Beyond the Single Image - Introduction

Bi-Monthly Competition Winners and Their Projects

Ian Wright ARPS

While a single image can communicate a great deal, the project and the photo-essay form the structure in which documentary photographers operate.

I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. If I must select one individual picture, it is very difficult for me.

(Excerpt from an interview with Sebastiao Salgado by Ken Lassiter, Photographer’s Forum).

With this in mind I decided to contact the winners of recent RPS Documentary Group Bi-Monthly competitions, to discuss their projects with them, (with my own image and ‘Rooted’ project also being part of the group). I invited the winners to put an image they had picked out as individually significant, into a wider context.

The projects reveal the great variety of opportunities to tell stories that matter. Four of us had worked on social or political documentaries but Paul Bryne’s ‘Rusty Relics’ reminds us that documentary has a much wider scope.

My interviews were aimed at discovering the mind-set of the photographers – why were they attracted to their subject matter, how did they approach the task from a social-interaction and access perspective, what are their photographic influences and what had they discovered through the project. I asked them to talk me through one or two of their images.

Many thanks to Mark Slater, Lorraine Poole, Paul Bryne and Angus Stewart for their excellent contributions.

What’s the objective of a documentary project? My answer would be to achieve to achieve ‘thereness’ - ‘a sense that we are looking at the world directly’. Or in the words of Larry Fink who I interviewed earlier in the year, ‘to take a two-dimensional picture and make it something that a viewer enters and doesn’t want to leave. So that once they enter the universe of the picture, they become immersed in what it was like to be in this space and time, right then and right there.’

This is perhaps a big ‘ask’. Whether images in a documentary project achieve this ‘transportation’ of the viewer is not entirely in the hands of a photographer – it also depends on the curiosity, imagination, empathy, life experiences, the ‘seeing abilities’ of the viewer and the time they are prepared to give to seriously looking. The viewer – as well as the photographer - needs to consider the content of a photo essay - the information, ideas and perspective that are communicated.

Sebastiao Salgado has spoken of this: ‘What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this. I don’t want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palate of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the pictures represent, and the kind of people [and issues] I photograph.’ This is why some text is necessary to ‘frame’ documentary images – and why I asked the series of questions about the photographers’ projects which follow.

While we have some exceptional documentary photographers, I’m not sure that we have a culture in the photography groups in this country which puts sufficient stress on this narrative foundation of documentary photography. At root, it’s really very simple - two questions - what’s this about? does the photographer communicate this effectively? The answers of course may not be simple – as I explain in regard to my own project. That’s part of the value of documentary work. My personal experience is that, in their discussions and pre-occupations, many photography groups commonly obsess about the medium rather than appreciating that the message is the starting point and that images without a concept, however technically brilliant, have no documentary meaning.

rps.org/groups/documentary/bi-monthly-competition