[The following is about print journalism, but I think it applies even more so to photojournalism and documentary photography. ]
The following is taken from an article, Liebling’s War by Francis-Noël Thomas in Humanities Magazine which is put out by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The article is about journalist A. J. Liebling.
“One of the things that must be missing from historical narrative is the observational self, because there is no place within historical narrative for the observational self to stand. There is no place for Keegan* [see below ], for example, to be as an observer—he has, in effect, exchanged his observational self for the persona of historian. As the narrative and analytical intelligence of his book, he is in no one place, and the events he is presenting with such exemplary historiographic competence and such rhetorical élan are not events that happened to him in the course of his lived experience; reading the documents and making the historiographic and rhetorical decisions that turned them into a coherent narrative are part of his lived experience, but that is a different matter. As a historian, he stands in hundreds of different places and from each of them he sees things in sharp focus. It is a convention of this kind of writing that his personality, his opinions, his beliefs, his personal life are left behind when he assumes his professional role.
“Liebling’s art is different. It acknowledges both the limitations and the personal baggage that are inevitable constituencies of observation. He cannot choose where he is even though he tries to place himself somewhere he thinks will offer a good view of important events. The role of reporter, unlike the role of historian, does not free him from whatever he brings with him as an individual living through events. He is constrained to bring with him an observational self that will inevitably affect what he sees and one that will change under the pressure of events. From a distance of twenty years he says he cannot even speak of “the war,” because what he experienced seems more like a series of different wars. The Second World War, even the war in the west, as a composite of innumerable separate events, directly experienced by no one person, is an artifact of the historical imagination. He does not want his experience folded into such an artifact because it will lose its aspect of lived experience.”
“The writer’s tacit claim is, “This is what you could have experienced had you been there; I know because it is what I experienced when I was there.” To succeed it must meticulously separate what was seen from what was only inferred, what was experienced at first from what was figured out later. It must also persuade the reader that there is nothing in the account that is the result of exceptional knowledge, exceptional intelligence, or special competence. It depends on convincing the reader that if he were present, he would have been able to experience just what Liebling did. This is, of course, untrue. For it to be true, the reader would have had to be present inside Liebling’s head, and that is why at least the relevant parts of what was going on in his head are themselves treated as things available to the reader in the same sense as the landing craft and the men on it are available to the reader. Treating the observational self as a “thing” fully available to the reader makes Liebling’s account of his experience function as a kind of allegory of experience.”
“… In reading about officially interesting subjects, we sometimes overlook how much the writer’s perception and judgment are what we are following. The strung-together clichés that make up the worst sort of newspaper “coverage” can make any subject trivial because they create separate “significant” stock events, made false by their discontinuity with the nature of ordinary experience. Subject matter does not determine style; a writer’s conception of truth, presentation, scene, cast, and the relationship between thought and language determine style, and style, in this rigorous sense, creates interest. Held in close focus, by a concentrated intelligence, everything is interesting.”
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*who is John Keegan?: “There are many excellent historical accounts of the Normandy Invasion; I will refer to just one: a masterpiece of military and political analysis juxtaposed with a compelling narrative of events by the British military historian John Keegan. Six Armies in Normandy was written long after D-day; it is a work of history, not reportage. Its detail—and it is rich in detail—is the result of research; its writing, sentence by sentence, is unobtrusively superb. The author is himself a kind of general making strategic rhetorical decisions and commanding with quiet mastery a seemingly endless assemblage of details, each one of which seems to have arrived just in time and to have found its optimal place without the least struggle. The details of what drew him to the subject or the details of how easy or difficult it was to gain access to the documents he used in writing about it have no place in his presentation of events—nor does his view of the war or of the parties to the war. He is everywhere and his sympathies are everywhere he is. This mobility—and the role of historian—adds an element of invention that gives historical writing its coherence and unity, and necessarily makes it false to the experience available to an individual.”
To read the full (long) article, click here.
-Julie
http://www.unrealnature.com
