Why Not Documentary?

The Ubiquity of Cinema

It is possible to find a similar cinematic feeling in documentary photography, so why then is it not too the focus of this exhibition? The photographs of Robert Capa and Frank Hurley seem to tick all the right boxes for a cinematic image. They seem subjective, with a personal narrative string at their core. They record the lives of extraordinary individuals in situations that most people will never know; he records real fantasies.

Frank Hurley’s First World War images display a sense of danger and unbelievable scale, and snapshots of the lives of heroic men in a far-off land. His composite images, created to emphasise the danger and scale beyond what his camera could see, mirror what John Knoll would pioneer with Industrial Light and Magic in modern special effects “So it looked like these men were in the middle of an absolutely tumultuous battle, when, of course, all of it was a fantasy.” (James Fox, 2020). Speaking now of Capa’s famous D-day images, there is a disconnect between them and our reality as we perceive it. They have an incredibly harsh contrast, cast in brilliant whites and deep blacks. They are shaky and difficult to focus on, and the subject matter is too terrifying and strange to be thought of as the everyday even though it was for these men.

It seems to be the photograph that combines subjectivity, narrative and fantasy feels cinematic. So what is the issue with Capa being labelled as cinematic? Firstly, there is the reality inherent in these photographs. They are documenting a real referent and even though the way they present the referent is subjective, and in Hurley’s case employs a substantial manipulation of the image, they are not completely fabricating a narrative. The visceral feeling of reality and the knowledge of the situations these photographs are taken in create a punctum about time. They capture a moment of time that can never be revisited or reclaimed. Barthes (1993, p.96) described this succinctly as “that is dead and that is going to die.” It is impossible for me to see these images and not think about what happened to the soldiers. Did they make it home? Even if they did, or if these were documentary photographs of an entirely safe situation they were still taken long enough ago that these people may not be with us anymore. There is an inherent sadness to historical documentary photography. The subjects and the moment in time are frozen in a moment in time that can never be revisited. The knowledge of the time that has passed since reminds us of our own mortality is extraordinarily discomforting. Contemporary documentary photography does not have the punctum of time passed to the same extent but there is still an intense feeling of reality that permeates them. Documentary photography feels too real to create the kind of disconnect, distraction and suspension of reality to feel cinematic.

There are plenty of documentary movies featuring cinematic visual language and fiction films that utilise archive documentary footage. One issue here lies in semantics. For a photograph to be labelled cinematic there is a claim that the photography is referencing, and commenting on, cinema. Alex Prager references and comments on Alfred Hitchcock and the Hollywood system and its films from the 1960s. Gregory Crewdson references and comments on Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s blockbusters of the 1980s and 1990s. Robert Capa and Frank Hurley do not reference or comment on cinema, rather cinema references and comments on them. Sam Mendes’ 2019 film 1917 references and comments on Frank Hurley. James Fox (2020) says of Frank Hurley’s images “Hurley’s photographs had undeniable impact. In the 100 years since they were taken, they inspired paintings, film sets [1917], and poster designers [War Horse], making the First World War unimaginable without them.”. Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan references and comments on Robert Capa. In a TV interview with Mark Cousins Steven Spielberg (1998) says “I kept saying, god we got to try to duplicate those Robert Capa photos, we’ve got to do what he did, except we’re doing it at twenty-four frames per second on movie film.”

Documentary photography does not disqualify itself from being described as cinematic by its nature as documentary. But in a world where nothing is original and inspiration is everywhere, it is commonplace to find cinema borrowing from the aesthetics of documentary photography, and rarely the other way around. The photographs of Robert Capa and Frank Hurley are not cinematic. The films 1917 and Saving Private Ryan, the films they inspired, are photographic.