Recording Reality, Desiring The Real

This book is about documentary in the sense of photo and video. However, the concepts explored can be related to documentary process in other forms of art practice. Documentary enables reality to 'speak' and to 'speak about' reality. However, 'it thereby becomes prey to a loss of the real in its narratives of reality'. p20

- An account of reality reflects the individual presenting it, altering its truth.

- History becomes more and more inaccurate over time, a fabrication of the truth and can not be solely trusted.

- In an art practice that documents, the body of work acts as a self-portrait, as each experience within reality is unique.

Documenting as spectacle

Charles Boudelaire said '"I want to represent things as they are, or rather as they would be, supposing that I did not exist, that is, the world before my intervention."' p20

I don't agree with this idea. I believe that everything we do, whether recording the fact or creating something impartially, is influenced by who we are as people, often subconscious and beyond our comprehension.

Even representation through photography - for example a completely impartial CCTV camera - the reality is partial as the shot only captures that scene, those people, those objects, not showing the wider picture.

'Recorded reality re-presented is a reenactment of the past as a making present again of places, people. and events to an audience, but because it is extracted from ongoing reality, it thereby distorts by becoming exemplary, standing in for but also excluding - as unrecorded - other views and other people.' p.21