Book as documentary

When we think about art and the word "documentary", there may be some very precise images floating into your mind: important historical events, distant places, and extreme conditions, often wartime or other political conflict. This is especially true in the case of photo books, which have a not-insignificant connection to journalistic photography as seen in magazines like Time or major newspapers. However, the way artists' books, as a slower, more individualized medium, are able to interpret and mediate these events-- as well as the ways they sometimes completely stray from the 'usual' or 'important' documentary subject matter-- creates a completely different impression of these events, the places they're happening in, and the people involved.

One element that artists' books have over journalistic media is an ability to more thoroughly recognize subjectivity. Artists can relate more personally with the spaces they are depicting, documenting not only their environment, but the self mediated and changed through their environment. Since they're more divorced from the pressure of current events or a news cycle, artists' books get to go places after 'the action' is over, or focus on elements of a history that have been sidelined by popular culture, and in crossing these lines they can even challenge linear narratives and create back-and-forth in the way they traverse time and space. Bill Burke's 'Minefields' moves from Cambodia to Boston, back and forth, documenting a period of Burke's career as a documentary photographer over multiple years; pulling together firsthand experiences, stories he encounters on his travels, news items and unanswered questions. He exchanges images with the Khmer, both literally in the form of the original polaroid positives he gives away (he keeps the negatives for personal use, in a bucket of developer), and artistically, incorporating sign-paintings, ephemera, and rephotography in addition to making his own pictures. In the end, the book becomes more than a document 'of the cambodian civil war' or 'the aftermath of the vietnam war', it turns into something wider. A document of vulnerability, violence, interpersonal relations-- as much in Cambodia at war as in Boston, where Burke's marriage was reaching a difficult end.

It's also through this understanding of the subjective nature of documentary that artists' books can help us navigate complex issues of identity, complicating who belongs to an in-group and who doesn't, who has the authority to make what call about the way a history, a community is remembered.

Robert Frank was a pioneer of the photobook form, a Swiss artist who in the 1950s traveled the United States making street photography of its citizens for his book, 'Les Americains' ('The Americans') In the original edition, the images are paired with text cited primarily from a variety of famous American authors (Whitman, Steinbeck, Richard Wright) as well as political figures like Lincoln, Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as French-language writers commenting on the nature of America and its people. However, when the book became popular and was brought to the US for an American edition, the text was edited out. Replaced by a single introductory essay by Jack Kerouac, the book becomes re-styled for the audience that 'already knows' from experience what it means to be American, and therefore do not need the extensive text to tell them about it. Despite originally being produced by (and largely, for) someone 'outside' of American identity, 'Les Americains' has become iconic of depictions of America in the 20th century, and influenced a lot of artists' visions of America, producing responses like Mishka Henner's 'Less Americains' (cutting subjects out of Frank's pictures) and Karl Baden's 'The Americans by Car' (where he reimagines Frank's images in the 2010s, through the frame of a car window).

When you document a place, you are also inevitably documenting a moment in time. Autobiography is always ephemeral, we go back and back and back every couple of years, we reflect, we contradict ourselves. This can serve to complicate positionality even more-- even if you're a 'local', the nature of a place changes, and your relationship to it changes regardless of if you leave or stay. In major urban areas especially, landmarks disappear all the time: gathering spaces, iconic sights, small or large businesses, populations pushed out. The nature of the city is always changing, burying the relevance of various modes of communication, dissolving communities and building new ones. In some works, like Heidi Neilson's "Long Island City Sundial Field Guide" the awareness of impermanence is part of the project of the book. She calculates and maps out what she calls "a neighborhood-wide sundial" cast from the shadow of a 201m corporate building in the city's downtown. She meticulously maps out the shadows of this makeshift 'sundial' for each season of the year, measuring their length, finding and photographing landmarks, all with the understanding that urban development would soon put an end to the makeshift sundial's existence.

In other projects, impermanence hangs in a higher sort of tension. Christian Walker published 'the theater project' in 1985 through Nexus Press (HYPERLINK), at the height of the AIDS crisis and the culture war over homoerotic imagery in American art. In the book, he documents the social scene of porn theaters in Boston's soon-to-be-eliminated red-light district, the Combat Zone. These theaters are already ghosts-- 'old burlesque houses' that had been shabbily converted for a new use, which in itself was a pretense for the gathering of unmoored, transient people, their anonymous meetings and invisibilized lives. In documenting this community, Walker spotlights the immense internal and external pressures on queer men in his era to downplay their own existence, especially their existence as sexual subjects. He reveals the irony of the disguises they take on, where "lawyers wear hardhats to entice hardhats wearing suits", but ultimately seeks to make the reader understand how important they are to staying afloat under the duress of repression, the value of being able to become ephemeral, 'transform' in this certain sort of place, at least for a moment. Looking back from the view of contemporary Boston, a much more homogenized, 'cleaner', public-facing city, it's a particularly potent statement of what places and populations are left behind, lost with the pressure of time and economic development.

In 'Defeat/Victory', Clifton Meador produces no image nor text himself. All material in the book is sourced from the time of the confederate surrender of the civil war. Revisionist history in the United States regarding the civil war, and the position of the Confederacy especially, is rampant, and has been as early as the 1890s, with the development of the Daughters of the Confederacy and other Neo-Confederate groups that worked to rewrite the content of American education to be more sympathetic to the seceding states. There are still statues of General Lee, in a number of states, depicting him at his peak, as a hero. In contrast, the documents Meador unearths are hauntingly human, quiet. An excerpt included in the book from the New York Times describes Lee after surrender as "so secluded that nobody would suppose, unless so informed, that he is still among us." Meador's curation of text and image, as well as his editorial treatment of the photographs by Matthew Brady, taken 10 days after the official surrender, create an image of a man fading away. He obscures Lee's face until the very last spread, hidden under a gatefold, and blurs away parts of his body, of the men from his army standing at his side. The work conveys the mutability of images, the inability of photography, which is so often considered an 'objective' reproduction, to capture immutable truths, prompting us to question the images of history that are handed down to us as our heritage.