Can introducing collaboration and trade and exchange into the photographic encounter respond to the inherent potential for exploitation, abuse and humiliation in traditional documentary photography? And, will doing this still maintain documentary photography's ability to capture the reality of living in towns in decline in Australia?

Abstract

Documentary photography is built on assumptions of factual objectivity, and seeks to provide direct access to human experience and emotion. Throughout its long history it has become synonymous with the recording of social conflict and human misery. However, it has also been criticised for exploiting, abusing and humiliating its subjects, as viewers often look at the downtrodden and their reality from a position of relative privilege and passivity. My exhibition of photographs and photobook collectively titled Other People’s Lives, and supported by the accompanying exegesis, challenge traditional documentary photography and propose a more ethical approach. The works are the result of fieldwork-based photographic practice involving people living in small towns in decline in Australia. My methodology examines whether collaboration and introducing notions of trade and exchange into the photographic encounter can respond to the inherent potential for exploitation, abuse and humiliation in documentary, whilst still maintaining its ability to capture the reality of those people living in towns in decline. The medium of the photobook, combining text and image, allows for a deeper exploration of subjects and their surrounds, whilst the exegesis, through two key case studies - Richard Avedon’s In The American West and Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - examines the relationships between subjects and photographers, including the impact of making payments to subjects, the effect of celebrity and the idea of trade and exchange in the photographic encounter. The research project references critiques of photographic practice by Ariella Azoulay, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and John Berger, as well as reflecting on work by a selection of contemporary documentary photographers that relates to the development of the methodology and aesthetic in the research project.