Reading In, Around and Afterthoughts by Martha Rosler

I found this a difficult piece of writing to read, probably due to my inexperience with reading this kind of literature. I spent a lot of time using an online dictionary and thesaurus, translating the dense wording into something I could better understand. I was successful with this for the most part, and the essay raises some very interesting points, which I’ll briefly outline here. It is worth bearing in mind that this essay is around 30 years old, so certain points made may no longer be applicable; references to The Bowery for example as being ‘an archetypal skidrow’.

From what I can gather, Rosler’s over-arching point in the essay is how the use of documentary photography had changed for the worse. She said:

‘The meliorism (the belief that the world can be made better by human effort) of Riis, Lewis Hine and others is in contrast to pure sensationalism of much of the journalistic attention to working-class, immigrant, and slum life’.

 In other words, Riis, Hine, and others were trying to use their photographs to bring attention to a particular problem, and encourage a gradual (rather than revolutionary) change. With their images they were trying to show facts, facts which were made more clear and concrete by being photographed. Jacob Riis alluded to this when he said; 'I wrote, but it made no impression'. These photographers used visual imagery in combination with other forms of discourse as propaganda to argue for the rectification of wrongs. They would also attempt to prompt action by appealing to polite society’s self-interest, arguing that the symptoms of poverty would affect their own health and security. Their work was in contrast to the sensationalistic journalistic attention to working-class, immigrant, and slum life.

This quote from the essay encapsulates Rosler’s thoughts on the progression of documentary photography over time:

            ‘The exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting—and careerism’.

Rosler also talks about the emphasis on the photographer, rather than the people they are photographing. Florence Thompson, the subject of Dorothea Lange’s famous image The Migrant Mother, is one such example. She gave her consent for the images, as she believed they would help to improve her situation. In fact, she personally benefited very little; her identity was not discovered until the late 1970s, where she was found living in a trailer home. Florence was quoted as saying:

 "I wish she [Lange] hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did."

Lange’s image was public domain (as the project was government funded), so she didn’t directly receive royalties from the image, although it did make her a celebrity and furthered her career. It seems to me that once the image was taken, it became a distinctly different entity to the person herself; the image thrust into the limelight for decades to come, and the person herself all but forgotten. As Rosler put it in her essay; ‘Florence Thompson is of interest solely because she is a postscript to an acknowledged work of art’.

To get some further insight into the essay, I searched YouTube in the hope of finding a video of someone talking about Rosler’s work. I didn’t get exactly that, but I did find an interesting video titled Aperture Foundation at The New School: Documentary Photography which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6nTXZKoggQ. The video is a look at the work of three contemporary documentary photographers, although the speaker does begin with a few words on Rosler’s essay. She talks about how ‘pictures of the poor are framed with a liberal rhetoric’ and how ‘Power relations characterise documentary photography; it's part of the genre’. Both points made by Rosler. The video was made recently, and so is a more up-to-date viewpoint than Rosler’s essay. The speaker in the video made a particular statement that I think is very pertinent to what we are looking at in this part of the course:

‘21st century documentary photography has a much more pervasive uncertainty about facts. It reveals the transparency of the medium, and the subjectivity of the photographer. It's not about giving truthful information; it's questioning what all that might mean’.