Chapter 5 Relations to the Real: the Fugitive Documentary of Stan Douglas and James Casebere
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Abstract
This essay looks at the ways in which the still powerful allure of documentary photography to serve as proof and authentic documentation has been called into question by the photographic practice of Stan Douglas and James Casebere. Douglas’s reconstructed settings in his seriesDisco Angola and Casebere’s miniature constructs of New England landscapes or his easily recognizable uncanny interiors of famous cultural places such as Monticello or Sing Sing penitentiary have intricately subverted documentary photography’s role in the representation of the places we live in. I will show how documentary photography’s evidentiary power has been undermined by the openly fictitious nature of Douglas’s and Casebere’s images, making us rethink the possibilities of the documentation, perception as well as representation of place in photography. Instead of allegedly photographing reality, these images of places evoke only shifting, evasive relations to the real, that is to the places of the world that we can only conceive of in fugitive images.