The doorstep portrait: intrusion and performance in mainstream American documentary photography¹

[1] This article is based on a paper presented at the International Visual Sociology Association Annual Conference, New York University, in August 2007. I want to thank Professor Jerome Krase, who encouraged me to refine my initial arguments. Oraien Catledge was kind enough to let me use his wonderful photographs. Sue Catledge, Bill Gillepsie, Debra Krajnak, Melissa Van Drie and Daniela Ruz were all very generous with their time, support and technical advice. Thank you.

Abstract

Documentary photography has always been confronted by criticisms and self-doubts about its method and purpose. Can pictures ostensibly intruding into the lives of the poor and the destitute, whether taken by academics, reformers or professional photographers, ever be legitimate? This article suggests that these concerns actually determine the way mainstream American social photography looks. Such is the case, at least, in a cliché which has run through the US documentary tradition since the 1930s, and which could be labelled ‘doorstep portraits’. Examples drawn from the famous Farm Security Administration archive and from Oraien Catledge's work in Atlanta's Cabbagetown in the 1980s show individuals and families sitting for a picture on the threshold of their house. This image is a meaningful convention because it seems to encode the nature of the relationship between photographer, subject and audience. This ritual ‘presentation of the self’ takes place as the private lives of the sitters are being transformed into public visual discourse through the photographic image. The first part of this paper attempts to define doorstep portraits as a kind of ‘metapicture’ – to use W.T.J. Mitchell's term. The issue of ‘access’ in documentary practice is then briefly described as the methodological problem which this metapicture engages. Erving Goffman's definition of ‘performance’ and Edward T. Hall's proxemics provide a theoretical framework for understanding how this engagement works. Finally, the normative dimension of documentary's visual conventions in the context of liberal reform discourse is re-examined in the light of this model.

Notes

[1] This article is based on a paper presented at the International Visual Sociology Association Annual Conference, New York University, in August 2007. I want to thank Professor Jerome Krase, who encouraged me to refine my initial arguments. Oraien Catledge was kind enough to let me use his wonderful photographs. Sue Catledge, Bill Gillepsie, Debra Krajnak, Melissa Van Drie and Daniela Ruz were all very generous with their time, support and technical advice. Thank you.

[2] These questions may even become the main topic of critical documentary series, such as Martha Rosler's groundbreaking The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems 1974–75. Rosler's conscious effort to work outside of mainstream documentary tradition is the reason why her photographs – and other, similar projects – will not be discussed here.

[3] I am conscious that the connection between documentary and sociology is in itself a complex issue, but I hope to provide a few examples that will justify the relevance of this comparison. While documentary work often claims to take part in social science, sociology and anthropology are wary of the liberal-reformist politics of most documentary film and photography. FSA director Roy Stryker was proud to quote photographer Ansel Adams's contemptuous assessment of his team: ‘What you've got are not photographers. They're a bunch of sociologists with cameras’ (quoted in Van Arragon; available from http://www.calvin.edu/minds/vol02/issue02/lvanarragon.php#_ftn31). On the contrary, Jay Ruby (1989) regrets the interference of documentary politics in scientific research. For a more comprehensive analysis of the relationship between sociology and photography, see Lugon (1997) and Stasz (1979).

[4] Research for this paper suggests that the visual convention I will be analysing was much less prevalent in the first decades of American social photography – or rather they seem to have had a somewhat different meaning and purpose. Still, references to the work of pioneer documentarists Jacob A. Riis and Lewis W. Hine are unavoidable, as the following pages will make clear.

[5] Although I realise that Mitchell considers that, potentially, all pictures are equally valid as visualisations of theory, his own examples suggest that some of them are ‘more equal than others’, to quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm (Mitchell 1994, 56–57).

[6] Available from http://home.earthlink.net/∼hsbecker/visual.html.

[7] This explanation directs attention to the fact that the silent photograph raises problems and questions that are not necessarily relevant to related media such as film, where sound usually enters as a decisive variable.

[8] Remarkably, for the point I am making here, Harper is best known for his work with homeless populations. See section IV.

[9] The economic metaphor used by Douglas Harper is more or less explicit in most criticisms of documentary.

[10] Becker 2007. Available from http://home.earthlink.net/∼hsbecker/seminar.htm.

[11] Jerome Krase's use of Goffman's work prompted me to look closer into this. See Jerome Krase (1982). Available from http://www.brooklynsoc.org/PLG/selfandcommunity/index.html.

[12] A recent use of Goffman's theory as applied to photographic self-presentation can also be found in Mendelsson 2007, 172–3.

[13] The Ellis Island series, which Trachtenberg refers to, is also revealing in so far as it shows outsiders (immigrants) hoping to find their way through America's ‘Golden Door’. They are eager visitors who are hoping, at this point, that no one will turn them back. The photographer is not visiting them.

[14] Murphy (2001, 94) analyses a series of FSA pictures taken in Montana by Lee Russell, choosing a perfect threshold portrait as her first illustration. Yet although she provides detailed and often fascinating information on the pictured subjects’ background and circumstances, she contends that to ‘decode’ the ‘mute image’ is to decode ‘body language’ only, overlooking the relation between bodies and social space.

[15] Available from http://www.nbm.org/blueprints/90s/spring95/page4/page4.htm. Unfortunately Margaret Morton did not grant permission for the use of her pictures in this article.

[16] ‘I believe when somebody owns their own home, they're realising the American Dream. They can say it's my home, it's nobody else's home.’ From George W. Bush's remarks at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Washington, DC, June 18, 2002. Available from http://www.hud.gov/news/speeches/presremarks.cfm.