Photo realism

Probably the biggest problem with trying to work with documentary photography is finding a subject that’s intriguing and powerful enough to warrant multiple photographs. I think documentary photography is challenging because the subject also has to hold he interest of the Photographer and the audience. If you’re at an exhibition of a certain photographer who‘s just showing photographs, and you don’t really respond to one image, you can move onto the next photograph or the next or the next and hopefully find that connection you want with an image. However, with documentary photography, the content within the image is going to be very similar, and while it might change from image to image, you’re looking to tell a cohesive story, if that makes any sense. So, when you’re taking a series of these images, you’re looking for something that builds and evolves from the photo that comes before it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it was tough to find a subject in less than a week that was accessible for me to try and make a documentary series out. It’s hard to find a subject in which people can find a story.

When I was reading the Cotton article this week, there was a lot of discussion about content and how the image is read, and what kind of narrative unfolds out of a picture. This was the week where the literary aspects of photography made sense while I was reading the text. Usually I have to wait until class, when pictures are discussed in a group, until the analytical part of my brain starts to process the image. I think that’s because when you’re presented with a documentary photograph, you know that something exists outside of the image. That is, when you look at un-documentary (?) image, the significance is the image as a whole, but with a documentary image, the significance lies in the fact that the reality isn’t exclusive to the photo - the person, or whatever is captured in the picture, is actual and not confined the way a traditional photography subject might be. I’m not sure I’m articulating this correctly, but I hope you get my point.
Anyway, the documentary images that I decided to post are of postcards that I was sent from a friend traveling abroad. I think they’re complicated image to analyze because what you’re looking at is a photograph within a photograph. I guess you could argue that an image like that might not be eligible for the “photograph” title. However, I think these images really work well as pictures that isolate. They basically say, “this is where you aren’t”, or “this isn’t the life you’ve have. You chose the mundane, while I chose the glamorous.”