by Armando Salazar Larrea
"is not pry into private but to be part of it"
(Henri Cartier Bresson)
"what important is not how a photographer sees the world,
important thing is their intimate relationship with him "(Antoine D'Agata)
The two phrases written above belong to two photojournalists from the Magnum agency, the one, Cartier Bresson, promoter of the famous "decisive moment" photograph was posed to find an image to synthesize what that moment of life was in essence, raised and a way to shoot from the cultured intellectual and computer in the world looking to find meanings in shooting. This idea, which shook the foundations of the profession of photojournalism was taken years later by the direct cinema documentary filmmakers like Albert Maysles that documentary called this attitude of "fly on the wall"; be in place and not be both. Cartier Bresson relates to the world by being part of the stage and from there try to feel the life is plotted against the lens, is part of it but not involved.
The other quote is by someone known at all (unless one is a fixed user of the website of Magnum): Antoine D'Agata . French as well but that belongs to a radically different world. His images speak of prostitutes, sexual extremism and other indoor areas, not in vain disciple of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark (the one who made that sensational long on youth and AIDS that called "Kids"). D'Agata not believe in it not being and being, for him the photographer is a direct participant in the creation of the image so it away is not important, what matters is being part of what happens in front of the camera and, if happens is marginal, dangerous, gritty, even better.
These two positions seem to want to force to decide where we place ourselves, in the territory of which notes and comments or in the territory of which observes and participates. This apparent requirement to be defined within one of the poles of the documentary craft, it becomes a straitjacket when you're looking for the location of its own view. While Cartier Bresson photographed in the fifties and D'Agata the two thousand, both now seem like two very decisive and totalizing looks like others that also marked his own territory immovable:
• The camera as an instrument of denunciation and hence political, that is the eyes of photographers like Eugene Smith or filmmakers like Joris Ivens who came to the big issues with a clear intention to change the world.
• The camera as a witness to the marginalization and the other portrayal instrument but never of oneself, is a demagogic look with deep awareness of class (it is assumed that as a subject that is), there is Sebastiao Salgado or any Latin American documentary to see the countryside from a paternalistic view where the exotic, the marginal and the funny thing boss.
• The look of melancholy lyric that attempts to transform its formal project in a social project as do Chris Marker or Juan Carlos Rulfo ( Del Olvido to I do not remember) where the film is assumed from the poetry and not from reality.
• The camera-mirror, the documentary as an extension of the daily intimate personal introspection and subjectivity that are not accountable to anyone. Here are many contemporary filmmakers tired of compulsory to change the world, preferring to start with themselves.
All these territories of the documentary are always built from a concept or idea concisely: the documentary as a translator, and recovery, such as reflexive or as a privileged witness.
But there is another dynamic in the documentary, a dynamic of being a resident of an intermediate space. A clear example is the work of Robert Frank, photographer and filmmaker art (art of feeling, not form) which in 1955 became a non-stereotypical project called THE AMERICANS , a document that took a year for photo tour by the U.S. on a different documentary idea that leads us to the world of intimacy but, therefore, lose sight of the respect and the structures of society, is a type of image you try to understand and comment and raises once we see the world always ask how we're watching. Between, or artistic or media and that is halfway between the eyes of Cartier Bresson and D'Agata A ntoine , an image that is not clearly identified or the art or with the press nor the news, is an area where the form is completed to see what life gives the documentary on a search and a constant struggle between what is and what we believe it is. This type of image documentary not always in the news, not always reflect intimate, not always aesthetically, not always document, part of a need for contact with life, human beings and spaces. This need to bump it everyday and not catch it, read the life and not think about it unilaterally, to seek and do not know, to try and it might not achieve by being at a non-place, limbo of live in a life time full of intensity, of chance and uncertainty is a documentary style where there's no room for the pose, the filatiquerÃa artistic or aesthetic cult, is the territory of the doubt and not that of an assumed superiority over that recorded creative.
Photo: Robert Frank - THE AMERICANS (1956) The question in all its forms is the driving force behind this way of working: The question of whether this is the correct camera position, whether or not it bother or how it is being perceived. The question to understand what life really is happening in front of us , how conflicts are resolved and what is at stake. Sometimes temporary certainty appears that we found something, that something of course, nothing lasts and continues the ongoing struggle against impossible where almost always late or just not be reached. At the end of the documentary process and only when the image has persisted or the issue has been found is when some of the doubt is dispelled and displayed glimpses of a look, an idea captured by a camera, a self that looks at another. Pause necessary, mount to go again in search of a dynamic documentary look out when we're seeing is what is inside and inside, there is, above all, are not sure.
* This text was originally published in the 2009 catalog of the Eighth International Documentary Film Festival, EDOC
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