The Legacy of Documentary Photography

In order to understand the art of Simpson, Weems, and Middlebrook, it is first necessary to contextualize it within a brief overview of the histories of documentary photography and modern African American art. From its beginnings, photography’s capacity for impartiality has been invoked to establish photographs as both evidence and record. The “scientific” objectivity of documentary photographs is based in their indexical and mimetic qualities, that is, in the conviction that what is pictured really existed. Because it is assumed that “the camera never lies,” truthfulness is deemed to be inherent to the medium. As photography scholar Allan Sekula noted, “Photography, according to this belief, reproduces the visible world: the camera is an engine of fact . . . independent of human practice.” 2 This truism presupposes that only the camera is involved in taking a photograph and does not account for the fact that it is a machine operated by the photographer. Indeed, since photographers decide how and what to depict, photographs are the result of their creators’ intent. For instance, photographers manipulate imagery by making any number of choices, including such things as film type and speed, using available or artificial light, and employing different format cameras. Because photographers, like other artists, are shaped by social ideology, photographs inevitably reflect the sociopolitical concerns of their makers. Understood this way, documentary photographs are anything but objective.

Simpson, Weems, and Middlebrook have been influenced indelibly by documentary photography, such as DeCarava’s Man Coming Up Subway Stairs, which seeks to classify data in order to communicate broad, sweeping ideas about its subjects. Although each of the artists was originally drawn to the didactic, communicative, and social aspects of documentary photography, each later came to critique the objectivity, veracity, and authority with which documentary photographs are invested. They also questioned the stereotypes on which documentary images rely. Ultimately, these artists switched to photography-based, mixed-media work, which, by its very nature, is an inclusive process, involving the weaving together of materials from different sources. A guerrilla technique, mixed media disrupts the high-versus-low arrangement of artistic media, according to which painting is primary. It also blurs the hierarchical distinction between the aesthetic and the utilitarian, whereby functionless objects are deemed more artistically valuable than functional ones. The artistic ideal of authenticity––in which originality is prized and reproduction devalued––is arguably the most taboo convention that mixed-media works challenge, as their appropriation of found images and materials undermines the uniqueness of the work of art. Paradoxically, the process reaffirms the singularity of the art object by producing something entirely different from its various parts. Simpson, Weems, and Middlebrook combine the documentary mode of representation with mixed media not only to subvert the unquestioned authority of documentary photographs, but also to assert the identity of African Americans. Thus, as this essay will show, they use the inherently disruptive nature of mixed media to reveal both the variety among African Americans and the many forces that shape African American “subjectivity,” a term encompassing a number of factors, including an individual’s beliefs, intelligence, and creativity, among other sensibilities.