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Empathy and Engagement: The Subjective Documentary

Mark Durden

 

"He doesn't want it here at the side of the house where everything is trashed and ugly, but with a good background; and in this and in the posing of the picture he gets his way... The background is a tall bush in dishevelling bloom, out in front of the house in the hard sun: George stands behind them all, one hand on Junior's shoulders, Louise (she has first straightened her dress, her hair, her ribbon), stands directly in front of her father, her head about to his breastbone, her hands crossed quietly at the joining of her thighs, looking very straight ahead, her eyes wide open in spite of the sun." (1)

James Agee is here describing how Walker Evans takes a portrait of one of the tenant farmer families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  Evans allows his subjects the dignity of determining how they would like to be pictured.  His portraits are generally celebrated for this ethical dimension, a negotiation between photographer and subject which differs from  much of the other Depression photography, which instead tended to reduce the poor to a spectacle of alterity: wretched, alien, defeated and pitiable.   Evans’ subjects address the camera, face on, upstanding, composed and commanding respect.   But while he might allow his subjects to determine how they have their photograph taken, Evans himself never shows his face.   Flaubert’s aesthetic is, as the photographer says, “absolutely mine: the non-appearance of author, the non-subjectivty.” (2) 

In contrast, Agee’s text represents a much more reflexive and embodied documentary.   Agee desires communion with the subjects he documents through his prose descriptions, in particular in the last part of the long book— nearly 500 pages— when the writer most fully addresses the tenants.  His prose avoids the expected distance and objectivity of documentary reportage.  Instead the text involves excesses of subjectivity; confessional and narcissistic moments as Agee openly talks of his own feelings and desires in relation to the people whose lives he seeks to make present in his book.    He thus becomes, as T.V.Reed puts it, “vulnerable in a face to face encounter”.(3)   Present in the prose, he gives us a very detailed account, for example, of the food eaten while staying the night with one of the tenant families, after his car gets stuck in the mud near their home late at night.   Agee is careful not to offend them by showing a lack of appetite— "better to keep them awake and to eat too much than in the least to let them continue to believe I am what they assume I must be: 'superior' to them or to their food." (4) This is then followed by a vivid account of his night sleeping with all the bugs running over his body and his attempts to keep them out.  For Reed, such moments involve an act of political vulnerability and communion.  While under no illusions that such shared moments give him any real understanding of their lives, they “represent the possibility of understanding, begin a dialogue"(5). 

While Agee’s book helps define an ethical and empathetic documentary practice, certain problems remain, shortcomings which are be linked to the visual and aesthetic effect of some of his prose descriptions.   In many respects photography affects and shapes Agee’s writing—  Evans’s photographs (all uncaptioned) precede Agee’s text in the book.  The non-narrative form of his writing, its descriptive excesses, all constitute as Paula Rabinowitz has put it, the book’s “paean to the visual.” (6) One can begin to understand Agee’s aesthetic praise of the people, their homes and meagre belongings, as proceeding in opposition to denigration— the abuses which marked much Depression documentary as it sought out squalor, abjection, denied its subjects the respect of self-composure before the lens.   Yet the praise means his prose gets caught up in a problematic aestheticising vision, one which can be seen to also particularly characterise Evans’s beautiful pictures of poverty.   Agee’s detailed descriptions of the tenant family homes and belongings underline their beauty: the partition wall of one of the families’ front bedrooms is referred to as "a great tragic poem" (7), while the texture and colour of one of their worn overalls is said to achieve a “scale of blues, subtle, delicious, and deft beyond what I have ever seen elsewhere approached except in rare skies, the smoky light some days are filmed with, and some of the blues of Cezanne.”(8)  

Such descriptions are nevertheless edged by guilt, admissions of the privilege of an educated sight: "To those who own and create it" the beauty of the tenant farmer homes is "irrelevant and indiscernible."(9) It is only seen by "those who by economic advantages of training have only a shameful and thief's right to it: and it might be said that they have any 'rights' whatever only in proportion as they recognise the ugliness and disgrace implicit in their privilege of perception." (10) "I have a strong feeling", Agee even goes so far as to say that "the 'sense of beauty', like nearly everything else, is a class privilege." (11) (12)     

Caught up in privilege, a clash of differences between documentarian and documented, questions of aesthetics remains, for Agee, ethically troubling.   And all this is very pertinent to the present climate, particularly the Saatchi-sanctioned vogue for the neurotic realism of certain contemporary documentary-based photography practices, perhaps best exemplified by Richard Billingham’s much vaunted pictures of his own family’s poverty.   Here we are far from the detached cool of Evans’ portraits.   Billingham’s pictures  rely on the tensions and contradictions between an essentially abject and counter-idealising vision and a pictorial richness.    Much of their aesthetic effect is caught up in a class collision of taste, where the spectacle of kitsch ornamentation— legible to middle-class viewers as working class ‘bad taste’— both maintains a cultural and class difference— keeps the subjects in their place, apart, separate,  and yet gives these pictures their aesthetic distinction, raises them from beyond ‘mere’ documentary: the optical play of patterns in these photos of crammed interiors providing a beautiful foil to the expansive spaces of both galleries and wealthy collectors’ homes.   

Thomas Hunter’s evocation of Vermeer in his portraits— recently on show with other Saatchi Neurotic Realists—  is intended to celebrate the lives of squatters: the seduction of colour and the calm of the Dutch painter help make his unsavoury subject matter palatable to middle-class viewers.   Aesthetics is however here also caught up in a celebration of these cultured and creative alternative lifestyles, integral to Hunter’s idealising refashioning of these people against a black and white dystopian documentary view which portrays them apart, as drug taking social misfits.  Yet that there is so little anger, that his subjects are so uniformly placid is not without its problems. And one wonders whether the very aestheticised staging of his subjects, while a reversal of denigration, still maintains difference, keeps them apart.     The real poverty and political struggles which mark out life in a squat are always in danger of becoming mere background to the overridingly visual effects as these alternative lifestyles are glamorised, made fashionable and chic.

 
Part of the problem of aesthetics and spectacle is the distance it sets up, on the part of the viewer, from documentary’s social referentiality.  The frozen nature of the tableau in Hunter’s carefully posed  and staged portraits further adds to this.   Georg Lukács’s distinction between narrative and description becomes particularly relevant here. (13)  He argued that with a preference for description over narration the possibility for action diminishes.  He highlighted Zola’s descriptive prose as being based upon distance.  Zola only ‘describes’ the horse race as a piece of verisimilitude, whereas Tolstoy ‘narrates’ the horse race as an integral part of his character’s lives.  Empathetic involvement was key to Lukács’s description of Tolstoy,  a shift from the alienation before Zola’s frozen tableaux to an engagement that is more participatory.  Bill Nichols evokes Lukács’s distinction in relation to his critique of contemporary news reporting, the way in which events themselves become “only a tableau for the reader, or at best a series of tableaux.” (14)  We are merely observers to the news, which is seen to exist “less to orient us toward action than to perpetuate itself as commodity, something to be fetishised, consumed.”(15)    

Subjectivity and identification are much more frequently explored in fiction than documentary.  Agee’s book is, then, an exception, empathy and engagement become central in his attempts  to convey the lives of an “appalling damaged group of individuals”.  Praise helps define the lack and problems within current documentary photography practice in which  aesthetics tends to function to screen and filter us from a lived social reality, inculcating a disengagement, a lack of empathy on the part of the viewer.   

If Praise is marked by a self consciousness about the cross class looking on the part of its privileged Harvard educated white author,  the Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar presents the viewer with the discomfiture of cross cultural looking, sets up situations which confront us with the differences between ‘our’ first world and the so called third world, forces us to look into the faces of the displaced, disempowered and under-privileged.      

Jaar’s A Hundred Times Nguyen, offers various permutations, in its sequencing, of a quartet of portraits of a little girl Jaar had met and photographed in a refugee centre in Hong Kong.   Jaar’s use and display of such portraits is to be set against the often distancing and disengaged effect of news reporting. The sentimental pull is deliberate, as is the strategy of repetition, an insistence that we look into this little girl’s face over and over, a process of reiteration which is intended not to drain empathy and affect out of the picture, but facilitate a slowing down of our relation to an image and  thereby countering what he describes as “ a media landscape filled with thousands of images, all fighting to get our attention, and most of them asking us to consume, consume, consume.” (16)  

“How can an image of pain, lost in sea of consumption, affect us”?  Jaar’s question helps explain the use of hyperbole and repetition, not only in A Hundred Times Nguyen, but in particular with the way he addresses the horrors of the Rwandan genocide.  In many senses his extraordinary installation, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita is be set against the media reduction of genocide in Rwanda to a spectacle of horror, with the visibility given to foreign bodies in Western media serving as signs of a barbaric  third world to ‘our’ civilised West.    With  its display of a million identical slides on a table lightbox, Jaar does not show the horror, but gives us instead a close up of the eyes of a young Tutsi woman who had witnessed her family being massacred.  Jaar calls attention to tragedy indirectly, through an elliptical installation centred upon an imploring eye to eye look.   The installation reverses the logic of media reporting where as Jaar puts it “we are given the sense of being present and living the information we are provided with, but once the TV is switched off, we are left with inescapable sense of distance... the media offer images which give an illusion of presence, which later leaves us with a sense of absence.”  In The Eyes of Gutete Emerita what he does is to “offer an absence that provokes a presence.”
 

Documentary negotiates difference and the ways in which this difference is negotiated determine its political effectivity. Tensions and conflicts invariably run through documentary practice, as one person seeks to represent the life and experience  of another.   Jaar’s strategic use of photography forces us to acknowledge cultural distance and difference, the boundary between my comfortable Western reality as viewer and that of the under-privileged individuals photographed.  Insistence on the eyes of Gutete Emerita— a photographic cliche as a sign of empathy— is a call for identification, an inter-subjective appeal which forces us to try and  begin to imagine the appalling horror witnessed and the pain she suffers.   A fundamental concern as Jaar has said is to establish a dialogue with his audience, “they complete the work, move it from ‘theory’ to the world of practice that makes it ‘real.”  “Each work must suggest and try to create a new model, a paradigm of social participation.”       

Jaar might work against photojournalism and documentary, but his basis is in documentary, as the photographs are grounded in the experience of gathering evidence for his art on site; he gets as close as possible to  realities other than his own.  He remains aware such experiences can never be adequately represented.   He can only create new strategies of representation.  The excesses of repetition both in A Hundred Times Nguyen and The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, are such strategies, installations which intended to set up active rather than passive relationship to the viewer, the rhetorical beseeching form of the work is intended to shake us out of comfort and complacency and in the case of The Eyes of Gutete Emerita avoid spectacularising horror.  There is always a need to go beyond the form of art, whatever the medium and whatever assumptions might be made about its worth as evidence. 

While writing, often exhaustively, of everything which only in actuality or in the mind happened or appeared, James Agee still openly admitted he never would be able to give us the truth of the lives of those he describes in Praise.  Acknowledging its failures, inadequacies, and incompleteness Agee’s text ultimately remains more engaged than Evans’ pictures.  While drawing attention to Praise I am looking back to a moment in documentary history, but a moment crucial in understanding the very real and difficult social exchanges which have to be negotiated in documentary making today. Praise helps us rethink the idea of documentary as simply one of disengagement— the disengagement of the aesthetic spectacle of celebrated artistic forms of documentary practice, the disengagement of emotionless TV news reporting of disasters. Instead, Praise helps us acknowledge the need for a documentary which is more empathetic, subjective, engaged.  And this move to engagement, as Bill Nichols points out, opens up a space for contestation, orients us to action.(17)    

 

Originally published in Face On: Photography as Social Exchange, London: Black Dog Publishing 2001, co-edited by Mark Durden and Craig Richardson.
Face On: Photography as Social Exchange is still available in book stores.