[From an article posted by Sandy Harris]:
JR: My point is that the WPM provided a source for the emergence of a documentary photographic culture around 1930. Documentary, I think, is a response to the need to visualise the working class in a new media culture corresponding to the era of mass democracy. Let's not forget that the conditions of visual culture and visual communication based on the photo-illustrated press emerge mostly from Germany in the 1920s. The British documentary movement and the later FSA project are I think liberal or social-democrat responses to the 1930s awareness of the emergence of the working class as a new and crucial historical subject. The triumph of the Soviet Revolution is of course part of that new awareness. In my opinion there is a constitutive tension between reformism and revolution in the emergence of documentary practices in 1930. This is not an opposition between left and right, or between fascism and revolution, but it is an opposition between two versions of the left, so to speak.
I think the birth of documentary is related to left wing cultural policies and can be compared to the role of Realism in Courbet's painting after the 1848 revolution. Realism started as an art of civic duty or public service, during the emergence of a new social movement. The birth of documentary in 1930 is I think a sort of reenactment of the birth of Realism, where art and social movement remain structurally attached.
http://www.foto8.com/new/online/blog/1424-worker-photography-movement
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Many thanks for posting this. It's one of the best things I've read on art and revolution which is always a difficult subject to write or think on. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the general subject.
It explains a lot of my education in art and some later experience in my struggles with the art world. In fact it explains a mystery of why WWII and post-WWII up to today looks the way it does in most of the visual media world. It might also explain my intense fascination with Egyptians and AJE as virtually the only medium of any remote resemblence to visual truth. I used to lay awake thinking about going to the Middle East with a camera and notebook just to grasp some tiny piece of history, which is a primal art desire.
It reminds me of all the things I should have done as a kid and as a student. I didn't have a camera from age fourteen to age twenty-six, and by then it was mostly over. I should of course have taken a photography class. A friend at the time did. His term project was a series on LA skid row, early 60s, around the old Greyhound station and environs. A couple of years later Ed Ruscha gas stations were all the rage. Nice point, but really?
What about the dirt streets in remote parts of East LA where chickens were running around loose, goats were tied to posts in the backyard, and people were sitting in chairs on the broken down porches, like it was some poverty stricken village in Mexico? Or similar conditions in Watts that looked like Mississippi or some gone broke steel town back east?
West Oakland still had similar places in and around the closed factories and wharehouses where I'd do occasional pick and deliveries. And then there was the Tenderloin and Bayveiw Hunters Point. The latter is the area in SF around the disappeared shipyards and manufacturing areas that produced for WWII in the Pacific theater. They were left out of the `golden age' of the post war years as production dropped and stagnated. They really took another hit when the Navy closed operations in the early 90s so they missed that little boom too.
I have some photos of the rot of Emeryville during the early 90s bust, while the dotcom bubble was filling up with bright shining lies. I happened to be working in an interzone between a dying manufacturing area and a redevelopment plan for commerical real estate along 6th St. A small ghetto impacted with expensive SUVs of people working for NorthPoint just before it went belly up. The new buildings along 6th were fantastic palaces of emptiness. They've recovered now, but back then it was a ludicrous waste plenty.
I finally saved enough to get my current camera and lens, just by the time most of the transition was over. I have a couple of rolls on it. Bright sun, stark shadows cutting across building facades, deathly empty lots, closed factories, dis-used rail lines, electric utility poles going nowhere to nothing. But frankly, I couldn't capture the pure creepiness of the places.
The other place I wanted to go and was basically just chicken shit to try was the Tenderloin. The wild and wooly street culture of the have nots and down and outters. There you can see soup kitchen lines gathering for noon while others are trying to get in the bars for a drink. The buildings are so old they look like something out of 1930 documentary photo. This particular scene is on some dead end street and very difficult to get to by car. All the streets are one way so you can get trapped. It is effectively hidden from the rest of the city. Glide Memorial sits near dead center.
I first got a taste of this world of divisions up here when I lived on 5th St in a small factory-residental area because it had the cheapest housing. A Mexican American family owned the place and their kids grew up there after the war. The family next door had been their poorer friends. They still grew corn and had chickens. Our place had an old chicken coop in the backyard. It made for great vegetable gardining. I was reminded again just a few blocks north on 3rd St by the tracks where I had a studio in the early 70s. It had been a machine shop. I was a living icon of the so-called artist moving into an area as the evil harbinger of the redevelopment agency come to plow down those last few old poor people, the unseen and unheard of since practically never.
This is the still forgotten United States. It was nice to see some recognition in a few videos of the back street protests in Detroit a few weeks ago on Democracy Now about a closing high school for pregnant girls and mothers with small kids. Some teachers and students started a sit-in and the cops came to break it up, arrest them and haul them off to the pokey. They got citations and left the station house jail. What were the cop to do with a bunch of pregnant women and little kids?
So some point here? Only that I think bourgeois society keeps generating this strange dialectic of the rise of realism or naturalism and then its suppression. So it keeps coming back and then going away and has to be re-invented by each generation. With technological change, it makes its appearence in newer media which has become accessible. It forms a counter to some other art style usually considered the `better' work by the well placed, because the well off critical audience, is also the rich art world. And then, there is the troubling impact. Most of the wealthy don't want to be reminded of the struggling down and out world where they probably made their most dough.
Well on the so-called art side here is another quote:
``There is a deep lyricism in the whole exhibition, a poetics of dispossession, which I think has to do with the fact that this poetics is constitutive of our notion of democracy and justice. We are equals because we are all vulnerable and precarious, equally exposed to nakedness, poverty and indignity. I think the WPM has been essential in the (photographic) production of this imaginary which is part of the modern democratic culture...
There are presumptions in the modernist notion of quality that this project tries, again, to expose, de-naturalise and make accessible to critique, since they involve consequences in terms of the inclusions and exclusions of history. Quality should be seen in terms of its political consequences, historically, not as a natural and already given condition of art...''
Here, here!
CG