An essay I wrote recently, not directly about this project, but i hope it will provide some insight into my approach to making images:
- For the purpose of this essay I will define the ‘documentary’ photographer as someone who makes photographs that explore the social and political condition of the world, with the gallery, books, dedicated websites and magazines as the intended destination for the images. I would like to make clear that I see a distinction between this and the working news photographer, who covers whichever stories are currently in the press in order to sell to news outlets; a job that seems increasingly threatened by the widespread use of camera phones and other imaging devices.
If “every photograph involves a certain degree of abstraction from the three dimensional fabric of the world”, one might question where this leaves the ‘documentary’ photographer. It seems this area of practice is underpinned by a desire to represent the world in the most ‘realistic’, or least ‘abstract’, way possible. Whilst a large proportion of photographers working in a ‘documentary’ way no longer claim to be presenting objective facts about the world, most still adhere to the traditional visual language of ‘documentary’ photography.
