Week 8 – Contemporary Documentary Photography

During week 8, we looked at various contemporary documentary photographers. Upon doing some further research, I found Desiree Dolron, a dutch photographer; and Simon Norfolk, who did work in post-war countries. Documentary is often seen as showing an event exactly how it happens, and is often categorised as ‘boring’. Through contemporary documentary photography however, photographers are known to be “reinventing documentary through combining portrait and landscape genres” (Bate, 2016).

Dolron is seen to use a lot of portraiture in her work, especially in her series ‘Wigstock’ where she documented the drag queens of New York’s annual drag festival.

(Dolron, 2017) In these images, Dolron shows the drag queens through mixing genres. She documents the festival by using her history in fashion photography to take images that would fit well in a fashion magazine, rather than images that would bore students in a history textbook 50 years down the line.

Norfolk takes a different approach, using more creative processes to document the aftermath of war.

(Norfolk, 2012)

The creativity surrounding these images make them feel as though they could be advertising a tropical holiday, from getting on a plane, to sitting poolside with palm trees and a beach nearby. However, upon closer inspection, the plane is an abandoned fighter jet in a bombed out city, and the pools are empty with fires raging in the background. “By making the dramatic scenes so aesthetically pleasing, Norfolk creates a distinct feeling of unease in the viewer.” (Herschdorfer, 2011)

Contemporary documentary photography could grow into a way to educate people on what is happening around the world, in a way that they would understand better, and would be interested to see.

References:

• Bate, D. (2016) Photography: The key concepts. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

• Dolron, D. (2017) Wigstock, i-D. Available at: https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/zm3p4j/unseen-photographs-of-fierce-drag-queens-from-wigstocks-heyday (Accessed: March 22, 2023).

• Herschdorfer, N. (2011) Afterwards: Contemporary photography confronting the past. London, UK: Thames & Hudson.

• Norfolk, S. (2012) The Battlespace, Simon Norfolk. Available at: https://www.simonnorfolk.com/the-battlespace#essay (Accessed: March 22, 2023).