DOCUMENTARY
One of the major concerns in my writing has been the intersection of surrealism and documentary and many of the texts that appear on this website under ‘Surrealism’ could just as well have been placed here under ‘Documentary’.
But there are also texts where I have explored other sorts of documentary, from reportage to portraiture and landscape. Some of these are presented here.
The first is an extended essay ‘Things as They Are’ which I contributed to the Companion to Photography, published by Wiley in 2020.
The second text ‘Documentary Fictions’ was published in 1995 as a broad study of the genre at that point in time.
Most of the other texts are focused on the work of individual photographers, but also raise more general questions about documentary practice.
The picture opposite is © Paul Reas, and was taken at the North of England Open Air Museum, Beamish, County Durham, as part of his project Flogging a Dead Horse, 1993. My thanks to him for allowing me to reproduce it here.
