"Post-Documentary?"
Rosler introduces her question by taking us to one of documentary's first and continuing troublesome concerns:

"'The penalty of realism is that it is about reality and has to bother forever not about being "beautiful" but about being right.' So wrote John Grierson, the man considered the 'father of documentary film,' the person who named the genre and helped establish documentary film in the English-speaking world. Grierson is pointing here to the dichotomies of accuracy and aesthetics, the criteria by which we have come to the worth of documentary imagery. But documentary — a practice that flourished with the twentieth-century and may die with it — is undergoing profound challenges from multiple sources, on social, political, and ethical grounds. Critiques of documentary have centered on questions of the image and its relationship to a phenomenologically present visual reality; denigration of its metonymic adequacy in relation to the situation it depicts; and doubt about the ability of any image of a visual field to convey lived experience, custom, tradition, or history. Postcolonial discourses have undermined the authorial voice of the photographic image, the photographer, and the cultural milieu in which the image is inserted. The burden of truth borne by documentary has tended to shoulder aside questions of aesthetics in favor of a variety of other issues, leaving aesthetics to surface seemingly as an afterthought — which has not prevented documentarians from regarding the aesthetic dimension as a kind of necessary surplus that protects them from charges of propaganda; yet the interest in aesthetics has in its turn subjectivized the photographic document. Neoliberalism, which seeks to bring about the destruction of the postwar welfare state, has undermined the shared assumptions about the ethical obligations of modern democracy, helping the art world to bring into prominence photographic practices that could not have been widely supported earlier.

"These challenges, which radically undermine photography's claim to a unique capacity to offer direct insight into the real and to offer up structural truths about power differentials in society, have produced something of a crisis among artists and intellectuals and troubling some in journalism and the legal professions, if not others in the wider audience. My aim is to explore some of the attributes and functions of social documentary photography and to determine if it still has a place in the postmodern world."