Crisis Doucmentation in Photography
Considering that crisis documentation in photography is an asset of popular culture, it is enriching our society. The images are used to inform and educate readers of newspapers, magazines and other prints, if it is on a war in a remote country or a crisis situation. From the battlefield of Gettysburg to the Balkan Crisis, documentary photography is illustrating what happens in front of the camera in the moment the shutter is released. The information in the photograph is relevant because it underlines what is written in the text, it records events or situations and it adds a visual component to the story.
As soon as the image is open to the public it brings the viewer in the position of an observer. In a century which ìis arguably the most violent in human history photographs testify to the horrors, which seem to be so far away from our country and society. If it is the picture of a dying child in Sudan or of an attacking rioter in Jakarta, we look at these pictures geographically and emotionally from a distance. The dreadfulness presented uncensored and in most graphic way resolves in a certain "horror fatigue" in contemporary witnessing. We are overwhelmed by "images of cruelty and violence", but the images do not change necessarily the situation this cruelty and violence takes place in. The image is nothing more than another record of a situation which ought to be, but most rarely will not be changed. The key question I want to discuss further in regard to documentary photography in popular culture is on what grounds "we justify producing and distributing photographs of horror if they did nothing to stop horror" .
Starving Child in Sudan, Kevin Carter 1993
  
n our culture we are confronted with all different kinds of media distributing horrific documentary photographs. The pictures we see in the newspaper or on the Internet are real because they show what was a real situation caught in a fraction of a second. Just as the most photographic images we take that realism in that image for granted. Even in advertising where the image is altered, posed and phony we believe in what we see. The photographic image has a power in itself, which the press makes use of. The camera becomes a window to the world. In the case of travel magazines it is the window to a beautiful world captured in a beautiful picture. In press it is the window to a war, crime, crisis or tragedy. The paradox is that the photograph is often understood as being something beautiful. Most famous example is press photographer Wegee who documented "violent crimes, disasters, and their survivors [in New York Cityís late 1930s] which brought him international attention" as a freelance photographer and artist.
As Schopenhauer once noticed "photography [...] offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity". The medium pleases the reader even if we talk about atrocity on a print. It also pleases its own "sensationalist and voyeuristic tendencies". But how real is it what we see? The window we look through has recorded the action, which happened in a fraction of a second, on paper and in our mind. What happened before and after the photograph was taken is not recorded. Just as the photograph is real for us it may also be unreal for the reality it takes place in. Looking through that window it is the photographer who frames that window for us whom we have to rely on. Just as the time factor, other objects and circumstances are subjectively excluded from the reality of a photograph - circumstances which cannot be captured with a camera.
After he was told that a camera could not lie, Franz Kafka said in a conversation with Gustav Janouch: " Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling...". It proofs that photography's "verified reality" is and can only be the shadow in Platoís Cage. The photographer stands between its product and reality, which will never be one and the same. Kafka speaks of things the sharpest lens would not capture just as shadows will never show more then the shape of an object.
A photograph always assumes a certain knowledge from the viewer. If that required knowledge is not present the picture especially in documentary photography is useless for the viewer. This knowledge should also lead the viewer to question the displayed reality. Coming back to advertising, a lack in this knowledge will disappoint the consumer, who is attracted to a product by an image, when it doesn't fulfill what it is representing on that image. In our society there is a widely accepted tolerance for this discrepancy of how things really are in comparison to their representation.
In documentary photography this discrepancy would be the end of honest photojournalism. Documentary photography is therefore a very delicate genre in the medium itself, where the esthetical has to come way after the ethical element. As soon these parts come too close together the photograph is displaced out of its context and is more likely beautiful than from journalistic importance. When the esthetic is the primary the image resolves in something Baudelaire described as this: "And now the public says to itself: "Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the idiots!), then photography and art are the same thing.""
Although I consider photography being a form of art the product of a documentary photograph may never be reduced to a piece of art. As soon as documentary photography resolves in beautiful pictures, assuming that art is what is presented as beautiful, we have a nice picture of a horrible situation, which reduces the importance of that situation. "To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wronglyî" Nietzsche once said. In our context this quotation means that a beautiful representation is misleading the observer. Once again the realism of a photograph is very questionable in our culture. The consequence of artistic press photography is that journalism becomes superficial, arrogant, and leaves no place for questions. The photograph stands above the story, its context, its development and possible solution.

In a culture of fast communication we donít have the time to read the whole story. The lack of engagement to the subject leads us to flip the pages of the magazines. The information, which is delivered the fastest and easiest way is the photograph. Documentary photography is incredibly important in our society because the picture looked at for just a few seconds will be the only information on that subject for many people. An overwhelmingly shocking presentation or in the opposite the romanticizing of a conflict is therefore very critical because one could get literally a wrong image from that conflict.
Either to accept the conflict and the image the viewer should question both through a critical approach. In "humanitarian reporting" the picture has to raise questions about what is seen in the frame the photographer shapes for us. Besides the photograph, the actual information in the frame also has to raise questions about the conflict. Without desensitizing the viewer or influence him in taking position, the photograph must be as real as possible. The viewer should always remind himself that a photograph cannot "tell the whole truth". Its truth value is just as questionable as the conflict it has captured. When a horrifying documentary photograph raises these questions their production and distribution is justified through the fact that it has more political and social relevance then just another image.
Marco Bohr, February 2000
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