From Witness to Participant: Making Subversive Documentary

Abstract

As documentary forms, both photography and oral history have historically been used as evidence of an authentic social reality or cultural truth. Photographic documentaries often provide viewers with a sense of “witnessing” an event. Oral histories can likewise be presented as testimony. As witness or as testimony, these forms imply a credibility of experience whereby the event of documentation is transparent, and the artifact (be that a photograph or a recording) is simply a carrier by which the subject can communicate directly and without interference. The perception of inherent truth of documentary media, however, obscures how their meaning is created rather than revealed.