Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s

Afterimage, Jan, 2000 by Lucy Soutter

Like all contemporary art, the 1990s wave of narrative photography is given its meaning by the institutions and rhetorical framework in which it appears. This context is in turn shaped by decades of artistic activity and critical debate. In the current eclecticism, contemporary photographers can, to a certain extent, choose their own genealogy. For the most part they draw from three different strands of postwar photographic practice: first, the subjectivized approach to the documentary tradition championed by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) under John Szarkowski and embodied in the 1967 "New Documents" show of work by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand; second, the conceptual photographic activities of artists such as Eleanor Antin, Robert Barry and Ed Ruscha; and third, the postmodern appropriation and staging by artists including Richard Prince, Sherman and Jeff Wall. While these references may seem readily apparent, I think it worthwhile to pursue the ways in which they overlap and interact i n recent photography, particularly since these different strands of work are of dissimilar aesthetic and political agendas.

Coming to the fore at the same time as realist narratives in painting and literature, the documentary photography of the 1930s used carefully measured fictions in order to forward a highly politicized version of Truth. [9] Documentary photographers in this tradition use stylistic elements to code their images as factual, so that even if they present a static view of a landscape or interior rather than a figure in motion, the image can be read as a narrative of the way things were. Walker Evans put his finger on the artifice involved in this project. He used the term "documentary style," to describe the visual codes (which in his own case included sharp focus, even lighting and a head-on camera angle) for indicating that an image was to be read as immediate, straightforward and unbiased. [10] In other words, Evans was aware of the temptation to view documentary photographs as mimetic (i.e., imitating the world perfectly) but knew that they were in fact diegetic, telling a story in a particular way. Nonetheles s, the credibility of documentary photography at mid-century relied on a rhetoric of objectivity in order to put the image at the mercy of particular political agendas.

In the late-1950s and 1960s, Szarkowski developed a sophisticated formalist rhetoric, based on the ideas of modernist critic Clement Greenberg, in order to promote a new brand of documentary photography, embodied in the "New Documents" exhibition. In the work of the featured photographers (Arbus, Friedlander and Winogrand) narrative was always present but fragmented. If the most praised documentary photographs had distilled a complex situation into a single frame, as in Henri Cartier-Bresson's notion of the "decisive moment," or into a timeless icon like Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936), the new documentarians worked against this kind of completeness. Emphasis was thrown onto their stylistic and compositional elements by the fracturing of their subject matter--often a quirky gesture in the work of Winogrand, a fleeting shadow or reflection in the work of Friedlander or an unexpected, deliberately unexplained scenario in the work of Arbus. This kind of work substituted a subjective, idiosyncratic and fa llible visual "voice" for the all-seeing, seemingly disinterested documentary eye.