CRITICAL AUTHENTICITY
Harri Laakso

Now, and throughout its history, the Backlight photography triennial has insistently attempted a double task: It has sought to provide an open stage for the examination of documentary photographic art and – true to its name – to provide exposure for marginal and unexpected subjects.

In 2002 such aims call for clarification. For it is possible to say that ‘documentary’ no longer refers to any separate mode or style of photography as much as it refers to an attempt to puncture and exceed the supposed autonomy of art. The documentary in all photography is the force by which images negotiate their cultural, historical and ethical balance; a projection from what is “just art” towards a just art.

Similarly the second part of the aim, “to provide exposure for marginal and unexpected subjects,” has to be read anew, with the same words, but understanding that the marginal ‘subject’ no longer refers to the matters in images (as viewed from a firm center) but to active agents with multiple and uncontrollable voices.

These self-prescribed tasks place Backlight at a challenging juncture, as they open the potential of documentary in all photographic artwork and as they allow for the possibility of heterogeneous and conflicting individual voices. It is precisely this tension by which Backlight is charged, by which it acquires its critical mass (and hopefully its critical authenticity).

* * *

It is not easy to describe the future of documentary photography – of something so clearly dependent on the past. For it has always been the task of documentary to represent the views and events as they have once taken place in the past, maybe years ago, or just parts of a second away. Documentary looks back in time. It bears witness, then it testifies. All estimates on the truthfulness and validity of images are based upon this temporal ordering. There is no future tense for documentary images, only histories of photographs viewed in the tense future.

Documentary photographs themselves cannot speculate; they are artifacts about which we can speculate. And for this we need a prior agreement – however feeble or unspoken – of what such a photograph is. We will have to have been lured by the photograph. This mutual understanding is as necessary for our lies as it is for our truths and for all the forms of pretense and dissimulation. It marks the place where fiction intertwines with true testimony.

There still can be true testimonies and events. If fiction has a place near these testimonies and events, it is one given as a possibility. Fiction does not work to confuse the line between itself and a true testimony, but functions as its power to respond and exercise responsibility. To see fiction and documentary as the two poles of a corroded battery (to be discarded or as reason enough for one pole to be victorious and jubilant) would miss the potency of the charge.

Some things do happen to me. I hear of things, which have happened – even improbable and tragic things – which I believe have happened. When an improbable event occurs it sometimes actualizes virtual events from popular films or from the darkness of someone’s private fears. We might quickly point out that fictions have become realities and that the limit between the two (as if it were two) has been tainted by unimaginable horrors that have effaced the distinction. But when we point out this reversal we give those fears an imaginable face and reveal the true horror: that they were not unimaginable.

Probability and repetition are the keys, the ethical rhythm. [The Titanic sunk three times: as a ship, as the unsinkable ship, as the unsinkable ship on its maiden voyage. (The improbable/impossible happened when it was given its first opportunity.) The double towers fell twice; the second testifying to the collapse of the first.]

Documentary looks back on time and repeats. When it works with the improbable its ability to repeat is hampered because it is very difficult to repeat events, which probably do not happen. Its status as knowledge will also have changed.

Truth and falsity are no longer the operative concepts, and ‘documentary’ is tempted to sink with this pair. Perhaps Vilém Flusser foresaw this in his desire to regard truth merely as the limit of the probable, (and false as the limit of the improbable). His idea was that knowledge can be approached by two different routes: Science infers from the probable to the more probable while art from the probable to the more improbable. The work placed at this junction is the documentary of the future. Such work is always authentic, but not necessarily true. We are always to be critical of it.

Things happen to all people, an innumerable array of singular events presenting themselves as images. The past year has been one of great political, social and even natural turbulence. Critical authenticity finds itself in the ethical urgency of all of these encounters outside the grasp of the global documentary program. The most pressing need for the re-evaluation of our documentary contracts is within the margins of the global world where the global-western documentary program (still hailed for its powers of truth and correspondence) most actively suppresses authentic acts. The ability to respond (which – following Flusser again – is responsibility) finds its authentic path, not in the simple belief that an original cultural essence can be preserved or rightly represented, but precisely in the recognition and portrayal of the conflict of responsibilities.

A response is an action. ‘Authenticity’ has an ‘author’ (as clearly as these two words have a shared etymological origin). Authenticity is hand made. What used to be thought of as the worst enemy of the authentic photographic image – that someone tampers with it, that it is manufactured – turns out to be its precondition.

* * *

Photography is a self-organized amalgam of projections and of traces. Evidently there is no need to understand these two dimensions merely as the technical descriptions of a potent medium. Photography is not sufficiently addressed by describing its optical relation to the passage of light or by its chemical or digital ability to preserve marks. Yet these features, metaphorically understood, aptly describe the way of being involved in the interlocking systems of looking, being seen, and witnessing on the one hand, and recording, testifying and producing artifacts on the other.

In Backlight 02 these two sets of concerns – which time and again animate the photographing individual – produce complex combinations. The system of projection (camera) is clearly voiced in the meticulously composed camera obscura images of Marja Pirilä, in the images taken in car headlights by Oswaldo Sanviti, or in the way Marco Calo has pointed his camera at the inhabitants of domestic spaces from the direction of the television set. Similarly the work of Eva Brunner-Szabo and Thomas Kutschker portray the system of traces (print) by employing found materials, double exposures; even concentrating on the markings on the reverse side of the discovered artifact. There is, however, no need to force these distinctions further, as projection and remembrance are clearly – in the work of these artists as well as in the work of others – always inseparably intertwined.

The layering of social fields, present for example in the work of Marcos López and Martin Kollar, provide the master key, the ethical rhythm or backdrop, by which the rights and responsibilities of photography are assessed. Such works are sobering and often ironic acts by which photography partakes in the deconstruction of the myths of global economic necessities. They are critical and they are authentic local responses. But simultaneously they are tinted with a nostalgia; partly yearning to preserve times past, partly mourning the transformation of documentary as the feeble prior agreement.

Backlight houses many views directed at the world or at oneself, many individual projections and traces. There are numerous instances of courage in looking at the everyday and in creating truths in its texture. We are reminded: there still remain things to be said, testimonies to witness.