Abstract
When recent artists have documented the effects of the Great Recession on contemporary life, they have repeatedly turned to the genre of the ‘modernist photo text’ for aesthetic and ethical inspiration. Yet the medial and institutional networks that support and publish these works are vastly different today than they were in the 1930s. This essay turns to two photo text projects, Matt Black’s American Geography (2014–Present) and Radcliffe ‘Ruddy’ Roye’s When Living is a Protest (2015–Present), that adapt the FSA style of New Deal documentary to the social media platform Instagram. Black’s and Roye’s Instagram documentaries make visible the changing place of the photographer, and photography as a medium, in the 21st century. At the same time, they offer parallel but opposed examples of how ‘born digital’ literary and visual art can reimagine modernism’s insistence on media specificity for 21st-century artistic works, especially those keyed to capturing the social life of economic crisis.
Highlights
In the wake of the 2008 global economic collapse, retroactively termed the Great Recession, both visual artists and critics turned to the genre of documentary to make sense of the social, psychological, and political effects of widespread impoverishment
If the economic situation of the Great Recession has shaped 21st century histories of the Great Depression (Marsh, 2019), it is true that the tropes of Depression-era documentary—what the genre does, what type of artist creates it, what it should look like, where it should be viewed—tend to set the criteria for how contemporary artists conceive of Recession-era documentary
Even as contemporary documentary borrows from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) style, the institutional and economic arrangement that produces these contemporary works is quite different than the situation experienced by earlier artists
Summary
In the wake of the 2008 global economic collapse, retroactively termed the Great Recession, both visual artists and critics turned to the genre of documentary to make sense of the social, psychological, and political effects of widespread impoverishment. Mainstream news coverage focused on the implosion of the subprime mortgage market and subsequent housing market collapse. Black counterintuitively repurposes a device (the mobile phone) and platform (Instagram) that are deeply implicated in widespread, statistically significant impoverishment, so as to take, view, and share photos that provide a bridge rather than a barrier to a photographer’s connection to that poverty In this way, one might see Black’s silhouetted bodies, which empty out the personality of individual poor people while locating poverty in space, as self-portraits of the photojournalist in the age of social media, when his photographic style and his artistic identity enter a platform awash with other, similar images
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