In this chapter Soutter looks how documentary photography has influenced the art photograph.

She starts by claiming that documentary photographs incorporate left wing assumptions, which is understandable as they are often of social scenes or some social issue. Then from making this point she moves onto say:

The indexicality of the photograph carries an ethical burden alongside claims to the truth (P53)

So a documentary photograph assumes political left wing ideology and this is given credibility because the genre assumes photographic truth, that what we see and interpret actually happened that way. This is then summarised with the statement:

Classical documentary photography combines several functions at once; indexical evidence is interwoven with the aesthetic pleasure of well crafted images and inflected with a political position. (P55)

This emphasises the different layers that we see in a documentary photograph. For instance, if we look at People sheltering in the Tube, Elephant and Castle Underground Station, 1940 by Bill Brandt we can see that quote in practical terms. We have a recognisable scene – London Underground with people sleeping – that makes it endexicable. We then have a good composition – the rule of thirds and a vanishing point – and we have a political issue – people sheltering from the 1940 London blitz. This gives the foundation for a classically influenced documentary photograph.

Soutter then mentions how over a period of time this approach became tired and predictable and she raises the issue when she writes:

Traditional documentary photography carried the promise of the real but now seems either clichéd on the one hand (not real enough) or too manipulative (possibly real but in the service of a non-real agenda) on the other, (P58)

As with practically everything, documentary photography needed to evolve and this is where it combined with art photography. Soutter then talks about An-My Le who worked photographing Vietnam War Re-enactment groups which then suggests that was is being depicted in a documentary style is not real, that the photographic truth is undermined.

She also talks about the conditional consent when we look at fiction. For instance, when we see a science fiction film such as Blade Runner we know what we see isn’t real, that it is all constructed, but because it looks believable, the viewer is then prepared to give conditional consent and believe what they see.

It is with this conditional consent that Soutter then explores the fiction within the photographs especially the re-enactment images. From this standpoint she moves onto the photographers that have been embedded with the military in real war zones. Here she raises the issues of how tightly controlled the photographers are with the type of images they can produce, which is a legacy from the Vietnam war.

She then mentions Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin who produced The day Nobody Died which is just light sensitive paper exposed inside a tank when an event happened as it symbolised something occurring but they were unable to photograph the event because of restrictions. This is perhaps the boldest combination of documentary photography and the art photograph. It fulfils the ethical burden and elements of photographic truth, but removes the notion of indexicality and objectivity.