Critical Distance in Documentary Media 1St Ed Edition Gerda Cammaer Full Chapter

Critical Distance in Documentary Media
1st ed. Edition Gerda Cammaer

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/critical-distance-in-documentary-media-1st-ed-edition
-gerda-cammaer/
EDITED BY GERDA CAMMAER,
BLAKE FITZPATRICK AND BRUNO LESSARD
Critical Distance in Documentary Media
Gerda Cammaer · Blake Fitzpatrick
Bruno Lessard
Editors
Critical Distance
in Documentary
Media
Editors
Gerda Cammaer Bruno Lessard
Ryerson University Ryerson University
Toronto, ON, Canada Toronto, ON, Canada
Blake Fitzpatrick
Ryerson University
Toronto, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-96766-0 ISBN 978-3-319-96767-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96767-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951552
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover image: OZGUR TOLGA ILDUN/Alamy Stock Photo

Cover design: Ran Shauli
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to Adrian Miles, Australian scholar
of documentary film and new media.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the contributors for their insightful texts that
help to expand the field of documentary studies. Special thanks go to the
Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC) in the School of Image
Arts at Ryerson University for the financial and moral support. Thanks to
Daniel Fisher for his much-appreciated help with the index for the book.
We also want to thank the Visible Evidence community for the inspira-
tion and encouragement to keep challenging established ideas and norms
in documentary studies, making it more diverse and inclusive. Finally,
we would also like to acknowledge the precious help of our editor, Lina
Aboujieb, and our editorial assistant, Ellie Freedman.
vii
Contents
Introduction: Critically Distant 1

Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick and Bruno Lessard
Indexicality in the Age of the Sensor and Metadata 23

Craig Hight
Shot in the Dark: Nocturnal Philosophy and Night

Photography 45
Bruno Lessard
Approaches to Xianchang: Documenting the Real

in Post-socialist China 69
Madeline Eschenburg
Ai Weiwei: Grafting as a Documentary Tactic in Art 91

Luísa Santos
Unsatisfactory Devices: Legacy and the Undocumentable

in Art 109
Angela Bartram
ix
x Contents
From Above: Critical Distance, Aerial Views, and

Counter-Images 129
Blake Fitzpatrick
Phantom Rides as Images of the World Unfolding 149

Gerda Cammaer
Mobile Media: A Reliable Documentary Witness? 169

Anandana Kapur
Redefining the “Document”: Social-Media Photographs

as Narrative, Performance, Habitude 195
Kris Belden-Adams
Instagram as Archive: Constructing Experimental

Documentary Narratives from Everyday Moments 209
Patrick Kelly
That Seagull Stole My Camera (and My Shot)!:

Overlapping Metaphorical and Physical Distances
in the Human-Animal-Camera Triad 231
Concepción Cortés Zulueta
Re-placing the Urban Soundscape: Performative

Documentary Research in Vancouver’s False Creek 257
Randolph Jordan
From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through

Multi-linear Documentary 279
Kim Munro
From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive

Documentary and Relational Media 301
Adrian Miles with Bruno Lessard, Hannah Brasier
and Franziska Weidle
Index 321
Notes on Contributors
Angela Bartram is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. Her

publications include the co-edited book Recto-Verso: Redefining the
Sketchbook, and chapters in Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century
and Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance. Recent exhibi-
tions include Karst, Plymouth (2016), Hillyer Art Space, Washington
DC (2016), Miami International Performance Festival (2013, 2014),
and Grace Exhibition Space, New York (2012, 2014).
Kris Belden-Adams is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the
University of Mississippi, and specializes in the history of photography.
Her work has been published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
in Photographies, Afterimage, Southern Studies, The International Journal
of Technology, Knowledge and Society, and Cabinet.
Hannah Brasier holds a PhD from RMIT University, Melbourne. Her
research proposes that a practice of attuned noticing for multilinear non-
fiction offers an ecocritical engagement with the world. She has pre-
sented at The World Cinema and the Essay Film Conference, the Digital
Cultures Research Centre, and Visible Evidence. Hannah is a co-founder
of the Docuverse group and was a visiting PhD scholar at the University
of Leeds during 2015.
Gerda Cammaer is an Associate Professor in the School of Image
Arts, Ryerson University, and is the co-director of the Documentary
Media Research Centre. She is a filmmaker and scholar. Her artistic
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
work consists of experimental films, poetic documentaries, and mobile

cinema. She is the co-author of Forbidden Love, and the co-editor of
Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in
Canada.
Concepción Cortés Zulueta is a Juan de la Cierva Post-Doctoral
Fellow at Universidad de Málaga, Spain. Her research focuses on the
presence and agency of non-human animals in contemporary art from
the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Madeline Eschenburg is a Lecturer in art history at Washburn
University. She has published articles in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary
Chinese Art and Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture.
Most recently, she assisted with the curation of “Chinese Apartment Art:
Primary Documents from the Gao Minglu Archive, 1970s–1990s” at the
University Art Gallery in the University of Pittsburgh.
Blake Fitzpatrick holds the position of Professor and Chair in the
School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, and is the co-director of the
Documentary Media Research Centre. His research examines war and
conflict representation in documentary works, and his visual work has
been exhibited in Canada and internationally.
Craig Hight is an Associate Professor in Creative Industries at the
University of Newcastle. His current research focuses on the relation-
ships between digital media technologies and documentary practice,
especially the variety of factors shaping online documentary cultures. His
most recent book is New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms,
Practices and Discourses (co-edited with Kate Nash and Catherine
Summerhayes).
Randolph Jordan is a Lecturer in the Mel Hoppenheim School of
Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal. His research, teaching, and
creative practice reside at the intersections of soundscape research, media
studies, and critical geography. He has published widely on the ways in
which the fields of acoustic ecology and film sound studies can inform
each other, and he is now completing a book manuscript for Oxford
University Press entitled An Acoustic Ecology of the Cinema.
Anandana Kapur is a Ph.D. student at Jamia Millia Islamia University
in Delhi, India. She is the co-founder of CINEMAD India and is an
award-winning filmmaker and communications designer focused on
Notes on Contributors xiii
integrating film with social change initiatives. She has written on gender,
culture, and cinema in India, and she has taught courses on documentary
production and representation in India and U.S.-based programs.
Patrick Kelly is a Lecturer at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication
in Melbourne. His teaching and research focus on media production in
the areas of documentary, social media, mobile media, interactivity, career
development, and practice-led research. He also worked as a digital producer
in film, television, online media, and film festivals.
Bruno Lessard is an Associate Professor in the School of Image Arts at
Ryerson University, where he is the Director of the Documentary Media
MFA program. He has published extensively on topics as diverse as con-
temporary cinema, new media arts, digital games, and Chinese photogra-
phy. He is a photographic artist and the author of The Art of Subtraction:
Digital Adaptation and the Object Image (2017).
Adrian Miles was an Associate Professor, co-director of the non/fiction
Lab, and Deputy Dean Learning and Teaching at RMIT University in
Melbourne. He was the Program Director of the consilience Honours
lab. His research focused on networked video, interactive documentary,
and computational nonfiction, from a materialist point of view with a
Deleuzean cinematic inflection. His research interests also included ped-
agogies for new media, digital video poetics, and experimental academic
writing practices.
Kim Munro is a filmmaker, artist, teacher and Ph.D. candidate at RMIT
University in Melbourne. Her practice explores nonlinear documen-
tary practices across film, installation, and interactive works. She is also
co-founder of Docuverse: A Symposium for Expanded Documentary
Practices and part of the non/fiction Lab at RMIT. Her current prac-
tice-led research is about aloneness.
Luísa Santos is Gulbenkian Professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences
at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon. Combining research with
curatorial practice, her most recent activities include the curatorship of
“Græsset er altid grønnere”, Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde (DK)
(2014–2015), the executive curatorship of the first edition of Anozero:
Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art (PT) (2015), and “Notes in
Tomorrow”, CreArt European Network, in Kaunas (LT), Kristiansand
(NO) and Aveiro (PT) (2016–2017).
xiv Notes on Contributors
Franziska Weidle is a visual anthropologist mainly working with film,

photography, and installation. Currently, she is in the final stages of
completing her PhD on the role of media software in expanding non-
fiction practices at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Her gen-
eral research interests revolve around digital computation, its impact on
visual and material culture, as well as experimental formats for ethno-
graphic knowledge production and dissemination.
List of Figures
Shot in the Dark: Nocturnal Philosophy and Night Photography

Fig. 1 Bruno Lessard, Guangzhou, May 11, 2016. Image courtesy
of the artist 57
Fig. 2 Bruno Lessard, Chongqing, May 4, 2016. Image courtesy
of the artist 59
Approaches to Xianchang: Documenting the Real in Post-socialist
China
Fig. 1 Song Dong, Together with Migrants, performance, 2003.
Photograph courtesy of the artist 70
Fig. 2 Song Dong, Together with Migrants, performance, 2003.
Photograph courtesy of the artist 71
Fig. 3 Luo Zhongli, Father, oil on canvas, 1980. Image courtesy
of the Gao Minglu Archive 74
Ai Weiwei: Grafting as a Documentary Tactic in Art
Fig. 1 Dan Graham, Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth
(1994), sculpture. Image courtesy of Andrew Russeth 92
Unsatisfactory Devices: Legacy and the Undocumentable in Art
Fig. 1 Luce Choules, installation Bideford Black: The New Generation,
2016. Image courtesy of Angela Bartram and Chris Goddard 116
Fig. 2 Andrew Pepper, installation Three-Nine, 2016. Image courtesy
of Angela Bartram and Chris Goddard 122
xv
xvi List of Figures
From Above: Critical Distance, Aerial Views, and Counter-Images

Fig. 1 Robert Del Tredici, The White Train, Pantex Nuclear Weapons
Final Assembly Plant, Carson County, Texas. August 7, 1982.
Image courtesy of the artist 137
Fig. 2 Trevor Paglen, Circles (video still), 2015. Courtesy of the
artist and Metro Pictures, New York 142
Phantom Rides as Images of the World Unfolding
Fig. 1 Daniel Crooks, Phantom Ride, 2016. Courtesy of the artist
and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 158
Mobile Media: A Reliable Documentary Witness?
Fig. 1 Avijit Mukul Kishore, Certified Universal, 2009.
Image courtesy of the artist 180
Fig. 2 Anandana Kapur, Jasoosni, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist 182
Redefining the “Document”: Social-Media Photographs
as Narrative, Performance, Habitude
Fig. 1 Barbara Kinney, Selfie Swarm, Orlando, FL, Campaign Stop
“Spillover” Room, 2016. Image courtesy of Barbara Kinney
for Hilary for America 197
Fig. 2 Barbara Kinney, Philadelphia, PA, November 6, 2016. Image
courtesy of Barbara Kinney for Hilary for America 201
Fig. 3 Barbara Kinney, Detroit, MI, November 4, 2016. Image
courtesy of Barbara Kinney for Hilary for America 202
Instagram as Archive: Constructing Experimental Documentary
Narratives from Everyday Moments
Fig. 1 Patrick Kelly, Quo Grab #02, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.
The Western Wall juxtaposed with a house inspection back
home (right) 215
Fig. 2 Patrick Kelly, Quo Grab #02, 2017. Image courtesy
of the artist. A selfie at the Western Wall (Left) 218
Fig. 3 Marsha Berry, Wayfarer’s Trail, 2016. Image courtesy of the
artist. Courtesy of Marsha Berry 220
List of Figures xvii
From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through Multi-linear

Documentary
Fig. 1 Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see,
2017. Image courtesy of the artist 284
Fig. 2 Maria Court and Rosemarie Lerner, Quipu Project, 2015.
Image courtesy of the artists 287
Fig. 3 Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill, Empire: The Unintended
Consequences of Dutch Colonialism, 2012–2014. Image courtesy
of the artists 292
Introduction: Critically Distant
Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick and Bruno Lessard
Predicated upon the notion of “critical distance,” this collection

addresses the power of documentary images and sounds to do crucial
work in responding critically to contemporary issues as discovered in
the situated conditions of the world. The authors argue that the present
moment is one in which collapsing social structures, weakened demo-
cratic institutions, increasing migratory flows, and pressing environmen-
tal challenges are best addressed through new formulations of ideas
and practices within documentary media. These considerations concern
space, time, theory, media, and dissemination as the cinema screen gives
way to the gallery, mobile screens, and the Internet as sites for docu-
mentary images and sounds. As locative media, augmented reality, and
drones become more and more present in the documentary landscape,
new theorizations are needed to account for how such media represent
recent political, social, and representational shifts and challenge the
G. Cammaer · B. Fitzpatrick · B. Lessard (*)

Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: lessard@ryerson.ca
G. Cammaer
e-mail: gcammaer@ryerson.ca
B. Fitzpatrick
School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: bfitzpatrick@ryerson.ca
© The Author(s) 2018 1

G. Cammaer et al. (eds.), Critical Distance in Documentary Media,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96767-7_1
2 G. CAMMAER ET AL.
predominant approaches within documentary studies, as well as tradi-

tional models for film and photographic distribution.
The collection thus addresses counter-narratives to dominant docu-
mentary media forms, practices, formats, and theories that the field of
documentary studies has relied on for several years while fashioning its
scholarly and institutional identity to the detriment of other theories and
practices. In doing so, the authors also provide an alternative to analyt-
ical approaches associated with film studies such as formalism, auteur
theory, narratology, semiotics, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,
feminist thought, gender studies, and Marxism/post-Marxism that have
helped to build the field as we know it, but that contemporary theoreti-
cal approaches have deeply questioned in promoting new sensibilities.
This collection is by no means the first to feature scholars and prac-
titioners who have sought to provide an alternative to the current state
of affairs within documentary studies. Indeed, numerous documen-
tary scholars and practitioners have expanded the field in distinct fash-
ion within the last few years, and the present collection does build upon
the critical ethos found in their work. For example, Gierstberg et al.’s
Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film and
the Visual Arts and Daniels, McLaughlin, and Pearce’s Truth, Dare or
Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited were among the first collections
to set up a dialog between documentary making and visual art practices.
Nash, Hight, and Summerhayes’ New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging
Platforms, Practices, and Discourses was the first collection to address the
interactive documentary and the affordances of the computer and the
Internet to relaunch documentary practice in more collaborative and
participatory modes, featuring both scholarly chapters and interviews
with practitioners. As another alternative to the film-based collection,
Balsom and Peleg’s Documentary Across Disciplines features chapters
on neglected areas within documentary studies such as photography
and data visualization, thus providing a broader range of documentary
practices and theories. Similarly, Caillet and Pouillaude’s Un art docu-
mentaire. Enjeux esthétiques, politiques et éthiques and Hohenberger and
Mundt’s Ortsbestimmungen. Das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und
Kunst are only two examples of non-English-language scholarly works
published in the spirit of contesting documentary hegemonies associated
with film studies approaches. In addition to what these pioneering vol-
umes offer, the present collection includes chapters on installation art,
INTRODUCTION: CRITICALLY DISTANT 3
sonic environments, and mobile media, among other sites of documen-

tary practice, as it also broadens documentary studies’ traditional focus
by featuring non-Western case studies.
In the introduction, we survey the current state of documentary stud-
ies, putting particular emphasis on how the field has vastly expanded
since the early 1990s when foundational publications and conferences
established the critical paradigms towards which scholars would gravitate
to shed light on nonfiction film. We address recent shifts in documen-
tary practice and theory, the possible futures of documentary studies, and
the need to rethink the place of the human within documentary studies.
We believe this discussion holds exemplary value insofar as it highlights
some of the most critical challenges facing documentary scholars and
practitioners in the years to come. While technological changes relating to
digital production and exhibition have been extensively discussed, there
remains the lingering need to question established theoretical apparatuses
within documentary studies in consideration of advances in other disci-
plines, introduce new concepts and methodologies, and speculate on their
potential impact on the field. Diverse means of production and distribu-
tion call for new analytical models and multifaceted approaches to docu-
mentary media linking documentary theory and practice to an expanded
scholarly field including media studies, cultural studies, digital media arts,
animal studies, continental philosophy, and contemporary art, to name a
few, as well as non-Western documentary practices and the work of docu-
mentary theorists publishing in languages other than English.
The Possible Futures of Documentary Studies

By questioning the exclusion of certain visual media from the documen-
tary canon and the overreliance on approaches derived from film stud-
ies, rather than, say, sociology, philosophy, media studies, or art theory,
this collection does set itself at a distance from the paradigmatic views
in the field. Since the 1990s, a number of dedicated journals such as
Studies in Documentary Film and Images documentaires, international
conferences such as Visible Evidence and i-Docs, organizations and festi-
vals such as IDFA and Hot Docs, and book series such as the University
of Minnesota Press’s “Visible Evidence,” Wallflower’s “Nonfictions,”
and Vorwerk 8’s “Texte zum Dokumentarfilm” have opened docu-
mentary studies to an emerging and active community of scholars and
practitioners. Our critical stance does not wish to deny the remarkable
4 G. CAMMAER ET AL.
achievements of the past twenty years within documentary studies, but

it does function as a call to expand the purview of the field in light of
historically neglected media and practices within the field such as pho-
tography, installation art, and the plethora of theoretical approaches at
our disposal aside from the ones drawn from film studies.
The reorientation we are proposing is geared toward ensuring that the
field does not rest content with past achievements. This is also to ensure
that the future of documentary studies is not solely tied to the develop-
ment of interactive documentary practices, the Internet, and augmented
reality, and that future approaches to documentary media reach beyond
theorizing levels of interactivity and classificatory schemas. The possible
futures of documentary studies are not solely linked to further refining
approaches to the feature-length documentary film or speculating on
the future of interactive documentary; they will emerge from a thorough
reconsideration of the documentary canon in terms of media, practices,
and theories that will bring into focus both neglected pasts and possible
futures.
Within the last few years, the critical observer has witnessed two main
orientations within documentary studies, namely, a surge of English-
language, film-centric publications,1 and numerous collections of essays
on interactive documentary.2 These collections, readers, and monographs
indicate a certain bias toward the filmic and the interactive. Indeed, the
predominance of film within documentary studies is no secret, but the
bigger issue here, as noted by Caillet and Pouillaude (2017, 8), is that
the emphasis on film has meant the development of a body of literature
along the lines of medium specificity and the disciplinary concerns of film
studies rather than the long-overdue development of a field of study that
would address all types of documentary image-making practices irrespec-
tive of established university disciplines.
Consider the case of documentary photography. By way of discipli-
nary formation, why was documentary photography attached to his-
tories of photography and located in the art history department while
documentary film found a home in the film studies department? Did the
problem of medium specificity push film and photography into dualis-
tic camps of still and moving images, and the limiting binaries of fact
and fiction, art and documentary? Medium specificity clearly played a
crucial role in the arbitrary separation between the still and the moving
documentary image that congealed along institutional lines. While there
are historical factors to consider in the development of disciplines and
their object of study, the fact remains that a department of documentary

studies encompassing photography, film, and the visual arts would have
been more appropriate to address documentary esthetics and the shared
concerns of documentarians working in visual media instead of distin-
guishing between photo and film according to medium-specific criteria
and facing a host of theoretical and conceptual problems each time a new
medium or technology is introduced.
There are profound implications for a field such as documentary
studies when medium specificity assumes the role of prime mover.
Unexplored linkages and untold stories fill disciplinary silos, as schol-
ars and students of the form fail to appreciate the deep connections and
shared concerns between documentarians. For example, in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, visual artists Allan Sekula (1978) and Martha Rosler
(1981) voiced strong concerns about the representational effectiveness
and emancipatory power of social documentary photography in their
critical writings. These reflections predated similar concerns in docu-
mentary film studies by more than ten years. A fruitful dialog between
documentary photo scholars and documentary film scholars could have
happened but never did as a result of rigid medium specific bounda-
ries, which are artificial institutional constructs still in place today. This
also applies to contemporary artists such as Harun Farocki, Christian
Boltanski, Yvonne Rainer, and Walid Raad whose documentary installa-
tions rarely figure as subjects of discussion within documentary studies
but tend to be relegated to contemporary art criticism. Other documen-
tary forms such as documentary theater and podcasts could be added to
this list of documentary experiences that have not received much atten-
tion from documentary scholars as a result of institutionally entrenched
and unchallenged disciplinary boundaries.
The wish for an expanded field of documentary media and arts reflects
the ideal of consolidating approaches, theories, and ways of making that
address the documentary beyond medium specific distinctions—at least
from an institutional and pedagogical point of view. The media and the
established disciplines are not at issue here; the community of docu-
mentary scholars and makers and their pedagogical activities impacting
future generations of scholars and makers are. These concerns are com-
pounded by the hybrid generation of practitioner–scholars who have
already impacted the field. Indeed, several contributors to this volume—
including its editors—are both documentary makers and scholars, and
their work concerns the liminal space known as “practice-based research”
6 G. CAMMAER ET AL.
or “research-creation,” as it is referred to in Canada. Many contributions

to this collection reflect the growing number of individuals who combine
image making and scholarship, and whose place is difficult to find within
the existing disciplinary concerns of documentary studies. As the reader
will gather, the chapters display varying degrees of emphasis on docu-
mentary making and scholarship, discussing image-making practices and
media untraditionally found in documentary studies such as photogra-
phy, installation, sound design, and mobile phones. The wish to expand
the boundaries of documentary studies to include these forms of image
and/or sound-making media, and alternative exhibition and screening
venues, parallels the overarching intention to question what has been
deemed “documentary” in its institutionalized form over the last dec-
ades. Including the documentary work of practice-based researchers is
yet another way of diversifying the field by acknowledging the meaning-
ful contributions of media makers who contextualize their practice within
the scholarly tradition identified by Adrian Miles as a “shared and com-
mon argot of practice and theory” (2018, 1).
Hybrid chapters combining scholarly and experimental writing,
personal reflections in the autobiographical mode, and speculative
moments reveal an emerging form of expression that is widely expand-
ing in academia and that the expanded field of documentary studies
could accommodate. One could argue that there is an intersectional
nature to this form of writing in terms of genres, as documentary media
intersect with the autobiographical, the scholarly, the pragmatic, and
the speculative. In many chapters, the implicit aim is to find a form
that will best speak to the creative and scholarly aspects of a given pro-
ject for an academic audience. A conversational and dialogic approach
that will accommodate such creative practice and scholarly work will
be highly desirable in the twenty-first century. With the proliferation of
practice-based doctoral programs in English-speaking countries, these
hybrid practitioners and thinkers will constitute a greater part of the
attendance at conferences and will author publications whose approach
shall be significantly different given their hybrid training. This collec-
tion offers a sample of these emerging voices as they too expand the
field of documentary studies.
Scholarly practices need to be challenged to face current devel-
opments as the one described in the preceding paragraph, as well as
imagine what the future of documentary within the university will be
once we have discarded the institutional boundaries that have prevented

documentary to flourish outside film studies circles. In order to do so,
documentary scholars should consider integrating the writings of art
historians, visual artists, and media scholars such as T.J. Demos (2013,
2016), Hito Steyerl (2008, 2016), Lu Xinyu (2003, 2015), Renate
Wöhrer (2015), and Paolo Magagnoli (2015) who have examined doc-
umentary practices in contemporary art and in non-Western countries.
The “documentary turn” within visual arts is a fascinating example of
how contemporary practices demand more familiarity with the writings
of art critics and media theorists to make sense of documentary media
in the present. In order to understand the shift from the projected doc-
umentary film to the exhibited documentary installation, and the pro-
found implications this has for spectatorship and the training of future
documentary scholars, it is crucial to rethink documentary studies
critically.
The interactive documentary and the growing body of literature sur-
rounding it are instructive with regard to challenging the status quo
and the theoretical strategies that can be used within the field. What
is refreshing in the work of interactive documentary scholars such as
Gershon and Malitsky (2010) and Miles (2017) is that, by drawing on a
field such as software studies or an approach such as actor-network the-
ory that is not traditionally associated with documentary studies, they
have implicitly questioned the capacity of film studies approaches to shed
light on the impact of digital technologies, Web 2.0, social media, and
interactivity on documentary practices in their reflections on linearity,
collective authorship, and online distribution.
This collection does include reflections on the interactive documen-
tary, as we recognize it is as one of the most significant genres to have
emerged in recent documentary practices, alongside the crowd-sourced
documentary, but we do think that limiting the discussion of the future
of documentary media to one genre does not reflect the great variety
of documentary work done today. Nor is it our belief that the future of
documentary practice or that of documentary studies is solely linked to
the interactive documentary and the Internet. It is our profound con-
viction that the essays in this collection draw from the great diversity of
documentary theories and practices today, and that we need to be critical
of technologically deterministic claims about the future of documentary
practice.
8 G. CAMMAER ET AL.
William Uricchio’s approach to the interactive documentary reflects

the critically distant work we advocate in this collection. Indeed,
Uricchio has cautioned against technological determinism, and he has
posited that while we are amidst great technological changes that will
impact how documentaries are made, distributed, and viewed, a perspec-
tive grounded in history or the longue durée may be our best ally. Using
immersion as an example, Uricchio notes that, from the nineteenth-
century panorama to the Oculus Rift, what we find is not so much
technological progress in visual media as a “long-term fascination with
evoking a sense of immersion in the world around us” (2017, 191).
Uricchio’s example is an interesting one, insofar as it points in the
direction of other immersive media—both past and present—and sug-
gests that we need to be weary of technologically deterministic claims in
assessing interactive documentaries.
While we concur with Uricchio that the historical perspective is still
preferable to utopian visions based in technological determinism, and
that approaches such as media archaeology could make a great contri-
bution to the field by unearthing little-known documentary media, we
wish to add that there lies a potential danger in the implicit claim that
the futures of documentary media would lie exclusively in the techno-
logical future rather than in the exploration and inclusion of excluded
and marginalized documentary media. We agree that “Our task is neither
to lament the passing of the old nor grow frantic over the emergence of
the new, but rather to assess carefully and critically their capacities and
implications for documentary practice and representational literacy more
broadly” (2017, 203). Indeed, while i-docs, virtual reality, and aug-
mented reality have undeniably changed the face of documentary mak-
ing and viewing and will continue to do so, documentary studies still
needs to integrate a great number of documentary media and work to
diversify its canon, and that such a task is long overdue in the case of
a documentary medium such as photography. Therefore, the possible
futures of documentary practice equally lie in the past as in the future.
While some would claim that the future of documentary media is about
interactivity and algorithms, we claim that documentary studies needs to
avoid technological determinism and teleological predictions and take a
close, critical look at the media, practices, and areas it has excluded over
the last three decades while constructing its institutional identity in the
Anglophone world.
Critical Humanism and Posthumanist Distance

One recurring interrogation underlying this volume’s critical perspective
relates to the reasons that could explain the divergent paths film stud-
ies and documentary studies have taken since the 1990s with regard to
theory. Indeed, while fiction film studies fashioned its institutional iden-
tity in the 1970s by appropriating concepts from Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis, feminist thought, Marxist apparatus theory, and semi-
otics to construct what came to be known as “film theory,” documen-
tary scholars have never demonstrated the same interest in “theory” to
conceptualize the notions (e.g., truth, the real, representation, the self,
memory, authenticity) central to the field, which do require a solid criti-
cal and philosophical foundation to be deployable in a discursive context.
Moreover, one would be hard pressed to find in documentary studies
thorough engagements with recent developments in critical theory and
philosophy such as post-Lacanian thought, assemblage theory, specula-
tive realism, object-oriented ontology, or posthumanism, to name just
a few approaches that have greatly questioned human subjectivity and
anthropocentrism.3 While references to the analysis of power relations or
references to the body in the tradition of phenomenological analysis still
dominate, documentary scholars have seemed reticent to integrate theo-
ries and concepts found in other fields. What could possibly explain this
lack of interest for current theoretical, critical, and philosophical issues?
While film studies has continued to show a marked interest in develop-
ments in critical theory and philosophy and has developed a film theory
canon that is constantly evolving with the times, documentary studies
as a field has yet to generate a solid body of work that could bear the
name “documentary theory.”
As opposed to film theory that has been rejuvenated a number of
times since the 1970s, documentary theory seems to have been still-
born in the early 1990s in what remains the only publication explicitly
targeting documentary theory itself: Michael Renov’s edited collection
Theorizing Documentary (1993). More than 25 years after the publica-
tion of Renov’s collection, documentary scholars need to pause and ask
how the current body of literature could be augmented to face the chal-
lenges of the twenty-first century. Facing this imperative, a key question
at the heart of this volume is: how can current theoretical approaches
in other fields of inquiry change our understanding of documen-
tary media, which is traditionally predicated upon the film as text, the
10 G. CAMMAER ET AL.
institution as the site of shifting power struggles, and the audience as

the agent of signification?
An example of what can be accomplished by turning to alterna-
tive theories relates to one of the central notions in documentary
studies, namely, the human. Documentary scholars versed in poststruc-
turalist theory concede that the concept of the “human” and its cog-
nates, humanity and humanism, have been contested since the early days
of structuralism in the 1960s. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault,
in his memorable conclusion, writes about the death of “man”:
As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of

recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were
to disappear as they appeared… as the ground of classical thought did at the
end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would
be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (2000, 387)
Such Nietzschean reflections were by no means exclusive to Foucault.

Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze
expressed similar ideas on the death of the subject or the death of the
author in the late 1960s and early 1970s. How can one explain the
absence of the need to rethink the human or humanism in documen-
tary studies given the debunking of the figure of the human more than
40 years ago? Surprisingly, documentary work still passes as the human-
istic practice par excellence in visual media, representing the disenfran-
chised and giving voice to the voiceless. This is not to say that issues of
representation have not been addressed, but that the very notion at the
heart of the debate—the human—could have been thoroughly examined
in a way that would have reflected advances made well before documen-
tary film came to find a place in the university.
Is it possible to rethink documentary practice in a way that rejects the
classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, and human
and animal, in order to fashion a different mode of critical thinking in
the “posthuman age”? Can documentary theory and practice have a
future if they are anti-anthropocentric and reject human exceptionalism?
What could a posthuman reformulation of the idea of the human lead to
in documentary studies? Could it echo the historical reformulations that
have accompanied the rise of the Anthropocene as an object of study and
the rise of “critical life studies” (Weinstein and Colebrook 2017) as the
field that thinks the posthumous, that is, life after the human? Would this
kind of rethinking concern only the Anthropocene and environmentally

related documentary films, or are there methodological and conceptual
principles embedded in such fields that could apply more generally to the
work that documentarians do, the subjects they document, and the way
in which they go about it?
A more cautious and theoretically informed approach to the
human, humanity, and humanism is in order in documentary studies.
If Christopher Watkin is right to state that “we find ourselves enter-
ing a new moment of constructive transformation in which fresh and
ambitious figures of the human are forged and discussed, and in which
humanism itself is being reinvented and reclaimed in multiple ways”
(2017, 1), then scholars should take stock of these developments in fields
not traditionally associated with documentary media.
A rare example of current critical practices that challenges the status
quo is Pooja Rangan’s Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in
Documentary. Her book thoroughly challenges the humanitarian desires
long thought to be at the heart of documentary film. Rangan argues that
the “endangered, dehumanized life not only sustains documentary, but
supplies its raison d’être. This is especially true, I propose, of participa-
tory documentary, whose guiding humanitarian ethic—giving the camera
to the other—invents the very disenfranchised humanity that it claims to
redeem” (2017, 1). The documentarian’s complicity in constructing the
very disenfranchised and dehumanized other he or she purports to give
a voice to would actually produce the humanity it is supposed to docu-
ment in the first place. Rangan’s views go against the grain of received
ideas in documentary theory and practice such as the progressive nature
of the medium and the humanitarian ideals of its practitioners to reveal
“how disenfranchised humanity is repeatedly enlisted and commodi-
fied to corroborate documentary’s privileged connection with the real”
(2017, 2). Rangan ultimately asks: How have documentary filmmakers
benefitted from the suffering humanity they set out to empower?
In her challenging work, Rangan reminds us that there was no follow-up
to the criticisms made by Trinh T. Min-ha and Fatimah Tobing Rony in
the 1990s against the representation of the non-West and what counts as
a legitimate documentary subject. In short, what should be an object of
debate is how “documentary, especially in its most benevolent human-
itarian guises, is thoroughly implicated in the work of regulating what
does and does not count as human” (2017, 8). Alongside Rangan, we
argue that such criticisms not only apply to how non-Western countries
and subjects are represented, but also how Western humanism has
overdetermined documentary practice and theory. This call for diversity
of thought in documentary studies is not so much meant to disparage
one theoretical approach or one documentary mode over another as to
expand the theoretical and conceptual concerns of the field. This is in the
spirit of challenging the status quo and the apparent consensus in docu-
mentary studies around the vestiges of humanist thought and the politics
of compassion predicated upon a certain sentimentalism and universal-
izing claims that animates most discussions. This may be considered an
ethical matter that moves beyond calls for empathy, particularly if such
calls too quickly default to a version of the self-same.
The integration of current issues in critical theory and continental
philosophy, while a daunting proposal, would help to establish a dialog
between the new materialisms that have forced both a turn away from
the textual narcissism of poststructuralism and a reconsideration of
the human and its role on the planet. The goal would be to rethink the
notion of subjectivity in light of these new materialisms, that is, both the
subjectivity of the documentarian and the subjective aspects of spectator-
ship. A fascinating example of such revisionist work is Joanna Zylinska’s
timely Nonhuman Photography. In her call for a new understanding of
photography that will grapple with nonhuman agency and vision to go
“beyond its traditional humanist frameworks and perceptions”, Zylinska
aims to construct a “posthumanist philosophy of photography, anchored in
the sensibility of what has become known as ‘the nonhuman turn’” (2017,
3, emphasis in original). Contesting the two traditional frameworks
which have been used to make sense of photographs—the art historical,
esthetic paradigm and the social practice paradigm—Zylinska proposes to
consider photographs as processes rather than esthetic or social objects
first and foremost, and she develops a theory of ontological mediation
to expand the human-centered focus of both philosophical esthetics
and photography history. Analyzing “imaging practices from which the
human is absent—as its subject, agent, or addressee”, Zylinska explores
images that “are not of the human” such as depopulated landscapes;
“photographs that are not by the human” such as CCTV images, body
scanners, and satellite images; and “photographs that are not for the
human” such as QR codes (2017, 5, emphases in original). Building
upon the “nonhuman turn” (Grusin 2015) and the general decenter-
ing of the human that has accompanied posthuman theory in the work
of scholars such as Cary Wolfe (2009), Jane Bennett (2010), Catherine
Malabou (2014), Donna Haraway (2016), Timothy Morton (2017), and

N. Katherine Hayles (2017), and in the literature on Speculative Realism
(Bryant et al. 2011; Avanessian and Malik 2016) and the Anthropocene
that has alerted us to our anthropocentric ways of perceiving the world—
and of constructing documentary narratives we might add—the notion
of “nonhuman vision” (Zylinska 2017, 8) emerges as a timely notion for
both understanding the challenges we face in the twenty-first century
and thinking the future of the photographic medium.
In addition to the figure of the human, one could argue that one
of the problems haunting documentary studies is that it has not devel-
oped a vocabulary that could satisfy its posthumanistic ambitions in the
twenty-first century. While documentary scholars have developed tools
to address the epistemological, sociocultural, and political stakes of rep-
resentation, they still do not possess a clear ontology. Here, the refer-
ence to ontology does not refer to the ontological status of the filmic
or photographic image à la André Bazin; rather, we refer to a profound
reflection on the very existence of the various entities populating the
world that would lead to the crafting of what Manuel DeLanda (2002),
Bruno Latour (2007), and Graham Harman (2016) have called a “flat
ontology” in which all entities—human and nonhuman—are given equal
weight, and, therefore, are worthy of being documented.
Needless to say, a flat ontology goes against the grain of the human-
istic tradition upon which documentary studies asserts its bias for all
things human. If documentary studies is to develop into a posthuman-
ist discipline taking part in contemporary debates, then it will have to
reconsider the overreliance on the depiction of humans (the field’s
anthropocentrism in other words), and then account for developments
in fields such as environmental studies and contemporary continental
philosophy that have developed new sensibilities. On the topic of the
interactive documentary and what he calls “algorithmic storytelling” and
“3D-capture virtual reality systems” (2017, 202), Uricchio claims that
“the concept of agency common to these future systems does not fit eas-
ily with the notion of the subject as it has developed in the West since
the fifteenth century” (2017, 203). Uricchio’s words do echo what we
argue for in this section, that is, documentary studies needs to critically
formulate an ontology fit for the documentation of twenty-first century
human and nonhuman entities. In future practical and theoretical exer-
cises, what if one was to worry less about capturing the real for humans
and worried more about capturing all that is real? Such a turn would
deemphasize epistemology in order to explore documentary media’s

neglected ontology (in the form of a flat ontology) and create a more
democratic and rebalanced approach to both the human and nonhuman
entities out there that equally deserve to be documented.
What Is Critical About Distance?

Our use of the term “critical” qualifies the distance taken from the cur-
rent state of affairs in documentary studies, and it points to the various
ways in which the authors represented in this collection respond to a
seismic shift in documentary thinking and practice. In this concluding
section, we examine the idea of critical distance with reference to both
words, critical and distance, and their usefulness to contemporary docu-
mentary media.
In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams
locates the word “critical” in relation to a constellation of other words
such as criticism and crisis. Williams notes that the word “critical” sep-
arates itself from the judgmental tasks of “criticism,” but, like the word
“crisis,” it is persistently used to refer to a “turning point” (1976, 75).
Turning points are moments of rupture and change. In documentary
media, they may signify the fault lines in hegemonic forms of cultural
power and indicate where alternatives forms, approaches, and subject
definitions are possible. Specifically, the essays offered by the authors in
this collection mark turning points in documentary production and the-
ory that are set at a distance from narrative film-based, nonfiction works.
The alternative forms explored in the collection include hybrid practices
of relational, performative, and socially engaged documentary media
as encountered in gallery installations, social media, sound works, and
i-docs, to name just a few. Beyond questions of form, some authors also
challenge the very notion of storytelling as a foundational concept in the
practice of documentary media.
In The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions, Georges Didi-
Huberman draws attention to Bertolt Brecht’s writing on war during
the time of his exile from Germany (1933–1948) and the montages of
visual documents and photographs he created under the title War Primer
[Kriegsfibel]. Didi-Huberman shows through Brecht how the eyes of his-
tory require “re-spatializing and re-temporalizing our way of looking”
(2018, xxvi). The respatialization that Didi–Huberman considers in rela-
tion to Brecht enacts a literal distance from, in this case, Europe, and
from the front-line of war certainly, but also to forms of critical and crea-
tive distanciation that operate by way of montage and the act of showing:
“to distance is to show, Brecht claimed. It is to make the image appear by
informing the spectator that what he sees is only an incomplete aspect
and not the entire thing, the thing itself that the image shows” (Didi-
Huberman 2018, 57, italics in original). To distance is to show and to
show by way of distance is to show beyond the thing itself, the thing
that the image shows. Redirected to documentary, we would suggest
that Brecht’s distancing technique provides an instructive stepping back
from story, narratological closure, identity, or too quick an equation that
would collapse a social subject into its visual representation. To distance
is to show beyond oneself, to provide observation plus a distance that
may step back from an observed other through an open-ended and non-
assuming gaze.
Paul Virilio has observed that if all presence is only presence at a dis-
tance, then “the presence of the contemporary philosopher of this
globalization can only be situated hinc et nunc in an opening up of dis-
tancing and meanings. Yet this auspicious distance can be more or less
wide, more or less distended” (1998, vii). Virilio’s insightful words res-
onate with the approach taken in this collection, for the concept of crit-
ical distance starts with an understanding that the subjects addressed are
at various critical junctures in history. The junctures may be social, spa-
tial, or representational, thus accounting for chapters that identify critical
moments, take critical stances, and find subjects of critical significance in
the social world, and explore the distances between the document and the
fluidity of experience, emergent modes of representation, and/or in the
distance or proximity between the referent and representation.
Throughout the volume, contributors examine documentary prac-
tices and ideas through the concept of critical distance, as a guide that
exemplifies concerns addressed in this introduction. Several chapters
address a multiplicity of technological and artistic sites where critical
distance has become paramount. In the opening chapter, Craig Hight
argues that the notion of indexicality has to be reassessed in the age of
mobile media and metadata. Hight makes the case that, while meta-
data augments the “sense-making” capability of documentarians, it also
suggests different meanings that are not readily apparent within the
various automated mobile, locative, and networked systems that pop-
ulate the world and which documentarians are invited to use. Bruno
Lessard examines the work of artists who distance themselves from the
dominant registers of light. In his investigation into night photography,

Lessard draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on night to articu-
late the principles of a “nocturnal philosophy” with which to examine
the work of photographic artists who have distanced themselves from
the diurnal register of documentary media to offer a unique critical per-
spective on some of our most pressing sociohistorical and environmental
challenges. The following two chapters analyze how performance art,
activism, and tactics advocate on behalf of marginalized communities.
Madeline Eschenburg examines how migrant workers have participated
in Chinese performance art. Using the notion of xianchang (site-speci-
ficity), Eschenburg shows how the use and application of this key term
have reflected historical change as a critical condition in postsocialist
China. Luísa Santos offers a discussion of the documentary and social
media strategies employed by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who
has acted as a critical witness to the ongoing refugee crisis in various
exhibitions.
Art documentation and the transformation of fluid and ephem-
eral experience into presentational modes, including those of the gal-
lery, are addressed in the following essays. Angela Bartram analyzes
two site-specific works and the production of sympathetic modes of
alternative critical documentation in exhibited work. Blake Fitzpatrick
examines the relationship between the aerial image and militarism as
undermined by the work of two artists who turn the aerial platform
associated with war and destruction against those who would control
others from the sky. Freeing tracking shots known as “phantom rides”
from narrative obligations and teleological cause-and-effect structures,
Gerda Cammaer’s chapter illustrates how documentary artists use phan-
tom rides as a continuous flow of motion that helps to create a space for
reflection in a world in flux.
The following chapters examine marginalized histories, sites, and
places, alongside alternative practices of the present in the critical mode.
In the context of the collapse of distance between filmmaker, subject,
and audience resulting from the use of mobile media, Anandana Kapur
reexamines the concept of documentary as a testimonial form and as wit-
ness to overlooked histories in four case studies drawing on the Indian
context, addressing critical issues such as reciprocity, access, and control.
Social movements and critical moments in the public sphere are discussed
by Kris Belden-Adams in a critical exploration of online persona and the
use of the selfie in the 2016 Hilary Clinton election campaign. Patrick
Kelly discusses how Instagram provides a platform for making and shar-
ing personal mobilementaries using juxtapositions of the quotidian,
questioning if and how makers of these media objects can remain crit-
ically distant when they reuse their own formerly posted media objects
as source material. Drawing on the field of animal studies, Concepción
Cortés Zulueta looks at relations and reversals in the human-camera-
animal triad to examine the distances between animal and human, self
and other, in online “photobombs,” thus critically rethinking wild-
life documentary. Randolph Jordan examines sound in location based
media to reinscribe the troubled intersections of geographical, social, and
political space and obscured Indigenous histories in Vancouver’s False
Creek area. Kim Munro addresses how voice and speaking positions are
aligned with power in documentary, proposing, as an alternative, the
overlooked act of listening as a critical and ethical turn in documentary.
Munro argues that a documentary practice foregrounding listening cre-
ates a critical distance that has the potential to implicate practitioners and
audiences in a new ecology of relationships. Finally, while the preceding
examples look at activism and the use of creative, emergent, and publi-
cally accessible media forms as interventions in the public sphere, Adrian
Miles takes a critical stance in relation to the presumed centrality of story
in documentary media and makes the case for the potential of actor-net-
work theory to relaunch documentary practice in the intimate mode.
Arguing instead for interactive documentary as a form of relational media
that is less about telling a story than it is about performing the world
critically, he turns the tables on critical distance to propose the notion of
“critical intimacy.”
To conclude, in this volume, the “critical” in critical distance points
to the various ways in which the authors subscribe to the post-Kantian
ethos of critique. In the Kantian sense, the concept of philosophical cri-
tique implies a certain distance, an objective stance predicated upon the
powers of reason necessary to know not the things in themselves, but
the way we come to know the epistemological stakes in human under-
standing and the foundations of knowledge itself. For this, Kant instructs
us, critical distance is necessary. It embodies the “critical attitude”
(2007, 42) Foucault developed as a concept when discussing Kant and
his reflections on the Enlightenment. In our post-Kantian age, what is
at stake in documentary practices is knowing the source and the episte-
mological limits of the critical distance Kant first championed. Although
they differ in style, approach, and method, the contributions to this
volume take various approaches to the notion of critical distance as a

central concern at the heart of documentary media, and they demon-
strate how temporary disquiet and disharmony are necessary ills to
effectively think the futures of documentary theory and practice in the
twenty-first century and the discourses that frame them within documen-
tary studies.
Notes
1. See, among numerous others, Brink and Oppenheimer (2013), Winston
(2013), Juhasz and Lebow (2015), Marcus and Kara (2015), Kahana
(2016), Nichols (2016), Winston et al. (2017), and LaRocca (2017).
2. See Nash et al. (2014), Zimmermann and De Michiel (2017), Aston et al.
(2017), and Miles (2018).
3. Named after a 2007 conference at Goldsmiths where it was first discussed
by Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Ray
Brassier, Speculative Realism wishes to counter the tradition of phenome-
nological and antirealist inquiries into human consciousness and language
by making the provocative claim that the world exists irrespective of our
sensory perception and our ability to discuss it. A cornerstone of specu-
lative realism is Meillassoux’s groundbreaking After Finitude (2008), in
which the author mounts an attack on correlationism, that is, “the idea
according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between
thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the
other” (2008, 5). According to Meillassoux, correlationism has defined
philosophical thought since Kant’s epoch-making distinction between the
noumenal and the phenomenal world. As is well known, the former refers
to a world that is beyond human cognition; it is the Kantian thing-in-itself
[Ding-an-sich] that resists human understanding, whereas the latter points
to the world humans can know through the senses, which is the world
phenomenological and epistemological studies have examined extensively.
It is the finitude of human thought that Meillassoux rejects in Kant’s
understanding of the noumenon. For the French philosopher and his coun-
terparts, it is possible to know the world in itself, and they have offered
numerous studies of the world and its objects to revive both continental
philosophy and metaphysical speculation.
Bibliography
Aston, Judith, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose (eds.). 2017. i-Docs: The
Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. London: Wallflower Press.
Avanessian, Armen, and Suhail Malik (eds.). 2016. Genealogies of Speculation:

Materialism and Subjectivity Since Structuralism. London: Bloomsbury.
Balsom, Erika, and Hila Peleg (eds.). 2016. Documentary Across Disciplines.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Brink, Joram ten, and Joshua Oppenheimer (eds.). 2013. Killer Images:
Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence. London:
Wallflower Press.
Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds.). 2011. The Speculative
Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press.
Caillet, Aline, and Frédéric Pouillaude (eds.). 2017. Un art documentaire:
Enjeux esthétiques, politiques et éthiques. Rennes: Presses universitaires de
Rennes.
Daniels, Jill, Cahal McLaughlin, and Gail Pearce (eds.). 2013. Truth, Dare or
Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars.
DeLanda, Manuel. 2002. Intensive Science and Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury.
Demos, T.J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary
During Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Demos, T.J. 2016. Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of
Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2018. The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions.
Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2000. The Order of Things. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. “What Is Critique?” In The Politics of Truth, edited by
Sylvère Lotringer, 41–81. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Gershon, Ilana, and Joshua Malitsky. 2010. “Actor-Network Theory and
Documentary Studies.” Studies in Documentary Film 4 (1): 65–78.
Gierstberg, Frits, Maartje van den Heuvel, Hans Scholten, and Martijn
Verhoeven (eds.). 2005. Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in
Photography, Film and the Visual Arts. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
Grusin, Richard (ed.). 2015. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the
Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harman, Graham. 2016. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. London:
Polity.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hohenberger, Eva, and Katrin Mundt (eds.). 2016. Ortsbestimmungen: Das
Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst. Berlin: Vorwerk 8.
Juhasz, Alexandra, and Alisa Lebow (eds.). 2015. A Companion to Contemporary

Documentary Film. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kahana, Jonathan (ed.). 2016. The Documentary Film Reader. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
LaRocca, David (ed.). 2017. The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound,
Fiction, Truth. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network
Theory. London and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lu Xinyu. 2003. Jilu Zhongguo: Dangdai Zhongguo xin jilu yundong. Beijing:
Sanlian shudian.
Lu Xinyu. 2015. Xueshu, chuanmei yu gonggongxing. Shanghai: Huadong shifan
daxue chubanshe.
Magagnoli, Paolo. 2015. Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental
Documentary. London: Wallflower Press.
Malabou, Catherine. 2014. Avant demain. Épigenèse et rationalité. Paris: PUF.
Marcus, Daniel, and Selmin Kara (eds.). 2015. Contemporary Documentary. New
York: Routledge.
Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude. Translated by Ray Brassier. London:
Polity.
Miles, Adrian. 2017. “Matters of Concern and Interactive Documentary: Notes
for a Computational Nonfiction.” Studies in Documentary Film 11 (2):
104–120.
Miles, Adrian. 2018. “Thirteen Points of Views from Afar.” In Digital Media
and Documentary: Antipodean Approaches, edited by Adrian Miles, 1–11.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Morton, Timothy. 2017. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People.
London: Verso.
Nash, Kate, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes (eds.). 2014. New
Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Nichols, Bill. 2016. Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in
Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rangan, Pooja. 2017. Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in
Documentary. Durham: Duke University Press.
Renov, Michael (ed.). 1993. Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge.
Rosler, Martha. 1981. “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary
Photography).” In 3 Works, 61–93. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design.
Sekula, Allan. 1978. “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary.”
Massachusetts Review 19 (4): 859–883.
Steyerl, Hito. 2008. Die Farbe der Wahrheit: Documentarismen im Kunstfeld.
Vienna: Turia + Kant.
Steyerl, Hito. 2016. Jenseits der Repräsentation/Beyond Representation. Cologne:

Walther König.
Uricchio, William. 2017. “Things to Come: The Possible Futures of
Documentary … from a Historical Perspective.” In i-Docs: The Evolving
Practices of Interactive Documentary, edited by Judith Aston, Sandra
Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, 191–205. London: Wallflower Press.
Virilio, Paul. 1998. “Foreword.” In Constructions, edited by John Rajchman,
vii–ix. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Watkin, Christopher. 2017. French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human
in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Weinstein, Jami, and Claire Colebrook (eds.). 2017. Posthumous Life: Theorizing
Beyond the Posthuman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winston, Brian (ed.). 2013. The Documentary Film Book. London: BFI.
Winston, Brian, Gail Vanstone, and Wang Chi. 2017. The Act of Documenting:
Documentary Film in the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury.
Wöhrer, Renate. 2015. Dokumentation als emanzipatorische Praxis. Künstlerische
Strategien zur Darstellung von Arbeit unter globalisierten Bedingungen.
Paderborn: Fink.
Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Zimmermann, Patricia R., and Helen De Michiel. 2017. Open Space New Media
Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.
Zylinska, Joanna. 2017. Nonhuman Photography. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Indexicality in the Age of the Sensor
and Metadata
Craig Hight
In one sense, this chapter is an attempt to outline the conditions

generating a critical distance from notions of indexicality that have vexed
documentary theory since its inception. But in another sense, the dis-
cussion here is part of an effort to identify and discuss ways in which
documentary practitioners themselves are now required to operate with
a more critical perspective on the nature of the sociotechnical assemblage
in which still and moving forms of photographic evidence find them-
selves. This chapter explores a notion of critical distance which is derived
from a variety of mechanisms, protocols, and everyday practices inte-
grated with photographic (and other forms of) evidence.
As has already been well rehearsed elsewhere (Rubinstein and Sluis
2013a, b; Lister 2013), indexicality is not a useful notion in the sense
of identifying and categorizing the ontology of photographic evidence.
Yet it retains its potency, particularly in a discursive sense, as a lingering
“commonsense” around the importance of mechanically captured rep-
resentations of the social-historical world.
C. Hight (*)
University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia
e-mail: craig.hight@newcastle.edu.au
© The Author(s) 2018 23

G. Cammaer et al. (eds.), Critical Distance in Documentary Media,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96767-7_2
24 C. HIGHT
Indexicality and the Documentary Agenda

“Indexicality” refers to the way in which certain representations are
formed from the physical trace of that which is represented; this is a
concept deeply embedded within the cultural power of the photo-
graph, the sound recording, and the cinematic and electronic image
(Corner 1996, 191). The concept of indexicality has remained funda-
mental to documentary, helping to distinguish the genre from other
audio-visual forms, and providing the sense of urgency it generates
as a social–political form (Corner 1996; Nichols 1991; Renov 2004;
Winston 2008).
According to Nichols, indexical documentation is one of four founda-
tion stones for documentary film (together with narrative story-telling,
poetic experimentation, and rhetorical tradition of oratory) (Nichols
2017). It conveys a sense of the “stickiness” of reality, fixing photo-
graphic representations within a specific time and place, and hence, a
sense of authenticity around photographic evidence (Nichols 1991,
149–155).
We do not have the space here to outline a detailed history of this
concept, but it is important to the discussion to note that this emerged
as part of the development of the social–technical apparatus of early pho-
tography and film, itself embedded within and informed by the ambi-
tions of the Enlightenment paradigms of observation, collation, analysis,
and findings. The desire for an apparatus capable of “capturing” reality
has always been at the center of an irresistible urge to “know” the world.
The early cameras appeared to offer the guarantee (through a physical
trace of light on photosensitive material) of objective evidence of the
real, the capability to “see” beyond the human eye, to transcend human
bias. Within documentary, the indexical also provides a basis for political
action:
The charge of the real is also, if to varying degree, an ethical charge: one
that calls forth not only response but also responsibility – not only aes-
thetic valuation but also ethical judgment. It engages our awareness not
only of the existential consequences of representation but also of our own
ethical implication in representation. It remands us reflexively to ourselves
as embodied, culturally knowledgeable, and socially invested viewers.
(Sobchack 2004, 284, emphases in original)
INDEXICALITY IN THE AGE OF THE SENSOR AND METADATA 25
Indexicality, then, has long been not only part of the common-sense
discourses around photographic images, but also something dependent
upon a sociotechnical assemblage generated within particular historical
(and hence material) contexts.
These claims, of course, have always been complicated by the more
mundane but inescapable complicating practicalities of how the camera
is used, such as where it is pointing, and what is outside the frame and
not being captured. Such factors become more problematic in a digital
age, when the photographic image is no longer associated with assump-
tions of “finite, framed, singular and static” meaning but those which are
“continuous, frameless, multiple and processual” (Rubinstein and Sluis
2013b, 30).
The “Post-photographic” Era

“Post-photographic” was a label which emerged in the wake of soft-
ware-based image manipulation practices such as those associated with
Adobe Photoshop. It signaled an apparent crisis in representation
and fostered anxieties about the implications of a collapse in indexical-
ity (Lister 2013). The notion of indexical evidence did not disappear,
however, but instead settled into an uneasy coexistence with a more
widespread sense of reflexivity toward the capability to manufacture,
manipulate, and distort image files. In retrospect, uncertainties around
integrity of the evidential are part of a wider ambivalent set of tensions
prompted by continuities of the Enlightenment agenda increasingly
played out in different (digital) contexts. The popularizing and natural-
izing of photography (particularly George Eastman’s success in establish-
ing the “snapshot” as everyday history and sense making) are too deeply
entangled within everyday life to be abandoned.1
As Rubinstein and Sluis note (2008, 11), it took a great deal of time
for digital technology as a whole to revolutionize photography, as this
larger transformation depended upon a range of technologies (hardware
and software) becoming available, cost affordable, and accessible for mass
consumption. It was not until cheap, automated, widely available digital
still cameras easily meshed with the capabilities of social networks that
online photography truly flourished. The “snapshot” remains, but is
extended and transformed into a broadening variety of social, cultural,
political, and economic practices. Pictures are becoming more personal,
intimate, shareable, and also more banal and everyday (Gye 2007, 285).
26 C. HIGHT
Murray argues that the capability of producing streams of images (and

displayed through platforms such as Flickr) encourages the generation
of streams of more transient, ephemeral images and inevitably reduces
the significance of any individual image (2008, 151). There are plenty
of accounts already of this side of photographic culture, attempts to
generalize from what Hands terms the “radically pervasive” nature of
image taking within contemporary culture (2012). As video has become
a standard capability on mobile devices, similar trends have manifested
within online video cultures.
Of particular interest to this discussion is the gradual entanglement of
the photographic apparatus within software culture. The task of taking a
photograph has long been one aided by automated and a semiautomated
software, with algorithmic tools evaluating the light conditions, detect-
ing faces in the frame, automatically determining the optimal settings for
elements such as focus, shutter speed, and flash to produce the best snap-
shots (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 120).
As software is able to operate unfettered from specific hardware con-
figurations, we can recognize practices of image/sound manipulation
as operating on a more fluid continuum. In particular, there is a very
deliberate blurring here between the act of taking footage and the act
of manipulating it. The act of “correcting” mistakes in image taking
is positioned as an extension of taking video footage.2 These develop-
ments constitute a complex field of expectations and assumptions about
photographic evidence in a digital era. These now increasingly also
play out within what Andrejevic and Burdon term our “sensor society”
(Andrejevic and Burdon 2015).
The Camera and Other Sensors

Within mobile digital devices, a camera is just one of an array of increas-
ingly standard sensors. Image sensors have been around since the first
digital camera, CCD and CMOS sensors first emerging in the 1960s,
the basis for later developments in professional and consumer digi-
tal cameras. They “allow the transformation of optical images, created
with the aid of a lens and a small opening in front of a dark chamber,
into binary digital data” (Lehmuskallio 2016, 248). The proliferation of
other sensors in particular on mobile devices with image-capturing capa-
bility (smartphones are the exemplars of this trend) means that these are
devices not only primed for everyday image operations by users, but are
inevitably also networked to other software-based regimes which shape

these operations’ potential meanings.
The list of sensors increasingly used on smartphones (here iPhone 6)
provides a useful snapshot of developments in the field. A proximity sen-
sor determines how close the iPhone is to your face, to prevent acciden-
tal touches to the interface. A 3-axis accelerometer senses the orientation
of the phone and changes the screen accordingly, allowing the user to
easily switch between portrait and landscape mode, for example, or to
use shaking as a form of input. An ambient light sensor determines how
much light is available in the area and automatically adjusts the bright-
ness of the screen. A moisture sensor detects when the phone has been
submerged in water. The magnetometer measures the strength and/or
direction of the magnetic field in the vicinity of the device. This sensor is
used with the device’s global positioning system (GPS) and other loca-
tion awareness features to help determine your iPhone’s location, which
direction it is facing, and mapping functions.
For the purposes of this discussion, the most crucial aspects of a slow
“sensor creep” (continually adding further sensors as the hardware with
each new smartphone release) are the potential to keep adding to the vari-
ety of metadata which are already automatically added to or associated
with image files at the point of capture. Metadata are data which describe
or provide some kind of information about other data (Pomerantz 2015).
The generation of moving/still images together with metadata, recording
an increasing array of information (in particular temporal and spatial data),
involves the generation of additional layers of information which carry
meaning above and beyond that seen within the frame and have signifi-
cant implications for how we define (moving) images themselves and how
they may be used. Image stabilization, to give one example, is made pos-
sible because of the metadata around camera orientation, positioning, and
movement that are captured by default by most video cameras.
The addition of new sensors, the increasing sensitivity and sophistica-
tion of sensor operations, and the combinations in which they might be
used mean that smartphones allow for new and distinctive additions to
their operations—all part of the wider seductive appeal of these devices
within everyday lives.3
The implications for images themselves are profound, as has been
widely discussed elsewhere. In Hoelzl and Marie’s terms, the image has
become software, and in ways that transform its ontology and relation-
ship to other forms of software culture.
28 C. HIGHT
The image is no longer a passive and fixed representational form, but is

active and multiplatform, endowed with signaletic temporality that is not
only the result of digital screening (and compression) but also of transfer
across digital networks. […] It is no longer a stable representation of the
world but a programmable view of database that is updated in real-time.
It no longer functions as a (political and iconic) representation but plays a
vital role in synchronic data-to-data relationships. (Hoelzl and Marie 2015,
3–4)
Moving or still images are generated, by default, with a host of associated

metadata which contain profound implications for notions of indexical-
ity, and hence for documentary practice. As Hoelzl and Marie note, pho-
tographic data are now (layered forms of) data no longer separate from
the algorithm. All such material is stored as compressed files through
standards such as JPEG formats or video codecs, able to be compressed
and easily distributed, then rendered using the algorithm applied again.
By re-writing the image as machine-readable text, metadata facilitates

the identification, discovery, retrieval, misuse, exploitation and dissemi-
nation of images online. […] To conceive of metadata simply as another
layer of information is therefore to overlook its potential to contaminate,
mutate or change the direction and context of the image at every turn.
(Rubinstein and Sluis 2013a, 152)
Sensors are, thus, deeply connected with the effort to generate new
streams of information from a variety of sources and opening these to
new possibilities for applying a variety of computer-centered forms of
manipulation, sorting, and sense making. The wider contexts to note
here are the drift toward Big Data paradigms and their prioritizing of
data itself as a form of knowing, and the centrality of programming code
as a key part of the new human-machine assemblage of photography.
Metadata and Big Data

There are a host of assumptions to this new era, not least that they rep-
resent an “unprecedented opportunity to observe human behavior and
social interaction in real time, at a microscopic level yet on a global scale”
(Golder and Macy 2014, 146), and this occurs through the generation of
the “vernacular datasets of the digital age,” helpfully generated by users
themselves (McPherson 2013, 7) through practices of self-archivisation,

self-surveillance, and the full spectrum of human performance. As Smith
notes, history is being “archived live” (Smith 2013, 381) through social
media platforms.
Debates over Big Data have yet to provide a consensus on its defi-
nition, although Kitchin provides a more than useful summary which
includes features such as huge in volume, high in velocity, diverse in vari-
ety, exhaustive in scope, fine-grained in resolution, relational in nature,
and flexible (Kitchin 2014, 68). Big Data is offered as a new paradigm in
science (Kitchin 2014, 129), one marked by belief in the inherent truth
of data free of theory (Anderson 2008, n.p.), and an attendant faith in
algorithms to uncover patterns through data mining and machine learn-
ing, and a preoccupation with fostering an ability to predict rather than
explain (Kitchin 2014, 132).
There is a powerful and attractive set of ideas at work in these arguments

that runs counter to the deductive approach that is hegemonic within
modern science. First, that big data can capture the whole of a domain
and provide full resolution. Second that there is no need for a priori the-
ory, models or hypotheses. Third, that through the application of agnos-
tic data analytics the data can speak for themselves free of human bias or
framing, and that any patterns and relationships within big data are inher-
ently meaningful and truthful. Fourth, that meaning transcends context or
domain-specific knowledge. (Kitchin 2014, 132)
Social media is the key innovator and exemplar here, offering the prom-
ise of an ocean of data, and not just any data. These infrastructures
promise to map onto national size populations, and to collate data inti-
mately related to what people actually do, to how people actually think
about things (Steen-Johnsen and Enjolras 2015, 125). Critics have pro-
vided labels such as “data fundamentalism” (Crawford 2013), and “data-
fication” (Van Dijck 2014) to term a discursive regime that obscures the
monetizing agenda behind social media platforms and promotes quantifi-
cation as an objective paradigm for humanity. Social data, in this regime,
are raw, untainted, waiting to be culled, scraped, and made sense with
by researchers inside and outside of platforms. In Kitchin’s terms this is
“data determinism” (Kitchin 2014, 135), where the data simply speak
for themselves.
30 C. HIGHT
The broader paradigms of data, offered as a new ontology about

the world, and an attendant series of approaches in interfacing with all
aspects of society inform the ways in which digital images are entangled
in these new infrastructures. In turn, new perspectives are required to
make sense of, and offer critical commentary on, such paradigms, one of
which is software studies.
Software and Data Practice

Software studies are a comparatively new field of inquiry that Lev
Manovich and others have championed (Johnson 1997; Fuller 2003,
2008; Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Manovich 2013). Within the software
studies paradigm, software is the dominant cultural technology of our
time, one which is fundamentally reshaping all areas of modern life and
requiring all disciplines focused on contemporary society and culture to
account for its role and effects.
A core premise of software studies is the need to move away from see-
ing software applications, platforms, and infrastructure as “neutral” tools
(Fuller 2003, 16). Software is itself a cultural artifact, evolving within
particular organizations which operate with their own specific discourses
on the purposes and uses of their technology, with components that may
have their own life cycle, but are also available to be recombined toward
new ends (Berry 2011, 42). And most crucially software has agency.
Software possesses secondary agency that engenders it with high technic-
ity. As such, software needs to be understood as an actant in the world—
it augments, supplements, mediates, and regulates our lives and opens
up new possibilities—but not in a deterministic way. Rather, software is
afforded power by a network of contingencies that allows it to do work
in the world (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 43–44).
Coding (or programming, as these terms tend to be used inter-
changeably) is a form of writing which inscribes types of actions to be
performed using a computer.4 It is a form of writing that not only has
material effects but also often has unintended consequences. No form of
code is perfect; it emerges from human endeavor and is inscribed with
the conditions of its creation as with all cultural artifacts. Software is also
an evolving part of culture, “an essentially unfinished product, a continu-
ally updated, edited and reconstructed piece of machinery” (Berry 2011,
39), with components that may have their own life cycle, break down, or
be recombined toward new ends (Berry 2011).
There are key aspects of software culture which we need to briefly

outline here. First, programming code needs to be understood broadly
as engendering “both forces of empowerment and discipline” (Kitchin
and Dodge 2011, 10–11). Software applications and platforms are
attractive precisely because they are designed toward increasing efficien-
cies and productivity, generating entirely new markets, and providing
new forms of play and creativity. However, they also serve as “a broad
range of technologies that more efficiently and successfully represent,
collate, sort, categorize, match, profiles, and regulate people, processes,
and places” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 10–11). This tension between
“empowerment” and “discipline” offers a broad frame for understanding
the layered and complex role which software plays at a variety of levels
especially within networked media. At the more microlevel, we need to
be considering the manner and ways in which specific pieces of software
work to both enable and constrain creative practices, such as those asso-
ciated with (digital) documentary practices.
At that level, we as users encounter an application or platform, and
our engagement is both fostered and constrained through the affor-
dances that piece of software provides. An affordance “is an action possi-
bility or an offering,” something which might be provided by hardware
or software (McGrenere and Ho 2000, 6). Affordances allow us to do
particular thing: to select, to view, to manipulate in specific ways. If we
look at a software application as providing a set of these possible actions,
then it is vital to map how these affordances appear within a specific
hierarchy, with some made easily available to its users, and how they are
more generally organized to support or constrain what users can use that
application for. The interface for a piece of software embodies that hier-
archy of affordances; these are the default tools we find most easily on
ribbons or drop-down menus. At a more fundamental level, if we extrap-
olate from the set of affordances which a piece of software provides, we
can start to see the underlying conceptual framework which an applica-
tion, platform, or infrastructure operates within.5
Another closely related and fundamental facet of software culture,
one which facilitates the transformative potential of coded practices, is
automation. Automation enables aspects of a practice to be translated
into algorithmic form and hence opens new possibilities for augment-
ing and scaling up a practice. By combining different automated pro-
cesses, sequentially or in parallel, software culture can start to exhibit
practices that take on their own distinctive quality, including generating
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
I LUKU
Oli silloin kolkko marraskuu ja päivät himmeinä hiipi, kun

kotimaahan ma matkustin, — puut tuuli paljaiksi riipi.
Ja rajalle tullessa tunsin ma,

kun kiivahammin sykki
sydän rinnassa, luulenpa, silmääni
ihan kyyneleitä lykki.
Ja kieltä kotoista kuullessa

niin mieli kummaksi meni,
ihan kuin verenvuotohon suloiseen
ois riutunut sydämeni.
Oli harpputyttönen tyllerö,

tosituntein ja äänin väärin
hän lauloi, vaan mua liikutti
toki soitto se suuressa määrin.
Hän lauloi, kuin lempii ja uhrautuu

ja kärsii ja jälleen tapaa
tuoll' iloissa paremman maailman
sydän toisensa, vaivoista vapaa.
Maan murhelaaksosta lauloi hän,
sen riemuista rikkuvista,
isänmaasta sielun kirkastuneen,
ilohäistä sen ikuisista.
Soi vanha kieltäymysvirsi taas,

tuo taivaan aa-lulla-loru,
jolla kansan, tuon ison vintiön,
pois tuuditellaan poru.
Hyvin virren ja virrentekijät

ne tunnen ma, tiedän että
he salassa viiniä itse joi,
mut julki veisasi vettä.
Uus laulu, laulu parempi

nyt, veikot, laulakamme!
Me taivaan valtakunnan jo
maan päälle perustamme.
Tääll' olla tahdomme onnelliset,

pois puutteet, polot ja raiskat!
Käden ansiota ei ahkeran
saa ahmia vatsat laiskat.
Joka ihmislapselle kasvavi

tääll' leipä ja leivän apu,
ilo, kauneus, ruusut ja myrtit myös,
joka suuhun sokeri papu.
Niin, sokeripapuja kaikille,

heti kohta kun halkee palot!
Me huostaan houkkain ja enkelein
jo jätämme taivaan talot.
Ja luoksenne vieraiksi lennämme,

jos kuoltua siivet saamme;
autuuden kauneimmat kakkuset
me siellä kanssanne jaamme.
Uus laulu, laulu parempi!

kuin viulun ja huilun humu!
Ohi Miserere on, vaiennut
jo kuolinkellojen kumu.
Europa-neitseen kihlannut
on Vapaus, sulho suuri,
ens syleilyn, ens suutelon
jumalaisen he vaihtaa juuri.
Sitä vaikka pappi ei siunannut,

on luja se liitto ja sauma —
pari kaunis kauan eläköön,
jalo nouskoon lapsien lauma!
Häälaulu on mun lauluni,

se uus, mi vanhat voittaa!
Olen haltioitu, mun sielussain
pyhät, korkeat tähdet koittaa —
tulitähdet tenhotut, hillittömät kuin tulvivat liekkilammet —

väen kumman tunnen ma itsessäni, käsin voisin taitella
tammet!
Kotimaahan jalkani käytyä mun lumonesteet suonissa
soutaa — emon tapasi jättiläinen taas, hält' uusia voimia
noutaa.
II LUKU
Kun tyttönen lauloi ja liritti, min taisi, taivahan taikaa, niin

tulliherrat ne tutkivat mun arkkuni sillä aikaa.
Nenäliinat ja paidat ja housut muut,

joka nurkan ne nuuski ja kurkki;
jalokiviä, pitsejä, kirjoja
myös kielletyitä ne urkki.
Te tomppelit arkkujen tutkijat,

te tutkitte turhin vaivoin!
Salatavarat, joita ma kuljetan,
ne mull' on arkussa aivoin.
Siell' on mulla pitsit hienommat

kuin Brüsselin parhaat — ne jahka
ma näytän, niin neulasin neulotuiks
ne tunnette, tulessa nahka.
Jalokivet on, valtatimantit

ajan uuden otsalle mulla,
nuoren jumalan temppelikalleudet,
suuren tuntemattoman tulla.
Ja kirjoja päässäni mulla myös,
sen sanon, on sangen monta!
Kuin laulava linnunpesä se pää
lukemista on luvatonta.
Sen sanon ma, Saatanan kirjastoss'

on tuskin niin turmiokkaita;
ei Hoffmann von Fallersleben ees
niin vaarallisia laitat —
Joku matkustaja se mainitsi,

ett' edessämme juuri
oli Preussin tulliliitto nyt,
tuo tullirengas suuri.
"On tulliliitto" — hän huomautti —

"perus kansallisuutemme vakaa,
isänmaalle eheän yhteyden
se pirstotulle takaa.
Meille ulkonaisen se yhteyden suo,

niin sanotun aineellisen;
suo sensuuri henkisen yhteyden,
tuon tosi-aatteellisen.
Meille tahtoo se sisäisen, mielien, ajatusten yhteyden taata;

yksimielinen Saksa me tarvitaan, sisält', ulkoa yhtä maata."
III LUKU
Tuoll' Aachenin tuomiokirkossa

Karolus Magnus maatuu, —
Karl Mayer, Svaabissa eläjä,
mies vallan toist' on laatuu.
Vähät maata Aachenin kirkossa

ma keisarivainaana soisin;
ennen Stukkertiss' äärellä Neckarjoen
runopiltti pieni ma oisin.
Kovin Aachenin koirill' on ikävä,

alamaisesti anoo ne suita:
"Meille potku suo, vähän virkistää
meit' ehkä se, vieras kulta.":
Tuossa kuivassa pesässä kulutin

ma saappaan korkoja tovin.
Sotaväkeä preussiläist' oli taas,
eip' ollut muuttunut kovin.
Sama vanha, harmaa mantteli

ja korkea punainen kaulus —
"Puna verta frankkien merkitsee",
soi muinen, Körner, sun laulusi
Nuo samat pedanttiset pökkelöt,

yhä vaan sama suora kulma
joka kääntehessä, ja kasvoilla
sama samea, puutunut pulma.
Yhä tuo sama jäykkä jäppäily,

sama asento seivässojo,
kuin kitaansa kepin he nielleet ois,
josta kyljiss' ol' ennen mojo.
Niin, sisäll' on heillä nyt pamppu, se

ole milloinkaan ihan laannut;
on sijaansa vaan tuo vanha "hän"
"sinän" tuttavallisen saanut.
Noina pitkinä viiksinä virkaan taas

sama vanha palmikko palas:
takapuolia se ennen puikkeli vaan,
nokan alta nyt riippuu alas.
Tuo uus univormu ratsuväen

mua miellytti melkoisesti,
teräspiikkinen kypäri semminkin, —
hyvä sillä on ollut lesti.
Sen ritarisuudessa kangastaa

kaikk' armahat romantiikit,
jalorotuiset rouva Montfauconit,
Fouquét, Uhlandit, Tieckit.
Keskiaika kaunoinen kangastaa,
sen linnat ja ritarituvat,
asepojat, povissa uskollisuus,
takamuksissa vaakunakuvat.
Kaikki ristiretket ja turnaukset,

hovit lemmen ja kaihot kainot,
ajat aapisettoman uskon, jot' ei
vielä vienehet kirjapainot.
Jalo kypäri, kaikkein korkeimman

se sukkeluuden on väläys!
Se piikkiä, kärkeä puutu ei —
kuninkaallinen päähänpäläys!
Vain pelkään, ett' ukkosen noustessa

pian moinen piikki se johtaa
upo-uusimmat taivaan salamat
romanttista päätänne kohtaani
On köykäisemmät päähineet
sodan tullen tarvis ostaa;
kovin raskas on kesk'ajan kypäri,
jalat laukkaan kun saatte nostaa. — —
Ovell' Aachenin postitalon se taas

tuo lintu kilvessä liehui,
jota vihaan ma niin! Mua kohti sen
kähy musta silmissä kiehui.
Sa lintu-iljetys, maltas kun

sun käsiini saamaan osun,
mä kyllä sun kynin ja höyhennän
ja kyntes murskaksi hosun.
Sa maltas, ilmassa heilua saat

pian varressa pitkän luudan;
ma hauskahan haukan-ammuntaan
kytät, reiniläiset huudan.
Ken alas sun ampuu, se valtikan saa

sekä kruunun mult', uros oiva!
Torvet raikuvat, "kuningas eläköön!"
on riemuhuutomme soiva.
IV LUKU
Tulin Kölniin myöhään illalla, luo pauhuisen Reinin partaan,

mua hyväili ilmat jo isänmaan, niin minussa herätti hartaan
ne ruokahalun. Ma siellä söin munakakkua, kinkkua sian,

liha suolainen vaati suun kostukkeeks myös Reininviiniä pian.
Yhä vehreissä roomalaislaseissa

se vielä kultana hohtaa,
ja liikaa jos puolikon jonkun juot,
nokan päähän se nousee kohta.
Nokan päähän niin makea kutkutus,

että malta et maistamatt' olla; —
ulos lähteä katuja kaiuttamaan
piti öisellä kuutamolla.
Kivitalot ne katseli mua, kuin ois

ajan ammoisen tarinoita,
pyhän Kölnin kaupungin tahtoneet
mulle kertoa muisteloita.
Niin, tääll' ovat nähneet elostavan
ne pappein, hurskasten sutten,
täällä "hämärät miehet" on häärineet,
kuten kertoo Ulrik von Hutten.
Täällä kesk'ajan nunnain ja munkkien

oli kankaani-maskeraati;
Hoogstraaten, Kölnin Menzel, tääll'
ilmiannot äkäiset laati.
Tääll' ihmisiä ja kirjoja

tulirovio tuhosi muinen;
soi kellot ja kyrie-eleison
nous ilmoille tuhatsuinen.
Täällä tyhmyys ja kiukku ne kiimaili

kuin koirat raitteja pitkin;
vielä tuntea uskonvimmastaan
voi jälkeläiset ne nytkin. —
Vaan tuolla kuutamossa, kas,

tuota jylhää kummitusta!
Se Kölnin tuomiokirkko on
tuo pelätti peikko-musta.
Tuli olla sen hengen bastilji,

ketut Rooman ne tuumi: tänne,
tähän jättityrmään turtuva
on Saksan järjen jänne!
Tuli silloin Luther, luja mies,

seis-huutonsa kuului suuri —
sen koommin korkenematta jäi
tuon tuomiokirkon muuri.
Se kesken jäi — ja se hyvä on.

Juuri valmistumatta-jäänti
sen Saksan voiman ja tehtävän
protestanttisen merkiks säänti.
Te tomppelit tuomioneuvoston,
onko aikomus kättenne heikkoin
työ jäänyt päättää, valmistaa
pesä vanha se sorron peikkoin?
Voi mielettömyyttä! Te kalistakaa

ropopussia, juoskaa rahaa
kereteiltä ja juutalaisiltakin —
siit' apua ei pahan pahaa.
Suotta suuri Franz Liszt hän soitollaan

tuota tuomiokirkkoa tukee,
ja muuan lahjakas kuningas
suotta hyväks sen lausuu ja lukee!
Tule tuomiokirkko se valmiiks ei,

vaikka Svaabin narrit keksi
koko laivan kiviä lähettää
sen jaloksi jatkamiseksi.
Tule valmiiks ei, vaikka kirkuna

miten korppein ja pöllöin kiihtyy,
jotka vanhanaikaisin aatteineen
hyvin vanhoissa torneissa viihtyy.
Niin, aika on saava, mi itseään
sen valmistelull' ei vaivaa,
päinvastoin suojat sen sisäiset
se hevostalliksi raivaa.
"Hevostalliksi tuomiokirkkomme!
Mut kuinkas silloin noiden
pyhän kolmen kuninkaamme käy,
tabernaklissa nukkujoiden?"
Niin kysytte multa, mut pakkoko

on kursailla tämän ajan?
Itämaan pyhät kolmet kuninkaat
saa muuttaa muualle majan.
Ma teitä neuvon, ne pistäkää

noihin kolmeen rautavakkaan,
jotka Münsterissä on ripustetut
Pyhän Lambertin tornin lakkaan.
Ja jos triumviraatti ei täys, joku muu mies lisäksi pankaa

vainen, sijast' itäisten maitten kuninkaan joku pankaa
länsimainen.
V LUKU
Ja tuonne kun Reinin sillalle tulin Satamavallin luoksi, näin isä

Reinin, kun valossa kuun se juhlallisna juoksi.
Ole tervehditty sä, isä Rein,

sa oletko voinut hyvin?
Sua olen monesti muistellut
ma kaipauksin syvin.
Noin virkoin, ja oli kuin veestä ois

niin outo urina soinut,
mies vanha kuin yskäisin, vapisevin
ois äänin vaikeroinut:
"Tervetullut, poikani, kiitos, kun

noin vuott' olet kolmetoista
mua muistanut, poissa ollessas
sain kokea monenmoista.
Biberichissä kiviä niellä sain,

ei kiittää kestä se kekker'!
Mut pahemmin lastasi laulullaan
mun vatsani Niklas Becker.
Mua laulanut on hän, kuin oisin ma
mikä puhtahin impi ikään,
kenen kunniankukkaista riistämään
ei tulla saa mies mikään.
Tuon tuhman laulun kuullessain

ihan valkopartani voisin
pois reväistä, itseni hukuttaa
ihan omaan itseeni soisin.
Pojat Ranskan ne paremmin tietävät,

mi on impeydessäni perää;
ovat voittajavetensä sekoittaneet
mun vesiini monta jo erää.
Tuo tuhma laulu ja tuhma mies!

Mua herjasi suotta syyttä.
Tavallaan mulle hän tuotti myös
poliittista ikävyyttä.
Näet ranskalaiset jos palaa nyt,

saan hävetä niiden eessä,
joka taivaalta heit' olen takaisin
ain' anonut silmät veessä.
Pikku ranskalaisia rakastanut

olen aina — vieläkö siellä
vain leikkivät, laulavat, valkoiset
heill' onko housut vielä?
Ilo heit' ois tavata, elleivät

he irvisteleis mua nähden
tuon kirotun loilotuksen vuoks,
tuon häväistyksen tähden.
Alfred de Musset, katupoika tuo,

etupäässä päälleni käyden
ehkä rummunlyöjänä rummuttaa
mulle kompia korvan täyden."
Noin huoltaan päivitti isä Rein,

koko oloa onnetonta.
Koin häntä rohkaista, haastelin
hälle lohdun sanaa monta:
Ole huoleti ilkuista, isä Rein,

ei enää he moniin vuosiin
ole vanhoja ranskalaisia,
myös housut on uuteen kuosiin.
Ne on punaiset nyt, ei valkoiset,

napit toiset myös niitä sulkee.
Heiltä leikit ja laulut on lakanneet,
päät kuurussa miettein he kulkee.
He filosofeeraa nyt Kanteista

ja Fichteistä, Hegeleistä,
he piippua polttaa ja olutta juo,
lyö keilaakin moni heistä.
Poroporvareiksi kuin mekin he käy,

ja vimmatummiksi vielä;
Voltairen henki on heistä pois,
pian Hengstenberg herra on siellä.
Alfred de Musset'llä tosiaan
vielä katupojan on eljet;
mut rauhaan jää, hänen kielelleen
kyllä teemme häijylle teljet.
Pahan komman sulle jos rummuttaa,

saa kuulla hän pahemmat kommat,
saa kuulla, kuin kävi kauniissa
hamekansassa häitä hommat.
Viis tuhmista lauluista, isä Rein,

pois huolet ja huonot tuulet!
Jää hyvästi, jälleen tapaamme —
pian paremman laulun kuulet.
VI LUKU
Paganinia seurasi alati oma spiritus familiaris, kuin koira

milloin, milloin kuin edesmennyt herra Georg Harrys.
Näki punaisen miehen Napoleon,

kun suurt' oli tapahtuva,
ja Sokrateell' oli daimoni,
ei ollut se hourekuva.
Minä itse, kun pöytäni ääressä

välin myöhään yöll' olin työssä,
olan takaa olennon kammokkaan
näin naamio kasvoilla yössä.
Salas jotain kummasti kiiluvaa

hänen vaippansa vaiheella hihan,
se kirveeltä, teloituskirveeltä
mun silmääni näytti ihan.
Oli olento vanttera varreltaan,

ja silmät kuin tähteä kaksi;
ei koskaan työtäni häirinnyt,
jäi tyynnä vaan taemmaksi.
Ei vuosiin ollut näyttäynyt
tuo kumma kumppani luona,
kun äkisti Kölnissä tapasin taas
hänet kuutamoyönä tuona.
Ma miettien katuja mitatessain

hänen keksin takana käyvän,
kuin varjoni ois, ja kun pysähdin,
näin hänenkin pysähtäyvän.
Hän pysähti, kuin mit' ois odottanut,

kävi taas, kun käydä ma aloin.
Noin tuomiokirkon torille
oli tultu me jalka jaloin.
Sit' en sietänyt enää, ma käännähdin:

"Tee tili, mies, mikä sulia
jok' askel noin läpi aution yön
on tarvis takana tulla?
Sun aina tapaan, kun laineihin

saa maailmantunteet laajat
mun poveni, kun läpi aivojen
lyö hengen hehkuvat vaajat.
Sa minuun jäykästi tuijotat noin —

tee tili: sa mitä salaat,
joka vilkkuu ja välkkyy suu viitastas?
Ken olet ja mitä halaat?"
Mut toinen laiskan kuivasti

vain vastaa: "Salli nyt saattos,

Critical Distance in Documentary Media 1St Ed Edition Gerda Cammaer Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Critical Distance in Documentary Media 1St Ed Edition Gerda Cammaer Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Critical Distance in Documentary Media

1st ed. Edition Gerda Cammaer

ISBN 978-3-319-96766-0 ISBN 978-3-319-96767-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951552

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover image: OZGUR TOLGA ILDUN/Alamy Stock Photo

Introduction: Critically Distant 1

Indexicality in the Age of the Sensor and Metadata 23

Shot in the Dark: Nocturnal Philosophy and Night

Approaches to Xianchang: Documenting the Real

Ai Weiwei: Grafting as a Documentary Tactic in Art 91

Unsatisfactory Devices: Legacy and the Undocumentable

From Above: Critical Distance, Aerial Views, and

Phantom Rides as Images of the World Unfolding 149

Mobile Media: A Reliable Documentary Witness? 169

Redefining the “Document”: Social-Media Photographs

Instagram as Archive: Constructing Experimental

That Seagull Stole My Camera (and My Shot)!:

Re-placing the Urban Soundscape: Performative

From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through

From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive

Angela Bartram is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. Her

work consists of experimental films, poetic documentaries, and mobile

Franziska Weidle is a visual anthropologist mainly working with film,

Shot in the Dark: Nocturnal Philosophy and Night Photography

From Above: Critical Distance, Aerial Views, and Counter-Images

From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through Multi-linear

Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick and Bruno Lessard

Predicated upon the notion of “critical distance,” this collection

G. Cammaer · B. Fitzpatrick · B. Lessard (*)

© The Author(s) 2018 1

predominant approaches within documentary studies, as well as tradi-

sonic environments, and mobile media, among other sites of documen-

The Possible Futures of Documentary Studies

achievements of the past twenty years within documentary studies, but

their object of study, the fact remains that a department of documentary

or “research-creation,” as it is referred to in Canada. Many contributions

once we have discarded the institutional boundaries that have prevented

William Uricchio’s approach to the interactive documentary reflects

Critical Humanism and Posthumanist Distance

institution as the site of shifting power struggles, and the audience as

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of

Such Nietzschean reflections were by no means exclusive to Foucault.

kind of rethinking concern only the Anthropocene and environmentally

Malabou (2014), Donna Haraway (2016), Timothy Morton (2017), and

deemphasize epistemology in order to explore documentary media’s

What Is Critical About Distance?

dominant registers of light. In his investigation into night photography,

volume take various approaches to the notion of critical distance as a

Avanessian, Armen, and Suhail Malik (eds.). 2016. Genealogies of Speculation:

Juhasz, Alexandra, and Alisa Lebow (eds.). 2015. A Companion to Contemporary

Steyerl, Hito. 2016. Jenseits der Repräsentation/Beyond Representation. Cologne:

In one sense, this chapter is an attempt to outline the conditions

© The Author(s) 2018 23

Indexicality and the Documentary Agenda

The “Post-photographic” Era

Murray argues that the capability of producing streams of images (and

The Camera and Other Sensors

inevitably also networked to other software-based regimes which shape

The image is no longer a passive and fixed representational form, but is

Moving or still images are generated, by default, with a host of associated

By re-writing the image as machine-readable text, metadata facilitates

Metadata and Big Data

The Possible Futures of Documentary Studies

The Camera and Other Sensors

Metadata and Big Data

Software and Data Practice