Documentary photography is generally understood to be an ‘accurate representation of people, places and objects’ and is thus associated with authenticity. Staged photographs can be dismissed as inauthentic, especially when multiple figures pose in fictitious scenes known as tableaux vivant (French for ‘living pictures’). Tableaux pre-date photography, featuring in medieval public pageantry, Renaissance religious paintings as well as nineteenth-century theatre. A photograph that uses tableaux can feel overly determined and hence artificial. Nonetheless, there are plenty of photographers, such as Tyler Mitchell and Justine Kurland, whose innovative use of tableaux challenge the documentary form, fusing together the real with the imaginary.
Tyler Mitchell collaborates with friends, models and strangers to depict a geographically ambiguous Black utopia. His work blurs the line between fashion and art photography, while his aesthetic, to use Mitchell’s own words, ‘[uses] the tools of documentary reportage’. Although he does not specify what these tools are, Mitchell documents people in relation to their environment using natural light and a range of camera angles, all of which create a feeling of candid spontaneity. Nevertheless, Mitchell’s 2021 exhibition ‘Dreaming in Real Time’, contains multiple tableaux and his most obviously staged photographs to date. However, they still reflect back to the viewer specific historic and contemporary truths, documenting the lived experience of Black Americans.
Georgia Hillside (Redlining) (2021)
Georgia Hillside (Redlining) (2021) exemplifies Mitchell’s alternative form of documentary reportage. Two-thirds of the 6x7 rectangular frame is taken up by the titular hillside, on which people partake in leisure activities. A middle-aged couple has a picnic. A young woman lies down in the grass. A mother and child have their portrait taken. Three women engage in conversation. On top of the hill, a young man flies a kite which hangs in the powder-blue sky above. Overall, the image feels like a postcard, and with so many people enjoying themselves simultaneously, the photograph is idyllic to the point of looking unreal. Yet the ‘tools’ of documentary reportage (a sharp focus and uniform depth of field) also make it appear like a snapshot of reality, almost as if it has been taken by an amateur using a disposable camera. The content of the image is staged, yet the medium in which we view the figures increases the impression that what we are looking at is authentic reality, especially as the figures seem unaware of Mitchell’s camera.
Look closer, and each figure carries a symbolic weight which positions the work more towards fine art photography. The image of a solitary young man flying a kite occurs throughout Mitchell’s work and is a conscious allusion to individuals like 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who in 2014 was shot and killed by a police officer while playing with a toy gun. Hence the photograph is a way of reclaiming, as Mitchell states, ‘moments of leisure, play and delight which have historically been denied for Black people’. The three figures in the white dresses (whose silhouettes evoke the early 1900s) call to mind the three generations of women in Daughters of the Dust (1991) which portrays the Gullah people of the Deep South who developed a unique Creole culture on isolated islands away from their former slave owners. The quilts of the picnicking couple evoke the Quilts of Gee’s Bend, made by African Americans who, like the Gullah, lived isolated from the rest of society on land enclosed by the Alabama River. The photograph can be read as a love letter to Black autonomy and the half-fantasy, half-reality of simply living physically and psychically removed from the oppression of white society and the white gaze. Thinking of different gazes, the mother and child having their photograph taken alludes to family photo albums and vernacular photography, which, as Abondance Matanda proposes, offers an alternative archive where Black people can represent themselves free from the stereotypes placed upon them by white photographers. The man taking the photograph (perhaps a form of self-portraiture on Mitchell’s part), places Georgia Hillside (Redlining) firmly within the realms of metaphotography. The photograph within a photograph reminds us that what we are looking at is a highly self-conscious construction of reality.
Does this sense of construction disqualify the photograph from being considered documentary photography? The latter was, as Maribel Castro Díaz states, traditionally ‘based on the idea that the photographer did not collaborate with the subject of the image or interfere with what appeared in front of the camera’. However, this view has been challenged, for example by James Curtis, who states ‘a documentary photographer is an actor bent upon communicating a message to an audience’, and that ‘documentary photographs…are conscious acts of persuasion’. I share this view, considering all photographers carry biases (whether conscious of them or not) which affect the way we take a photograph. Indeed, ‘document’ is etymologically linked to persuasion, evolving from the Medieval Latin docere: ‘to show, teach, cause to know’. Curtis references Matthew Brady, some of whose photographs of dead soldiers in the American Civil War were played by his living assistants and are ‘undoubtedly staged tableaux’. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) was both posed and airbrushed. These documentary photographers were, according to Curtis, not ‘passive observers of the contemporary scene’ but rather ‘active agents searching for the most effective way to communicate their views’.
I would argue Mitchell belongs within this lineage of documentarians. He too has crafted a photograph that responds directly to the contemporary moment, albeit in more abstract and ethical ways. 2020-2021 saw Black Lives Matter protests take place globally following the murder of George Floyd, calling for an end to structural and systemic racism. Redlining, a prime example of this, is represented in the photograph, and provides its most striking visual element: a network of red lines spray painted onto the grass partitioning the figures into separate spaces. Redlining originated in the 1920s, keeping financial services like mortgages and loans out of reach for non-white residents of certain areas. Significantly, the figures in Mitchell’s photograph are financially affluent, dressed in formal clothes and high-fashion looks. By dressing his figures in expensive and avant-garde clothing, Mitchell challenges stereotypes often perpetuated by white photographers about the economic backgrounds of Black people, making Georgia Hillside (Redlining) a statement about social and economic mobility, and how Black people can prosper regardless of their geographical location.
Mitchell’s photograph teaches us that seeking and finding pleasure is a political form of resistance and that the Black body can momentarily escape, either through play or through photography itself, the structural inequalities placed upon it. For Mark Sealy, Mitchell’s images are devices that ‘[enable] a place of…bodily existence, just to simply be’; they ‘[imagine] a world that takes away that sense of having to be hypervigilant around race”. The young woman lying barefoot in the grass smiling with her eyes closed embodies this lack of hypervigilance, and instead, a body luxuriating in rest and relaxation. She is the image’s most important player, and interestingly the only figure not separated from the rest of the group by a red line. I interpret her as the image’s gatekeeper, daydreaming the photograph into being, or rather, ‘dreaming in real time’. Ultimately, if what is depicted is a dream-like Black utopia, the artificial nature of the photograph draws attention to the fact that this utopian land has not been founded yet. Hence the photograph is paradoxically artificial and an accurate, authentic documentation of the contemporary moment.
The need to document a desired future is articulated by Queer (postcolonial, and feminist) theorists like Jose Esteban Muñoz. Muñoz claims ‘Queerness is not yet here…Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realms of the aesthetic’ and that ‘Queerness is…a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future’. This idea is a useful framework through which to consider the photographer Justine Kurland and her series Girl Pictures (1997-2002). Both photographers’ work share utopian and aesthetic qualities, Kurland ‘[imagining] a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls—they would multiply through the sheer force of togetherness and lay claim to a new territory.’
In her dream-like medium-format images, teenage girls run away from home and travel by foot across desolate American landscapes. Like Mitchell’s figures, Kurland’s girls play; they hula-hoop, swing on trees, make daisy chains and play-fight. It is important at this point to distinguish between play and the act of posing, the latter of which creates, for Roland Barthes, 'a sensation of inauthenticity’. Play, conversely, immerses the photographic subject in a group activity requiring mental focus (sometimes involving jeopardy) which potentially becomes just as important, if not more so, than the camera recording the original act of play. If play absorbs people in genuine activities, Kurland and Mitchell document with the aid of a camera fully inhabited fragments of reality, even if these moments are performed for the camera.
Boy Torture: Love (1999)
Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) by John Waterhouse
Boy Torture: Love (1999) also offers an example of Kurland subverting the expectations of the male gaze. The composition of the photograph is inspired by John Waterhouse’s 1896 painting in which Hylas is lured to his death by water nymphs. In Kurland’s photograph, a group of teenagers gather near a small pond. A girl with her back to the camera (taking Hylas’ place in the painting) takes off her t-shirt to reveal her breasts to the group. The virile man of Waterhouse’s painting who is both attracted to and attracting the bare-chested nymphs becomes in Kurland’s photograph, a young woman controlling how much of her body she wants to reveal to the women in front of her (her motives as ambiguous as her actual identity). The only male in the group (who looks like he has been held hostage) has his eyes covered by the girl knelt behind him. Laura Larson regards ‘this gesture—to render him blind’ as significant, and interprets the girl’s revelation of her body to be ‘for her female audience.’ Larson argues that ‘Kurland queers girlhood, harnessing the gravitational pull of the gaze as the central dynamic of her [drama].’ Whether or not this speaks of a queer gaze or not, what is clear is that in Kurland’s work, the nuances of female intimacy play out amongst other women and are recorded through the lens of a female photographer.
Field Trip (1999) exhibits a tension between the real and the staged, the authentic and inauthentic as well as the ambiguity of Kurland’s role as facilitator/observer. Created in response to the tableaux paintings of Henry Darger, an outsider artist who illustrated armies of young girls battling a nation of older men in his fantasy novel ‘The Realms of the Unreal’, it ostensibly belongs to fine art photography. In it, Kurland’s vision of girls multiplying becomes a reality, Field Trip presenting hundreds of girls marching up a hill from the depths of a forest. To stage the image, Kurland took girls from a Vermont high school out of their first lesson: ‘I wanted to imagine them…coming out to conquer a new world.’ In this sense, a staged tableau documenting the photographer’s imagined future demonstrates Kurland ‘queering’ (to use Muñoz’s term) what a documentary photograph might be. Kurland’s image also has a documentary quality (and is less choreographed than Mitchell’s) in that you sense a tension between what she has directed the girls to do versus their behaviour in the moment. For instance, a couple of girls in the line have broken rank, the randomness of their configuration making it look like they naturally walk in pairs or according to their friendship groups. The photograph therefore documents something real about their interpersonal bonds, attesting to Laura Larson’s idea that ‘their relationship to one another is their true landscape’. For the same girls looking at the photograph in the present, it surely offers a tangible memory; a reminder of how they dressed and who their friends were on that day in 1999, and so the image becomes an alternative school photo. Thus even an artificially produced photograph acts as a memento for the actors/individuals within it, documenting the reality of their shared experience.
This perhaps explains Kurland’s literal and neutral title, Field Trip, which disguises the photograph’s connection to the art of Henry Darger: ‘I call this picture Field Trip because it actually looks both like an army of girls coming out of the woods and a class field trip…I’m interested in the idea that it can hold both my projection of what it could possibly be and what it is by itself.’ The first part of Mitchell’s title Georgia Hillside is similarly neutral, conforming to the convention of identifying a photograph based on its geographical location. Hence the titling of images encourages us to interpret (and literally read them) through the lens of documentary photography. By directing our gaze towards the landscape, and by titling their work in this way, Kurland and Mitchell claim to represent the topography of the real world.
Kurland’s Girl Pictures also feel authentic and documentary-like because they present vast naturally lit real-life landscapes. Kurland situates herself within the nineteenth-century tradition of American Landscape photography, which became a tool for documenting the western territories. Nevertheless, Kurland also reminds us early nature photography was staged for the public, calling it a ‘receptacle for a utopian impulse…at once geographical as well as economic’. Indeed, photographing nature fulfilled a spiritual purpose, each wet-plate symbolising ‘man’s edification toward the eternal’, the scale of the mountains and waterfalls photographed in, for example, the Wheeler Survey of 1872-1879, assuming the symbolic role of Europe’s great cathedrals for early Americans. On an economic level, these expeditions demarcated areas of land for mining and the railroad. Kurland states: ‘America had been conquered in so many ways’ through landscape photographs (predominantly taken by men) that ‘it felt like the only spaces left were these bits of wilderness near the freeways’.
Mitchell also offers new perspectives on landscape photography, the vast sand dunes in Albany, Georgia (2021), and meandering waterways in Riverside Scene (2021), intended to reveal ‘the sheer diversity of the landscapes of Georgia’. Mitchell purposefully didn’t photograph ‘Welcome to Georgia’ signs in order to create ‘a loose allusion to the area of the American South’. This increases the Edenic nature of his images which offer an alternative history where Black people encounter the American continent independently, as if for the first time. Two things are achieved at once: at the same time as the landscape’s politicization, we also view the American South in more straightforwardly documentary terms, marvelling at its diversity, beauty and paired-back simplicity.
Albany, Georgia (2021)
Riverside Scene (2021)
The synchronicity between Kurland’s subjects and their locations act on the viewer on an almost unconscious level, and increase their documentary quality. The ‘wilderness near the freeways’, neither entirely rural nor urban, provides a liminal space which parallels the females’ in-between state as teenagers. In Smoke Bombs (2000), for example, three girls are partially obscured by smoke, and Kurland was interested in the symbolism of haze, interpreting the girls as ‘creating their own sense of illusion. It’s a kind of posturing, and if there’s anything about being a teenager…[it’s] a staged process of life’. It is apt therefore that the experience of being a teenager (experimenting with risk, “playing with fire”, feeling both visible and invisible) is documented through a staged tableau. Although we see Kurland’s girls in a more ethereal light than say, Larry Clark’s 1960s teenagers in Tulsa (1971) who inject drugs, have sex and play provocatively with guns, there is a sense that both sets of teenagers are playing and performing for the camera, the camera allowing them to both construct and inhabit their adolescent identities.
Smoke Bombs (2000)
Mitchell and Kurland’s work reminds us that the practice of photography will always contain an element of artifice. They achieve this by placing their figures in staged tableaux which (to paraphrase Muñoz) enact a desired reality which has not yet happened. However, as I have suggested, these tableaux incorporate moments of play and spontaneity which are as authentically real and in the moment as the natural landscapes of sand, water, grass and rocks that surround the players. Documentary photography might therefore benefit from a broader definition which considers the fact that fantasy and reality, the present and the future, are not always in opposition to each other, but can co-exist within the same photograph.