What Is Documentary?

What Is Documentary?

"Documentary is the creative treatment of actuality" according to John Grierson, a Scottish documentary film maker. This means that we may think we are being shown the truth, but really we're being shown the artist's version of the truth; perhaps an object was moved to make an image or scene more shocking, or a subject was told to pose in a certain way to convey a message. 

But how are we to know that what's being presented to us isn't 'truth', and does it matter whether it's been tampered with or not? Personally, I think it's up to the artist to make that decision to keep things in or leave things out while documenting something, as long as they don't try to fool the viewer into believing something that is not accurate, such as painting a person in a bad light and fooling around with evidence in order to point a point across.

It's always going to be hard to try to show the truth as the truth to each person is doing to be different; what you may see in something, I may not. Our demographics, Psychographics and cultural differences means that it's impossible for us to perceive things the same way, and so if two photographers were in a room documenting something, it's likely they'd have different results because they will see the situation with another perspective.

With my own photography I feel that my aim is always to show a story, however with documentary I feel that the purpose is to show an existing story rather than creating one, which I would do with portraiture. Because of this, documentary photography is a powerful tool to get a reaction from a viewer, whether it be laughter, disgust, understanding or even the need to make a change, but to use this tool to the best of it's ability perhaps a photographer should know about the subject relevantly well, such as doing research. This allows a photographer to have a greater understanding of what they're dealing with, and so may be able to convey a message more clearly through the use of visuals.