The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia

Seminar

This seminar offers a discussion of some of the key concepts which form the basis of the exhibition The Universal Archive. The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia (MACBA, September 2008-January 2009) and continues the debate begun in the seminar The Metropolis in the Era of Photography (MACBA, February 2007).

The seminar is articulated as a look at some of the problems inherent in the debate about the status of the document during the 20th century, problems that, in some cases and in each era, have been reformulated in a singular way, due to which they are questions that remain open.

Documentary is a genre historically inseparable from the construction of discourses about realism in photography and film. Having said that, a more precise study foregrounds not only some of the ambiguities of the genre but also a radical difficulty in defining it. This seminar seeks to contribute to an understanding of the complexity of the category of documentary by studying debates about the genre during the 20th century. It is not so much a question of creating a history of documentary or of exhausting its possible definitions as of attempting to study how the genre has always been constituted in an ambivalent and polemical way in relation to certain specific historical conditions, by trying to delineate what it is in each case and how the historical subject of the documentary genre is constructed.

The program addresses issues like the processes of insertion of images in the public sphere via the printed page and an architectural conception of the image which results, in the first half of the century, in a new expository concept linked to methods of propaganda; the relation of the document to the discursive space of the archive and the library, and hence the epistemological status of the photographic image; the ethical and political problems of the document, namely the nature of the document and the archive as a space of knowledge/power and the relations between the subject and object of documentary representation; the nature of the document in relation to debates on realism, and hence its permanently problematical insertion in the dominant discourses of modern art.

Proceeding from the study of a few concrete examples, the objective of the seminar is to put forward a set of hypotheses on the meanings and mechanisms of the documentary in a historical cycle that gets under way with the culminating moment of the hegemony of the photograph in the illustrated press midway through the 20th century before arriving at the crisis of photographic realism in the digital era at the end of the century.

The seminar forms part of the PEI's Open Program, in the context of the course Modern (Photographic) Documents.