06 - SOCIAL COMMENT
Plato Rivellis: A couple is dancing in a ballroom photographed by Roy De Carava, a photographer who lived and worked in Harlem. Social photography, the social commentary we usually encounter in magazines, covers topics of broader and more timeless interest rather than events with some newsworthy value. These topics are primarily based on the emotion, the feeling they will evoke in both the photographer and the viewer through the content of reality they present.
Andreas Pagoulatos: In Roy De Carava, I see that element you mentioned earlier, meaning if you want people in the city who in some way are not just talking about their own problem or their own stance, their own gesture, if they make a gesture, but are talking about something that somehow transcends them.
PR: Roy De Carava does not photograph black people in a black ghetto. And for this reason, he can speak much beyond the depiction of the black fate, let's say. And he does this with a photographic method. The decidedly underexposed photos create an atmosphere. His strength is that he escapes from reporting on Harlem. If he did that, we would not be interested at all. We would be interested just informatively. And beyond Roy De Carava, I want to say that this photography could be from a white photographer. We should not think that it is because the specific photographer happens to be black. This might slightly enhance things. This creates a new risk for De Carava because he is very important he transcends it. And the risk is to make a tender, emotional photograph or one full of anger from the subject which concerns him. What is his success, though? That his photos operate on many levels. And I don't know of any significant photo that does not operate on many levels.
AP: What we call social photography, whether in the form of reportage or as a more complete creation, strongly reminds me of the documentary with all its types, the cinematic. Meaning if you want from the reportage documentary to the art documentary. I think there are some analogies. However, there are extremes that do not fall into the realm of aesthetics, of creation, and that might be a photo ordered by someone to someone else and the other does it in a professional and external way and gives it. Like there could also be an order which ends up as a work of art. In my opinion, the documentary is very much equivalent to social photography. With photography that supports or suggests a social commentary.
PR: Indeed, what the Americans call social documentary, this social photography has provided excellent examples of photographic images even from an artistic standpoint if one sees it. Nonetheless, it hides very significant risks. Because the important thing in social photography is the social event. That is, the photographer wants to support something, possibly wants to enlist for or against an event. We saw in our previous discussions that the topic itself and this reality in the hands of a photographer are a pretext for him to go and make his personal and expressive work.
AP: It's like the photographer carries within him a fleeting sequence of images and seeks to match one of these images that becomes specific in this case with a specific image of reality again. And if this harmonization is achieved, then we have what you call a photographic event. That is, an aesthetic validation of his subject.
PR: It is characteristic that in the hands of the very well-known and significant American photographer Eugene Smith, photography sometimes reached very high levels of artistic creation and many other times simply in enlisted propagandistic photography. And he himself did not distinguish in his photos because he was mainly carried away by the topic. He was a very honest and honorable person towards his subject and he himself admitted that he is between two forces, one is his passion for social justice and the other is his anxiety to be a creator.
When Roy De Carava photographs the life of the residents of New York's Harlem, he does not make social commentary. He photographs the diary of his life. These people who move in a gray world he knows well. De Carava balances between the artistic image and the social observation without allowing the latter to become accusatory, superficial emotion, or schooling. He boldly uses the formalistic weapons of photography but does not let them turn into manneristic acrobatics nor to threaten the credible presence of his heroes. De Carava generates the strongest artistic emotion, that is, one based on the inventive use of the elements of the photographic medium and is not afraid of the presence of reality as it is presented to us through its most everyday and emotional side. A challenging and difficult bet that could erase a photographer but one that De Carava has undoubtedly won.
In the field of good photojournalism, the name W Eugene Smith appears like a guiding lighthouse. A position he held well before his sudden death in 1978. However, it would be unjust to characterize Smith as merely a good reporter while a large number of his photos elevate him to the level of a worthy creator and even an artist who nearly achieves the impossible. That is, to start mainly with the aim of restoring social justice, to make therefore enlisted photography but often end up in images where his artistic sensitivity transforms the initial emotional placement into a work with a much larger scope. Thus a simple outcry can be transformed into a cry that concerns broader areas of the spirit and more people and eras. Smith's tenure at major magazines such as Life and National Geographic showed the inability of the prints to understand a non-sloganeering approach, something we have all now tragically accepted. Smith operated photographically through historical themes. However, if one makes the effort to disconnect these photos from their journalistic and editorial shell, one would enjoy a photographer with overflowing sensitivity who knows by instinct how to tame it and organize it into an artistic work through his great talent.
AP: Seeing Smith's photos from the period he went to Spain and photographed farmers, peasants, women, and children, I discern a great strictness in the structure and construction of the photography, I can say. And I am aesthetically moved by this series of photographs. Indeed, I find huge correspondences with what I would call tragedy. As if many times these forms, the game, the black and white, the structure that these photos have, strongly recall in my memory and my sense something analogous to the Greek tragedy. These photographs are very Mediterranean, I would say.
PR: And to tell you about this specific subject you mentioned, the Spanish village, which happened in the '30s, that the photographs indeed remained in history as pieces of pure art, they did not perform any social purpose. Life in the village never improved, or at least did not improve because of the photographs published then by Life, and the villagers considered Smith a hated person. And as they told a photographer who went years later to visit them, they considered that he exploited their poverty to promote his work. They did not consider that he did them any good by showing them, say, poor and hungry and the like. Smith's value indeed lies in that he did not show them poor and hungry. In that he thought he was recording a poor and miserable life in a village while in reality, he recorded, there his artistic element prevailed, he recorded heroic, theatrical figures almost of tragedy, as you said.
Now, another point that our previous conversation led us to is that social reporting, social commentary, the community documentary usually deals with things that carry sadness. Rarely with joy.
AP: Violent deaths, tragic situations, wars.
PR: This is probably for two reasons. Let's forget how much the public is seduced by these. Or even if it is seduced, it has the same justification. Death remains the cleansing element for the creation of art. And for this reason, death for artists is a strong and positive element. It is not something we fear, we do not face it crying. It is what defines the need we have to create. If we think about it. We do not think about it every day. Thus, this death which exists in the whole history of art is not depicted as the event of a specific death. Then it is a mistake, it is a weakness. That is, if the important thing in a photograph is fear, terror, death, anxiety, to illustrate. Example thousands of journalistic photos where a mother cries over her child. There we do not transcend anything from the event, we do not talk about death, we talk about the specific death. The great Polish theater man Tadeusz Kantor once said that I am interested in putting death on stage, death itself not the death of a specific person in a tragedy. To be death on stage. And this on-stage death to cause the tears of the viewer. You realize that all the great documentarians of photography such as Evans with the farmers in the '30s and many others did this. However, this very event is in contrast with what the world, the magazines want, that is the very specific expression through the events of a specific era.
The Magnum agency, which was founded by Cartier Bresson and includes Bruce Davidson, consists of photographers who give special attention to social events as presented through the pages of major magazines. However, apart from the almost common thematology, Magnum has also adopted an almost common form. That of the wide-angle lens where between 90 + 60 degrees these events develop with impressive exaggeration. Few are the agency's photographers who deviate from these directions and among them certainly the American Bruce Davidson. Davidson also photographs events of the social environment without, however, making a report on them. Thus he gives the possibility for his photos to move on many levels and to function both as autonomous and isolated works of art. His forms are always simple But when they tend towards exaggeration he does it in an extreme way so that exaggeration is used as a lever of photography and not as a simple garment. The people he approaches he knows and does not use them. His photography therefore both in content and in form is discreet and not aggressive. Davidson thus gains both our admiration and our esteem.
AP: Do you believe, Plato, that the photographer ought to know, to be familiar with his subject?
PR: My opinion is that it is not necessary to know it. Unless he is a reporter. The reporter must render the truth of the events accurately. The photographer renders his own truth.
The subject for the photographer simply serves as a pretext for him to be led to his own truth. He may therefore use it purely in a false way. That is, if I go to an unknown country to be stimulated by the new things I see, to make them the starting point of a work of my own that will be a clear contrast to the reality of that country. It is characteristic that there are many photographers who have difficulty photographing their loved ones. Perhaps because they know them very well. And it is difficult for them to be led to the mystery through specific knowledge. It is difficult, Bresson says this, to photograph your place.
In the history of photography, quite often unknown names appear that conquer a brief and small proposition in the form of a book, an exhibition only to perhaps be lost for a long, perhaps forever. Ken Schles did not want, at least with his first book, to give us any biographical or other element concerning him and left us only the marks of a personal photographic journey. Schles emphasizes beyond any doubt the personal starting point of his photographic gaze through the daring and not at all reportage form of his images. However, he leaves us an attractive doubt about the depicted images that may constitute images of his own reality and simultaneously appear strangely familiar as if they come from an invisible city that concerns us.
I'm thinking, in what we call the personal world and world of acquaintance that when you photograph a social space, hence you make a comment on it, let's say you know some elements of it. When you photograph your own space, your world, your people, your house, your soul, how well do you know these? At this point to perhaps move on to something supplementary or opposite of the social comment. Let's look at a photograph by Ken Schles which we do not know if it photographs a social or family comment. If it photographs his house, the house of friends, the house of strangers. And we do not know because he does not give it to us in his photos and very rightly does not give it to us in any text in his books. The photograph of the person who is next to a kitchen in a house immerses us in a world that may simply be a personal diary.