While photography was associated with the idea of truth, documentary photography seemed to be endowed with such an objectivity that the objective singularity in the observation of the photographer seemed to remain in a secondary position, more as a point of view or a perspective than the indicator of a willpower of free evaluation of reality.

The history of documentary photography is the core of photography history proper that, generally speaking, unfolds in a constant redefinition of “time” and in the precision of a sense for the modality of the representation of reality. The idea of truth is intimately linked to the concept of the document and obviously of photography taken as a document. Still, the methodological foundations on which this conception is based, presuppose the existence of objectiveness as a need that it should be universally known as a structure of “truth”.

The objection to the idea of truth in photography opens up a process of transformation of documentalism into a very versatile and flexible tool where, together with the analysis of reality and the information, also include narration, processes, the experience of emotions or a methodological detachment. In many occasions it is everything at the same time, everything is mixed. The contingency of objectivity thus presents a different model of shared relations between the photographer, the subject and the audience. The mechanism of this procedure tries to move beyond the mere information so as to develop the document in the mode of a narration that describes an emotional and expanded time, abridged in its various folds, making reality more complex, a reality which is as contradictory as the experience of life.

In this way, the “time-instant” contrasts with “time-duration” which, as a fluid is built in the narration. It is not by chance that objectiveness should be what opens subjectivity. These mechanisms can be appreciated in the evolution of many documentary photographers, as a model not only of renewal, but also of exploration and experimentation. This is the case of photographers such as Miguel Rio Branco, who with the report as a starting point, lands in projects in which the personal observation visually narrates from sensations to experience in a penetrating way, for example, of a territory as the Amazonia, without having to struggle with a “document” that would make situations or concrete scenes explicit. Also, in the work of Mario Cravo Neto, we come across a similar movement, that in his case moves towards the construction of a symbolic quality for the idea of “blackness” that concerns his city, Salvador de Bahia.

But it is perhaps in the works of Adriana Lestido in which the distinction is not so radical, where these issues appear characterized through the emphasis of a time experience as an inner narration process. All her works are run through a temporal discourse. The story line builds an emotional process shared by the eyes of the author and her characters, and it is possible for the observer to read both discourses in parallel, inseparable but autonomous at the same time. The temporality of the document is also the emotional time of her own work.

The experience of a shared emotion appears as the storyline of her work. The different photographic essays made from the 80´s, tackle the various folds that the maternity experience has in all its combinations and variables.

Retrospectively, it is possible to appreciate a concatenation among them. But, above all they show that they belong to the same process, where the documentary character is just a perspective to approach, that involves certain style rules. Then they let all those other things appear, that something which summarizes the emotional experience of a shared time.

When in an interview about the project Adolescent Mothers (1989-1990) Adriana Lestido explains the way in which the subject determines its time: "I did it at a home for adolescent mothers, who depended on Minoridad y Familia (Minors and Family) on Donato Álvarez Street, Flores. It was called the Maternity Shelter Nuestra Señora del Valle. I was planning to go a couple of times for a task on different aspects of maternity. But I couldn´t stop going and I did it once a week during a whole year. It ended being a job in itself. In the end, the original idea on maternity took ten years. Almost all the adolescent mothers I photographed had a great lack of mother care. They needed a mother and in turn they had a child." 1

In a very obvious manner in Imprisoned Women (1991 – 1993) the process takes a vital importance through a continuity that lets you penetrate efficiently in the daily life of a prison. The importance of “time-duration” over “time-instant” transforms the information in a narration whose reading is more based on reflection rather than the visual impact. And that is the procedure that appears in Mothers and Daughters (1995-1999). The use of duration as a procedure aims at penetrating the silences and the folds of the relationship, to “go beyond” the obvious, let that “something else “appear that characterizes the observation. Adriana Lestido, as many other photographers, starts working for the press, in Buenos Aires, in La Voz, DyN, and Pagina 12. But her works move away from the report when she undergoes the projects of “duration” in which the documents become greatly and personally involved in, or more precisely, when her observation becomes an emotional dimension with the subject. This will be a progressive process and takes a slow deepening in what it means, a relationship between photography and life. The most documentary works Children´s Hospital and Adolescent Mothers, establish strategies for the approach in which the subjective observation both control and leads the narration.

All these aspects of contact between subjectivity and objectivity had already been manifested in the milestones of documentary photography such as Spanish Village that Eugene Smith makes for Life in 1950, the town of Deleitosa in Extremadura. But if in the Smith case, intentionality and subjectivity, distort document 2, in the photographs of Diane Arbus (for example in the works about children with Down Syndrome) they are strengthened as from the dimension of sharing. The works of Adriana Lestido and Diane Arbus have the idea of sharing in common. In both of them, times last. In Robert Frank, time, on the contrary, is an instant and paradoxically turns into linear space, itinerary, transit, a road story. It is not casual Jack Kerouac writes the introduction of the book The Americans. When referring to an image of R. Frank where a group of senior citizens appear sitting on some benches in St. Petersburg, Florida, writes: "Such an American image – the faces neither manipulate nor criticize nor say anything”, except for “This shows how we are in real life and if you don´t like it, I don´t care because I live my life my way and God blesses us all, perhaps "…"if it´s deserved" (...) Later she adds, to stress the trip and the space dimension that rules over time: "Crazy highway driving people forward– crazy highway, solitary, driving along bends in the entrances of space towards the snowy horizon in Wasatch that we were promised in the vision of the west (…)" 3.

Temporality and space are patterns of different times for the documentary eyes. In both, there is a process but the sense is very different. That difference between time – time and time – space is also produced as a dominant agent in the crisis of photo reporting and in the transformation of documentalism. Documentalism and press photography are linked but they are very different, both in their use and their reading. It´s a different use of temporality that determines the perspectives or modes of distance.

The need to build a narration will encourage photographers to move from the press photography towards a photo essay that, in turn, will create a distance from the strict documentary vision 4. That path is also taken by photographers such Allan Sekula, whose work will move towards various positionings that documentalism uses from a conceptual and committed perspective.

Pepe Baeza defines photo journalism as one of the ways documentalism can take: "Usually, the term documentalism is used to name those works that are either exhibited in galleries or in books, that deal with structural issues, and are carried out with ample margins of time and reflection. Instead, photo journalism defines the application of one type of documentalism that depends on a request or some directions established by a press media on circumstances and related to values of information or news."5

The process of manufacturing of the documentary process has been strongly determined by the end support of the publication. At the presence of the book, the exhibition has opened another channel for reading, introducing a different time/rhythm of visualization, through a slowness determined by the body. But the deepest changes take place the moment photography breaks in and in the documentary films in the artistic circles. It is not an insertion in terms of absorption. It takes place as the transfer of indies towards the artistic field coming from journalism, and from there it moves with another energy and with other objectives, the re-ocuppation of a territory abandoned by the media.

In the 80´s the media concentration in big corporations with varied interests, generates a thorough internal transformation in the journalistic system and in the information. Investigation journalism is uncared for, there is a very strict control as to the distribution of information and increases audiences by highlighting the headlines, the production of the news, and the different variety of the supply to please the audiences who are every time more sensitive to leisure, entertainment and news. The time for the information is restricted, it has to be fast and immediate, and in turn, easily replaceable by new headlines. There is a fierce audiovisual competition and the times of photographic documentalism become obsolete, are too slow. On the other hand, the piece of news has to be easy and quick to understand, simple. Reflection is not important. The change of staff personnel affects work and also photographers.

The audiovisual documentary is for entertainment, curiosities and does not deal with conflictive issues. The TV programming is filled with documentaries on nature and travel. Media corporations do not want to get into trouble; their aim is on sales and audience. The documentary observation is made of another substance and it does not fit because it can turn uneasy.

In the art field as a need to resume the collective and individual memory as a core of reflection, as well the reassessment of the idea of cataloguing, forces towards the adoption of documentary tools. At the same time there is an insertion of many eyes and projects coming from photographic and film documentalism that contribute with a new perspective of social and political criticism. It seems that in the art field, the documentary observation can be harmless, because it has niehter so much presence nor importance and it is not so dangerous, but finds a rich ground for debate. A debate slower and deeper than the one the media offers.

This intertwining of perspectives, the works with documentary roots such as the ones of Adriana Lestido will strengthen structurally. The addition of subjective elements of interpretation and reading, add a richer touch to her own documentary eyes, establishing the temporal dimension of fluidity for the narration as the axis of a vision that is connected to a critical connection with the emotional aspect. The perspective that, in the artistic environment, introduces the documenta IX, of Catherine David in 1997 and later in 2002, determines a new configuration of the observation of the documenta X de Okwui Enwezor in 2002, the new configuration of the observation attempts at the social problems and does not relegate subjectivity to the private circles, and turns it into another analysis too, perhaps the most important one, for the public circles.

These transformations would partly explain how the most recent works of Adriana Lestido, Love (1992-2005) or Villa Gesell (2005) seem not to relate to a documentary observation. Deep inside they propose to revive it as a tool for analysis of the confusing relations between photography and life (or what is the same, between art and life) lighting and revealing the common sense of their most documentary works that deal with the subject and the observation it shows. This is that “something” Adriana Lestido refers to in several interviews and writings, when she refers to those emotional aspects that flourish in her documentary works, as a testimony of the intimate duration of time within her subjectivity.

It has not been reflected enough on the importance of those photographic times when these are applied to the process looking and the relation the subject establishes with the environment.

If there was anything necessary for the historical documentalism, was the relative speed or quickness of the synthesis. Each take must be able to summarize in one image the time of the narration. When the photographer has the chance of using time as a resource of interior duration, processes surface as new areas for the observation to exist, allowing a different way of sharing and experimenting, and above all, of narrate stories through images.

The “time-duration” faced with the “time-instant” and not on the light, finally becomes the axis that builds the sense of photographic eyes.

1. Martín Caparrós, Adriana Lestido. Beyond photography, Magazine, 2008.
2. See Horacio Fernández, Variations in Spain. Photography and Art, 1900-1980, Chapter IV, pags 104-114. CAAM – La Fábrica, 2004.
3. Robert Frank, The Americans, La Fábrica, Madrid 2008.
4. See Miguel Rio Branco Talks with Tereza Siza, section The Documentary Photography, pag. 29, La Fábrica 2002, Madrid.
5. Pepe Baeza, The critical role for press photography, pag. 41, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 2001.

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