Rules of Engagement: with photographic truthfulness no longer taken on faith, some photographers are working out a new set of protocols for making pictures that are seriously real

Art in America, June-July, 2008 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Shortly before the conclusion of Shattered Glass, the 2003 film that recounts the downfall of a hot young journalist at the New Republic who was found to have fabricated the better part of his reputation-building features, the magazine's anguished editor receives an assessment of how the crisis might have been averted from his assistant. "You know what could have prevented all this, don't you?" she asks solemnly. "Pictures. How could you make up characters if everyone you wrote about had to be photographed?" (1)

The audience I shared the film with greeted that line with waves of derisive laughter. To even casual observers of the field of photography, an expression of unqualified faith in the evidentiary value of pictures would come as a bigger shock than did the details of Stephen Glass's violations of press ethics. Indeed, the "mirror with a memory" cracked well before Glass shattered. Since the early 1970s, the documentary photograph has been subjected to a lengthy--some would argue torturous--interrogation, leading to an assortment of charges and disclosures about such iconic images as Robert Capa's 1936 The Falling Soldier (quite possibly a reenactment) and Robert Doisneau's osculating couple of 1950 (posed, not impassioned) in Le Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville. Pretty much from its infancy--which is to say from the mid-19th-century Crimean War pictures of Roger Fenton and the Civil War images produced by the Mathew Brady Studio--photojournalism has been art directed, with backdrops scouted and purposefully framed, and corpses and firearms repositioned for enhanced narrative or esthetic effect. (2) Not even forensic photography was born innocent. In his 1992 book Evidence, Luc Sante tells of his discovery in New York's Municipal Archives of 55 police department crime-scene photographs from 1914-18. Though technically primitive, the pictures nevertheless evince a uniform look or "style," and a comparison of views of the same locations disclosed that bodies and objects had been repositioned between shots. (3) The climate of trust in which a photojournalist could submit pictures of the inconceivable with the terse injunction "Believe it"--as did Lee Miller when she sent her photographs of Buchenwald to Vogue magazine in 1945--seems irretrievable today.

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On the bright side, the long examination of photographic contingency and chicanery has fueled a boom in picture-making aimed principally at the gallery and museum, where a high premium is placed on foregrounding the art part of photography. For more than three decades, a large and diverse contingent of artists (Christian Boltanski, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Jeff Wall, Laurie Simmons, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gregory Crewd son, Gillian Wearing, Walid Raad, Thomas Demand and Andreas Gursky are among the more famous) have worked to bolster and exploit the new photographic dispensation, which stipulates that a photograph is not an inherently transparent representation but rather the crafted product of staging (sometimes) and editing (inevitably), and that a photograph's "reception" (for, like a text, a picture has neither intrinsic nor fixed meaning) hinges on the circumstances of its presentation (context, label) and on the expectations and preconceptions of an audience.

Of course, the triumph of the new orthodoxy didn't banish straight photography from exhibition. For all the macrocephalic moppets digitally bred by Loretta Lux, the gauntlet of social embarrassments arranged for Joshua, Charlie White's humanoid puppet, and the full array of suburban nightmares concocted by Gregory Crewdson, we've also seen the awkward adolescent bathers forthrightly pictured by Rineke Dijkstra, a survey of execution chambers across the U.S. compiled by Lucinda Devlin in "The Omega Suites," and Edward Burtynsky's justly spectacular views of the demolitions and excavations for China's Three Gorges Dam. But if the photographic document didn't vanish from view, the audience--like the photographers-did grow more circumspect and self-conscious, more prepared to scrutinize the influence of format, seriality and artistic intention: should we castigate or congratulate Devlin for the disarming serenity and handsome chiaroscuro of her prints, which induce us to linger so comfortably over pictures of holding cells, electric chairs and gurneys?

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Questions about the applicability and the usefulness of lessons learned about photography came to mind during the last season or so of exhibitions, a period that showed signs of an uptick of interest in pictures that claim a certain measure of documentary credibility or some photo-based engagement with social and political reality. (Let's agree to dispense with ironic quotes around that last word.) No doubt several factors have been at play. We've experienced a succession of critical events--the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib--for which the circulation of amateur and professional pictures proved fundamental if not crucial to the formation of public opinion. Probably just as pertinent to a reconsideration of reality-based photography has been a contrary phenomenon: the emergence in the West of a culture of surveillance and secrecy as one aspect of the domestic war on terrorism. Fretting over an image glut or staging polished send-ups of the society of the spectacle can seem beside the point when security cameras are proliferating on the one hand, and, on the other, the government is taking measures to sharply restrict photographic access (whether in the form of a ban on photographing the flag-draped military coffins that arrive at Dover Air Force Base or the recent attempt by the Bloomberg administration to expand the circumstances under which professional and amateur photographers in New York City must register for permits and insurance). (4) When the control of visual access becomes a flashpoint, the urge to photograph the real acquires the allure of a mission.