth documentary and social democracy in the United States, determinednot only by the completion of the FSA project and the participation ofthe United States in World War II, but also by the structuraltransformations in the composition of the working class and the newpublic role of minorities (here Tagg refers to women, AfricanAmerican, and Latino movements) throughout the 1940s. By examiningpractices related to those social groups, Tagg argues that therhetoric of transparency, which characterised the New Deal documentarycontract, lost its historical conditions. The New Deal logic ofuniversal social inclusion, in other words, had reached its limit.

The last two chapters are shorter and of a different nature; theybreak the historical focus and sequence of the previous chapters andtake on the “disciplinary mechanisms of history and art history”(209). By referring to Roland Barthes’s statement inCamera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) that theinventions of Photography and History were simultaneous, chapter 5attempts to write a pre-history of the documentary discourse inphotography. In this way, it problematises the limits and conditionsof the discursive field of documentary photography and thephotographic archive, and it exposes some of the exclusions that theyproduce. The final chapter is articulated as thematic flashes on termssuch as “the image,” “the frame,” and “the apparatus” and theirattempts to formulate possible directions for the continuation of theproject of the 1970’s New Art History, which Tagg calls an “endlessmetacommentary,” where the discursive practice is not detached fromthe realm of the social and the political.

Tagg’s major contribution in this book seems, quite paradoxically, tooccur in its most “traditional” aspects, such as itspolitical-genealogical reading of the constitution of the documentaryparadigm as an expression of New Deal policies. It is very important(and Tagg does this exceedingly well) to understand how documentaryrhetoric has been historically built upon such notions of universalismand transparency, which are inherent not only to New Deal’s socialdemocracy but to liberal representative democracy technologies forpublic address and communication. By focusing on the Griersonian-FSAparadigm, Tagg illuminates the structural link between the documentaryapproach and the liberal democratic public sphere. But this importantand necessary discourse is hardly new. Maren Stange’s,Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America,1890–1950(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and John Roberts’sThe Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) are two good examplesof other theoretical photographic studies emerging from the New ArtHistory approach that have traced that lineage before; we might alsopoint to the work of artists like Martha Rosler or Allan Sekula, whosepolitical readings of photographic modernism since the mid-1970s onmany levels coincide with and precede those of Tagg.

My main dissatisfaction with Tagg’s approach stems from the fact thathe limits his discussion of documentary culture to the Anglo-AmericanGriersonian-FSA mode, which is (for good reason) the hegemonic modelof the twentieth century. But he should be aware that such a focusexcludes other practices that may question or invalidate his ownconclusions. In this respect, it would be interesting to see Tagg’sbrilliant scholarship applied to the American Photo League as part ofthe international worker-photography movement of the 1930s, which isthe other (and still rather repressed) side of the 1930s documentaryand political dilemmas. The Photo League constitutes a possiblecounter-model to FSA documentary, and it is part of the manysuccessful attempts in the 1930s to constitute a proletarian publicsphere. One wonders to what extent Tagg’s theoretical framework simplydoes not allow him to study anything but hegemonic practices anddiscourses, or the ways in which the bourgeois State co-opts,“recruits and mobilises” rather than the deviations, ruptures, andmoments of indeterminacy or resistance. Tagg’s method also seems topredetermine his melancholic defeatism, which we might associate withhis decision not to read documentary photography after 1945 or tothink beyond the genealogical and intervene politically in currentdebates.

So, what if what is politically needed today is precisely what Taggseeks to avoid – namely, “the reconstitution of a new archivism or ofa new documentalism” (233)? What if, in other words, we need toreinvent some equivalent (but not identical) conditions ofuniversality and transparency associated with the classic forms of NewDeal documentary, precisely because the documentary social functioncontinues to exist and operate publicly and hegemonically in spite ofdeclarations from academia that it is obsolete? Documentary iseverywhere today, since it is structurally linked to democraticdiscourse and to the ideological conditions of the liberal publicsphere in which we live, as Tagg himself has worked to illuminate.That said, we also need to recognise that documentary practices willcontinue to exist as long as liberal democracy does. What do we dowith that?

We can look for a possible and productive answer to that question inAriella Azoulay’s book,The Civil Contract of Photography. Azoulay lives and works inIsrael and her study of photography, particularly in this book, isvery much informed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This meansthat the book’s theoretical elaborations are rooted in the empiricalobservation of and participation in the photographic practices relatedto that conflict, which produces well-known conditions of exclusion ofpolitical rights and citizenship to a large number of people. In sucha context, photography has demonstrated that it continues to be a keypolitical instrument of emancipation in current social struggles.

Azoulay’s theoretical tools are grounded in feminism, postcolonialtheory, and political philosophy. She draws from the work of EttieneBalibar, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, as well as WalterBenjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. Her book is an unusualcombination of photographic theory and political philosophy whichreconceives citizenship as based on the “relations between thegoverned” in ways not limited to the conditions of the State. Thisnotion of citizenship is based on a “new ontological-politicalunderstanding of photography” (23) that considers the many differentagents involved in the production and circulation of photographicdiscourse (the camera, the photographer, the photographed subject, andthe spectator), with none of these granted the power to controlmeaning alone. Azoulay’s notion of photography as a civil contract is,moreover, a reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’sThe Social Contract (1760). She thus theorises photography as anon-essentialist secular agreement amongst citizens, as defined bymodern political philosophy.

The book is divided into nine chapters, as a “progression ofdifferent, but related topics,” and combines a theoretical elaborationon and analysis of practices primarily concerning the Middle Eastconflict. In the introduction, Azoulay explains that her project is toanalyse how photography may contribute to a public and collectivespace that creates conditions of citizenship and participation beyondthe regulation of governing powers. She writes: “The Civil Contract of Photographyis an attempt to anchor spectatorship in civic duty toward thephotographed persons who haven’t stopped being ‘there’, towardsdispossessed citizens who, in turn, enable the rethinking of theconcept and practice of citizenship…. An emphasis on the dimensionof being governed allows a rethinking of the political sphere as aspace between the governed, whose political duty is first and foremosta duty toward one another, rather than toward the ruling power”(16-17). She goes on to explain that her use of the term “contract”replaces others like “shame” or “compassion.” As a result, it isgrounded in an understanding of the relations established throughphotography and its modes of public circulation, which produces ade-territorialised public sphere that offers a general and equallyshared condition of citizenship.

The first chapter is a reading of theDeclaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from theFrench Revolution of 1789 as a constitutive document for modern (maleand female) citizens. The second chapter explains the civil contractof photography itself and constitutes the core of the book’s argument.Chapters 3 and 7 contribute to an understanding of the conditions ofconsent among partners and the figure of the spectator as an effect ofphotography. Chapter 4 analyses the image of horror as a case studyfor understanding what the author calls the production of an“emergency claim” in photography, drawing examples from the secondintifada. Chapters 5 and 9 deal with representations of women andsexual violence, while chapters 6 and 8 present the “living conditionsof Palestinians as existence on the threshold of catastrophe,” as wellas the photographic methods of managing and oppressing the Palestinianpopulation.

What makes this book important is the way it changes the conditionsfor thinking about the public life of the photographic document andopens up a fertile new space to be explored in the future. Bringingtogether modern philosophy and her own observations of Palestinianpolitical struggles, Azoulay reinserts micro-political practices intodiscursive production and reactivates the social potential of thephotographic document. Contrary to photographic theory produced in thecontext of the New Art History, Azoulay’s book displays neither atheoretical nor a political hesitation to reintroduce notions ofuniversality and transparency into her discussion of documentaryphotography. Here it is useful to compare Azoulay with Tagg, whosediscursive process challenges the positivistic universalism of modernpolitical philosophy, based on a universalclassless-genderless-raceless citizen. Post-1968 theory (what has beenvariously labelled poststructuralism and postcolonialism) introducedmicro-politics, or a politics of minorities not predetermined by Statelogic, as the site of political struggles in new social movements, atthe same time that it de-centered the myth of the universal citizen.Tagg also expresses the limits or failure of a micro-political scopeby stopping short of bringing micro-politics into a transformativelogic – that is, into a practice able to overcome the repressivemacro-political machine of the State. By internalising the theoreticallegacy of both modernity and postmodernity, on the other hand, Azoulayaddresses the fact that micro-politics needs to generate forms ofuniversalism, or somehow deal with the macro-political scale, in orderto produce transformative and emancipatory effects. It is precisely inthe photographic documentary contract that she finds space for such anoperation: “photography remains part of the res publica of thecitizenry,” she writes, “and is or can become one of the last lines ofdefense in the battle over citizenship for those who still seecitizenship as something worth fighting for” (131).

It is meaningful in this respect to see how Azoulay’s book liquidatessimply and quickly questions concerning the photographic index andphotographic realism, which have been so determining in postmodernapproaches to the medium precisely because the index has functioned asan emblem of positivism and thus of the (false) universalism andtransparency of the photographic sign. By examining how “indexical”documentary photography continues to circulate and function sociallyin the media in spite of philosophical debates about the death ofphotographic realism, she observes that “critical discussions seekingto challenge the truth of photography, or argue that ‘photographylies’, remain anecdotal and marginal to the institutionalisedpractices of exhibiting and publishing photographs. Only a glance at anewspaper kiosk is needed to realise the enduring power of the newsphoto. Photography’s critics tend to forget that despite the fact thatphotography speaks falsely, it also speaks the truth” (126–27).This is not a negation or refusal of postmodernism, but a change ofemphasis, a new focus. While a critique on the level of artisticmediation or representation is fundamental, it cannot stop there; thetheoretical tools Azoulay offers have powerful ethical implicationsand suggest new ways to reconnect discursive production with socialstruggles.

The Disciplinary Frame andThe Civil Contract of Photography are thus complementary booksinsofar as they update the cultural and political space of thephotographic document. They do so, moreover, in a period whenphotographic theory has not been particularly productive on thatfront, trapped as it has been in metaphysical dilemmas concerning theindexicality of the photographic sign, which includes the debates onpost-photography and the impact of digital technologies onphotography’s nature. Paradigmatic of this state of the field is therecent anthology edited by James Elkins,Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007), which continuesto foreground somewhat sterile debates about indexicality above allothers, one can hope for the last time. The appearance of these newbooks by Tagg and Azoulay, along with other recent studies by authorslike Blake Stimson (The Pivot of The World: Photography and its Nation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), may be symptomatic of a welcomedturning point. What these authors do is particularly important, sincethey also fundamentally challenge Michael Fried’s claim that today“photography matters as art as never before” (Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). Together theyoffer a very different conclusion: if photography can return to apolemical documentary status today, then it will come back to life.What is more, photography may be useful for throwing bricks againstthe State, but it can also transcend and surpass the State. It canproduce what we might call a “citizenry of photography,” or ade-territorialised restoration of citizenship in the global era.

Jorge Ribalta, artist, freelance curator and writer, Barcelona,Spain