The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

130 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
Among the material sent to them were still photographs, and they
were asked to comment in various ways about these pictures. One
of these photos was a portrait of a man in the middle of an on-going
situation, taken on the fly, snapped just as he looks at the camera.
The rather unkind question they were asked about this picture was
this: “When you look at the man in this photo, do you feel he is like
himself?” 1
Some of the applicants replied: “How the hell do I know, I never
met him,” or words to that effect, and this was a fair enough answer,
of course. Others gave answers like: “Of course I have never met
him, but when I look at the photo I think… ” and so on. Others
answered like this: “ When I look at him, I think the camera and the
photographer have made him feel… ” and so on.
I found the results of this little task revealing and, I think, quite
useful. I felt I did not want students who were too naïve about
documentary’s abilities to represent realities, but rather students
who were already aware – either intuitively, or consciously – of
pitfalls of documentary “authenticity.” Personally I believe that
documentary is, basically, impossible, but that it is nevertheless very
necessary. A film culture that contained only fiction would not be a
healthy one. In particular it seemed to me that, on this short course,
I needed students who already understood that documentary
realism is different from fictional realism and that a fictional
photographer has a different kind of influence on what is in front of
the camera than does a documentary photographer. I felt the oneyear
course was too short to have to teach them this from scratch.
1 The “... is he like himself ?” question originated from Agneta Ekman Wingate.
It was one she started using when she was a teacher of documentary still
photography at Christer Strömholm’s Foto Skolan in Stockholm in the ´60s.