A Medium Seen Otherwise

Abstract

Abstract A Medium Seen Otherwise examines the innovative incorporation of photography into documentary film, exploring the various ways in which this specific manifestation of intermediality permits us to see both photography and documentary film otherwise. Photographs, whether professional or vernacular, are conventionally understood to furnish documentaries with indexical evidence and visual illustration of history, yet the spatio-temporal dimensions of film permit documentaries to illuminate photography’s wider capacities beyond the merely representational. Through an investigation of how political, historical, and art documentaries engage with photographic images, objects, and archives, the book argues that film allows us to better understand what people do with analog and digital photographs as material objects that enable particular forms of social and political relationality through multisensory experience. Moreover, film can bring the event of photography into fuller view, demonstrating how no single participant in it (photographer, subject, camera, photograph, or viewer) has sovereignty over its affect, meaning, or value. Combining new critical perspectives on well-known documentary filmmakers and photographers (Agnès Varda, Rithy Panh, Edward Burtynsky, Malick Sidibé, Vivian Maier, JR, Ken Burns, Errol Morris, and Akram Zaatari) with analysis of lesser known, but important, documentaries, the book investigates a global range of documentary and vernacular photographic contexts, including Lebanon, Palestine, Mali, Congo, Cambodia, Ireland, Spain, Mexico, Chile, Canada, and the United States. While authorship and representation remain common rhetorical frameworks for documentaries about photography, A Medium Seen Otherwise offers an account of how the intermediality between documentary film and photography can posit far more expansive conceptions of both media.