urban ku # 31 - document and picture

Dark threatening sky over white snow #2,. • click on photo to embiggen itIn Photography, A Very Short Introduction (here we go again), Steve Edwards basically divides photography into categories - documents (not to be confused with documentary) and pictures.

At its inception, photography was deemed to produce documents, i.e., purely objective, mechanical copies of actual/real people, places and things. These documents were not deemed to be pictures, i.e., work that displayed evidence of intellect used in the creation of "idealized forms".

Hence, this notion - "Banality can ... be employed as a device for stretching the viewer's attention - for renewing art in a distracted age; similarly, some artists use(d) the plain document as a counter-weight to the spectacular values of the mass media ... The continued exploration of everyday life in photography usually retains the rhetoric of the document to reveal the overlooked and the ordinary .. [s]ometimes these things attain a strange beauty, at others their very ordinariness is stressed; in some instances, the seemngly trivial details of life take on a transcendent or quasi-spiritual quality ..."

Of course, today (and in the past - Strand and Evans as examples) many photographers use the rhetoric of the document to create pictures.

Just in case you couldn't tell from viewing my photographs, I like this notion very much.