Critical Distance in Documentary Media

Gerda Cammaer
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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
Fig. 2 Daniel Crooks, Phantom Ride, 2016. Courtesy of the artist
and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 161
Fig. 3 Daniel Crooks, Phantom Ride, 2016. Courtesy of the artist
and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 161
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
 INTRODUCTION: CRITICALLY DISTANT 5

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
 INTRODUCTION: CRITICALLY DISTANT 7

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.
 INTRODUCTION: CRITICALLY DISTANT 9

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
 INTRODUCTION: CRITICALLY DISTANT 11

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
12 G. CAMMAER ET AL.

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
 INTRODUCTION: CRITICALLY DISTANT 13

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
14 G. CAMMAER ET AL.

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
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