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The need for political participation felt in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution, and the widespread mobilization of photography to political ends during this period intersected with postmodern theory in a global arena. While US-based critiques of the documentary genre have been duly analyzed in the relevant literature, related conversations taking place in Latin America have only been marginally explored. This article posits that so-called postmodern discourses in fact created the basis for a horizontal, transnational and multi-centered, rather than vertical (North‒South) dynamic between these photographic communities. Through their commitment to politics, and to avant-garde aesthetics, documentary photographers performed gestures of cultural and visual appropriation, fitting their itinerant context. This article analyzes the work of Claudia Gordillo, taking as a case study Nicaragua during the 1980s.

Staging Disorder examines the relationship between a form of documentary practice dealing with global conflict and a simulated reality. Gathered together for the first time, the seven bodies of work discussed and exhibited within Staging Disorder, were all made or initially presented in the first decade of the new millennium. In bringing these series together, I ask whether the resonance that these works have with one another symbolised a profound shift in strategy in the deployment of realism in documentary photography at this time. In depicting already constructed anticipatory spaces of conflict using documentary strategies, I suggest that the works that these artists produced were representative of a new type of realism that I term post-illusion realism. I argue that this form of representation not only offered a new expanded temporal paradigm in the representation of conflict¬–the anticipatory–but that it was also a strategically deliberate break with what came before. These works were all created following an era in photography dominated by both the crisis of the real in documentary photography, and the subsequent problematic relationship to the real within a postmodernist photographic culture, which was preoccupied with the construction of the illusionary and the simulated real. All the artists within Staging Disorder worked directly with physical spaces of rehearsal, at a time of heightened global conflict, revealing the potential within documentary photography to subtly engage with the complex representation of reality. Ultimately, I claim that it is in these works and the artist's physical engagement with spaces of conflict, that allows for a reinvigorated, enduring and critically relevant documentary practice. Cognisant of the intricacies of representing the real based on observation, whilst also effectively engaging with, and interpreting the political complexities of our world, the artists in Staging Disorder reveal a turn within documentary photography in which the future, rather than the past or ...

AbstractPhotographers are often inspired by politics but can they influence it? Drawing on the study of public policy and the history of photography, this article considers three ways in which documentary photographers enter the policy process. It considers the photographer as: a bureaucrat working within government networks to achieve individual and institutional aims; an advocate working with like-minded actors to advance shared political beliefs; an expert working within an epistemic community driven by a shared policy enterprise. These roles highlight the institutional channels through which photographers seek and sometimes secure political change and the contradictions and constraints they face in so doing. These contrasting perspectives are discussed with reference to the work of canonical and contemporary photographers engaged in national and international politics from 1890 to today.

This article explores how vernacular aesthetics have been re-appropriated from pictorial to modern documentary photography over the past century to instigate a modern collective imagination of the industrial disintegration in the Chinese urban milieu. Within the scope of a discursive visual process, Jean Philippe Gauvrit (b.1963) documents the departure of the industrial urban society in his photo-essay Shanghai in JP Gauvrit (2008). The paper claims that Gauvrit's documentary photography can be understood as a visual critical discourse of several representational perspectives of time that render visible anachronistic and new social structures that come into being: between utopias of the past and visions of the future in an alternative chronotopic 'present' cartography. Drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) conception of chronotope, in this study, the sublime industrial comes to be represented as an intelligible reconfiguration of linear and cyclical time. By linking that socio-economic reality of that time with a collective consciousness, documentary photography can serve as a chronotope that reveals both the tension and the assimilation relating to the historical myths that lie between the fall of an industrial mode of production and the birth of a post-industrial cultural city in an era of de-industrialization.

This paper discusses artistic documentary photography from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the mid-1970s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and suggests that it functioned as a substitute public&ndash ; Ersatzö ; ffentlichkeit&ndash ; in society. This concept of a substitute public sphere sometimes termed a counter-public sphere, relates to GDR literature that, in retrospect, has been allocated this role. On the whole, in critical discourse certain texts have been recognised as being distinct from GDR propaganda which sought to deliver alternative readings in their coded texts. I propose that photography, despite having had a different status to literature in the GDR, adopted similar traits and also functioned as part of a substitute public sphere. These photographers aimed to expose the existing gap between the propagandised and actual life under socialism. They embedded a moral and critical position in their photographs to comment on society and to incite debate. However, it was necessary for these debates to occur in the private sphere, so that artists and their audience would avoid state persecution. In this paper, I review Harald Hauswald&rsquo ; s series Everyday Life (1976&ndash ; 1990) to demonstrate how photographs enabled substitute discourses in visual ways. Hauswald is a representative of artistic documentary photography and although he was never published in the official GDR media, he was the first East German photographer to publish in renowned West German and European media outlets, such as GEO magazine and ZEITmagazin, before the reunification. In 1990, he founded the &lsquo ; Ostkreuz&ndash ; Agency of Photographers&rsquo ; with six other East German documentary photographers.

Assesses the contribution photography has made to the interpretation of work in modern society. (GAW)

While the documentary tradition in photography is long established, its boundaries & its status as "evidence" remain unclear. Questions relating to photography as a discourse between the photographer, the subject of the photograph, & the viewer are discussed in the light of the repesentation of work by photographs. By considering the various ways in which work has been portrayed, & how photographs depicting work can be interpreted, the problematic status of the photographic document becomes clearer. The various traditions of work-related photography are traced & the issues raised in reading or decoding the work images are outlined. Two photographs are examined in detail. Photographs can represent highly valid sources of social scientific information, but only if the circumstances of the photograph's creation -- how the photograph was taken, for whom, & for what purpose, etc -- are known. 2 Photographs, 25 References. AA