Vilnius Academy of Arts Photography and Media Arts M.A. Thesis

DOCUMENTARY SPECTACLE DOKUMENTINIS SPEKTAKLIS

Mikko Elias Waltari Kaimelio g. 20, LT-07100 Vilnius [email protected]

supervisor: Associate Professor Dr. Agnė Narušytė

Vilnius 2017

DOCUMENTARY SPECTACLE documentary spectacle

abstract ...... 3 a statement ...... 5 introduction ...... 6

I (the truth) ...... 10

II (post-truth) ...... 20

III (lies) ...... 23

IV (spectacle) ...... 26

V (reality hunger) ...... 29

VI (documentary) ...... 35

VII (rhetorics) ...... 48

VIII (art) ...... 51

IX (post-documentary) ...... 55 pictures ...... 67 conclusions ...... 71 list of literature ...... 74 web-articles ...... 77 summary ...... 80 santrauka ...... 83

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abstract

Mikko Waltari’s MA-thesis Documentary Spectacle rumbles through truthlikeness, post-truth, lies, documentary, spectacle, rhetorics, art, reality-hunger, and post-documentary in nine chapters - nine different views to representing reality. At the same time, the society of the spectacle is not only manipulated by images, but separated further in the virtual reality of social media, where alternative facts and fake news dominate the discussion.

The concept of truthlikeness belongs to philosophy of science, but little discussed in connection to humanities and arts. Understanding the process of simplification by the means of abstraction and idealisation could help in evaluating the documentary truth.

Overcoming the documentary’s concerns of moral, ethics, objectivity, and authenticity, late photography intends to represent world in a more graspable form. Such documentary, focusing on the representation of the aftermath of events in tableaux hung on the museum wall, is called post-documentary, or - documentary spectacle.

keywords: documentary, photography, post-documentary, spectacle, truth, truthlikeness

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!4 / 85! documentary spectacle a statement

i was thrown into this world - got to thinking about it.

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introduction

Documentary has been a purpose of photography since the very beginning. They both, photography and documentary, have had their crisis. The crisis had as much to do with the ontology of the photograph as with the concept of truth. While the crises may be over, the discussion continues. Continuation is natural, since not only the practices but the definitions need to be updated to match the changing world; production, distribution, and consuming of photographs are being transformed greatly with digitalisation.

In our post-truth era pseudo-scientific healers and the preachers of the strangest cults are taking over people's minds, political populism using emotional arguments for the causes of inequality in the western countries is rising its head ever higher, controversial personal opinions in the social media are taken as facts, and the news-media seem to be divided into two opposite ends of truth- telling. The spectacle keeps going on by repeating the lies to the extent that not just the ordinary people but many educated individuals project their hopes on fake messiahs promising to heal their troubles. We are living a period that is nearly as confusing as the times preceding the world-wars, a period when the guilt of the elite and the immigrants is taken for granted and when the truth is being considered of secondary importance.

For a long time photographs have been the most effective tools in spreading reliable information. While technological advancement has made it easier than ever to manipulate the photographic reality, photographs are still considered the proof of truth. But, thinking logically, any picture alone is worthless evidence. It requires accompanying words to become as such: one has to claim that something has been, and that that something is shown in the photograph, which is true to its subject.

Seeking for the truth is hard work. There is no definition, no formula to which the news stream could be forced on. We must filtrate spam, use our knowledge of history and cross-reference the flood of information to estimate which particular story is true. I wonder if we actually care – or do

!6 / 85! introduction documentary spectacle we prefer to not see the truth? The alternative realities offered to us on silver plate are easier to digest, aren’t they? If to take aynrandian1 objectivism seriously, we are very much alone with the decision while pursuing our happiness.

The original thought of documentary spectacle was to continue my BA-project plays. Instead of using my subjective view on the matter at hand, I wanted to introduce the protagonists own, independent view. As a co-incidence, I was invited to take part in a photography project in Finland throughout the year 2016. The experience made me doubt the objectivity of such an approach, similar to my planned project. But there was also my own personality in play – personality that, despite the intrigues in directing actors in constructed photographs, prefers to see things from afar, avoiding such a close contact with strangers that the plays require. The uncomfortable feelings I went through while working on my photographs didn’t seem to let go after creating a dozen of them. As a consequence of my unnatural position as an artist, I decided to find a more honest style to myself. I believe that the decision has increased the truthlikeness of my work accordingly.

My study includes nine topics, which are presented as separate essays. However, the truth is the common denominator in each of them. It is not possible to consider these subjects within the given space, from every point of view and in high detail. Thus, the overall picture in the thesis is a documentary of a kind, created while looking at the world from afar and from my point of view.

I have used various source-materials ranging from printed and electronic literature on the topics, and researching articles that I have found in academia.edu and other websites to news articles from various medias that I follow. I have also used on-line encyclopaedias and wikipedia I was not able to access the original literature in question, but in such cases I have tried to cross-reference the information with other possible sources in the net.

Discussions on photography, documentary, and truth have been going on for ages. Since many of the previously known truths have been proven untrue, and also the concept of truth seems to be unclear, I hope to introduce a relatively new concept to my audience (whoever it may be, besides

1 Aynrandian objectivism is a philosophy developed by Ayn Rand in the USA during the 20th century. It says among other things: 1.Pursue your own happiness as your highest moral aim. 2.Prosper by treating others as individuals, trading value for value. The loneliness in keeping one’s own convictions becomes obvious in her fictional work The Fountainhead (1936). Ayn Rand, https://www.aynrand.org/ideas/overview (04.06.2017)

!7 / 85! introduction documentary spectacle me); truthlikeness (or verisimilitude) is a modern concept used in the philosophy of science since 1960 but less in discussions connected to arts. Abstraction and idealisation are methods of simplification in the concept of truthlikness, and have also opened to me a fresh view to (often so confusing) contemporary art. While the term truthlikeness appears in many theoretical texts on art and documentary frequently, they lack specification for the meaning of the term – giving an understanding that its use is merely rhetorical instead of connected to the above mentioned concept. However, I contacted Ilkka Niiniluoto, professor emeritus and an author of several books on truhlikeness, receiving a short email2 confirming that there are possible uses of verisimilitude on the field of humanities.

Another thing worth mentioning here is related to Svetlana Alpers’ theory of cartography in Dutch paintings, which led me to read Béatrice Han-Pile’s essay, arguing against Alpers view, with the help of Heidegger’s unworlding in Vermeer’s paintings. Also, Aristotle’s dramatic theory of mimesis states that for a piece of art to hold significance or persuasion for an audience, or its ability to cause catharsis, it must have grounding in reality. In this respect, cartography and unworlding meeting in a work of art seems rather logical.

Then there are equally important sources, like Gombrich's Art and Illusion, specifically on the role of label, and Michael Fried's accounts on theatricality and photography. A relatively recent concept of post-documentary will be introduced at the very end.

While there is no agreed specification for representing reality, there are several ways to categorise documentary. This is serving mostly human nature, which has a tendency to organise information systematically, a wish to be a rückenfigur above the restless world. This evidently springs from our need for control in order to feel safe. Needless to say, the neurosis of categorising extends naturally to my own work; I need to find my own branch from which to reflect on the world, or to feel safe that the branch I have chosen is the right one.

There is no obvious motivation, beyond the need for total control, why I am interested in the truth – I don’t feel neither great empathy towards the fooled individuals (including myself) nor a fierce

2 email 15.01.2017

!8 / 85! introduction documentary spectacle need to reveal any specific truth. Digging into these questions is simply a way of comprehending the reality I live in, to make some sense of our being here, and to fight against my very own frustration, which springs from the recent political events.

A Chekhov play Three Sisters, directed by Yana Ross, ends with the words: “The meaning of life is its meaning”. in connection to verisimilitude besides art for the art’s sake, Anjan Chakravartty mentions there could be also a science for the science’s sake. Here, the process is that what matters, and helps us approximate the truth. Couldn’t this be a valid motivation? Therefore, the only target for a thesis would be not to have a target?

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I (the truth)

The Truth About Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (1941) was Finnish war propaganda. Mika Waltari, when writing the book, was educated enough to understand that the truth was a bold claim for the description of the confusing situation in the Baltic States. Waltari was employed by the Finnish Government Information Centre, and the aim of the book is clearly stated in its preface: to introduce the drama in the Baltic States in order to understand what would have happened in Finland if it had not refused the Soviet demands in the fall of 19393. Finnish press, considering the difficult relationship with the Soviet Union, had referred mainly to the official Soviet stream of news regarding the Baltics.4 Nauticus, as the author’s name was mentioned in the first edition, lists the sources of information, notes his reserves, especially on the motivation and validity of Estonian refugees’ descriptions of the situation back home, and describes his attempts to verify them by comparing testimonies of various realities to other sources of information, finally encouraging his readers to draw the final conclusion about the truth by themselves5.

The truth is understood as something absolute. It is the ideal where a proposition is perfectly identical to reality. Because of the high demands on truth, the claims of finding the truth have a great probability of becoming not true. Anjan Chakravartty comments on the scientific truth that Even realists and empiricists who think that the sciences are in the truth business readily admit the hyperbole involved in suggesting that current representations (however circumscribed) are generally perfectly and comprehensively true. The history of the sciences has made a mockery of that suggestion in the past, and no doubt there is further mockery to come.6

3 Mika Waltari, Totuus Virosta, Latviasta ja Liettuasta. Third edition, WS Bookwell Oy, Juva, 2008 (1941), p.20

4 ibid, p.17-18

5 ibid, p.19

6 Anjan Chakravartty, Truth and Representation in Science: Two Inspirations from Art, in Beyond Mimesis and Convention - Representation in Art and Science, Roman Frigg and Matthew C. Hunter (ets.), Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg, London, 2010. PDF, p.34

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It is not only that there is a difficulty in finding propositions that reveal the truth, but there are questions regarding the concept of truth itself. Before we can claim a proposition represents the truth, we must decide how to define the truth. The problem of truth is in a way easy to state: what truths are, and what (if anything) makes them true. But this simple statement masks a great deal of controversy. Whether there is a metaphysical problem of truth at all, and if there is, what kind of theory might address it, are all standing issues in the theory of truth.7

There are several theories of truth, but they all seem to have some shortcomings. A simple example of correspondence theory will have to do the argument because of the lack of space in my thesis. Correspondence theories emphasise that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs. This type of theory stresses a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a traditional model tracing its origins to ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.8 At first correspondence theory sounds logical, but let’s try asking simply: “is this apple red?” Here we should first agree what accounts for red colour. It becomes even more complicated when asking: “is this apple tasty?” In this case we face a subjective opinion that can not be measured objectively.

In returning back to Waltari’s book, the truth in his context could be taken as a saying of what is that it is, is true – or, as truth is what one honestly believes that is true or, perhaps only as a rhetorical expression. These common sense understandings of truth relate to famously known movie-scenes of court, where one is told to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”.

The problem with truth, besides knowing definitely, what is true, is that there are so many claims in Waltari’s research, of which some seem closer to truth than the others.9 This makes forming the

7 Truth, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/ (24.01.2017)

8 Correspondence theory, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_theory_of_truth (24.01.2017)

9 The dichotomy of the class of propositions into truths and falsehoods needs to be supplemented with a more fine-grained ordering - one which classifies propositions according to their closeness to the truth, their degree of truthlikeness, or their verisimilitude. Truthlikeness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truthlikeness/#LikProTru (21.01.2017)

Liudas Truska has evaluated Waltari’s book and found some inconsistencies in it: Suomiu rašitojo tiesos zodis apie sovietine Baltijos šalių okupaciją, Parlamento Studijos, http://www.parlamentostudijos.lt/ Recenzijos/2006/Truska06.htm

!11 / 85! the truth documentary spectacle overall image of the situation in the Baltic States difficult. Therefore, instead of sticking to the concept of truth (as in the book’s title) for evaluation, I’d suggest to concentrate on the approximate truth, or the truthlikeness of representation. Acknowledging that there are variations in-between being the truth and being falsehood, the term seems to intuitively fit here well. Since I’d like to use this constant throughout my thesis, it needs to be defined satisfactorily in the way that fits within the limited space given (an effort to prove it more fundamentally would demand at least a book or two).

According to Oxford Dictionary, truthlikeness is the appearance, or impression, of something being true or real.10 To define truthlikeness further, I want to refer directly to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, which says (contrary to Oxford Dictionary concerning the appearance) that: […]truthlikeness - likeness to the whole truth of some matter - [doesn’t] have much to do with high probability. Probability - at least of the epistemic variety - measures the degree of seeming to be true, while truthlikeness measures the degree of being similar to the truth. Seeming and being similar might at first strike one as closely related, but of course they are very different. Seeming concerns the appearances whereas being similar concerns the objective facts, facts about similarity or likeness. Even more important, there is a difference between being true and being the truth. The truth, of course, has the property of being true, but not every proposition that is true is the truth in the sense of the aim of inquiry. The truth of a matter at which an inquiry aims is ideally the complete, true answer to its central query. Thus there are two dimensions along which probability (seeming to be true) and truthlikeness (being similar to the truth) differ radically.11

Truthlikeness (or verisimilitude) is a currently discussed concept within scientific philosophy, and there are some texts that compare the meaning of truthlikeness in art and in science. According to the concept of truthlikeness, a proposition may be false when compared to the actual world, but it may be true in several possible worlds12. The distance of these possible worlds (in which the theory is true) are measured to the actual world that represents the absolute truth. Truthlikeness is thus an average of these distances, which may also be called the approximate truth. It is common that, both

10 Verisimilitude, Oxford Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/verisimilitude (19.01.2017)

11 Truthlikeness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truthlikeness/ (28.01.2017)

12 Possible Worlds, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/ (28.01.2017)

!12 / 85! the truth documentary spectacle in abstract (simplified target)13 and in idealised (simplified process)14 theories of science, the aim of the theory is not even meant to be matching the actual world for practical reasons. It may be sufficient to have a representation that gives only approximate truth of the actual world, writes Anjan Chakravartty. He compares truth and representation in science to artistic representations in illustrating the nature and the benefits of approximate truth: Let me sum up the import of the first analogy furnished by representation in art before turning to a second. When viewing a painting or a sculpture, one may extract more or less information regarding the things it represents, depending on the amount of information it contains, and the extent to which one has mastered the conventions of representation it employs. At one end of this spectrum is what Goodman calls realistic representation in art. Here, the viewer is sufficiently acculturated with some relevant system or systems of representation to derive significant information about the subject matter represented. At the other end of the spectrum representations may convey very little information, but information nonetheless. Consider the representational content of paintings, for example. Just one of the reasons Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is one of the most celebrated artworks of the twentieth century is its captivating representational power. Its subject is the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Hitler’s and Mussolini’s air forces, with the complicity of Franco, during the Spanish Civil War. Aspects of the work, such as the figures of a bull, a dead baby in the arms of a screaming woman, a speared horse, the broken body of a soldier, and so on, represent various things with greater and lesser degrees of realism. The painting taken as a whole also has representational content. Among other things, for instance, it represents the rising threat of European fascism. Insofar as the painting represents this, however, it is not depictive, but merely denotative. It does not provide much in the way of ‘description’ beyond the existential ‘claim’ it makes concerning the presence of a terrifying danger. Scientific representations also yield information about their subject matter, but whether they do so by providing true characterizations of specifically chosen parameters, or by distorting the parameters to which they successfully refer, will depend on how abstract and idealized they are. The contrast between depiction and mere denotation as a central feature of representation in art is an analogy for the contrast between truth and mere reference as a central feature of representation in the sciences. Higher degrees of approximate truth can be understood in terms of improved

13 “Therefore, pure abstractions are perfectly accurate representations of some nomically possible target systems (that is, ones that could exist, given the laws of nature that obtain in our world), even if they are impoverished representations of other, more complex ones.” Anjan Chakravartty, Truth and Representation in Science: Two Inspirations from Art. p.39

14 “In cases of idealization, however, one requires a rather different understanding of the relevant conditions of approximation. For here, unlike in cases of pure abstraction, one does not have the luxury of representations that accurately characterize at least some nomically possible phenomena. Idealizations are more egregiously fictional than abstractions; they constitute not mere omissions, but distortions of things in the world. Models in classical mechanics, for example, generally treat the masses of bodies as though they are concentrated at extensionless points, but given the nature of mass as we understand it, in accordance with the laws of nature, it cannot be concentrated this way in any world such as ours, where particulars with masses exist. What information about the world is contained in fictions such as these?” ibid, p.40

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representations of the natures of target systems in the world, and this improvement can be mapped along two dimensions: how many of the relevant properties and relations one describes (abstraction), and how accurately one describes them (idealization). This simple formula, combined with an understanding of the conditions of approximation involved in the practices it describes, comprises an explication of the principal notions at stake in making sense of the idea of approximate truth.15

The second analogy that Chakravartty finds between art and science is connected with scientific claims concerning both observable and unobservable aspects of target systems. Using performance art as an example, he directs attention from products to production: Consider the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. One of the defining features of this work is a commitment to expressing emotional and other cognitive states of the artist, as opposed to depicting them as such. The methodology of Jackson Pollock is legendary in this regard: Pollock would drip, fling, and otherwise propel paint onto canvases placed on the ground, by means of controlled and sometimes highly athletic movements. The process of creation here is a central part of the content of the work. The artists of this and other movements increasingly emphasised the materiality of the process of painting, as opposed anything like realistic representation. The surface of the canvas, its shape, the thickness of the paint, and so on, took on a new significance. Co-opting the slogan of the American art critic Clement Greenberg (2003/1939, 539), this is “art for art’s sake”. The rise of performance art may exemplify this tendency towards attaching greater significance to processes involved in the creation of art as opposed to its products per se better than anything else. Works associated with the Fluxus movement, for example, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, may serve to illustrate the point. Cut Piece was performed by Ono four times, in Kyoto (1964), Tokyo (1964), New York (1965), and London (1966). During these events, the artist sat on a stage while members of the audience approached, individually and in succession, to cut pieces of clothing from her body with a pair of scissors. The piece is variously interpreted as engaging with issues of female vulnerability, sexual violence, and gender politics; and as a response to the horrors of war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Here as in all work in the performance art genre, the idea of a process takes on so much significance that it now is the central focus of the artwork. What matters is an event or a series of events. The idea that the value of the performance resides in any further output is completely lost. Of course, photographs of works of performance art are very important for purposes of discussion and art criticism, but such outputs are considered mere documents of the art form, not things that are important in their own right, and certainly not things that are the proper focus of attention when considering the nature or significance of the work.16

15 ibid, p.45

16 ibid, p.47

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Thus, the focus in science (if not in art as well) has led, perhaps controversially, away from the truth. Directed by practical reasons, as a wider and a more comprehensive truth on actual world would often be impossible, truthlikeness has become the desirable target. This is somewhat contentious to Gombrich’s understanding of progress, but then again, Gombrich never really got his hands on contemporary art in Art and Illusion (1960). Yet, when Gombrich talks about “making and matching”17 as a method of progress in arts, one could draw a conclusion that simplified referencing is one of the ways getting closer to the actual truth. Anjan Chakravartty seems to be confirming my thought by referring to Nelson Goodman’s “striking” idea in Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1976); Ultimately, says Goodman, truth can be understood in terms of ‘a matter of fit’ between theories and facts, and as it turns out, just this sort of ‘fitting’ is characteristic of the relationship between art and the world (1976, 264). Truth in both domains should be understood in terms of approximating reality by means of representations.18

When referring to words as painting an image of reality19 (which has truthlikeness), I am literally thinking about a painting with brushstrokes that cannot document every detail of the reality, but to represent its mood in a simplified way and as truthfully as possible – just think about poetry. Image is another term that I’d like to continue using throughout the text, and it may be separated from picture - an image here is rather the semblance of a thing in a picture, than the picture itself 20. This is problematic in Finnish language, where we do not have separate words for physical picture and mental image. Perhaps we Finns are lacking imagination and tend to focus only on visible facts?

Logically, the further we are standing, the fewer details can be seen in the picture. Similarly, I think, human memory is losing details depending on the distance in time, but at the same moment gaining a wider view to the event. The question that arises is if the likeness to the truth is effected in any way: how much detail (narrative) can be lost until the image becomes not true at all? When an

17 E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Princeton University Press, 1960. PDF p.29

18 Truth and Representation in Science, p.35

19 What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Susan Sontag, On Photography. Penguin Books,1979. p.5

20 Finnish translator Martti Lintunen on translating the word “image”, in John Berger, Toisinkertoja (a collection of essays on photograph), Literos Oy, 1987. p.9

!15 / 85! the truth documentary spectacle image loses its recognisability, it becomes an abstraction, a symbol that requires a common agreement on its meaning. The truthlikeness disappears, its meaning can be changed more easily. As Ernst Gombrich says in Art and Illusion, “A picture is never a statement in that sense of the term. It can no more be true or false than a statement can be blue or green… It is an understandable confusion because in our culture pictures are usually labelled, and labels, or captions, can be understood as abbreviated statements”21. Patricia Koenig has been comparing Gombrich’s theories on progress in arts against the scientific progress; [Propositions] withstanding severe testing and criticism can only indicate a high level of corroboration - never verification (Niiniluoto, 2011). Gombrich similarly postulates that concepts, like pictures, can ‘only be more or less useful for the formation of descriptions’, but never true or false (1960, p.77).22

While truthlikeness seems to be useful concept in science, what does truthlikeness actually indicate in arts? Trying to clarify this further, I’d like to refer to a couple of texts. In the first I can see that truthlikeness is comparable to development in artistic representation – explaining the change from imitation to abstraction of reality both in art and science; None of these established approaches [abstraction and simplification] to approximate truth pays much if any explicit attention to the qualitative dimensions of the concept, which concern the ways in which theories and models typically diverge from truth in the first place. It is precisely a better understanding of these details, I contend, that is crucial to understanding the nature and truth content of scientific representations, and it is in this context that I will take inspiration from certain analogies to practices of representation in art.23

The truthlikeness thus seems to be connected to the abolishment of factual representation, to the abilities to create an image which is not claimed to be a true representation of the actual world, but only aiming at getting closer to it by deploying possible worlds where the representation is true. The second text refers to the need of the change using truthlikeness when it was understood that the truth is unreachable. Applying the notion of truthlikeness to the history and the future of science allows us to think of scientific achievements the way engineers think of technological achievements. If a technological

21 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p.68

22 Patrizia Koenig, Progress in Arts & Science - Exploring E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) in Relation to the Philosophy of Science, University College Maastricht, 2012. iBook 2.1

23 Chakravartty, p. 37

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device functions badly, engineers think they should try to improve it or invent a new and better one; if a scientific theory has theoretical problems and/or empirical anomalies, scientists should think they have to try to modify it or create a new and more truthlike theory. As in engineering it is natural and common to invent imperfect devices, it should in science be regarded as natural and common to create theories that are only truthlike.24

Truthlikeness could possibly be connected to art in two ways then: the first is the progressive development in the history of art, where the image was supposed to be a true representation of reality; the second is the revolution in art25, the abolishment of reality which ended the art(history). These two stages refer to the truthlikeness of a picture. The truth of an image is yet unaffected. To get more precise about the image, we need a third example that comes from Martin Heidegger who analysed Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes to demonstrate how an image could bring the things that do not exist anymore back, and how it reveals the truth of things: In the standing-there of the temple, truth happens. This does not mean that something would be correctly represented and rendered back, but rather that being in its totality (das Seiende im Ganzen) is brought into unconcealedness and held in it. To hold, halten, is originally to heed, hüten. In Van Gogh’s painting, truth happens. This does not mean that here something at-hand-before-us would be correctly depicted, but rather that in the becoming-manifest of the being-tool (des Zeugseins) of the shoe-tool, being in its totality (das Seiende im Ganzen), world and earth in their counterplay, attain to unconcealedness.26

Heidegger suggests that a picture, or the image in it, is true in its own entity. It does not pretend, it does not claim anything more than it is. The truth, if it happens, happens within the picture – it is the image that reveals the being of a thing pictured to us.

The controversy here rises when one claims that the shoes in fact belonged, or not belonged, to the peasant but to the artist. But does it really matter if the shoes were Van Gogh’s own, like Mayer Schapiro says27, or some peasant’s shoes as Heidegger imagines – if we don’t claim this in words?

24 Ingvar Johansson, In Defense of the Notion of Truthlikeness, Springer Science+Business Media, Dordrecht, 2016.

25 Patrizia Koenig, Progress in Arts & Science - Exploring E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, 3.

26 Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art,1950. Translated by Roger Berkowitz and Philippe Nonet. Draft, December 2006. PN revised. pfd-copy. p.38

27 Martin Schapiro, The Still Life as a Personal Object - A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh, in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 1968. PDF

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Schapiro returns to the question some twenty-six years later, ending his text: Did he [Heidegger] wish to affirm, in the face of current doubts, that his metaphysical interpretation was true, even if the shoes had belonged to van Gogh?28 It seems that it mattered to Heidegger and it matters in the context of van Gogh’s biography, and it surely changes the way we see the shoes and their meaning. Yet, without label (as originally presented), the shoes are just old shoes that represent different things to different people, perhaps human condition for the most cultivated ones. For the organisers of Salon de Paris, the shoes represented nothing.29

While a picture is what it is – a representation of the world, or the world on its own terms, perhaps even one of the many possible worlds, a narrative is formed by words and thus extends in space and time. Perhaps, an image could be considered as the artistic representation and its caption/narrative as the scientific representation with claimed facts. Narrative, supposedly, turns that what an image describes into visual confirmation of that what is claimed to be the truth, because the term ‘narrative’ refers to the extended representational activity in virtue of which the events and their temporal/causal relations come to be articulated30. However, the difference between fictional and non-fictional narratives is that fictional narratives do not appear to be offering us knowledge, but describe imaginings instead of beliefs, whereas non-fiction narratives do present a certain amount of knowledge, either true or false.31

Magritte’s pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 1926) might be the best possible example of co-existence of an image and words/narrative. In This Is Not A Pipe Michel Foucault writes that there are two principles that have ruled the Western painting for hundreds of years: 1) the separation between plastic representation and linguistic reference. The two systems can neither merge nor intersect, subordination is always required; 2) an equivalence between the fact of resemblance and the affirmation of a representative bond.32 This second principle introduced discourse to the art form – in Magritte’s case, the claim was both a denial (NO, an image of a pipe is not a pipe) and a

28 Martin Schapiro, Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh, in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 1994. PDF

29 ibid

30 George M. Wilson, Narrative, The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. p.392

31 idid, p.403

32 Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, University of California Press, Ltd, London, 1983. PDF p.32

!18 / 85! the truth documentary spectacle confirmation (YES, an image of a pipe is not a pipe) at the same time. There is also a notion concerning the placement of the text (which plays a role in formation of the before mentioned claims) in This Is Not A Pipe; either it is part of the image, or it is placed by the image. Here, the denial – more clearly, at least – springs from the argument placed within the image, whereas the confirmation seems to arise when the text is placed separately from the image. But the confirmation, in Magritte’s case, is controversial; it leads the attention from the image towards the evaluation of the claim33 (to be exact, Magritte’s picture provoke discussion precisely because of the unclear distance of the text from the image).

In other words, the picture does not claim, it shows (an image). Even when photographs, which are believed not to be statements about, but pieces of our world34, are used as evidence, they only show that what has been35. A claim can be expressed only in words, in the structure of language that intends to connect the picture to the proposed narrative. The narrative could be the label or the title of the picture. The more detailed the image and the more narrative connected to it, the less abstraction there is, thus requiring less from the beholder to fill in the empty spaces36. However, the more narrative is involved, the bigger the chance of error becomes37. Our hypothetically infinite universe seems to guarantee that the absolute truth remains unreachable38. Supposedly, we can never get to the very truth, but to a greater truthlikeness instead, by carefully selecting and balancing the properties and relations described in the representation.

33 ibid, p.36

34 Susan Sontag, On Photography. p.4

35 Roland Barthers, Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, New York, 1994 (1981). p.77

36 Conditions of Illusion - E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p.203

37 Anjan Chakravartty, Truth and Representation in Science, p.44

38 The originator and, by far, the best known proponent of concretism is David Lewis. For Lewis and, as noted, concretists generally, the actual world is the concrete physical universe as it is, stretched out in space-time. Concrete Worlds and Existence Therein, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/ #AbstractPWs (24.01.2017)

!19 / 85! post-truth documentary spectacle

II (post-truth)

The recent political events in Europe as well as in the USA show that the populist black propaganda, which is targeted against elitist political rivals using completely false or stereotypic arguments, has taken place from objective reasoning. There is much similarity between Putinian Russia’s, the Brexiteer’s, and the Trumpian post-truth era39 rhetorics. The list could be extended at least to include the French, Polish, Dutch, and Hungarian populistic movements as well.

The similarity, as I see it, is that they all use highly questionable “alternative facts”, which are aimed at the unsophisticated masses who have become less fortunate in surviving the changes in the global economic structure during the past few decades. The messages sent are meant to affect more the emotions of their voters than to generate open dialogue on the choices offered. Even when offering “facts”, the sources are carefully selected to serve the purpose of the populists, and taking advantage of the voters’ fears and despair.

A good example of the controversial and thus confusing research is books on the recent development of inequality. French economist Thomas Piketty’s Inequality Theory states, most notably, that the 1% of population is collecting wealth from the remaining 99%. His massive opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century drew enormous amounts of attention at the time of its publication in 2013–2014. His message is that we are going back to the feudal society of the 19th century, where small elite is ruling and the majority is losing40. It took not long before the critics of his massive work came out, headlining already in 2015 that “Piketty is history”41. An article in Financial Times stated that “Global income inequality is falling — but widening disparities within

39 Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Post-truth, Oxford Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/post-truth (28.01.2017)

40 Talousguru Thomas Piketty: Koroilla elävä eliitti ottaa vallan, Helsingin Sanomat, http://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/kirja-arvostelu/ art-2000002730368.html (11.01.2017)

41 Piketty on menneisyyttä. Tulevaisuudessa palkansaajien valta kasvaa taas, Helsingin Sanomat, http://www.talouselama.fi/ uutiset/piketty-on-menneisyytta-tulevaisuudessa-palkansaajien-valta-kasvaa-taas-3486631 (04.01.2017)

!20 / 85! post-truth documentary spectacle nations present huge challenges”42. The article discusses Branko Milanovic’s book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, and comparing it with Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Milanovic focuses more on global than on national inequality, and also more on income than on wealth. His thesis seems to claim that inequality rises, falls and then rises again, perhaps endlessly. Therefore Piketty’s theory seems wrong: we are currently living one of the many temporal downhills of the equality. But he also points out the effect of high local inequality on national politics. Milanovic stresses one encouraging fact. While inequality is rising within most countries, notably the high- income ones, global inequality of incomes, though huge, has been falling, particularly since 2000… …The overall picture, then, is one of modestly falling global inequality and rising inequality within countries, notably high-income ones. Since most politics is national, periods of rising inequality within countries inevitably have political implications. Not least, Milanovic notes, ‘very high inequality eventually becomes unsustainable’. This partly explains the period of falling inequality within the high-income countries that preceded the more recent increases in inequality. During much of the 20th century, the middle and lower classes of high-income countries benefited not only from the growth of these economies, but also from marked reductions in the very high inequality of the 19th century… …The more recent rise in inequality in nearly all high-income countries also has economic and political causes and consequences. Globalisation, technological progress, the rising importance of finance and the emergence of winner-takes-all markets are the economic forces. Plutocracy then emerges and reinforces the tendency towards inequality. Evidence from the US shows, for example, that politicians routinely ignore the concerns of the lower- and middle-income groups.43

Michael Hudson, in his turn but with less publicity than Piketty, is blaming debt deflation and the finance and rentier economy for inequality44, which partly disagrees, partly agrees with Piketty, whereas the impact of finance market clearly agrees with Milanovic.

Finding the truth about the chain of events that have caused the current situation seems a tricky job, not to talk about correcting the course of events. As Juhana Vartiainen explains, theories of economy are constantly lagging behind the practice; conclusions made during the previous crisis are

42 ft.com > life&arts > books > Non-Fiction, April 14, 2016 4:10 pm

43 Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/ 13603aa2-0185-11e6-ac98-3c15a1aa2e62 (24.01.2017)

44 Michael Hudson on debt deflation, the rentier economy, and the coming financial cold war, Naked Capitalism, http:// www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-hudson-on-debt-deflation-the-rentier-economy-and-the-coming-financial-cold- war.html (05.01.2017)

!21 / 85! post-truth documentary spectacle not necessarily valid during the next crisis, because there is a constant mutation in the economy45. However, it is easy to find the seemingly guilty parties in the mentioned books: the well-doing economic and political elite. Before blaming anyone at this point, I’d suggest to take a look at the Cato Institute’s article on five myths (inequality has never been worse; the rich didn’t earn their money; the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor; more inequality means more poverty, and inequality distorts the political process) that are blamed for the current economic situation. It says at the very end of the article that the rich may not be the biggest evil to be blamed: Too much of the debate over economic inequality has been driven by emotion or misinformation. […]But even if inequality were as bad as advertised, one has to ask why that should be considered a problem. Of course, inequality may be a problem if the wealthy became rich through unfair means. […]While inequality per se may not be a problem, poverty is. But there is little evidence to suggest that economic inequality increases poverty. Indeed, policies designed to reduce inequality by imposing new burdens on the wealthy may perversely harm the poor by slowing economic growth and reducing job opportunities.46

Since there is no consensus on how far these economical theories are from actual world, it is hard to draw any definite conclusion about the situation. Well, except Donald Trump, who is happily using any theory that could help him gain victory.

45 Talous Tiikerin Selässä, Suomen Kuvalehti, https://suomenkuvalehti.fi/digilehti/232016/talous-tiikerin-selassa (24.01.2017)

46 Five Myths about Economic Inequality in America, Cato Institute, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/five-myths- about-economic-inequality-america (05.01.2017)

!22 / 85! lies documentary spectacle

III (lies)

Donald Trump is running for presidency by lying and just might succeed, wrote Saska Saarikoski47 in Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest Finnish daily paper. Saarikoski was based in the USA at the time, and thus was able to attend Trump’s election rally in Charleston, West Virginia, which is one of the poorest areas in the country. The article is long, and after describing the almost religious atmosphere in the rally he finds out that Trump believes in the theory of the Big Lie, introduced in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kamp in 1925; All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large- scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X 48

And so, Trump actually succeeded in lying himself to the presidency. Paul Krugman, a respected economist, is wondering in New York Times if and how president Trump’s big lie may carry on while adding his view to the confusing discussion on economy. Krugman’s message, as below, claims that USA has been doing very well recently. The unemployment is record-low, as opposed to Trump’s parallel reality, and can thus get only worse:

47 Donald Trump pyrkii valehtelemalla presidentiksi ja saattaa onnistua siinä, HS Kuukausiliite, June 2016, http://www.hs.fi/ kuukausiliite/art-2000002904442.html (17.01.2017)

48 The Big Lie, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie (05.01.2017)

!23 / 85! lies documentary spectacle

Trump’s inaugural speech was, of course, full of lies — pretty much the same lies that marked the campaign. Above all, there was the portrayal of a dystopia of social and economic collapse that bears little relationship to American reality. The interesting question now is whether fake carnage can be replaced by fake non-carnage. How many people can be convinced that things are getting better under the Trump-Putin administration even as they actually get worse? Will they actually get worse? Almost surely. Unemployment will probably rise over the next four years, if only because it starts out low — historically the unemployment rate has a strong reversion to the mean, and it probably can’t go much lower than it is now but can go much higher. The number of uninsured will soar if Republicans repeal Obamacare, whatever alleged replacement they offer.” 49

No wonder it is hard for the ordinary people to see the big picture. They see their own and their neighbours’ meaningless lives, and so they believe in what they want to believe – that someone, the unfair elite, and the immigrants are the reason for their misery… that a messiah has arrived to solve the injustice. No facts penetrate their emotional shield; no reason is heard over their anger. And why should they reason, for there are no clear facts as we have seen. There is only an infinite chain of more or less controlled events that have led to what is called now.

Marko Maunula, an associate professor of American history in Atlanta, was analysing the Trump- phenomena in the respectable weekly Suomen Kuvalehti last August50. His subjective interpretation is that instead of, or besides the common reasons listed in hundreds of essays, queries and editorials, it is the western atomistic individualism with a mix of aynrandian51 selfishness and clever self- manipulation that drives Trump’s popularity. Trump is forgiven for his narcissism, ruthless maximisation of his own good and open, non-apologetic lying, because tens of millions of Americans take his traits as commendable. This attitude is based on the presumption that all politicians are lying, thus an open liar is an eligible option. This also appeals to people who have learned to take society as a mechanism, the financing of which belongs to the others, but which

49 The Opposite of Carnage, NY Times, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com (24.01.2017)

50 Trump-ilmiö voi tapahtua myös Suomessa, Suomen Kuvalehti, http://suomenkuvalehti.fi/americana/trump-ilmio-voi-tapahtua- myos-suomessa/?shared=3002-11814274-4 (05.01.2017)

51 While Ayn Rand emphasised a.o. that one should prosper by treating others as individuals and advised to follow reason, the only part of her teaching that has remained is selfishness.

!24 / 85! lies documentary spectacle owes to one. Such individuals are found both on the left and the right, the high and the low layers of the society.

The snow melts, then it snows again still in May, but the sun keeps getting up earlier and higher during the day. Throughout the spring the press has been publishing news on Trump. The East-coast mainstream media, BBC, Politico, HS, YLE, SK, The Economist, The Guardian, everyone repeats the very same news about the chaos in the White House. Nothing that Trump does seem to be right, the focus has shifted from the deeds to the doer. Trump seems to have many enemies that want him out, but also surprisingly many allies to defend him. There are also occasional misfires by the press (however high-quality it might be) - the facts have not been checked - and it has to apologise and to correct the misleading information afterwards, thus adding bulk to the news stream.

In my obsession to read everything about the subject, I am getting tired. The cloud of smoke created by Trump’s counter-attacks and alternative facts generate new stories. Accusations of his mental health and integrity are thrown, but there is no real progress either in fulfilling the campaign promises or in getting the madman out of the house. The disturbing reality-show is turning to business as usual, I am losing the focus of things, the image begins to blur.52 I wonder if others are feeling the same?

52 Someone must be feeling the same: Human minds, when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to un-accept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension. Eventually, without quite realising it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true. Trump’s Lies vs. Your Brain, Politico Magazine, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect- brain-214658 (27.05.2017)

!25 / 85! spectacle documentary spectacle

IV (spectacle)

According to Charles Taylor, European social order changed from the harmony, coming from the consonance among the Ideas or Forms manifested in the different levels of being or ranks in society, towards modern social imaginary, which was seeing our society as an economy, an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange, and consumption. The economic defines a way we are linked together.53

In the development of these political imaginaries, it seems almost like Jean-Jacques Rousseau had community theatre in his mind already during the 18th century, when demanding transparency to political representation, transparency that is the enemy of representation in all its forms whether political, theatrical, or linguistic: “…Do better yet; let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united.”54

Rousseau was a great idealist, who managed to change the society for better, and his contribution to modern political imaginary can’t be denied. But something in the development went wrong along the way, if to believe Guy Debord, a fierce Marxist who's work was the base for the student revolution in France in 1968. His book The Society of the Spectacle attempts to identify the characteristics of the phase of capitalism that is called ‘the spectacle’. Debord is accusing representation for causing alienation. For him, separation is the “alpha and omega of the spectacle.”55

53 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2004. iBook. 5. The Economy as Objectified Reality

54 ibid, 8. The Sovereing People

55 Guy Debord, Society of The Spectacle, Bread and Circuses Publishing, 1977 (1967), iBook 1-25

!26 / 85! spectacle documentary spectacle

I could imagine that this separation works in two ways in our society: it separates the society into those who are able to get closer to what the spectacle offers, and into those who are slipping further away from this ideal; those who manage to live according to the ideals, are being separated from the reality by the false images of the spectacle. The spectactor that Rousseaus’s Social Contract was aiming at has become a mere spectator, a passive consumer of images that is being kept in affective grip, instead of freeing one to participate in the society.

Debord’s Spectacle seems to have roots not only in Rousseaunian representation, but in the shadows of Plato’s cave. His very first thesis says that “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” and his fourth thesis specifies “the spectacle as not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The sixth thesis mentions that “the spectacle occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.” When we add here the ninth “In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.” one can only wonder how Debord’s fifty years old manifesto matches to today’s social media in post-truth era. Spectacle is not primarily concerned with a looking at images but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects… In this way attention becomes key to the operation of noncoercive forms of power… Spectacle is not an optics of power but an architecture. Television and the personal computer… are methods for the management of attention… even as they simulate the illusion of choices and ‘interactivity’. (Crary 1999: 74–5)56

Financial crises, which began in the USA during 2007, resulting the collapse of Lehman Brothers, demonstrated the ruthlessness of financial institutions around the globe. Consuming became not only impossible, but the previously encouraged over-consuming led many to adapt to a position comparable to feudal peasants. There were no common interests left, the only importance was the institutions' rather one-sided survival, which, as a consequence, has increased local inequality globally. Immigration, now represented by refugees, has become the main target (inside the larger issue of globalisation) of blame by populist politics. The spectacle, we could assume, has turned the attention away from its own operations in blaming the others, who we see as a threat to our wellbeing, tending to separate us, keeping us busy so that we couldn’t unite against the oppression

56 Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Reading the Visual, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2004. PDF, p.170

!27 / 85! spectacle documentary spectacle by the elite’s institutions… Of course, I am somewhat speculating here, or should I say: simplifying to approximate the truth.

Where ever the truth is, today’s situation is rather uncomfortable. Spectacle, using images and language, encourage action based on emotion and to bypass all rational thinking. Situationist détournement, diverting the spectacle's means against itself, is a way of fighting it back. Any image could serve the spectacle by intentional labelling. Reading the Visual - the Media as Spectacle concludes that there are certain type of images that could encourage us to see behind the representation - to see the sunnier side, instead of the shadows - of our culture. The media largely function to facilitate and stage the society of the spectacle that Guy Debord detected in the 1960s, and this spectacle works to isolate individuals from each other through the setting up of a human–technological entre nous, which has become the pervasive social relationship of our time. As a corollary, the media make use of a variety of techniques (such as the politics of affect) to normalise and naturalise dominant visual regimes (particularly normalisation and capitalism) and authorised performances of subjectivity. […]What this sort of photograph has the potential to do is to seize and hold on to our visual attention, and to interrupt the process (look, recognise, move on) of the politics of affect. Our habitus, influenced by our cultural trajectory and constantly subjected to powerful visual regimes, orients and disposes us to look quickly at whatever is in front of us, categorise it, and accept this tacit recognition as the obvious and undeniable truth. But, as Bourdieu (2000) makes clear, there are times when the habitus invites us to see and recognise a world that is no longer there, that has moved on—or we can’t help but notice complexity and difference when the habitus directs us to see nothing but simplicity and uniformity. In these moments we can deduce, in Michel de Certeau’s words, ‘a lack of co- ordination between . . . references and the functioning of socio-cultural “authorities”’, to the extent that the latter ‘no longer correspond to the real geography of meaning’ 57

What could we make out of this, then, than to decide that a photograph works best when it can hold our attention and be addressed with scrutiny. The picture becomes freed from its label, enabling objective conclusions.

57 ibid, p.191

!28 / 85! reality hunger documentary spectacle

V (reality hunger)

Haven’t you heard? U.S. President Donald Trump. Is. The. Best. Across Europe, it is hard to find someone who doesn’t love Trump. Or love to hate him. Besides for the populist politicians, Trump is the best for journalists, who have never had more to write. And for establishment intellectuals who have never seemed more intellectual or more establishment. It is easy to believe that the press loves to hate him. How else could this be, since the man comes from reality-showbiz and seems to love almost any kind of publicity; a man who is a walking self-made spectacle; a pig wearing lipstick turned to the President of the United States.

Approximately half of the Americans voted for Trump, and seem to love him. How to explain the acceptance and the popularity of an openly lying, seemingly egotistic personality who has been so greatly dismissed by the press? After thoughtful reading, I think that the answer is found in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. His book seems to explain it all. Consider the state of literature at the moment.

Consider the rise of the memoir, the incidences of contrived and fabricated memoirs, the rash of imputations of plagiarism in novels, the overall ill health of the mainstream novel. Consider, too, culture outside of literature: reality TV, the many shades and variations of documentary film, the rise of the curator, the rise of the D.J., sampling, appropriation, the carry-over of collage from modernism into postmodernism. Now consider that all these elements might somehow be connected, might represent different aspects of some giant whatsit that will eventually constitute the cultural face of our time in the eyes of the future. David Shields argues that what all those things have in common is that they express or fulfil a need for reality, a need that is not being met by the old and crumbling models of literature.

!29 / 85! reality hunger documentary spectacle

Reality Hunger does contain quite a few slogan-ready phrases, but they weren’t all written by Shields, and some are more than a century old. One way in which the book expresses its thesis is in its organization: it is made up of 618 numbered paragraphs, more than half of them drawn from other sources, attributed only at the end of the book.

Field’s manifesto, written seven years ago, couldn’t be more true in today’s light; just look at Trump’s popularity, which is greatly based on his (auto)biography. Tony Schwartz, the ghost-writer of that biography, did such a good job creating Donald Trump - he’s truly Dr. Frankenstein - that he is now in great regret: “I put lipstick on a pig,” he told me. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

Philip Roth wrote in the 60’s that the actuality is continually outdoing writers’ talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. He describes how Chicago was shocked and mystified by the death of two teen-age girls, and how the whole episode grew to a spectacle in which a strange man steps forward, by the name of Shultz or Schwartz—I don’t really remember, but he is in the appliance business and he presents the suffering mother, Mrs. Grimes with a whole new kitchen. Mrs. Grimes, beside herself with appreciation and joy, turns to her surviving daughter and says, “Imagine me in that kitchen!”. The cruel reality had turned itself to reality-show followed by millions, and where product placement is happily allowed by the victims. Roth goes on, wondering who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren? Roy Cohn and David Schine? Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine? Dwight David Eisenhower? Well, Tony Schwartz invented, or at least helped to invent Donald Trump, but after Schwartz the reality certainly has being acting on his behalf. The rise of the memoir over the past few decades doesn’t mean that readers are ready to abandon the techniques of fiction; but, like readers three centuries ago, they want the freedom of fiction along with consequentiality of fact.

It took a while for literary to develop from anonymous real-life stories to absorbing fiction. The suspension of disbelief that fiction involves is a late stage in the evolution of taste, and it may prove to have been a temporary one. There is a strange connection between the fiction and the

!30 / 85! reality hunger documentary spectacle unbelievable reality (like the one described above by Roth): firstly, because we know that certain things “could never happen,” they mark the story as fiction; because we know similar things have happened and will happen in reality, they become truthful fictions. Secondly, as with the autobiography of Trump, an alternative approach is to make fiction as close to fact as possible, by reducing its scope to the one subject on which each writer is an unchallengeable authority: himself or herself. Schwartz was engaged in the sophisticated project, in which the line between truth and fiction became harder and harder to make out. It would have been safe and correct to label the biography as fiction, but the postmodern solution is to not to put such a label on biography.

There is an artistic movement brewing, among which hallmarks are the incorporation of “seemingly unprocessed” material; randomness, openness to accident and serendipity; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

So what constitutes reality, then, as it affects culture? It can be as simple as a glitch, an interruption, a dropped beat, a foreign object that suddenly intrudes. Reality is a landscape that includes unreal features; being true to reality involves a certain amount of wavering between real and unreal. Likewise originality, if there can ever be any such thing, will inevitably entail a quantity of borrowing, conscious and otherwise.

Postmodern solution relies on us recognising a lie as a lie but still treat it as if it were a reality. The problem is that, more and more, people seem to want to be lied to. This is the flip side of “reality hunger,” since a lie, like a fake memoir, is a fiction that does not admit its fictionality. That is why the lie is so seductive: It allows the liar and his audience to cooperate in changing the nature of reality itself, in a way that can appear almost magical. “Magical thinking” is used as an insult, but it is perhaps the most primal kind of thinking there is. The problem for modern people is that we can no longer perform this magic naively, with an undoubting faith in the reality of our inventions. We lie to ourselves now with a bad conscience. When the memoir is exposed as not having “really” happened, we want our money back.

!31 / 85! reality hunger documentary spectacle

People who can turn a lie into a truth have the power to shape reality; they are poets of the real. And the audience that gives them its willing suspension of disbelief is a co-conspirator in this uncanny transformation, just as novel readers conspire in their enchantment. The bond between demagogues and their audience is cemented by their exhilarating consciousness of shared culpability. The problem with today's “post-truth” politics is that a large share of the population has moved beyond true and false. They thrill precisely to the falsehood of a statement, because it shows that the speaker has the power to reshape reality in line with their own fantasies of self-righteous beleaguerment. It is only that this process can have deadly results...

From its beginning, the novel has tested the distinction between truth, fiction and lie; now the collapse of those distinctions has given us the age of Trump. We are entering a period in which the very idea of literature may come to seem a luxury, a distraction from political struggle. But the opposite is true: No matter how irrelevant hardheaded people may believe it to be, literature continually proves itself a sensitive instrument, a leading indicator of changes that will manifest themselves in society and culture. Today as always, the imagination is our best guide to what reality has in store.

There might be no doubt about literatures importance, but I doubt that the people who’d gain most from reading it will read anything at all. Some years ago the late Zygmunt Bauman, then very much alive, gave a lecture in Vilnius University. The auditorium was extremely packed, and people on the balcony were talking while standing shoulder to shoulder, or sitting on the floor side by side and surfing the net. I did not catch much of the address over the noise, but one thing I did hear and still remember it: Bauman was complaining that it has become, even for himself, extremely difficult to focus on long read. He claimed that while trying to read an article in his computer, his mind begins to drift to all possible sites where something even more interesting could be found and consumed. I too recognise his agony, and his remark reminds me also of how we consume images.

The way photographs are consumed has changed in the era of internet. Gone, for most people, is the habit of reading an image carefully and absorbing its nuance and detail. Today, with so many images, there is little time to absorb each one – or any. Glance, swipe, glance, swipe, often on a tiny

!32 / 85! reality hunger documentary spectacle smartphone screen. Today’s teenagers consume information on one, two or even three screens simultaneously.

It was the crowd that soon drew attention after Trumps inauguration; How many people had been there to watch? An image, shot by a Reuters photographer from the top of the Washington Monument, of the crowd in attendance, showed significantly fewer people than at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. A new White House Press Secretary emerged the next day to vehemently assault the facts about crowd size, his demonstrable falsehoods disproven by those images. Another senior official later said he was deploying “alternative facts” and that we should believe him, despite the photographic proof to the contrary. And yet another official added a day later that the media should “keep its mouth shut”.

This is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, when the main character, working in the Ministry of Truth, destroys a politically inconvenient image: "He dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes."

So, what role is photography to play in this “post-truth” era, when even documentary evidence is denied or disputed by those in power, where access is controlled, where we suffer from an information overload and the battle for the information space is chaotic and fought on a thousand fronts?

Once upon a time we were told that “a photograph never lies” and that we should trust in the still image. Nowadays, drenched in information, much of it visual, we struggle to make sense of the personal and professional views on our world.

The “post-truth” environment we live in seems, at least in part, to be a function of the current confusing information flow and how politicians, governments and others use it towards their own ends. It remains to be seen what longer term effects this will have on journalism generally and photojournalism in particular but the power of the still image remains undeniable, even if some choose to ignore inconvenient truths.

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In fight against the post-truth there might be one more weapon besides literature, journalism and documentary photography: Characteristically, artists in post-documentary photography (Luc Delahaye, Walid Raad (the Atlas Group), and Aernout Mik) seek to incorporate documentary’s conventional values (close engagement with reality, political consciousness, objectivity, etc.) with various aesthetic sensibilities (large scale picture planes, vivid colour, theatrical narratives, etc.) in order to produce more provocative and more engaging visual testimonies of recent histories. Post- documentary may become the form of visual communication that brings an effective merger between art and politics in this new age of image war.58

58 In order to emphasise the message, chapter VII was written mostly by appropriating paragraphs from the following six journalistic sources and a doctoral dissertation 1. Everybody Loves Donald, Politico European edition 02.02.2017, http://www.politico.eu/article/everybody-loves- donald-trump-europe/ (03.02.2017) 2. The Fiction of Memory, The New York Times 12.03.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/books/review/ Sante-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (04.02.2017) 3. Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All, The New Yorker 25.07.2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all (04.02.2017) 4. Lie to Me: Fiction in the Post-Truth Era, The New York Times 15.01.2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/15/ books/lie-to-me-fiction-in-the-post-truth-era.html (04.02.2017) 5. Writing American Fiction, Commentary Magazine, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/writing-american- fiction/ (04.02.2017) 6. The Purpose of Photography in a Post-Truth Era, Time Magazine 27.01.2017, http://time.com/4650956/ photojournalism-post-truth/ (04.02.2017) 7. Jong Chul Choi, Representing The Unrepresentable: Ethics Of Photography In Post-Photographic Era – Post- Documentary Of Luc Delahaye, Walid Raad (The Atlas Group) And Aernout Mik. A doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Florida, 2012. PDF p.7.

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VI (documentary)

The idea of documentary is as old as, if not older than the history of photography. The genre has gone through some crisis, where the photograph’s ability to capture reality has been questioned. These questions have been raised by Susan Sontag and Martha Rosler, among others. Whereas Sontag was accusing photography for serving the Spectacle in On Photography and questioning further its ethics in Regarding the Pain of Others, Martha Rosler doubts the objectivity and authenticity of photography in digital era in her essay Post-photography/Post-Documentary. According to TJ Demos, instead of killing the documentary, the crisis has led to the reinvention (as crises often do) of the documentary photography style: The return to documentary practice invalidates past pronouncements of the so-called crisis of the real, according to which visual experience was understood to have succumbed to the “spectacle”. That is, the commercialized realm of appearance encountered in television, advertisements and film. During the 1980s, this visual realm enthralled photography, when it was mimicked by many artists to the point where it appeared that actual lived existence had been eclipsed by representations of representations, as if one lived one’s whole life in front of a television. And despite more recent forecasts of the demise of photographic truth in the face of digitization, current documentary practitioners refuse to give up the belief that photography is capable of penetrating deeply into reality’s web, as Walter Benjamin claimed long ago.59 …Photographers have learned the lesson that “reality” remains available only through the practices that represent it. Which is to say, documentary photography, long thought historically exhausted in contemporary art, is now being reinvented.60

Michael Baxandall claims that one can actually read Renaissance-era Italian paintings as historical documents.61 For more than a hundred years, it has been suggested that the great 17th-century

59 TJ Demos, Vitamin Ph, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2006. p.006.

60 ibid, p.007

61 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: a primer in the social history of pictorial style, Oxford University Press, 1972. PDF

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Dutch master Johannes Vermeer made use of the camera obscura as an aid to painting.62 Baxandall’s colleague Svetlana Alpers has suggested that Vermeer’s highly detailed paintings from the 17th century are a sort of cartography, a social documentary where “what matters [in Dutch art] is precisely what meets the eye”63 (I will get back to Alper’s theory in chapter VIII). Finally, with the invention of the camera, it became much easier to capture the details of our world. Every man could, instead of competing with painters, use photography quite simply and directly as a means of recording the world about them.64

Almost contemporary with the invention of photography was the birth and phenomenal growth of the pictorial press which allowed mass circulation of images of our world. In the beginning, these images were not photographs, but wood engravings. It took some time before the technology allowed high-speed printing of photographs.65 Only the invention of half-tone plate in 1880 made it possible to print the images together with the text.66 While the public seemed to prefer the engravings over the photographs as more artistic, photographs were used in occasion to carry a conviction.67 The quality of authenticity implicit in a photograph may give it special value as evidence, or proof. Such a photograph can be called “documentary” by dictionary definition: “an original and official paper relied upon as basis, proof, or support of anything else; - in its most extended sense, including any writing, book, or other instrument conveying information. Thus any photograph can be considered a document if it is found to contain useful information about the specific subject under study.68

In the very beginning of the 20th century, Lewis Hine, a trained sociologist, photographed immigrants, children working in sweat-shops, and the human derelicts in the slums of New York.

62 Vermeer and the Camera Obscura, BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/vermeer_camera_01.shtml (20.04.2017)

63 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing - Dutch Art in the Seventieth Century, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Mysteries of Dutch Painting by Ernst Gombrich, The New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/11/10/ mysteries-of-dutch-painting/ (22.04.2017)

64 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005. p.85

65 ibid, p.249

66 ibid, p.251

67 ibid, p. 252

68 ibid, p.235

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He realised that the camera is a powerful tool for research and for communicating his finding to others. Hine understood that his photographs were subjective and, for that very reason, were powerful and readily grasped criticisms of the impact of the economic system on the lives of underprivileged and exploited classes.69 In the 1930’s, during the Great Depression, many artists returned to realism in order to instruct the public through their work. Also the government of the United States turned to photographers, Walker Evans a.o., for help to fight the Depression. The project became to be known after the agency that ran it, the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Evans was using a big 8x10 inches camera to capture detailed, aesthetically composed images that were dignified and “enjoyable”, as Glenway Westcott wrote.70

Another photographer who joined the FSA-project was Dorothy Lang. She had a different approach than Evans. She did not tamper with or arrange the pictures, but trie to capture the sense of the subject’s place and time in her photographs.71 Also working for the FSA, Ben Shahn, a painter, used a 35mm camera with the right-angle viewfinder to photograph people without their knowledge to get a snap-shot appearance. However, his photographs are transient images, and yet many are massive, even sculptural, bearing a close affinity to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom Shahn greatly admired.72

Approximately a decade before the FSA project, a new kind of cinema was created in the UK. These films were rooted in real problems and situations, with the participants themselves as the actors. The term “documentary” was coined by one of their most notable makers, John Grierson in 1926 – almost a century after the birth of the first photograph. From the very beginning of the movement the documentary film makers insisted that documentary was not art but an anti-aesthetic movement. Yet, Grierson wrote that what confuses the history is that we had always the good sense to use the aesthetes. We did so because we liked them and because we needed them.73

69 ibid, p.235

70 ibid, p.238

71 ibid, p.244

72 ibid, p.244

73 ibid, p.238

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Walt Whitman (1819–1892), an American poet, talked about an approach that makes use of the artistic faculties to give “vivication to fact”, in explaining the place of poetry in the modern world.74 Despite all the efforts, the definition of documentary is still, nearly a hundred years after the term’s invention, under discussion. Especially “the creative treatment of actuality” by Grierson is to be blamed, as seen here in the following quotations: -The toughest problem for common-sense definitions of documentary, like Grierson’s "the creative treatment of actuality,” is determining just what constitutes “actuality." Every representation of reality is no more than a fiction in the sense that it is an artificial construct, a highly contrived and selective view of the world, produced for some purpose and therefore unavoidably reflecting a given subjectivity or point of view. Even our “brute" perceptions of the world are inescapably tainted by our beliefs, assumptions, goals, and desires. So, even if there is a concrete, material reality upon which our existence depends (something very few actually doubt) we can only apprehend it through mental representations that at best resemble reality and that are in large part socially created. Some film theorists have responded to this dilemma by claiming that documentary is actually no more than a kind of fiction that is constituted to cover over or “disavow" its own fictionality.75 -To remind viewers of the construction of the reality we behold, of the creative element in John Grierson’s famous definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” undercuts the very claim to truth and authenticity on which the documentary depends. If we cannot take its images as visible evidence of the nature of a particular part of the historical world, of what can we take them? By suppressing this question, the institutional framework for documentary suppresses much of the complexity in the relationship between representation and reality, but it also achieves a clarity or simplicity that implies that documentaries achieve direct, truthful access to the real. This functions as one of the prime attractions of the form.76 -Documentary film makers have to manipulate reality in order to make their art, even if that means exploiting their subjects. This implies that filmmakers are also manipulating - and exploiting - their audience; “reality” is sold out in favor of “art”. What is said here about documentary filmmaking can be said as well of documentary still photography, despite the imperative toward narrativity of the time-based medium. But documentary, whether still or moving, precisely as an “art-full” practice, can hardly escape the inclination toward some form of dramatization.77

74 ibid, p.238

75 Dirk Eitzen, When is Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception, CinemaJournal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995. pdf p.82

76 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001. pdf p.24

77 Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001, pdf p.210

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Obviously, there are opposite opinions about the documentary as well. The Guardian, celebrating Robert Frank’s 90th birthday in 2014, had a long interview with him. The Americans, published in 1958–59, was a new kind of documentary where Frank’s America is a place of shadows, real and metaphorical. His Americans look furtive, lonely, suspicious. He caught what Diane Arbus called the ‘hollowness’ at the heart of many American lives, the chasm between the American dream and the everyday reality. The Americans was shocking – and enduringly influential – because it simply showed things as they were. ‘I was tired of romanticism,’ Frank told me, ‘I wanted to present what I saw, pure and simple.’78

As early as in 1944, MoMa organised an exhibition called The American Snapshot, and Willard D. Morgan, Director of the Museum’s Department of Photography, introduced the snapshot in the exhibition catalogue as an honest art: …The snapshot has become in truth, a folk art, spontaneous, almost effortless, yet deeply expressive. It is an honest art, partly because it doesn’t occur to the average snapshooter to look beyond reality, partly because the natural domain of the camera is in the world of things as they are, and partly because it is simply more trouble to make an untrue than a true picture. Above all, the folk art of the camera is unselfconscious. It may well be a highly significant form of self expression, but the snapshooter doesn’t think of it that way. He takes pictures merely because he likes to.79

John Szarkowski, the director of the MoMa Department of Photography at the time, organised an exhibition in MoMa called New Documentary in 1967. He introduced Diana Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand as a new generation of photographers that had directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. “Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it.”80 But the three were not the ones that rebelled most against the modernist understanding of photography. Borrowing from FSA’s Ben Shahn’s and Frank’s documentary styles,

78 The Guardian, “Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back” https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/07/robert-frank-americans-photography-influence-shadows (25.04.2017)

79 M o M a , “ T h e A m e r i c a n S n a p s h o t ”, https://www.moma.org/d/c/exhibition_catalogues/ W1siZiIsIjMwMDI5NDIxMSJdLFsicCIsImVuY292ZXIiLCJ3d3cubW9tYS5vcmcvY2FsZW5kYXIvZXhoaWJpdGlvbnMvMjMxNiIsImh0 dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm1vbWEub3JnL2NhbGVuZGFyL2V4aGliaXRpb25zLzIzMTY%2FbG9jYWxlPWVuIiwiaSJdXQ.pdf? sha=9f43c445a036c531 (26.04.2017)

80 The Guardian, “Was John Szarkowski the most influential person in the 20th century photography?”, https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jul/20/john-szarkowski-photography-moma (02.05.2017)

!39 / 85! documentary documentary spectacle postmodernists of the 1960’s claimed snapshot as the only true use of camera in art (and documentary) while surfing on the wave of de-skilling.81

Thierry de Duve writes in Photography Theory that photography could be either a snapshot that captures life but is unable to convey it, or a time exposure as a reminder of times that have died away. Photography is taken in either of two ways: as an event, but then as an odd-looking one, a frozen gestalt that conveys very little, if anything at all, of the fluency of things happening in real life; or it is taken as a picture, as an autonomous representation that can indeed be framed and hung, but that then curiously ceases to refer to the particular event from which it was drawn. In other words, the photograph is seen either as natural evidence and live witness (picture) of a vanished past, or as an abrupt artefact (event), a devilish device designed to capture life but unable to convey it. Both notions of what is happening at the surface of the image have their counterpart in reality. Seen as live evidence, the photograph cannot fail to designate, outside of itself, the death of the referent, the accomplished past, the suspension of time. And seen as deadening artifact, the photograph indicates that life outside continues, time flows by, and the captured object has slipped away.82

Nan Goldin, famous for her rather shocking diary-like snapshots, mentions in an interview the same notion as de Duve about capturing life into her photographs: I’d always believed that if I photographed anything or anyone enough I would never lose them. With the death of seven or eight of my closest friends and dozens and dozens of my acquaintances, I realize that there is so much the photograph doesn’t preserve. It doesn’t replace the person and it doesn’t really stave off mortality like I thought it did. It doesn’t preserve a life.83

Bill Nichols has been written many books about documentary, and is claimed to be the founder of the contemporary study of the documentary film. According to Nichols, every film is a documentary. Even the most whimsical of fictions gives evidence of the culture that produced it and reproduces the likenesses of the people who perform within it. In fact, we could say that there are two kinds of film: (1) documentaries of wish-fulfillment [what we call fiction] and (2)

81 Marjaana Kella, Käännöksiä, doctoral dissertation, Unigrafia Oy, Helsinki, 2014. p.179

82 Thierry de Duve, Time Exposure and Snapshot in Photography Theory, James Elkins (Ed.), Routledge, New York, 2007. p. 109-110

83 Nan Goldin by Stephen Westfall, BOMB, http://bombmagazine.org/article/1476/nan-goldin (26.04.2017)

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documentaries of social representation [non-fiction]. Each type tells a story, but the stories, or narratives, are of different sorts.84

If every film is a documentary, we could also think that Waltari’s book, which was not even intended to be a historical document, actually is. When compared to the archival documents that are available today, it is interesting to see how much truthlikeness it contains. If it does have some historical value concerning the events in the three Baltic States, it has even more so in revealing how much was understood in Finland about the events it attempted to shed light on: taking into account that Waltari had also access to Finnish military intelligence reports and interrogation scripts of the refugees by the police, we may estimate the amount of (classified) information the members of the Finnish Parliament had when deciding on the political actions of the time.

In addition to the kinds of film listed above, Nichols has listed six modes of non-fiction in chronological order;85 1. Poetic documentary [1920s]: reassemble fragments of the world poetically - lack of specificity, too abstract 2. Expository documentary [1920s]: directly address issues in the historical world - overly didactic. 3. Observational documentary [1960s]: eschew commentary and reenactment; observe things as they happen - lack of history, context. 4. Participatory documentary [1960s]: interview or interact with subjects; use archival film to retrieve history - excessive faith in witnesses, naive history, too intrusive. 5. Reflexive documentary [1980s]: question documentary form, defamiliarizes the other modes - too abstract, loss of sight of actual issues. 6. Performative documentary [1980s]: stress subjective aspects of a classically objective discourse - loss of emphasis on objectivity may relegate such films to the avant-garde; “excessive” use of style.

As we can see, all of the styles mentioned seem to have some shortcomings, thus showing that there is not a perfect documentary style to choose from. Despite the categorising, a film identified with a given mode could be a mix of modes. Even so, the modes do convey some sense of history of documentary cinema, each mode rising from the dissatisfaction of the previous.86 Notably, for a long time, it was also taken for granted that documentaries could talk about anything in the world

84 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, p.1

85 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001. PDF p.138

86 ibid, p.100

!41 / 85! documentary documentary spectacle except themselves. […] By suppressing the question [of creative treatment of reality], the institutional framework for documentary suppresses much of the complexity in the relationship between representation and reality, but it also achieves simplicity that hints of direct, truthful access to the real.”87

Categorising is fundamental to the way we make sense of experience.88 Carl Plantinga proposes that pragmatics of nonfiction moving pictures must deal with the semantic issues of photographic realism and reference. In addition, it must take in account the rhetorical uses of images and sounds. For Plantinga nonfictions occupy a central place in Western culture, but their importance is manifested in infinite variations. In addition, nonfiction has a multitude of effects and purposes, depending on use, context, audience, and other factors.89 While the intention of making documentary/non-fiction has been offered as one defining factor for documentary, indexing cannot be wholly determined by the producer/distributor/exhibitor, but also depends on that index being taken up by the audience… indexing is a social phenomenon, as much determined by what audiences will accept as nonfiction or fiction as by the intentions of those who handle the film.90 Dirk Eitzen summarises similarly: it is more correct to say that documentaries are presumed to be truthful, even though considerations about the veracity of particular assertions may play little role in how viewers actually make sense of them.91

Plantinga thus suggests that truth-telling depends on the culture, politics and attitude of the makers and consumers of the nonfiction – on a community dedication to truth-telling. Only if discourse meets intersubjective standards of truth-telling can it be useful for the diverse functions it performs in a democracy.”92 In the context of truth-telling he is also referring to approximate truth: The actual world, our relationship to it, and the constraints of rational discourse set limits on what we can truthfully and honestly show, say, and imply. The quality of our discourse partly depends on

87 ibid, p.24

88 Carl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film, Cambridge University Press, 1997. iBook Chapter 1. What is Nonfiction Film? - Why Categories, Definitions and Distinctions?

89 ibid, Introduction.

90 ibid, Chapter 1. Ambiquity and Indexing

91 Dirk Eitzen, When is Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception, CinemaJournal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995. PDF

92 ibid

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the importance and usefulness of what we choose to say and show. It also depends on our ability and desire, fallible as it is, to distinguish between truths and lies, honesty and deceit.93

Plantinga closes his account stating that Nonfiction films are complex representations with an infinite diversity of possible uses. Theirs is a rhetorical and pragmatic complexity that theory alone cannot comprehend; we require the aid of criticism and history.94

Intention, which is mentioned as a defining factor for documentary, belongs also to the more general discourse on art and photography as well. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition History of History introduced the idea of the photograph as a fossil95, and a photograph of a fossil, a double- indexicality, which again raises the question of photography as art. However, Walter Benn Michaels brings in Jeff Wall and Michael Fried, referring to their ideas on absorption and theatricality. It is one thing to value absorption as a mode of performance, and it is another thing to value it as the refusal or rather the absence of performance. […]Absorption here becomes a theoretical concept. The historical question of which intentions any given photographer had becomes the theoretical question of whether photographers have any intentions that matter, and, more generally, of what relation there is between the meaning of a work of art and the causal account of how it was produced. […]Insisting on the photographic fossil as an intentional object (“By photographing these fossils… I was making another set of fossils”), it marks the transformation of the natural object into the intentional one, of the trace into the representation, not exactly a representation of the referent but rather of the making of the photograph.96

Michael Fried, on his turn, is referring to the intentionality while analysing Robert Adams’ photography in a recent writing. The intentionality, or density of intention (or weight of intuited decision), according to Fried, can be seen in Adams’ Colorado Springs, Colorado. Introducing all the details and their relationships and meanings in the “strictly documentary photograph”, Fried argues that it is far from pure indexicality, but contains perfectionism, which can be nothing but a result of determined intention.97

93 ibid

94 ibid, Chapter 10. Nonfiction Pragmatics and the Limits of Theory - Truth-telling: A Conclusion.

95 Walter Benn Michaels, Photographs and Fossils, in Photography Theory, James Elkins (edt), Routledge, New York, 2007. p. 432

96 ibid, p.447

97 Density of Decision: Greenberg with Robert Adams, NonSite.org, http://nonsite.org/article/density-of-decision (02.05.2017)

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The crisis of the documentary, as mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, owes (also) much to the ontological questions of photography. James Elkins’ Photography Theory (2007) contains 470 numbered pages of text with zero photographs – speculations and opinions on the concept of photography give a unique perspective but at the same time demonstrate how confused we still are about the technology that supposedly is able to produce both art and documents. Even if it feels that there is too much speculation of what photography is or what it is not, we can’t get away without touching this question in connection to every photographic genre.

Besides the ontological dilemma, questions of the intention, and the definition of style, there are more controversies related to the objectivity of documentary. Bill Nichols offers a definition for documentary, which is likewise controversial because it introduces yet another kind of subjectivity: “It may seem circular, but one way to define documentary is to say, ‘Documentaries are what the organizations and institutions that produce them make.’ ”98

What do the organisations and institutions make then? This comes clearer when comparing documentary photography and photojournalism: Documentary photography generally relates to longer term projects with a more complex story line, while photojournalism concerns more breaking news stories. The two approaches often overlap. Some theorists argue that photojournalism, with its close relationship to the news media, is influenced to a greater degree than documentary photography by the need to entertain audiences and market products.99

Thus, it seems that documentary photography has yet another burden of representation to deal with. Even though a photograph is taken of something “that has been” [in front of the camera] as Roland Barthes suggests, it is always taken of the decidedly chosen Thing Itself, recording The Detail in increasing sharpness by getting closer to the subject. The Framing, Time, and Vantage Point100 are undoubtedly additional subjective factors to the image, as well as the chosen camera and its optics, the type of film, and development and printing processes – not to mention the digital technology’s

98 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, p.22

99 Antonin Kratochvil, Michael Persson, Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, Nieman Reports/Fall 2001. PDF p.27

100 John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007. introduction

!44 / 85! documentary documentary spectacle ability to enhance the results in an even greater degree. But, isn’t this the case with any kind of documentary recording, either filmed, written, or collected artefacts? We can’t possibly create a simulacrum of the whole reality, but need to decide on the pieces of reality that best describe it and attempt to show the truth in short form - we may forget the naive “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”, or at least the “whole truth”, and turn our aim at truthlikeness by simplifying and abstracting the subject matter.

In collecting these pieces we are forced to make choices (here is the density of decision), but John Tagg has found out that the burden extends to the showing of these pieces of truth as well. There is always someone who has to decide what to show, and where and when to show it. There is a special position of the photograph (and other products of intellect) in the political economy of truth, which Michel Foucault has named “a regime of truth”. A regime of truth is that circular relation which truth has to the systems of power that produce and sustain it, and to the effects of power which it induces and which redirect it. Such a regime has been not only an effect, but a condition of the formation and development of capitalist societies; to contest it, however, it is not enough to gesture at some 'truth' somehow emancipated from every system of power. Truth itself is already power, bound to the political, economic and institutional regime which produces it.101

Undoubtedly, photographs have great power either in triggering action or in justifying it. If we have already swept away the image of a drowned Syrian refugee child on the arms of a rescue worker on the shores of Greece in 2015, we still might remember (this weeks) images of Syrian children that died of the chemical weapons attack in Idlib. In the very morning of April 7, we have learned that, while just a week ago being very much against any intervention to Syrian conflict, president Trump ordered the night before an air-strike against the Assad regime in Homs that supposedly was responsible for the deadly action. “… as he put it in Wednesday’s press conference, describing how horrific images of gassed Syrian children had changed his ‘attitude’ toward Assad, who U.S. intelligence agencies were quick to deem responsible.”102 We may, at this early point, only hope that

101 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation, University of Minnesota Press, 1988. p.94

102 Trump’s Syria Whiplash, Politico Magazine, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/trumps-syria-whiplash-214997 (07.04.2017)

!45 / 85! documentary documentary spectacle the photographs have not launched a real shit-storm, in spite of that God will bless not only America, but the entire world103.

However, in the age of internet and social media, while the technology allows an effective and wide distribution of images, there is a problem with the (documentary) photograph. We get instant and continuing imagery of the events around the world, but there is also an overflow of such imagery, which is suffocating and conflicting with the effects produced. Jorge Ribalta is wondering to what extent Tagg’s theoretical framework simply does not allow him to study anything but hegemonic practices and discourses, or the ways in which the bourgeois State co-opts, ‘recruits and mobilizes’ rather than the deviations, ruptures, and moments of indeterminacy or resistance.104 For Tagg, in his book The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (2009), it seems that the documentary ended with the New Deal politics; So, what if what is politically needed today is precisely what Tagg seeks to avoid—namely, “the reconstitution of a new archivism or of a new documentalism”? What if, in other words, we need to reinvent some equivalent (but not identical) conditions of universality and transparency associated with the classic forms of New Deal documentary, precisely because the documentary social function continues to exist and operate publicly and hegemonically in spite of declarations from academia that it is obsolete? Documentary is everywhere today, since it is structurally linked to democratic discourse and to the ideological conditions of the liberal public sphere in which we live, as Tagg himself has worked to illuminate. That said, we also need to recognize that documentary practices will continue to exist as long as liberal democracy does. What do we do with that?105

Ribalta offers answers by looking at Ariella Azoulay’s book The Civil Contract of Photography (2008). What is interesting for me here is that these books by Tagg and Azoulay challenge (according to Ribalta) not only Photography Theory by James Elkins (2007), but Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). Quite rightly, in this context, Anne McCauley suggests to focus less on the ontology of photography (even though it is a fascinating philosophical puzzle) and more on photograph’s ethics and policies106. On the other hand, the

103 Trump breaks precedent by blessing the whole world, Politico, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/trump-syria-precedent- blesses-world-236977 (07.04.2017)

104 The Civil Contract of Photography and The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, caa.reviews, http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1446#.WOW94VIRq2w (06.04.2017)

105 ibid

106 Anne McCauley; The Trouble with Photography, Photography Theory p.423

!46 / 85! documentary documentary spectacle philosophical puzzles in Michael Fried’s account on photographs, even if controversial, direct my attention towards post-documentary and more precisely, towards Luc Delahaye (chapter IX).

!47 / 85! rhetorics documentary spectacle

VII (rhetorics)

Rhetorics: the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.107 Propaganda: dissemination of information - facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies - to influence public opinion.108

Watching Michael Moore's documentaries is a strange experience. Without knowing that they are labelled documentary, one could easily confuse them with Monty Python's parodies or a Benny Hill Show of a journalist who tries to pull his agenda with a Trumpian stubbornness.

Referring to Moore, Bill Nichols explains that “the context provides the cue; we would be foolish to ignore it even if this form of definition is less than exhaustive. …we make certain assumptions about the film’s documentary status and its degree of likely objectivity, reliability, and credibility. We make assumptions about its non-fiction status and its reference to our shared historical world rather than a world imagined by the filmmaker.”109

John Grierson wrote in 1942 that “The materials of citizenship today are different and the perspectives wider and more difficult, but we have, as ever, the duty of exploring them and of waking the heart and will with regard to them. That duty is what documentary is about.”110 Moore’s films may raise questions about their own fundamental value as political argument, but at the same time he is liberating documentary from the Griersonian burden. Moore has undoubtedly introduced a unique approach to documentary and changed the way we think about it.

107 Rhetorics, Apple’s Oxford Dictionary of English

108 Propaganda, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda (07.04.2017)

109 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary p.22

110 Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee (Ed.), Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2015. iBook, introduction

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Michael Moore portrays a socially conscious nebbish who will do whatever is necessary to get to the bottom of pressing social concerns.111 Whatever his approach is, if not the “fly-on-the-wall”, he is making documentaries. “Complaints that he is partial, biased, unfair and simple-minded (while all true) are completely irrelevant to the basic documentary value of his work. His ethical strength is that, however dubious his treatment of those he films can be on occasion… his audiences can be in no doubt whatsoever about his position.”112

There are more interesting comments in the introduction part of the book113 regarding Moore, but I am in no mood to edit them. They serve well, almost like his movie buffs, the way they are here below, but don’t underestimate their importance in the big picture.

Moore’s films, since the turn of the millennium, seem to have been designed to agitate at least as much as investigate, a formula that has earned Moore millions of dollars, four of the top-grossing documentaries of all time, and a long list of enemies. His films were part of a larger wave of political documentaries that found large audiences and new ways to challenge or hitchhike on the political economy of an increasingly consolidated media system.

Moore thus helped put documentary film back at the centre of political debate, acting as filmmaker, participant, and reflexive interrogator of his own method. Bill Nichols notes that documentary films are increasingly shot in what he calls a “participatory mode”, in which the filmmaker appears on screen and is part of the narrative.

Michael Moore has popularised self-reflexivity in documentary, his own presence in his films gives them a seeming directness, as if the spectator is directly observing the process of filmmaking, which has nothing to hide. The reflexivity is an effect, an appearance - it is not an absolute condition, nor could it be. Hence the reflexivity effect itself becomes a potential source of mystification.

Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the most controversial nonfiction film ever made; it was highly polarising in a sharply partisan age, and it attracted the heated attention of politicians, commentators, and the public. Further, it was strategically released during the 2004 presidential campaign in an apparent attempt to influence the election. It purported to offer a revealing and directly critical look at candidate Bush before audience went to the polls. This now common technique was unusual in 2004, and contributed to making the documentary film a staple of the pre-election campaign cycle.

111 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, p.14

112 Thomas W. Benson, Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary, introduction

113 ibid

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The question is not whether Fahrenheit 9/11 delivered the truth to audiences but whether the movie communicated a truth… demonstrating the potential of a feature-length documentary film to engage the American people in lively discussions about important political matters.

Roger Rapoport’s investigative biography argues that “Moore’s unique artistic achievement is to find someone to blame for your difficulties.” Yet, he carries a special air. “Sitting down for a talk with Michael Moore was a little like taking a seat in a confessional - with cameras.” Moore returns to the editing room to look at the day’s clips, mentally sorting his interviewees into two categories: those who’d been honest with him and those who wished they hadn’t.

Michael Moore’s films could be considered as modes of public argument and political art. The rhetorical effect of a Michael Moore film suggests very strongly the authorship and identity of “Michael Moore” as a representative for the viewer, who refuses to be humiliated into a slavish false belief in the pretensions of the powerful.

In trying to figure out the big picture, one comes to wonder if Michael Moore is more of a symptom, or the actual disease of the populist rhetorics of post-truth? Moore’s effect on the industry and his popularity has become so big that he deserves more attention than just the short introduction to the propagandistic rhetorics that have set foot in documentary.

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VIII (art)

The new art - call it post-modern or contemporary or actual - seems like a scientific and philosophical bird-nest that is too complex for my brain, it feels too isolated from life. I have great difficulty in attaching to it, in finding it interesting, understanding it. However, the theory of truthlikeness has helped here a little: instead of drawing inspiration from art to understand science, I draw from the philosophy of science to understand art. Still, there is something that bothers me, and for that I want to take two simplified examples to explain it: a painting by J. M. W. Turner and an ink-blot.

While such an old-fashioned artist as Turner might feel outdated, he is a great example for truthlikeness. The development in his style was aiming to capture the light and mood of a scene as truthfully as possible, yet some of his later works carry a near-abstract expression. The work in question is titled Snow Storm, or Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, or in full title Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the "Ariel" left Harwich, painted in 1842. It is this near-abstract, not full abstraction, a highly expressive style that makes a difference. It is possible, without labelling the work, to make out the sea, the ship, the waves, the smoke, the light, the feeling of spinning movement - it is possible for the beholder to get absorbed into a feeling of being in the storm, but of course, knowing nothing of the details that are mentioned in the painting’s title. The title, depending on the version, only adds background information regarding the place, the name of the ship, the sounds, and a documentary claim that the artist in fact experienced the storm in reality. Even this was enough to raise discussion about the ageing artist's ability to be on spot in such weather.114 The style of the expression raised the most arguments, and perhaps for the sake of defending the style it was necessary to state that this is how the storm actually was, how it was experienced by the artist personally.

114 Wikipeida, “Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Storm:_Steam- Boat_off_a_Harbour%27s_Mouth (05.02.2017)

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Think of an ink-blot, famously used in a personality test which involves the evaluation of a subject’s response to ambiguous ink blots115. The idea, naturally, is that a patient of a psychologist would interpret the ink-blot subjectively, describing the likeness of the blot to reality. Since ink- blots are only blots, interpretation varies from person to person, but it is likely that there are similar kinds of interpretations among many patients – if not exactly, then categorically. Of course, there is no correct answer, except for the ones that keeps one unlocked from the psychiatric hospital.

Now imagine the title of the Turner's painting, in its full length, as the intended meaning of an ink- blot. It would take many pages to explain and to interpret the ink-blot to the beholder to avoid a completely subjective rendering of the meaning. Such art would, of course, be conceptual, including many ink-blots on the gallery wall, thus the explanation of the concept would end up as a book. This would be good for the army of curators and critics, being employed for quite a while with the task, but evidently rather laborious for the average beholder to read the book while examining the art.

There is always a certain burden present in representation, and it is connected with our imagination. What is common between Kant and the Platypus? Umberto Eco wrote that “Kant, the confuter of idealism, would also have known very well that if the platypus offered him a sensible intuition, then it was and therefore could necessarily be thought; and no matter where the form that he conferred upon it sprang from, it had to be possible to construct it.”116 The challenge for Kant, were he to actually have encountered the platypus, would have been in critical judgment of the platypus. Judgment is the faculty of thinking of the particular as part of the general, Eco continues. And he continues for a long time, to the famous black square that from a suitable point of view and in appropriate context is to be read a “black cat on a moonless night.”117 I am almost sure that the famous black square was the one painted by Malevich – and perhaps Eco was referring to it, since he mentioned Nothingness and God earlier.

115 Wikipedia, “Rorschach test”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test (05.02.2017)

116 Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus, A Harvest Book Harcourt, Inc. 1999. iBook, 2.7 The Platypus.

117 ibid, 7.17 The Mexican on a Bicycle

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I think that when Malevich painted a square panel black and hung it in the corner of a room, he might have told the curator (just in case) “Ah, by the way, Sharikov, this is a portrait of God the way I see him” to avoid the possibility that the curator (who, still very quite recently, was occupied in chasing the alley cats) saw there nothing – or in the worst case, seeing there a black cat on a moonless night. Malevich might have been right in giving both visual and verbal hints, since it is hard to recognise someone whom we haven’t seen before.

What Eco is trying to tell us here, is that in order to decide that forms represent a given object or a scene, we must possess or guess the key (perhaps even a verbal one). Afterwards, we can adapt what we perceive to what we know. The key is equally important in the case of a black square as with documentary photographs, but the size of the key may vary. The thing that bothers me is that even if we are looking at pure nonsense, our brain quickly begins to find meaning for it.118 This, again, leads us driving the endless unlit highway that Michael Fried mentioned in his Art and Objecthood.119 Call me slow or inpatient, but I just want to arrive home in time…

It may sound crazy, but ink blots remind me of a milk maid – specifically, the one painted by Vermeer. Describing Reality or Disclosing Worldhood? Vermeer and Heidegger, drafted by Professor Béatrice Han-Pile, successfully argues against Svetlana Alper’s view on Dutch painting being mostly comparable to cartography; For her, Dutch painting is thus characterised by an objectivity close to that of the natural sciences, a ‘detached or perhaps even a culturally unbiased view of what is to be known in the world’ (Alpers: 163).120 Han-Pile writes about Vermeer’s realism, contributing to how I see photography: Although Vermeer’s paintings are not abstract and thus do not show how a world emerges from chaos, they perform a structurally similar kind of ontological disclosure: they highlight the un- worlding of a past world. They prompt and allow us to imagine the world of the Dutch golden age, and yet in the same movement make us aware of the fact that it is out of our existential reach. The poignancy of such un-worlding is emphasised by the way in which the worth of what was lost comes

118 Per Aage Brandt, A Note on the Meaning of Nonsense, Theoretical Seminar & Creative Discussion, VDA 16.03.2017

119 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, 1967. PDF

120 Béatrice Han-Pile, Describing Reality or Disclosing Worldhood? Vermeer and Heidegger. University of Essex Philosophy Department. PDF

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to the fore. As indicated above, the practices depicted share a common style which is one of deep care, both for the activities themselves, the objects involved and the world they belong to.121

The similarity and the difference between Vermeer and photography is related to light. As Han-Pile explains, for Vermeer it wasn't possible to capture the specific light exactly as it was, no matter what kind of a technical apparatus he used to help him “copy” the reality. He had to create the light from his imagination during the long process of painting the picture, painting such light that contributes to the “unworlding” in the image. Photography, on the other hand, can capture a particular light at the very moment, but hardly ever are the other elements in the picture in perfect order - unless one is extremely lucky, or is arranging the scene. Thus, certain type of photographs are “made” similarly to painting (we usually consider that photographs are “taken”).

121 ibid

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IX (post-documentary)

Documentary theatre – authenticity in theatre – may sound like diving-flying, a paradox of representing reality. It is a theatre based on interviews and other documentation, preferably first- hand information, explains Janne Junttila.122 The roots of documentary theatre are in epic and political theatres, fathered by Bertolt Brecht and his colleague Erwin Piscator respectively.123 The style was originally developed by Piscator in the 1920’s Berlin. In fact, back then it was very much communist agitation.124

The second wave of documentary theatre was experienced in the 1960’s. While Piscator was back to Germany from the USA, working on his new productions, Peter Cheeseman developed a theatre based on interviews, which he repeated on stage word-to-word. Because of Cheeseman, documentary theatre is called verbatim theatre in the U.K.125 The third wave of documentary theatre, still ongoing, began in the 90’s.

Current documentary theatre shares many features with contemporary theatre as well as with post- dramatic theatre, postmodern and postmodern’s counter-reactions. It could be divided into three aspects (which all may be included in a single work): 1. word-to-word, emphasising a person, his story and the way of representing it, and the interview-technic chosen in the research. 2. journalistic, emphasising journalistic investigation, representation, and values (new information,

122 Janne Junttila, Dokumenttiteatterin Uusi Aalto, Like Kustannus Oy, Helsinki, 2012. p.13.

123 ibid, p.16.

124 ibid, p.35.

125 ibid, p.20.

!55 / 85! post-documentary documentary spectacle understanding the big picture, equality of listening) in the context of art. 3. artistic, emphasising the author or the collective and interpretation.126

A cultural product is always a result of interpretation and selection, and in theatre the negotiation between reality and representation seems rather a natural way of structuring the world, even if the spectator might feel this is, at times, propagandist in nature.127

Documentary theatre is closely related to community theatre and to journalism, yet it isn’t either. Documentary theatre is art, a way to dig deeper into the histories of communities and explain the reason-consequence – the chain of social phenomena, in polyphony (whereas fiction is considered documentary monologue). While researching reality, the concept of art allows a certain freedom in interpretation and representation. In fact, using the freedom is obligatory: documentary representation must be interesting as a work of art, while maintaining its grip on ordinary people – while being art for the people.128

After reading Janne Junttila’s book on Documentary Theatre’s New Wave, I began to wonder why he didn’t include Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed in the history. I had to ask him personally, receiving the following answer: While documentary theatre is emphasising art, community theatre is about empowerment.129 Thus, there seems to be a clear line dividing the styles. Yet, they both tend to introduce the voice of marginal groups who otherwise couldn’t be heard: global problems or problems arising from globalisation are represented through local communities by bringing individual experiences on the stage. The familiarity of the local, even when controversial, allows the audience to find connection with their own daily life and grow understanding while in dialogue with the theatre and with their own collective.130

126 ibid, p.21.

127 ibid, p.27.

128 ibid, p.16.

129 e-mail exchange with Janne Junttila 14.2.2016

130 Janne Junttila, Dokumenttiteatterin Uusi Aalto, p.27.

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Community theatre is based on the philosophy of education theorist Paulo Freire's approach to critical pedagogy in theatre and on implementation techniques built by Augusto Boal. His production became known as Theatre of the Oppressed.131 It is a form of participatory art genre, in which the audience is engaged directly in the creative process, allowing them to become co-authors, editors, and observers of the work simultaneously.132 Both forms of art, documentary theatre and participatory art, were developed in Europe during the years following the Bolshevik Revolution. Participatory art emerged the second time in the 1960’s in such forms as Fluxus happenings and of constructed situations by Situationist International – the same time Cheeseman began his experiments of verbatim theatre in the U.K. The third wave of participatory art began in the Eastern Europe after the fall of communism - again, timing went hand in hand with the documentary theatre.133 It thus seems that the common nominators here are social movement and protest.

Claire Bishop has written a critical text on participatory art called Artificial Hells (2012), leading the reader through the history of the art-form, and covering a large scope of participatory art activities, including recent practices: the shift in the art has taken place from a crowd (1910’s) to the masses (1920’s), to the people (1960’s-70’s), to the excluded (1980’s), to community (1990’s), to today’s volunteers whose participation is continuous with a culture of reality television and social networking.134 Bishop has also found out that the main thesis of participatory art is one of negation: Activation of the audience in participatory art is positioned against its mythic counterpart, passive spectatorial consumption. Participation thus forms part of a larger narrative that traverses modernity: ‘art must be directed against contemplation, against spectatorship, against the passivity of the masses paralyzed by the spectacle of modern life’.135

Arjen Kuvat (Everyday Life)136, an art project in which I took part throughout 2016, was a part of a wider sociological study on growing inequality in Finland. Besides photography, or artistic approach, the project used journalistic material and interviews with individuals to map out the

131 Community Theatre, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_theatre (13.05.2017)

132 Participatory Art, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_art (13.05.2017)

133 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells - Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, London, 2012. PDF p. 4

134 ibid, p. 277

135 ibid, p. 275

136 Arjen Kuvat / Everyday Life, https://www.arjenkuvat.fi

!57 / 85! post-documentary documentary spectacle inequality. There were ten photographers (both professional and amateurs) chosen from the applications sent to The Photographic Artists’ Association. A workshop was run regularly throughout the project, facilitating us on what to photograph and how to photograph it, and in the end to help us to choose the photographs to be submitted to the project. There is a plan to have an exhibition and to publish a book of the results: close to 400 rather powerful images of the Finnish reality. Also, the journalistic partner of the project, Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest daily paper in Finland, is supposed to promote our efforts.

Erving Goffman proposes that when an individual appears before others his actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have. The expectations imagined by the others greatly affect the role that the individual takes. Sometimes the change in the role of the individual could be even an unconscious act, or that an often performed public role becomes a permanent one, a constructed personality of the individual.137 Therefore, what comes to my photographs where I am performing my everyday life in front of my camera, my performance may be adjusted to present myself in a certain light to the others and perhaps to myself as well - unconsciously.

Everybody wants to be famous for at least fifteen minutes, Andy Warhol announced long before the age of internet. Today, appearing for the others is easier than ever. The Spectacle, in the form of social media, has trained us all to manipulate our public image while satisfying our narcissistic need for publicity. Since doing something uniquely great is difficult, one could do easier by performing something uniquely embarrassing. The desperation for attention becomes embodied in reality TV: just think of the BB-House participants who are encouraged to do almost anything – who are doing almost anything – to make it to the front-page.

The reward of the afore mentioned photography project, besides the workshop education and financial compensation and possible publicity as an artist, was to stop and to look at my own life, to evaluate the values and people and material that either make it, or make it not, worth living. But wouldn’t it be quite natural to present one’s self in a better light instead of a worse one, considering the large publicity estimated for the project – or simply as a protective measure for one’s own

137 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, Monograph No. 2, 1956. PDF p.155

!58 / 85! post-documentary documentary spectacle sanity? On the other hand, the workshop facilitators as well as I may have been picking up such photographs that fit to the purpose best, photographs that capture attention.

Objectivity is a challenge, even when capturing snapshots of our own lives. Therefore, I had to discuss this with the owners of the project to clear out my confusion not only on objectivity but also on the differences of our project from participatory photography projects since “participatory” has been recently adapted (rather falsely) to many practices that bring people together in art- and social context.

Lisa Söderlund, a doctoral student currently preparing her PhD thesis on participatory photography for Aalto University in Helsinki, noted that all of us, the photographers in the project, were independent artists. We were not participating in bringing up any particular question regarding our lives that needed to be addressed in photography and to present it to the decision-makers to have it fixed. Even if we were taking part in research, and thus loosely tied to the research-question of rising inequality in Finland and she was partly using her experiences from running participatory photography projects, we had our artistic freedom in representational aspect – thus, the “creative treatment of actuality” was perfectly allowed. Also, we were not considered an oppressed and quiet marginal group – even though artists in many ways are marginal. Söderlund sees that our project is closer to documentary theatre than (participatory) community theatre with an aim to produce individual works (of which some were rather conceptual) around the single theme of everyday and to present them to the public. A collective, single voice was neither a requirement nor a result here; the result was more of a polyphony. She added that when talking about objectivity in pure participatory photography, we were talking about the subject’s personal view of his/her life. One may inspect one’s own life from a distance, as an object, to learn to answer questions independently. Nevertheless the objectivity is scarcely fulfilled.138

In going back to Janne Junttila’s book on documentary theatre, there is a mention from a guide to radio-documentary (Junttila is also a radio-journalist); Presenting facts in a chain is not “truthful”. One has to find in the subject the hidden, the allegorical content, the symbolic level, the general, the

138 e-mail exchange with the project owners Lisa Söderlund and Ida Pimenoff, 19.-21.5.2017

!59 / 85! post-documentary documentary spectacle level of myths and archetypes.139 And when speaking of truthfulness, Ann Deavere Smith speaks to Junttila in an interview about Bertol Brecht’s gestus, a credible, simple action or gesture that tells about the person’s social status, or the way of speaking – something that Smith herself uses when creating her documentary theatre plays.140 The gestus allows her not simply to act, but to mimic - to incarnate the personalities on stage.141 Gestus seems to bear some similarity to Roland Barthes’s punctum142 or air143 in photographs, or possibly even more to the third meaning144 which he found in Eisenstein film stills, even if the latter three could not be necessarily found in movement but in the stills. The third meaning is a feature of, or an expression, on face, a way to holding fingers, something similar to a halted gestus.

Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography that for Balzac, the spirit of an entire milieu could be disclosed by a single material detail, however paltry or arbitrary-seeming. The whole of a life may be summed up in a momentary appearance. [Balzac’s] supposedly realistic theory claims that a person is an aggregate of appearances, which can be made to yield infinite layers of significance.145 She is at once the embodiment and interpretation of her lodging-house, as surely as her lodging- house implies the existence of its mistress. You can no more imagine the one without the other, than you can think of a jail without a turnkey. The unwholesome corpulence of the little woman is produced by the life she leads, just as typhus fever is bred in the tainted air of a hospital. The very knitted woollen petticoat that she wears beneath a skirt made of an old gown, with the wadding protruding through the rents in the material, is a sort of epitome of the sitting-room, the dining-room, and the little garden; it discovers the cook, it foreshadows the lodgers—the picture of the house is completed by the portrait of its mistress.146

Barthes, a writer who must have been familiar with the both, Brecht and Balzac, says that it is on the level of the third meaning where the filmic emerges, and where the language and metalanguage

139 Janne Junttila, Dokumenttiteatterin Uusi Aalto, p.30.

140 ibid, p.114.

141 ibid, p.126.

142 Barthes, Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, New York, 1994. p.27

143 ibid, p.109.

144 see Roland Barthes, The Third Meaning - research notes on Eisenstein stills. PDF

145 Susan Sontag, On Photography, p.159

146 Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot, translated by Ellen Marriage. iBook

!60 / 85! post-documentary documentary spectacle end – something that can’t be expressed in words – contributing to experiencing the super- illusion147, seeing (or rather, sensing) the reality in its mute bareness (for Marpa, the death is no longer illusion, but the death of his son has made death a super-illusion). One comes to think that maybe, then, super-illusion is the truth (however subjective) of that what is shown in the picture.

For Micheal Fried, the seeing functions in both directions between the subject and the object, as he formulated already in 1967 in his controversial essay Art and Objecthood and in his later works defining his concepts of theatricality and absorption. Jong Chul Choi explains the connection of seeing between the subject and the object as follows: [Michael] Fried’s theoretical frameworks often involve the dynamics of “to see” and “to be seen.” To see is, by extension, to acknowledge a specific physical relation between the beholding subject and the object of beholding. It is moreover an action controlled by a conscious motivation. Thus, a work in this category of “to see” is often rendered theatrical… On the contrary, “to be seen” is an unconscious action and the other’s business. To be seen is to stand within the unknown relation (unknown time and space), and thus an object in this unknown distance does not care much about what happens to beholders. This indifference and passivity rather secure the object’s ontological independency (or autonomy), regardless of terms and conditions under which it is shown. There might be a beholder, but since an art in this category does not pay any attention to the beholder, it is something more than just simple theatrical (literal) presence; its presence becomes persistent in time and space.148

Michael Fried writes, in his book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, about Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Luc Delahaye, and many other contemporary photographers who are producing large format photographs and whose subjects in photographs are so deeply absorbed in their own world that they appear to exist on a totally different ontological terrain from beholders. Fried is explaining the tableau form by citing Jean-Francois Chevrier: Their images are not mere prints - mobile, manipulable sheets that are framed and mounted on a wall for the duration of an exhibition and go back into their boxes afterward. They are designed and produced for the wall, summoning a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with the habitual processes of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images are normally received and “consumed”… …There is a return to classical compositional forms, along with borrowings from the history of modern and premodern painting, but that movement is mediatized by the use of extra-painterly

147 On the buddhist text on Camera Lucida’s fourth cover of the original French version. Marjaana Kella, Käännöksiä, p.229.

148 Jong Chul Choi, Representing The Unrepresentable: Ethics Of Photography In Post-Photographic Era, p.144

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models, heterogenous with canonical art history - models from sculpture, cinema, or philosophical analysis.149

To define the tableau form better, Fried notes that "photographers who consider themselves artists can no longer merely 'take' pictures; they must cause them to exist, concretely, give them the weight and gravity within an actualized perceptual space of an 'object of thought'."150 Also, the anti- theatrical absorption mentioned before is an important factor here. For example, Jeff Wall produces pictures in which (photographed) figures appear not be “acting out” their world, only “being in” it.151 This mode is absorptive – in other words, anti-theatrical, objects are “to be seen”. But it is unlikely that the person pictured in the images wouldn’t have noticed being photographed. a moment’s reflection (about a model’s complete absorption, his unawareness to the presence of the photographer) is unlikely, both because the depicted situation appears patently staged, and because the conspicuousness of the apparatus of display suggests a comparable conspicuousness of the photographic apparatus as such.152

The picture discussed above is Jeff Wall’s Adrian Walker, Artist, Drawing From a Specimen in a Laboratory in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1992.

Transparency in lightbox. 119x164cm (page 69). Wall calls this photograph half-documentary, because the situation is real, the person actually is called Adrian Walker, and he was not doing anything that he wouldn’t normally do there in the laboratory. The actual moment, where Walker is contemplating the final form of his drawing in comparison to the specimen, happened. However, the moment depicted was a reenactment of that precise earlier moment for the photography.

I can see that Wall’s Adrian Walker looks similar to Vermeer’s Milkmaid (page 67): they both document an authentic-looking environment and -situation, in which a lonely character is absorbed in his/her own world, doing something that seems natural in the context of the highly detailed space around them. Also, the proximity to the subjects depicted gives a feeling of proximity, though not in the same world. However, Vermeer’s painting is still a painting even if a detailed one. It is also much smaller than Wall’s photograph. Encountering Milkmaid is an intimate process (page 68),

149 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008. p.143

150 ibid, p.146

151 ibid, p.38

152 ibid, p.41

!62 / 85! post-documentary documentary spectacle completely different from that with Adrian Walker. The tableau-format with all its near life-size details simply works more effectively while forcing one to contemplate it from greater distance.

It goes without saying that a tableau is big in size. Andreas Gursky’s pictures are often over 2x3m, and his Hong Kong Stock Exchange diptych (1994) has two frames of 191x263.5cm each.153 Yet there are more interesting features in Gursky’s work than these numbers. Similarly to Wall, the characters of Gursky are absorbed in their own world as being unaware of neither the photographer nor the viewer.154 But the world that Gursky shows is a far-away world, the people there are much smaller (further away from the camera) than those of Wall’s. I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world, Gursky himself has said.155 This means that also us, the spectators, are standing at a distance, yet being able to study the rich details of a photographic image without being part of the world it depicts. This makes us, what else than, outsiders – dropouts of a sort. Further, another important feature in Gursky’s pictures is the essence of globalisation, which is evoked through various local manifestations.156

Luc Delahaye, a war photographer for Newsweek and an ex-member of Magnum, seeks subjects of a sort that would ordinarily belong to his earlier practice as a photojournalist: dead soldiers, landscapes that are being bombed, refugee camps, court scenes, UN Security Council and other important meetings. Since 2001 he has turned to producing tableau-size panoramas that were originally called History. Instead of using hand-held camera to capture fractions of news-making situations as the photojournalistic norm goes, he began to carry heavy, large-format cameras to include more scene before him and at the same time to capture more visual information.157

Besides bearing many similarities, like anti-theatricality and size, to the works of Wall, Gursky and the other photographers mentioned in Fried’s book, there is something unique in Delahaye’s approach. The late Portfolio magazine from 2004 finds that in many ways his approach seems to be

153 ibid, p.170

154 ibid, p.173

155 ibid, p.162

156 ibid, p.174

157 ibid, p.182-183

!63 / 85! post-documentary documentary spectacle similar to that of Gursky’s, yet they are also made strange by their dislocation from the messages and polemics of the news media. Despite the fact that they are all made in response to real events, these photographs are given the order and control and fictionality associated with the tableau.158 Also Fried finds Delahaye’s approach different from Gursky’s; […]aspiring in the end to yield an imaginative experience nearly like a merger with the world – an aspiration that may well strike a wholly original note in contemporary photography.159 One needs to know how Delahaye works to fully understand the difference. Let Delahaye explain himself: I don’t intrude in the image, I let the viewer take control, interpret, or be ‘taken’ by the image.160 I want to show the event at the very moment it takes place. My body must be anchored to the ground and to seek the best point of view, without any visual taboos. But then, at the heart of the event, my effort is to disappear, I introduce a distance that borders on indifference. The visual result translates a more essential presence to things and to the world. In the being transparent, I reduce the distance between the event and the spectator. I’ve always worked that way, but in an intuitive way. With History I formalize that process.161

Bill Nichols makes a claim that the ‘institutionalisation of the news media has marginalised personal response.’ News is often reported in such a way it ‘often seems to bear the sign of a lack, a lack of human response to the events that unfold so that others, viewers, may see, witness, and experience what someone else reports dispassionately…’162

Thus, the aspiration that Fried talks about may be related to associating Delahaye’s work with the spectacle and the suffering offered us daily in the news media along a full transcript. Here, the wider world in Delahaye’s pictures is completely still and mute, not only allowing but forcing us to contemplate its details to make sense of it by ourselves (as proposed earlier at the end of chapter IV).

158 Mark Durden on Luc Delahaye, Portfolio Magazine 39, Portfolio Photography Workshop, Edinburgh, June 2004. p.14

159 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, p.187

160 Mark Durden, Portfolio Magazine 39, p.15

161 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, p.187

162 Mark Durden, Portfolio Magazine 39, p.14

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Delahaye’s approach is different also from Wall’s anti-theatricality, but resulting in the same anti- theatrical effect. The difference with their work sets the approach. Delahaye can’t spend time rehearsing with his personages, nor could he ask the scenes to be re-enacted, thus he must become “transparent” on the spot as soon as he reaches it. Therefore, the absorption found in Delahaye’s pictures is more authentic, a result of his own invisibility, against Wall’s meticulously rehearsed indifference to the seen (Fried has also called this rehearsed absorption supreme fiction).163 Even though Wall’s photographs are masterfully staged reality that please the art-lovers eye, they might be even too perfect. The perfectness may hint about theatricality. For a commoner, Delahaye’s photographs are more interesting, since they are appealing to everyone’s hunger for real events.

The need for reality is well explained by Nietzsche, while searching an explanation of the tragic effect which could justify it on the basis of artistic conditions: That pathological purgation, the catharsis of Aristotle, which the philologists are uncertain whether to count a medical or a moral phenomenon, brings to mind a remarkable feeling of Goethe’s. “Without a lively pathological interest,” he says, “I have also never succeeded in working on any kind of tragic situation, and therefore I have preferred to avoid it rather than seek it out. Could it perhaps be the case that among the merits of the ancients the highest degree of the pathetic was also only aesthetic play for them, while with us the truth of nature must be there as well, in order for such a work to be produced?” 164

Take a look at Delahaye’s Kabul Road (page 70), for example. There in the picture, some of the men are looking towards the photographer, but not exactly into the camera. They seem rather indifferent about being photographed, even though they seem to be looking at Delahaye, or rather, at something else behind the camera than at us. They are to be seen, instead of seeing, since there is something else at their feet (two dead bodies) that should be more important than the posing for the photographer. Yet, the dead bodies seem to evoke even less emotion in them than that of being photographed. Contemplating the picture gives us a feeling of not being present, and what we are seeing is the world as if it existed without us – this is awakening melancholy that could possibly contribute to Fried’s claim for the aspiration to merger with the world, perhaps in order to deliver the lacking human response.

163 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. PDF p.103.

164 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated by Ian Johnston Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, 2008 (1872). PDF p.77

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It looks like recent photographic art, of which Wall, Gursky and Delahaye represent a rich sample with their individually unique approaches, delivers an answer to – or better, frees themselves from – the concerns of documentary photography: the moral and ethics set by Susan Sontag in On Photography, asking what institutions they buttress, whose needs they really serve165 and in Regarding the Pain of Others166 where she has accused the media exploiting and re-victimising the victims and the questions of authenticity and documentary’s death, especially due to digital manipulation, discussed in Martha Rosler’s Post-documentary – Post-photography?167 Documentary art, when hung on a museum wall (despite Sontag's doubts regarding museums)168, is also letting itself free from the burden of the regime of truth, which controls the context that normally accompanies pictures in news media. This is especially clear in Delahaye’s case.

In an attempt to make some sense of the events, photographers are tracing the traces of an event, just like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of fossils are fossils of fossils of things. Any spectacular event itself, or closeup photographs of suffering individuals in the heart of a catastrophe, are hardly sufficient images to tell much about the lasting effects of the event to come. It takes some distance to see these consequences clearly, and it takes time to make and match to approximate the truth. Thus, we could call the new documentary, which focuses on making representations of the aftermaths of events and hung on the museum wall, post-documentary.169

165 Susan Sontag, On Photography, p.178

166 see Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003.

167 see Martha Rosler, Post-documentary – Post-photography? in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001, 2004.

168 Certain photographs - emblems of suffering… can be used like memento mori, as objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality; as secular icons, if you will. But that would seem to demand the equivalent of a sacred or meditative space in which to look at them. Space reserved for being serious is hard to com by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum). Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2003. iBook, chapter 9

169 See Jong Chul Choi, Representing The Unrepresentable: Ethics Of Photography In Post-Photographic Era, footnote 11, p.16

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Johannes Vermeer The Milkmaid (c. 1657-1658), 45,5x41cm

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Vermeer’s Milkmaid in The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (20.09.2015)

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Jeff Wall, Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in a laboratory in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (1992), 119x164cm

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Luc Delahaye, Kabul Road (2001), 110x240cm

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conclusions

Documentary and truth are often understood as synonyms, but in reality, they both are the most argued concepts. We cannot reach the truth because we cannot even agree about its definition. So, how could we use the truth in connection to define documentary?

The history of science has proved that many theories about our universe, previously thought as truths, have been proven untrue. However, these theories are contributing to the process of making and matching to find more accurate representations. Understanding the vulnerability of any theory, using the concept of truthlikeness instead of truth, has become a common practice in science.

While there are fewer attempts to apply truthlikeness to the subjects of humanities, some comparison has been made. Here, it is not about the numerical calculation of truthlikeness, but about understanding the concept, which possibly aids in a deeper appreciation of such subjects as documentary truth.

In today’s world we are facing an ever increasing flow of information, images and text. Truths and lies – opinions, facts, non-fiction and fiction – are mixed in arguments that want to shape our decisions. Emotion, instead of intellect, is the driving force packed in the images that are fed to us by the spectacle. The flow of information we receive via various channels – newspapers, TV, internet news, social media, outdoor media – is like a tsunami drowning our rational thinking.

The era of post-truth clearly shows that not just the truth, but photography and documentary in general are in crises that seem to be their deepest after the WWII. The financial crises, the refugees, the populist politics, everything seems to be interconnected, yet it is hard to see the big picture. There is very little we can do about it, unless we choose to totally close ourselves from the outside world. Yet, as Guy Debord proposes, we can still strike back using the strategy of détournement: using the spectacle’s means against itself.

!71 / 85! conclusions documentary spectacle

Truthlikeness has its connection in both Platonic and the Aristotelian dramatic theories of mimesis: the imitation or representation of nature. For a piece of art to hold significance or persuasion for an audience, according to Aristotle, it must have grounding in reality. The grounding in reality is obvious in connection to documentary theatre. Mixing reality with documentary theatre’s artistic freedom to make the play interesting as a work of art, explains much of its contemporary popularity.

Not just truthlikeness, but some other terms trying to explain how we experience reality, pop up frequently in my reading. As already mentioned, Brechtian gestus seems very similar to Barthesian air or the third meaning, the same as Balzacian momentary appearance, again contributing to Buddhist super-illusion. Gestus could also be compared to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment – the very moment when all the elements of the picture are positioned correctly – but on the scale of a human body. In drawing the equation further, we see that the Platonian shadows and Rousseaunian representation lends to Debordian images. Michael Fried talks about theatricality and absorption in art, and this all makes sense also in connection to representations of the spectacle: transparency is important; in being in one’s own world and to be seen instead of seeing creates the sense of the authenticity of something that a critical mind could label as true. I don’t believe that this similarity is accidental; there is a common idea behind each of them, adding to our own understanding of truth.

Reality outplays fiction, said Philip Roth fifty years ago. Our hunger for reality comes evident when non-fiction is exposed as fiction - a biography that turns out to be not true won’t sell, however interesting the story. Yet, documentary is tied to the Griersonian creative treatment of actuality. To overcome the questions of the creative treatment, there are proposals of classifying documentary by its own intention and by the community’s dedication to truth-telling and the discourse on standards as well as by the community’s ability to distinguish between truths and lies with the help of criticism and history, instead of by its style.

Another burden introduced to documentary is related to the regime of truth, which controls the circulation of documentary material, and chooses the context it will be implied to or used for. While it is true that we should pay more attention to the photograph’s ethics and policies, I find that the

!72 / 85! conclusions documentary spectacle ontological arguments are equally related to the question of the photograph’s use in the discourse on its ability to disclose worldhood while documenting reality, similarly to Vermeer’s paintings.

A new kind of photographic art, addressing the questions of documentary’s moral, ethics, objectivity and authenticity, has recently emerged. In setting the anti-theatrical performance against the backdrop of an actual event, the art intends to represent a truthlike narrative about the fate of individuals in their actual world. Unlike Michael Moore’s rather careless and comic self-reflexivity, it is using our sensibility to aesthetics and simplified representation of reality to make its point.

This “late photography” is not the trace of an event, but the trace of the trace of an event. However, unlike creating a copy of a copy of a copy… beyond recognition, the process is strictly controlled, aiming at doing exactly the opposite: by not taking but by making photographs that match reality it intends to represent our actual world in more graspable form, even if the representation is idealised and/or abstracted. Such documentary, focusing on the representation of aftermath of events, and hung on the museum wall, is called post-documentary. Considering its many similarities to documentary theatre – grounded in reality but welcoming the creative treatment – I propose to call it documentary spectacle.

While my thesis demonstrates the complexity of finding the right answers about our world, and sheds some light on the concept of truthlikeness and its possible use in evaluating post- documentary’s potential in representing reality, it would be foolish to think that the work is done. My introduction to truthlikeness in post-documentary photography leaves a generous amount of possibilities for further research, not to mention that there is still little consensus on what constitutes the best approach to the logical problem of truthlikeness itself. I must also emphasise that the term post-documentary, as proposed by Choi and as used in my thesis, is yet somewhat biased. The "one more thing" that deserves attention is whether the public sees post-documentary as non-fiction or fiction — it has one's say in the theoretical discourse on documentary truth.

!73 / 85! conclusions documentary spectacle

list of literature

Alpers, Svetlana The Art of Describing - Dutch Art in the Seventieth Century, University of Chicago Press, 1984. Balzac, Honore de Father Goriot, translated by Ellen Marriage. iBook Barthes, Roland Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, New York, 1994 (1981). Barthes, Roland The Third Meaning - research notes on Eisenstein stills. PDF Baxandall, Michael Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: a primer in the social history of pictorial style, Oxford University Press, 1972. PDF Benson, Thomas W. Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary, Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee (eds), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2015. iBook Berger, John Toisinkertoja, (a collection of essays on photographs translated by Martti Lintunen), Literos Oy, 1987. Bishop, Claire Artificial Hells - Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, London, 2012. PDF Chakravartty, Anjan Truth and Representation in Science: Two Inspirations from Art, in Beyond Mimesis and Convention - Representation in Art and Science, Roman Frigg and Matthew C. Hunter (Ed.), Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg, London, 2010. PDF Choi, Jong Chul Representing The Unrepresentable: Ethics Of Photography In Post- Photographic Era – Post-Documentary Of Luc Delahaye, Walid Raad (The Atlas Group) And Aernout Mik. A doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Florida, 2012. PDF Debord, Guy Society of The Spectacle, Bread and Circuses Publishing, 1977 (1967). iBook Demos, TJ Vitamin Ph, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2006. Durden, Mark Luc Delahaye, in Portfolio Magazine 39, Portfolio Photography Workshop, Edinburgh, June 2004. Eco, Umberto Kant and the Platypus, A Harvest Book Harcourt, Inc. 1999. iBook Eitzen, Dirk When is Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception, CinemaJournal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995. PDF Elkins, James Photography Theory, Routledge, New York, 2007.

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Foucault, Michel This is Not a Pipe, University of California Press, Ltd, London, 1983. PDF Fried, Michael Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980. PDF Fried, Michael Art and Objecthood, 1967. PDF Fried, Michael Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008. Goffman, Erving The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, Monograph No. 2, 1956. PDF

Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion, Princeton University Press, 1960. PDF Han-Pile, Béatrice Describing Reality or Disclosing Worldhood? Vermeer and Heidegger. University of Essex Philosophy Department. draft. PDF Heidegger, Martin The Origin of the Work of Art, 1950. Translated by Roger Berkowitz and Philippe Nonet. Draft, December 2006. PN revised. PDF Johansson, Ingvar In Defense of the Notion of Truthlikeness, Springer Science+Business Media, Dordrecht, 2016. Junttila, Janne Dokumenttiteatterin Uusi Aalto, Like Kustannus Oy, Helsinki, 2012. Kella, Marjaana Käännöksiä, doctoral dissertation, Unigrafia Oy, Helsinki, 2014. Koenig, Patrizia Progress in Arts & Science - Exploring E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) in Relation to the Philosophy of Science, University College Maastricht, December 9, 2012. iBook Kratochvil, Antonin Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, Nieman Reports / Fall 2001. PDF Newhall, Beaumont The History of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005. Nichols, Bill Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001. PDF Nietzsche, Friedrich The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated by Ian Johnston Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, 2008 (1872). PDF Plantinga, Carl R. Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film, Cambridge University Press, 1997. iBook Rosler, Martha Post-documentary - Post-photography in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001. PDF

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Schapiro, Martin The Still Life as a Personal Object - A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh, in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 1968. PDF Schapiro, Martin Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh, in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 1994. PDF Schirato, Tony Reading the Visual, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2004. PDF Sontag, Susan On Photography. Penguin Books, 1979. Sontag, Susan Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2003. iBook Szarkowski, John The Photographer’s Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007. Tagg, John The Burden of Representation, University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Taylor, Charles Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2004. iBook Waltari, Mika Totuus Virosta, Latviasta ja Liettuasta. Third edition, WS Bookwell Oy, Juva, 2008 (1941). Wilson, George M. Narrative, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003.

!76 / 85! web-articles documentary spectacle

web-articles

Correspondence theory, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_theory_of_truth (24.01.2017) Deflationary theory, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflationary_theory_of_truth (24.01.2017) Density of Decision: Greenberg with Robert Adams, NonSite.org http://nonsite.org/article/density-of-decision (02.05.2017) Donald Trump pyrkii valehtelemalla presidentiksi ja saattaa onnistua siinä, HS Kuukausiliite 6/2016 http://www.hs.fi/kuukausiliite/art-2000002904442.html (17.01.2017) Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All, The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all (04.02.2017) Epistemic theories, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_theories_of_truth (24.01.2017) Everybody Loves Donald, Politico European edition http://www.politico.eu/article/everybody-loves-donald-trump-europe/ (03.02.2017) Five Myths about Economic Inequality in America, Cato Institute https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/five-myths-about-economic-inequality-america (05.01.2017) Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/13603aa2-0185-11e6-ac98-3c15a1aa2e62 (24.01.2017) Lie to Me: Fiction in the Post-Truth Era, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/15/books/lie-to-me-fiction-in-the-post-truth-era.html (04.02.2017) Michael Hudson on debt deflation, the rentier economy, and the coming financial cold war, Naked Capitalism http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-hudson-on-debt-deflation-the-rentier- economy-and-the-coming-financial-cold-war.html (05.01.2017) Mysteries of Dutch Painting by Ernst Gombrich, The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/11/10/mysteries-of-dutch-painting/ (22.04.2017)

!77 / 85! web-articles documentary spectacle

Nan Goldin by Stephen Westfall, BOMB http://bombmagazine.org/article/1476/nan-goldin (26.04.2017) Perspectivist views, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_theories_of_truth#Perspectivist_views (28.01.2017) Piketty on menneisyyttä. Tulevaisuudessa palkansaajien valta kasvaa taas, Helsingin Sanomat http://www.talouselama.fi/uutiset/piketty-on-menneisyytta-tulevaisuudessa-palkansaajien-valta- kasvaa-taas-3486631 (04.01.2017) Possible Worlds, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/ (28.01.2017)

Propaganda, Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda (07.04.2017) Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/07/robert-frank-americans-photography- influence-shadows (25.04.2017) Rorschach test, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test (05.02.2017) Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Storm:_Steam-Boat_off_a_Harbour%27s_Mouth (05.02.2017) Suomiu rašitojo tiesos zodis apie sovietine Baltijos šalių okupaciją, Parlamento Studijos http://www.parlamentostudijos.lt/Recenzijos/2006/Truska06.htm (21.01.2017) Talous Tiikerin Selässä, Suomen Kuvalehti https://suomenkuvalehti.fi/digilehti/232016/talous-tiikerin-selassa (24.01.2017) Talousguru Thomas Piketty: Koroilla elävä eliitti ottaa vallan, Helsingin Sanomat http://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/kirja-arvostelu/art-2000002730368.html (11.01.2017) The American Snapshot, MoMa Exhibition Catalogue https://www.moma.org/d/c/exhibition_catalogues/ W1siZiIsIjMwMDI5NDIxMSJdLFsicCIsImVuY292ZXIiLCJ3d3cubW9tYS5vcmcvY2FsZW5kY XIvZXhoaWJpdGlvbnMvMjMxNiIsImh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm1vbWEub3JnL2NhbGVuZGFyL2V 4aGliaXRpb25zLzIzMTY%2FbG9jYWxlPWVuIiwiaSJdXQ.pdf?sha=9f43c445a036c531 (26.04.2017) The Big Lie, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie (05.01.2017) The Civil Contract of Photography and The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, caa.reviews http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1446#.WOW94VIRq2w (06.04.2017)

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The Fiction of Memory, The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/books/review/Sante-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (04.02.2017) The Opposite of Carnage, NY Times http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com (24.01.2017) The Purpose of Photography in a Post-Truth Era, Time Magazine http://time.com/4650956/photojournalism-post-truth/ (04.02.2017) Trump breaks precedent by blessing the whole world, Politico http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/trump-syria-precedent-blesses-world-236977 (07.04.2017) Trump-ilmiö voi tapahtua myös Suomessa, Suomen Kuvalehti http://suomenkuvalehti.fi/americana/trump-ilmio-voi-tapahtua-myos-suomessa/? shared=3002-11814274-4 (05.01.2017) Trump’s Lies vs. Your Brain, Politico Magazine http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658 (27.05.2017) Trump’s Syria Whiplash, Politico Magazine http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/trumps-syria-whiplash-214997 (07.04.2017) Truth, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/ (24.01.2017) Truthlikeness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truthlikeness/#LikProTru (21.01.2017) Verisimilitude, Oxford Dictionary https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/verisimilitude (19.01.2017) Vermeer and the Camera Obscura, BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/vermeer_camera_01.shtml (20.04.2017) Was John Szarkowski the most influential person in the 20th century photography?, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jul/20/john-szarkowski-photography-moma (02.05.2017) Writing American Fiction, Commentary Magazine https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/writing-american-fiction/ (04.02.2017)

!79 / 85! summary documentary spectacle

summary

Documentary and truth are often understood as synonyms, but in reality, they both are the most argued concepts. We cannot reach the truth because we cannot even agree about its definition. So, how could we use the truth in connection to define documentary? This is one of the questions that led to the crisis of documentary and is the main question in my thesis. While the crises may be over, the discussion continues. Continuation is natural since not only the practices but the definitions need to be updated to match the changing world; production, distribution, and consuming of photographs are being transformed greatly with the digitalisation. The discourse on documentary, photography, and truth is especially important today, in our post-truth era, when the truth is being considered of secondary importance.

In today’s world truths and lies – opinions, facts, non-fiction and fiction – are mixed in arguments that want to shape our decisions. Emotion, instead of intellect, is the driving force packed in the images that are fed to us by the spectacle. The flow of information we receive via various channels - newspapers, TV, internet news, social media, outdoor media - is like a tsunami drowning our rational thinking. There is no definition, no formula to which the news stream could be forced on. FAKE NEWS! We must filtrate spam, use our knowledge of history and cross-reference the flood of information to estimate which particular story is true. The alternative realities offered us on silver plate are easier to digest, aren’t they? If to take Aynrandian objectivism seriously, we are very much alone with the decision while pursuing our happiness. Yet, it shouldn’t necessarily be like that.

My study includes nine topics, which are presented as separate essays. It is not possible to consider these topics, within the given space, from every point of view. I have chosen to write broadly about the issues that are closest to my own heart, instead of concentrating on only some of the them in greater depth. Thus, the overall picture in the thesis is a documentary of a kind, looking at the world from afar and from my point of view.

!80 / 85! summary documentary spectacle

The history of science has proved that many theories about our universe, previously thought as truths, have been proven untrue. However, these theories are contributing to the process of making and matching to find more accurate representations. Understanding the vulnerability of any theory, using the concept of truthlikeness (or, verisimilitude) in science, instead of truth, has become a common practice. While there are fewer attempts to apply truthlikeness to humanities, some comparison has been made. Here, it is not about the numerical calculation of truthlikeness but about understanding of the concept, which possibly aids in a deeper evaluation of such subjects as documentary truth.

Truthlikeness has its connection to Platonic and the Aristotelian dramatic theories of mimesis, the imitation or representation of nature. For a piece of art to hold significance or persuasion for an audience, according to Aristotle, it must have grounding in reality. This grounding in reality is obvious in connection to documentary theatre, which intends to be art for the people. Mixing reality with documentary theatre’s artistic freedom – to make the play interesting as a work of art – explains much of its contemporary popularity.

For a long time photographs have been considered an effective tool in spreading reliable information. While technological advancement has made it easier than ever to manipulate the photographic reality, photographs are still considered a proof of truth. But, thinking logically, any picture alone is worthless evidence. It requires accompanying words to become as such - one has to claim that something has been, and that that something is shown in the photograph, which is true to its subject. Another burden to documentary is related to Michel Foucault’s the regime of truth, which controls the circulation of documentary material, and chooses the context it will be implied to or used for. While it is true that we should pay more attention on photograph’s ethics and policies, I find that the ontological arguments are important to the question of photograph’s use in documenting reality.

Reality outplays fiction, said Philip Roth fifty years ago. Our hunger for reality comes evident when non-fiction is exposed as fiction – a biography that turns out to be not true won’t sell, however interesting the story. Yet, documentary is tied to Griersonian creative treatment of actuality. To overcome the questions of the creative treatment, there are proposals of classifying documentary by

!81 / 85! summary documentary spectacle its own intention, and by community’s dedication to truth-telling and discourse on standards, as well as by community’s ability to distinguish between truths and lies with the help of criticism and history, instead of by its style.

Not just truthlikeness, but some specific terms attempting to explain how we experience reality, pop up frequently in my reading. Brechtian gestus seems very similar to Barthesian air or the third meaning, which is similar to the Balzacian momentary appearance, again contributing to Buddhist super-illusion. Gestus could also be comparable to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment – the very moment when all the elements of the picture are positioned correctly – but on the scale of a human body. In drawing equation marks further, we see that the Platonian shadows and Rousseaunian representation lends to Debordian images of the spectacle. Michael Fried talks about theatricality and absorption in art, and this all makes sense also in connection to the spectacle. This concludes that transparency is crucial; in being in one’s own world; to be seen instead of seeing creates the sense of authenticity of something that a critical mind could label as true.

A new kind of photographic art, addressing the questions of documentary’s moral, ethics, objectivity and authenticity, has recently emerged. In setting anti-theatrical performance against the backdrop of an actual event, the art is representing truthlike narratives about the fate of individuals in their actual world. Unlike Michael Moore’s rather careless and comic self-reflexivity, it is using our sensibility to aesthetics and simplified representation of reality to make its point.

This “late photography” is not the trace of an event, but the trace of the trace of an event. However, unlike creating a copy of a copy of a copy… beyond recognition, the process is strictly controlled, aiming at doing exactly the opposite: by not taking but by making photographs that match reality it intends to represent our actual world in more graspable form. Therefore, documentary photography focusing on the representation of aftermath of events, and hung on the museum wall, is called post- documentary. Considering its many similarities to documentary theatre – grounded in reality but welcoming the creative treatment – I propose to call it documentary spectacle.

!82 / 85! santrauka documentary spectacle

santrauka

Dokumentalumas ir tiesa dažnai laikomi sinonimais, bet iš tiesų tai – ginčytinos sąvokos. Mes negalime pasiekti tiesos, nes netgi negalime sutarti dėl jos apibrėžimo. Tad kaip galėtume panaudoti tiesos sąvoką dokumentalumo apibrėžimui? Tai – vienas klausimų, atvedusių į dokumentalumo krizę, taip pat tai yra pagrindinis mano darbo klausimas. Nors krizės baigiasi, diskusija tęsiasi. Tęstinumas – natūralus dalykas, nes reikia atnaujinti ne tik praktikas, bet ir sąvokas, kad jos atitiktų kintantį pasaulį. Fotografijų gamyba, sklaida ir vartojimas smarkiai pasikeitė skaitmenizacijos epochoje. Diskusijos apie dokumentalumą, fotografiją ir tiesą itin svarbios šiandien, mūsų post- tiesos laikais, kai tiesą imama laikyti antraeiliu dalyku.

Šiandienos pasaulyje tiesos ir melai – nuomonės, faktai, ne-fikcijos ir fikcijos – įmaišomi į argumentus, norint pakreipti mūsų sprendimus. Emocijos vietoje intelekto – tai į vaizdus įpakuota varomoji jėga, kurią mums sumaitina spektaklis. Mūsų gaunamos informacijos tėkmė įvairiais kanalais – per laikraščius, televiziją, internetines naujienas, socialinius tinklus – yra lyg cunamio banga, skandinanti racionalų mąstymą. Nėra apibrėžimo ar formulės, į kurią galima būtų sutalpinti naujienų srautą. NETIKROS ŽINIOS! Mes turime filtruoti tinkle siuntinėjamą informaciją, pasinaudoti istorijos žiniomis ir patikrinti nuorodas, jei norime suprasti, kuri istorija yra teisinga. Mums ant sidabrinio padėklo tiekiamos alternatyvios tikrovės lengviau virškinamos, ar ne? Jei rimtai žiūrėsime į Ayn Rand objektyvizmą, mes patys vieni sprendžiame, kaip mums tapti laimingiems. Tačiau taip nebūtinai turi būti.

Mano tyrimas apima devynias temas, kurios pristatomos kaip atskiros esė. Neįmanoma išsamiai apsvarstyti šių klausimų duotame puslapių skaičiuje. Pasirinkau kalbėti plačiai apie problemas, kurios man svarbiausios, užuot gilinęsis tik į kai kurias iš jų. Todėl bendras darbo vaizdas yra savotiška dokumentika savaip žvelgiant į pasaulį iš toli.

!83 / 85! santrauka documentary spectacle

Mokslo istorija įrodė, kad daugelis visatos teorijų, kurios anksčiau buvo laikomos tiesomis, yra neteisingos. Tačiau tos teorijos dalyvauja kūrimo ir lyginimo procese ieškant tikslesnių reprezentacijų. Dabar įprasta atsižvelgti į bet kokios teorijos pažeidžiamumą ir moksle naudoti panašumo į tiesą (ar tikroviškumo) sąvoką vietoje tiesos. Nors retai, bet mėginama taikyti panašumo į tiesą sąvoką ir humanitariniuose moksluose. Tai susiję ne tiek su panašumo į tiesą laipsnio paskaičiavimais, kiek su sąvokos supratimu – kas padės giliau suprasti tokius dalykus kaip dokumentalumo tiesa.

Panašumas į tiesą susijęs su Platono ir Aristotelio dramos teorijomis, svarstančiomis mimezę, gamtos imitaciją ar reprezentaciją. Kad meno kūrinys publikai būtų reikšmingas ar įtikinamas, anot Aristotelio, jis turi remtis realybe. Šis pagrindimas realybe yra akivaizdus dokumentiniame teatre, kurio tikslas – būti menu žmonėms. Dokumentiniame teatre, siekiant kad pjesė taptų įdomiu meno kūriniu, meninė laisvė maišoma su tikrove – tai paaiškina jo dabartinį populiarumą.

Ilgai fotografijos buvo laikomos efektyviais patikimos informacijos skleidimo įrankiais. Nors technologinės pažangos dėka tapo lengviau manipuliuoti fotografine tikrove, fotografijos vis dar laikomos tiesos įrodymais. Tačiau logiškai mąstant, bet koks vienas atvaizdas yra bevertis įrodymas. Kad tokiu taptų, jam reikia lydinčių žodžių – kažkas turi teigti, jog kažkas buvo, ir kad tas kažkas yra parodytas objekto neiškraipančioje fotografijoje. Kita dokumentalumo prievolė yra susijusi su Michelio Foucault tiesos režimu, kuris kontroliuoja dokumentinės medžiagos cirkuliaciją ir parenka panaudojimo kontekstą. Nors ir tiesa, kad turėtume kreipti daugiau dėmesio į fotografijos etiką ir politiką, manau, kad ontologiniai argumentai yra svarbūs kalbant apie tai, kaip fotografija pasitelkiama dokumentuojant tikrovę.

Tikrovė apžaidžia fikciją, pasakė Philipas Rothas prieš penkiasdešimt metų. Mūsų tikrovės geismas tampa akivaizdus, kai ne-fikcija demaskuojama kaip fikcija – biografijos, kuri paaiškėja besanti netiesa, niekas nepirks, kokia bebūtų įdomi istorija. Tačiau dokumentalumas susijęs su Griersono požiūriu į aktualybę. Apeinant kūrybinės raiškos klausimus, siūloma klasifikuoti dokumentinius kūrinius pagal jų intencijas, bendruomenės pasišventimą tiesosakai ir standartų diskursą, taip pat pagal bendruomenės gebėjimą skirti tiesą ir melą pasitelkiant kritiką ir istoriją, užuot tai darius remiantis stiliumi.

!84 / 85! santrauka documentary spectacle

Mano skaitiniuose dažnai šmėkščioja ne tik „panašumas į tiesą“, bet ir specifinės sąvokos, kuriomis mėginama paaiškinti, kaip mes patiriame tikrovę. Brechto gestus atrodo labai panašus į Barthes’o išraišką ar trečiąją prasmę, kuri panaši į Balzaco momentinį pasirodymą, o šis savo ruožtu pereina į budistinę superiliuziją. Gestus taip pat galima lyginti su Henri Cartier-Bressono lemiamu momentu – tuo momentu, kai visi vaizdo elementai išsidėsto teisingai, – bet pritaikytu žmogaus kūno masteliui. Toliau rašydami lygybės ženklus matome, kad Platono šešėliai ir Rousseau reprezentacija kai ką paskolina Debord’o spektaklio vaizdams. Michaelas Friedas kalba apie teatrališkumą ir absorbciją mene, o tai galima suprasti ir spektaklio kontekste. Tai leidžia daryti išvadą, kad skaidrumas yra esminis. Buvimas savo pasaulyje, buvimas matomam, užuot buvus matančiu, kelia autentiškumo jausmą – tai, ką kritiškas protas galėtų įvardyti kaip tikrą.

Neseniai atsirado nauja fotografijos meno rūšis, susijusi su dokumentalumo etikos, objektyvumo ir autentiškumo problematika. Naudodami antiteatrališkumo metodą tikrų įvykių fone menininkai sukuria panašų į tiesą naratyvą apie individų likimus jų pačių tikrovėje, aktualiame pasaulyje. Kitaip nei Michaelo Moore’o gana nerūpestingas ir komiškas savirefleksyvumas, ši fotografija įrodinėja savo tiesas pasinaudodama mūsų jautrumu estetikai ir supaprastinta tikrovės reprezentacija.

Ši „vėlyvoji fotografija“ yra ne įvykio pėdsakas, bet įvykio pėdsako pėdsakas. Tačiau, skirtingai nei kuriant kopijos kopijos kopiją... kol originalas tampa neatpažįstamas, šis procesas griežtai kontroliuojamas siekiant priešingo efekto: ne fotografuoti, bet kurti fotografijas, kurios apčiuopiamiau atitinka jose reprezentuojamą tikrovę, mūsų aktualų pasaulį. Todėl dokumentinė fotografija, siekianti pavaizduoti įvykių padarinius ir kabinama muziejuose ant sienų, yra vadinama postdokumentine. Turėdamas omenyje jos panašumus į dokumentinį teatrą – pagrįstą tikrove, bet priimantį kūrybines interpretacijas – galiu ją taip pat pavadinti dokumentiniu spektakliu.

!85 / 85! documentary spectacle mikko elias waltari vilnius 2017