A curious thing happens when documentary is officially recognized as art. Suddenly the hermeneutic pendulum careens from the objectivist end of its arc to the opposite, subjectivist end. Positivism yields to a subjective metaphysics, technologism gives way to auteurism. Suddenly the audience's attention is directed toward mannerism, toward sensibility, towards the physical and emotional risks taken by the artist. To use Roman Jakobson's categories, the referential function collapses into the expressive function. A cult of authorship, an auteurism, takes hold of the image, separating it from the social conditions of its making and elevating it above the multitude of lowly and mundane uses to which photography is commonly put.
Allen Sekula 1
Dave Herman's documentary photographs of the Gullah culture of his childhood along the South Carolina and Georgia coast are significant for the work itself, for the evocation of a culture in danger of vanishing, and significant for the context of their practice, for their engagement of a mode of photography hardly less in danger of vanishing.
Martha Rosler notes that the historicity of the development of documentary photography associates it with "the ideological climate of developing state liberalism and the attendant reform movements of the early-twentieth-century Progressive Era in the United States . . . ."2 As Peter B. Hales urges in considering the landscape and the documentary modes of photography:
Today the philosophical and aesthetic difficulties with these two photographic modes seems evident, even obvious. At the time, however, the loss of faith in these genres-or positions, or subjects, even-seemed sudden and truly unaccountable. To doubt them was to doubt the medium itself, to question its basic verities, its position not only within the world of art, but in the larger arenas where aesthetics are believed to "stand for" more significant issues of meaning, and myths of purpose. They were the two redemptive modes in photography . . . . Now they were unaccountably in eclipse. And this fall from grace seemed so unfair.3
The documentary mode in photography consists in the deployment of a constellation of conventions; it is a cultural construction,4 and not a fact of nature, however much its discursive narrative serves as a myth, "a device to mediate between culture and nature, either by culturizing nature or naturalizing culture."5 All of that having been said-and that and a great deal more was said during the deconstruction of the documentary mode over the past three decades-the photograph remains an index,6 entailing a semiotic of causal narrative between what is photographed and its representation as a photograph. Indeed, the photograph in its indexicality evokes the once-presentness of the thing photographed. The causal narrative connecting the photograph qua index and the thing photographed enables and elicits a particular mode of viewer response. Thus Roland Barthes:
The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have now is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence . . . its reality [is] that of the having-been-there . . . . 7
One regards Herman's Ancestral Chullin, indeed all of Herman's photographs and photographs in general, as a representation of what was co-present with the photographer at the time what was photographed was photographed. One knows the photograph to be a photograph, and as such a representation and not the presence of what was photographed, but the photograph stands to the viewer as what was photographed stands (or rather, stood) to the photographer. This relation, joining photographer and viewer as witness, underwrites the potential affect of the documentary photograph. What renders that potential affect actual and eloquent is the precision and grace with which what was photographed is manifested as a photograph, subsuming at once emotion and expression, content and form, meaning and medium. It is the capacity of the documentary photograph to be more than merely an evidentiary record, even and necessarily while it is always already an evidentiary record grounded in the indexicality of the photograph, that gives documentary photography its power for intervention in the social formation.
Ancestral Chullin is a record of the appearance of two children at a specific moment and place; it is also an image in which, as its title suggests, retention of the past and protention of the future, history and hope, are eloquently conjoined. The eloquence of a single photograph suffices to place into question the rhetoric adduced against documentary photography.
Dallas artist Dave Herman received the Bachelor of Science in Graphic Arts and Print Management from Florida A & M University. His exhibitions include: Men and Women...Boys and Girls, The Gallery Room at DCTV Studios, Dallas; Photographix.01, Tarrant County College NW Visual Arts Gallery, Ft. Worth; the traveling exhibition Etched In The Eyes: The Spirit Of A People Called Gullah, South Dallas Cultural Center, Dallas, Association of African American Museums Conference, Washington, D.C., Dreamkeepers Community Art Center, Georgetown, S.C., King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation Inc., The Beach Institute, Savannah, Georgia.